Topic: Getting feet wet - SOLO ONLY hardware list (Read 3170 times)

I think deepbit is best for newbies, payouts are pretty often.

On average being the key. With this sort of hardware, on average the OP will be dead and buried before he finds his second block. I guess his beneficiaries  will be better off.. "on average".

Not true.  I may not have any coins, or I may have 101 coins, or 1000.  The power of variance.  By average solo mining will pay better, independent of hashrate and difficulty.  Blocks are found randomly.  No single result is certain or impossible.  Correctly applied statistics can help you predict averages and other properties over time for large samples.

Btw, the difficulty has been declining for months now.  By some people's (flawed) logic, solo mining pays less due to difficulty increase.  Should be very profitable when difficulty goes down then, or what? :-)

its not because you cant mine that you cant contribute. Dont worry about the mining; others will: its simple free market economics. In fact, its because enough ppl already mine that you cant extract a profit.

If you want to further the bitcoin cause; simply spread the word. Every online purchase or donation you do, send an email asking if they accept bitcoins. And use bitcoins for purchases whenever you can. That does infinitely more to help bitcoin than setting up a mining farm.

Indeed if i could place such a generator without freaking the hell out of my neighbours
Another option was to place a wind turbine or solar panels it maybe would in time return the investments, but the rules and regulations of the local governement does not permit to do so
Placing windmills is not allowed nor placing solar panels in plain sight ... yes they own a huge portion on stock of the biggest energy company which totally controls all of my region, or even 1/3 of the netherlands for that matter. Its again got a new name because the old was too tainted, lol especially for me they had a very bad taste in the mouth. sadly this old government companies still have a firm hold on every aspect of the energy in our country and hold the market hostage.
So either way for me at the moment it seems impossible to gain something out of bitcoins or can contribute in other ways.
I plainly lack enough money todo it right nor can i put money i don't have into something which clearly at the moment only would cost money.
Do not get me wrong here i think bitcoins could be a very nice way to shop worldwide and yes it does have the same problem as all other means with value, their allways be people who will try to rip you off  or scam and steal it fom you. But hell lets be honest every thing we do we are at risk of that houses, cars and buildings get broken into, creditcards and bank accounts try to avoid others scam or steal also and many times fail to stop them. Walking over the street with a wallet with 20 euro in it will get you killed in some spots in our country.
So nothing new is being said here, i just hope bitcoin gets over this trust issue again and hopefully gets a more accepted means of paying for whatever

Depends how big the pool is. In a large pool, you can get payouts like every hour or so (although the first payout may take a day, because of the needed confirmations). In a smaller pool it can take days or weeks depending on luck, but obviously the payouts are bigger.

As for how to do it, just put in your wallet address in the pool's config page. If you are having trouble, Id suggest bitminter, its a pool with their own mining app, extremely easy to use (and fast too):
https://bitminter.com/
But its a small pool, so it can take a while.

BTW, I just checked your energy prices. Natural gas is cheap. 3-4x cheaper per KwH. Invest in a generator and produce your own energy .

About how often do you get bitcoins with pool mining and how do you do it? I still am waiting for all my blocks to download so I'm not sure how the whole thing works :/

If one card isnt profitable, 10x cards wont be either.

And indeed, with such energy prices, its likely never  profitable for you with GPUs. There might be brief windows of opportunity where it is profitable, when bitcoin price spikes and global hashrate and difficulty havent caught up yet, but in the grand scheme of things, nop. Unless you want mine with FPGA's. These have vastly lower energy cost per MH but are rather expensive to buy making it a somewhat risky or longer term investment.

If i read this well its simply in no way profitable to run a miner either if it runs on a pool nor as solo miner
As for the site given it seem to me giving incorrect values for germany and netherlands those prices are pure based on the energy itself but we pay transport costs and new energy tax and also a monthly tax which is not calculated by that site in total my energy per Kwh is 0.44 euro cents.
So if i am reading it right in no way this bitcoin mining can be profitable for me, even if i bought a enormous system with 3 x 6990 cards into it ( which i never can afford).
It simply would never cover the costs of the system and the needed electra which such system eats is like 1200 Kwh or something similar

6 Rigs + a leaf blower to keep them cool... now that's what I call mining

Its not profitable if you count all 225W of the machine (ie, if you otherwise turn the machine off).
Power cost per 24h: 0.43 USD
Revenue per day: 0.09 USD
      ... less power costs: -0.35 USD

See for yourself here:
http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

Dont bother with the quadro either.
There are only a few cards out there where its even possible to be profitable, that is basically 5770s, 58x0, 59x0, 68x0 and 69x0 cards. Even with those cards its tough to make a profit, with anything else, forget it.

In my honest opinion it is cheaper to buy bc than to farm them on a single machine.  My gaming rig eats more power than I can farm and the house gets hot.

Interesting points, but I think still having a machine running solo specifically for the variance is a good thing because if I hit I suddenly can afford to buy some new hardware that I would not otherwise have. And if you read before I am a gambler ;-) I used to play online poker for a living now I am doing actual working and looking for a new way “out”.

As an update what I thought was  a 5870 turned out to be a dead card so now I have my 6450 mining on this computer @ 28.5 Mhash/s on a pool. It is the best working machine I have atm so I am thinking of putting this solo and switching all the others to a pool. Right now I am paying $0.08 per KWh and according to my power management software I am using 5.40 KWh per day….. I also have a Quadro 3xxx that is PCIe that may be dead. Worth using if it is not?

Good luck with that then. Next year we will have the 7000 series and probably FPGAs/ASICs so your 20 years will become 100 years and then 1000 years and you still won't have any coins.

The card uses 19W.  About 0.7 Mhash/s per watt isn't very good, but not terrible either.  166 kWh/year for a 1:17 chance to win 50.fees bitcoins at current difficulty is not bad.  The power isn't free (I don't pay for it, but I care about it), but the alternative to mining is an electrical oven.  I don't care that much about 2.82 BTC a year either, providing no pool downtime or difficulty changes, but I would care about a anonymous virgin block of 50 + fees.

So what?  It will take even longer to get 50 + fees BTC when mining in a pool.  I may actually get the 50.something in the lifetime of the card.  With pooled mining I am certain not to.  My average income from this card will be higher than in a pool.  In reality it will probably be 0 from now, if the difficulty stays up, but it can also be any multiple of 50 (or 25, 12.5, etc) + fees.  If I used this in a pool, I'd get something like 2.82 BTC a year.  I'll rather invest my 2.82 coins in a 1 to 17 chance to win 50 + some.  A nice, anonymous virgin block just for myself.  :-)

Yes, it does.  Do the math.  Difficulty is irrelevant.  Difficulty only changes the average time between blocks in solo mining or price per share in pooled mining.  The effect is the same.  The chance of finding a block is just a bit higher with lower difficulty.

Statistics is often non-intuitive, but this shouldn't be.  When solo mining your average income for a given hashrate is proportional to the difficulty.  When pool mining your average income for a given hashrate is also proportional to the difficulty.  For the exact same reason.  This is true for any period, and when the change happens or the direction (higher or lower) doesn't matter.  It happens at the same time for everyone.

Bit pool is where it is at. Better to do it in a group vs going dumb luck method in my opinion.

This is the most misleading comment in the thread. Have you looked at difficulty changes since May? You will probably never find another Bitcoin block with that card. You will earn money if you turn if off (or join a pool, if you don't pay for electricity).