What is Bitcoin Farming? Have you tried it?
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bblondia
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Just wondering if anyone has some insight into this new trend. Has anyone tried it? Is it risky? Does it actually pay off? Are the files on my PC exposed? I read a little bit on the wikipedia site and it seems like you use your PC to help process transactions for a fee. You get paid in bit coins... Which may or may not be an accepted form of currency in the future. Do you have to pay to get started?
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Ashardis
- Posts: 488
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I've tried it, it's not really risky as such - the risk is primarily in whether the current BC vs $ exchange rate is up or down.
You're mainly doing Cost of electricity vs. Exchange rate of Bitcoin vs. $
Depending on how serious you are (or how much you want to invest in it), you either do CPU+low end gpu mining / High end GPU mining / Multiple Highend GPU mining / Dedicated ASIC or FPGA assembly - in order of cost and also how many bitcoins you get on average.
As a novice BC-miner, you should join a mining cluster - where everyone works on calculating a new set of bitcoins and if/when it pays off, everyone gets a share of the bitcoin - and your contribution of the total number of calculations determine the size of the share you get.
Almost all clusters also take a little share for themselves for their services.
The software itself isn't too complicated - what matters is that you realise that it'll completely use all resources your machine has to offer, so don't expect to be gaming or maybe even webbrowse of your machine. Also - since it's running at max load, it will be as loud as it is when you're gaming, only now you don't have other game sounds covering it.. so it might be hard to sleep with a miner PC in the room.
There's no starting cost, you DL the mining software.. and a BIIIIIG Bitcoinblock that's used for verification purposes (also your bitcoin wallet). Then you connect to the cluster and press GO.. and that's it.
What is hard is to get registered on the various currency exchanges and in the end actually converting your BC's into some form of currency you can get out on your bank account.. expect this to be somewhat complicated and incur some fees (both from exchange and other currency providers)
You're mainly doing Cost of electricity vs. Exchange rate of Bitcoin vs. $
Depending on how serious you are (or how much you want to invest in it), you either do CPU+low end gpu mining / High end GPU mining / Multiple Highend GPU mining / Dedicated ASIC or FPGA assembly - in order of cost and also how many bitcoins you get on average.
As a novice BC-miner, you should join a mining cluster - where everyone works on calculating a new set of bitcoins and if/when it pays off, everyone gets a share of the bitcoin - and your contribution of the total number of calculations determine the size of the share you get.
Almost all clusters also take a little share for themselves for their services.
The software itself isn't too complicated - what matters is that you realise that it'll completely use all resources your machine has to offer, so don't expect to be gaming or maybe even webbrowse of your machine. Also - since it's running at max load, it will be as loud as it is when you're gaming, only now you don't have other game sounds covering it.. so it might be hard to sleep with a miner PC in the room.
There's no starting cost, you DL the mining software.. and a BIIIIIG Bitcoinblock that's used for verification purposes (also your bitcoin wallet). Then you connect to the cluster and press GO.. and that's it.
What is hard is to get registered on the various currency exchanges and in the end actually converting your BC's into some form of currency you can get out on your bank account.. expect this to be somewhat complicated and incur some fees (both from exchange and other currency providers)
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bblondia
- Posts: 26
- Joined: Thu Feb 06, 2014 3:23 pm
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Wow. It sounds like it can be pretty involved. I have an old PC that is running a gtx550ti that I won't be utilizing that could run bitcoin farming exclusively. It was an HP home PC that I just added the video card and upgraded psu to about a year ago. The computer is about 5 years old though. Hmm. It sounds like you did not find it worth the time....
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Ashardis
- Posts: 488
- Joined: Fri Aug 09, 2013 4:31 pm
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Yeah.. well.. tbh, I seriously doubt that anyone who's not running dedicated ASICS/FPGA's will get a return on their investment in hardware + power costs covered.. especially as you're only looking at diminishing returns on the # of bitcoins/rising difficulty of getting a block of BC's
So.. if you have LOTS of free electricity.. AND a lot of free hardware.. then it might be worthwhile for you.. but there's a lot of ppl in this game.. and most of them are losers :/
So.. if you have LOTS of free electricity.. AND a lot of free hardware.. then it might be worthwhile for you.. but there's a lot of ppl in this game.. and most of them are losers :/
