Or one could say an effort into the future? Don't discount the power of the coin it's just the cost of energy outweights the average Joe from making a real go of this unless the parents don't question the sharp rise in the electric bill? lolAh, OK, I found this link in Wikipedia that makes more sense to me.
ELI5: bitcoin mining (xpost in ELI5) : Bitcoin
Also I think can be called "Exercise in Futility".
Sorry to pull more OT, how much is a bitcoin worth, the value of the bytes it's printed on? $0.000000000000001
One bitcoin is worth around $833 US currently. Prices rise and fall just like any other market though.
You get them in blocks of 50 if solo mining, but one block of fifty can take years to mine for someone doing it on their own. Sometimes they can be found sooner and a person might get two or three in a year and then not see any more for a couple of years or longer. Some people might spend five years mining and get nothing.
So that's $41650 for potentially 2-3 years of work and huge electric bills. Somewhere around $13,000 a year before expenses.
You can join pools and split the take while getting more frequent payouts. You're still going to be running your cards really hard, payouts tend to come in percentages of bitcoins, still take long periods of time to mine, generating a lot of heat, and end up with huge power bills even doing things that way though.
I have heard there is often a profit in mining by pooling. Not a huge one, but it does work out to a net gain a lot of the time. Breaking even is pretty common with this method as well. Losing money isn't common, but it does happen.
Still, your PC isn't going to be useful for much of anything else while mining, you've got to do it for long periods of time, it takes several hours to set up, and requires constant monitoring. Bitcoin mining is pretty much a full time job.
You can also just buy them, and as I understand it that's the smartest way to get into them right now as the price has been steadily climbing recently. It'll probably take a while to pan out if you do, but a lot of analysts are calling it a relatively low risk investment with promising potential returns and a good chance to break even at worst.
The whole thing could collapse and you could end up losing money of course, but the same can be said of any investment market. I wouldn't recommend unloading a huge percentage of your funds into it, but it's a good way to diversify an investment portfolio.
Just wanted to say all you guys and gals have great rigs and give ideas and help to everyone else. It is not a case of keeping up with the Joneses but some of these rigs have had a bunch of expensive parts fitted and no end of labour spent getting it all right and just as it should be. Good job everyone. It is also inspiring but having recently spent $1500 on upgrades for 2 of my PC's and the wife's computer rebuild I am done for now. Keep up the good work. I really like this forum, no one runs anyone else's rig down saying you have an AMD or Intel or NVidia etc and mine is faster than your rig. Seven forums is a good place to be. Once again thank you everyone. Tony.
We are glad to have you here to Tony, thanks for the kind words. Those attributes is what kept me hangin' on.
Only $1500 to upgrade 3 machines, that's good economics mate.
Personally, I don't believe it is possible to 'keep up with the Jonses'. I don't care how much you spend on a computer, whether it is $1500 or $15,000, I will promise you, there is someone with a better, faster, nicer looking computer than you have. So, the real thing here is about the illness. Most of us have a severe case of a terminal illness which I know of no cure for. It's a compulsion to keep buying parts so you don't go into DT's or having convulsions. It is also highly contagious for those of you who don't have the illness but hang around us that do. Ask Juan. He was not very long ago, perfectly normal until he started hanging out with us. Within a few short months, he was starting a business of building some extremely expensive and fantastic looking computers. I'm sure he would tell you, he couldn't stop if he wanted to. But,in all fairness, we warned him before he started hanging out with us.
It's a very slippery slope once you start but if you have an itch it must be scratched 