Bitcoin mining

[Icecreamarsenal]

I watch some Netflix at night, and it seems like a waste to use this highly capable desktop at that time just to stream video for an hour.  I'd like to 'mine' bitcoin. 
Is anyone actively doing just that?  I've searched the forum and don't see anything about it.  Looking for a step by step primer.
Not asking about pros and cons of mining.

[Syonyk]

You will not earn anything with a typical desktop machine.  You're 3-4 years too late for that.

All mining today is done with highly custom ASICs, running on bleeding edge or very close to bleeding edge processes.  FPGA boards, which are ~10x more efficient than your desktop, are not worth running, and early ASICs aren't worth running either.

I was quite active with bitcoin, mined a bunch, made a nice profit in my engagement, but haven't mined in 2 years.  Things moved on since then, and I was in the FPGA and ASIC era.

All you'll do is waste power and burn out your hardware early.  It is literally not worth doing on a general purpose computer right now.

[Icecreamarsenal]

You will not earn anything with a typical desktop machine.  You're 3-4 years too late for that.

All mining today is done with highly custom ASICs, running on bleeding edge or very close to bleeding edge processes.  FPGA boards, which are ~10x more efficient than your desktop, are not worth running, and early ASICs aren't worth running either.

I was quite active with bitcoin, mined a bunch, made a nice profit in my engagement, but haven't mined in 2 years.  Things moved on since then, and I was in the FPGA and ASIC era.

All you'll do is waste power and burn out your hardware early.  It is literally not worth doing on a general purpose computer right now.

Thanks for the informed response.  I wonder, are there people out there making small fortunes by investing in the hardware and relying on lack of knowledge and high startup costs to keep it niche?  I've done the obligatory page 1 google search and it is opaque to a semi-Luddite.

[bobechs]

China.

Google Bitcoin + China and you will see where mining is now being done.

It is where the hardware is made and with cheap to free power (depending on how dependable the corruption is) repurposed rural factories run by somewhat shady Chinese consortia are the source of the volume of new bitcoin.

[wienerdog]

If you wanted to just learn about it I would suggest getting a Raspberry Pi 2.  It can mine and will teach you the basics and only uses 5 watts or so.  You will really be just using it as a learning project.  Afterwards you can use it to learn Python or do a number of other things as the uses are endless.

https://learn.adafruit.com/piminer-raspberry-pi-bitcoin-miner/initial-setup-and-assembly

[2Birds1Stone]

I have a friend who got heavily into it 4-5 years ago. It was lucrative for a while before you needed more and more CPU power and electricity to mine each remaining bitcoin.

He could have been a millionaire had he cashed out at the peak.

[Syonyk]

If you wanted to just learn about it I would suggest getting a Raspberry Pi 2.  It can mine and will teach you the basics and only uses 5 watts or so.  You will really be just using it as a learning project.

Sorry, that's not useful advice.  The link you provided is to:

Building this project will allow you to use a Raspberry Pi as a 'headless' controller and status monitor for your USB bitcoin mining devices.

It's not mining on the Pi, it's using it to control assorted ASIC miners.

None of which are worth buying.  The only way to make money mining right now is, as mentioned above, to be an ASIC manufacturer with cheap or free power.

The individual mining train has long since passed, and it's literally not worth spending time on at this point.

He could have been a millionaire had he cashed out at the peak.

*shrug*  Peak was $1200 or so, it's still around $400, so it's still going to be worth a good chunk of change.

Nobody had any idea where things would go.  Hindsight is 20/20.  I cashed out a lot around $100/btc.  I wouldn't do anything different, because at the time, this was the best way to convert a very volatile, unknown commodity into something a bit more concrete.

[Kaspian]

The cost in electricity in Western countries no longer works for the mining.  It's a lose situation.  Even with a bunch of Raspberry Pi machines daisy chained together.

I have acquaintances in a nearby small town here who were rednecks but some sort of math geniuses.  When the price of diesel fuel would dip below a certain amount, they'd fire up their generators, feed the electrical grid, and get a cheque from the hydro company at the end of the month.  ...Yeah, just needlessly spew fumes into the atmosphere for money.  But always they knew exactly when they'd come ahead in cost of diesel versus cost of electricity.

[Cassie]

WE mined with our son for a number of years and made $. He was the brains of the operation. Recently we sold all our old miners because they were not making $. We have 2 newer ones that we still mine because they are making $.  We sold off some of our coin to lock in the profits and are holding some too for the future. My son trades coins a lot and made us a 30% profit that way too.  There have been a few threads in the last year or 2 about this because I participated in them. 

