Ok then. I just got into this in July after the flurry of news articles around Chuck Schumer etc. I started mining with a GTX260 @ ~50/mh, and a week later was running two 5770s on a cheap mobo with a sempron 140 : ) I was able to find a 5850 on craigslist, so I have 4 cards going and humming around 750mh/s. I still watch my movies through my gtx because id rather be mining 24/7 with the other cards.
I decided early on that even if I lost money on this it would be worth it. It's just plain fun. I like projects. And there's the possibility that the bitcoin/USD exchange rate will climb into 3 figures someday. Getting in now might still be considered
early adoption a decade from now.
The depth of analysis, opinion, and technical details available about bitcoin and bitcoin mining is inexhaustible. So I can dig in and play with my rigs to eek out another 5% of performance, or just let them spin and read optimistic articles about the impending economic revolution, and fantasize about my small handful of bitcoins someday becoming a beach house. All generated from electricity paid for by my landlord.
Aside from any significant financial gain, which I have no firm conviction one way or the other on, and aside from the pure fun of getting the gear working and being a part of something very new, Bitcoin has led me to the following activities:
- Researching available GPU technology and its relevance and application to BTC mining
- Having an excuse to build a new machine
- Learning more about linux and installing a few distros
- Learning about video card bioses, flashing them, their editable elements, etc
- Trying to wrap my head around the proof-of-work and the mining process
- Learning the meaning of and tweaking command line flags in various mining kernels
- Setting up a VNC server/client
- Learning about CUDA and OpenCL
- Learning about fiat currencies and macroeconomics in general
- Building a personal online reporting page using my mining pool's API and jGraph to show my daily average hash rates, bitcoins earned, USD earned at current exchange rates, etc
- Learning about disk encryption, truecrypt, live CDs, dead man's switches, and other interesting stuff
- Babbling to my friends about this new cryptocurrency thing, its ramifications, and the culture surrounding it
If the bitcoins drop to $0.04 each and I have sunk $600 or so dollars into mining gear, well, I have some sweet ass video cards, and I've had fun, and I for sure won't have to look back in 4 years wishing to god that I had gotten in when BTCs could still be mined by individuals and were trading at less than $50 USD.
And although I can't claim to have
any idea what will happen with all this, for the record: I don't think bitcoins will fall back to 4 cents. And if they do, I'm buying.
: )