How long does it take to mine a Bitcoin?

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Potemkin

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Hi,

forgive my naivety, but I am curious about Bitcoin. I know I can "mine" through a program on my machine - from what I understand.

How long does it take?

I work a lot in my office... prolly 10+ hours a day, so the electricity bill shouldn't be a major issue. I guess my machine works anyway, so it shouldn't increase my bill much more...

How long does it take?
 
What the hell is a bitcoin?

It's a "bitchcoin"... :noevil:

Latest trend alternative computer-generated cryptocurrency, you'd better look up on Wikipedia...

I just wanna find out how hard it is to create one :paperbag:
 
Potem..if you are open to opinions on this matter as well I'll be so bold.

From what I have been following, the bitcoin comes with some bad voodoo.

I would suggest to stay as far away from that as possible.

Picked up a story about a guy who rigged up some computers in his garage and forgot about it for a year or so. Came back and had over a million in bitcoins. The whole farming for them with programs as well as the recent backlash (legal as well) just doesn't hold well for its future.

Especially with underground and black markets using them.

I would do more research on the pro's con's so don't take me just at my word.

-Q
 
A bitcoin is an alternative currency based on crypto. Each new coin "mined" by someone takes more work than the last - it was an attempt to solve the problem of someone having a printing press devaluing them for everyone.

The short answer to how long is "much too long" with a normal computer - that's been true now for a couple years. Then people doing it went to specialized GPU cards that were maybe 100x faster for awhile - the power draw became significant (not to mention the upfront cost of GPU cards with a thousand or more compute cores). Now, people like butterfly labs and others sell a special machine that will do many giga-hashes (the underlying operation is SHA) per second, those are just hitting the market now.

Governments don't like competition, especially in currency - lots of bitcoin exchanges have been shut down (and people have lost their digital money), and there is actually an issue of theft via malware.

The prices go all over the place vs FRNs. Some speculate. And the Winklevoss brothers (of trying to steal Facebook fame) have started an ETF to trade them. That should tell you quite a lot - some of the most famous, spoiled-brat-dishonest people on the planet plan to control them.

Here's an ars article on someone with a butterfly labs box mining them. He did OK, but that was then - remember it's getting harder to do with time, and ever-faster dedicated machines, and farms of them are coming online every day - you're not going to do all that well competing with that as they find all the "easy ones" - pretty much already.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/06/how-a-total-n00b-mined-700-in-bitcoins/

This box is perhaps a few tens of thousands of times faster than your computer, FYI, at doing the necessary math. As you'll find out if you do some digging, there are farms of 1000's of even faster boxes you'd be competing with. As they say on Slashdot - GoodLuckWithThat - I'd be doing it myself were it worth it, but my fastest machine (an i7 with 2k CUDA GPU cores on two Tesla cards) isn't even in the running anymore - and it draws >500w just to run, so it's just not practical here off the grid to leave it on all the time.

The situation is well into the space of using custom designed ICs for this now. Unless you want to go there...it's not going to be worth it other than as a novelty. The issue of course, is that the guys who make these keep most of them - the people who get rich in a gold rush sell the shovels, usually, but in this case they can sell the shovels, while keeping the big machines themselves and do well off both.
 
Sound like a ponzi scheme, or other kind of scam. If it was too legitimate, the bankers would shut it down I bet. I'll stick with putting my money in solid investments.
 
They are already trying to shut it down, since the main uses at this point are drug sales and money laundering, according to them. Nice try, but forgot to get the right people on your side first. But then they would have forced a design that allowed the number of bitcoins to become infinite, like fiat.

As it is, anyone who can own enough nodes in the network to control 51% of them, wins it all. NSA springs to mind as someone with enough computers to do this.

It wasn't a ponzi at all, but it might become one. It IS one that rewarded early adopters more than later ones, which isn't quite the same thing, though the results are similar.
 
...

Excellent concise posts on Bitcoin, DCFusor. While I wish them (or the successor digital currency) well, I am not going to play in that sandbox.

Gold, fishez...
 
I think I've posted this before:

Before you can even get started, you need a virtual wallet, which needs to be synchronized. After letting my computer "synchronize" for 8 or 12 hours or so, I wasn't even halfway done. So forget about it!
 
When you mine you earn .0000001 coin at a time.

I have bit coin I can sell you as I want to just close it out.

I have to see what I have- but I accept paypal. I doubt I will use them- a local guy been on me for months to sell them- he never shows up tho.
 
If you’re an average gamer, you can mine 0.01 Bitcoin a day. It depends how mh/s you have. I have a hash rate around 120, which would get 0.007-0.008 bitcoin a day (24h).
 
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