[wienerdog]

Sorry, that's not useful advice.

It's not mining on the Pi, it's using it to control assorted ASIC miners.

I guess useful is in the eye of the beholder.  I clearly said if they just wanted to learn and the OP said they weren't interested in pros or cons of mining.  Yea they aren't going to make money but you can buy a used ASIC for $30 and have $70 in the setup.  I guess I could have made that part more clear but I thought they could read the article.  Maybe the learning experience is what they are after?  Investing in one's personal capital is sometimes just as satisfying as expanding one's capital.  As I stated the Pi can be used later on for learning a new programming language or learning the insides of Linux.

[Syonyk]

The OP was asking about using a desktop computer they had laying around to mine bitcoin.

Purchasing a Raspberry Pi to control ASICs they also have to purchase has nothing to do with that goal of making some spare cash from a computer they already had.

[bobechs]

The OP was asking about using a desktop computer they had laying around to mine bitcoin.

Purchasing a Raspberry Pi to control ASICs they also have to purchase has nothing to do with that goal of making some spare cash from a computer they already had.

I wonder, though, if you were in a situation where you a) accidentally had enough computing power in the form of a sufficiently powerful video card that you valued at zero and b) lived in a cold climate, but unfortunately had to heat the house with electricity, effectively making that amount of power zero cost to the project, what it would pay out to set up a bitcoin-generating space heater?

Enough to offset some perceptible amount of the electric bill or just enough to supplement the change you sometimes see on the sidewalk and in parking lots?

[wienerdog]

Purchasing a Raspberry Pi to control ASICs they also have to purchase has nothing to do with that goal of making some spare cash from a computer they already had.

Well if you are going to lose money I guess I would rather do it at slower rate but to each their own.  If the clunker computer's 500 watt supply is on 24 - 7 you can pay for the Pi and ASIC in 3-4 months at $0.13 kWhr.

[johnny847]

The OP was asking about using a desktop computer they had laying around to mine bitcoin.

Purchasing a Raspberry Pi to control ASICs they also have to purchase has nothing to do with that goal of making some spare cash from a computer they already had.

I wonder, though, if you were in a situation where you a) accidentally had enough computing power in the form of a sufficiently powerful video card that you valued at zero and b) lived in a cold climate, but unfortunately had to heat the house with electricity, effectively making that amount of power zero cost to the project, what it would pay out to set up a bitcoin-generating space heater?

Enough to offset some perceptible amount of the electric bill or just enough to supplement the change you sometimes see on the sidewalk and in parking lots?

Honestly at this point it's probably more effective in this situation to just move somewhere that has cheaper heating, such as gas, instead of staying htere and dabbling in bitcoin mining.

[alsoknownasDean]

Not to mention that the desktop running Netflix is likely running at lower speed anyway to conserve power.

Sent from my LG-D855 using Tapatalk

[EOS]

If the OP was interested, would the new batch of AntMiners be able to make him/her a few bucks after a while?

[slamturtle]

Hi,
This is my first post in this forum so hi everybody!

I have dabbled in bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin mining, using GPUs, then FPGA and ASIC miners - I was mainly doing it because I was fascinated by the technology but there is the obvious financial side of turning electricity into currency in your garage, but the "arms race" of every increasing bitcoin mining "difficulty" makes purchasing mining gear that is viable to use until made obsolete is a race against time.
Match that with the very long lead times times etc as the manufacturers of the mining gear rush finish first runs of incomplete devices or try and sell vapour-ware to get ahead of the competition, makes genuinely financially viable bitcoin mining on a small scale without free or very cheap electricity very risky.
This is from my experiences a while back, things may have changed but I suspect not.
As a bedroom dwelling computer nerd, it was great fun though when it was viable :-)
I still have a cardboard box in the garage of my obsolete mining gear -- even if I had free electricity I don't think it would be worth the effort of managing the mining gear for the minute trickle of bitcoin that would come in at current difficulty.

Here is a graph of the bitcoin difficulty for all time: the higher the difficulty, the more hashing the mining machines have to do:

https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

There are a number of calculators like this:
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator
that use the difficulty value, hashing power of the mining gear, its power consumption, the bitcoin exchange rate to let you work out your mining viability, but it seems to me with the pattern of meteoric growth of difficulty most mining gear will get obsolete very quickly.