Topic: Too Late to Join the Party? - page 2. (Read 7874 times)

try to overclock 5850 too I'm doing 250 on my 5830 @880. I wonder what is your clock?

5830's are far more cost effective than 5850's.  I got some 5830's for $90 after rebate.  5850's cost me $160.  I'm doing 288M hashes with 5830's and 318M hashes with 5850's.

If there's one thing I learned from watching the first two thirds of MC Hammer's Behind the Music, it's that the money never stops.

If miners were perfectly rational and willing to lie, then yes, it would be in their best interest to deny profitability.

However, most people posting here like to think that they are honest people.  As such, they express their "true" opinion, and not lies.  And most people who mine do so because they think it is profitable - just like most people who flipped houses in 2006 did so because they thought it was going to continue to be profitable - even when data was staring them straight in the face that houses were getting too expensive.  People will go to extraordinary lengths to continue to believe easy money will keep coming.

Except that once again, it would appear that your calculations aren't taking into consideration that the bounty gets halved every 210,000 blocks... not all 21m coins will be minted at 50btc per block. After 210,000 blocks, the bounty drops to 25btc per block, then at 420,000 it drops to 12.5? btc a block, etc. This drastically increases the amount of time it will take to mint all 21 million coins. Sure, the network is solving blocks faster than the optimal 6 per hour, but even at an increased rate, its not going to reduce decades of time into a couple of years.

yes, quit so the difficulty will be lower.

Yes! I also lost thousands of dollars on mining. Everyone should quit. The police will raid you for growing marijuanas. It's a fact!
 and the ozone from my overclocked 5850 gave me lung cancer.

It's still profitable and will be for at least 30 days. Why should you care about 30 days? Because that's when many electronic store return periods end for video cards. So long as you don't mind returning video cards for, at flat worst, store credit minus a 15% restocking fee, you aren't risking much on a few-videocard investment.

I'm not telling you to buy cards with the intention of returning them. Rather I'm saying that the risk is limited because, should the shit hit the fan, you could get most of your investment back. You'll have 29 days of mining to decide whether continuing is worth it or not.

Until then, you don't need to make a bunch of calculations and predictions on what mining will be like past the next few difficulty increases. It's possible that the exchange rate will rise to match difficulty. It's possible that I may fart doves out of my butt the next time I eat a big bowl of chili. The thing is, you don't want to be left out and miss the dove farts, especially when you can join in with little risk and also enjoy a big bowl of chili, which you were probably going to eat anyway because you made it a few days ago and you don't like throwing out leftovers when you spent so much time making that chili in the crockpot. You even used turkey meat to try to make it "healthier" before you gave up on healthfulness and added sausage that you found in the bottom of the freezer. That way, your arteries say "Hey, man, I appreciate the healthy option" right before they get clogged full of sausagey goodness and swear to end you for your trickery. Also, for some reason, you added garbanzo beans. In fact, I don't think this is chili at all anymore, which just supports my point even more, even though I can't remember what it was. Hey, I should put sour cream on this.

It would be in a miner's best interest to deny profitability because any additional computing power added to the network decreases the bitcoin income of the existing miner.

Difficulty drives solved blocks per hour to 6.  So, it is unlikely we will drop below 6 for any period of time so I consider that the long term best case scenario.  6 blocks is 300BTC.  21M BTC - current minted amount and divide by 300 and you get the number of hours.  Divide by 24 and again by 365.25 and you get the number of years.  Simple.  Now, if you look historically, BTC generation has FAR exceeded 6 blocks per hour and thus the large number of coins and currently minted.  I think there is little doubt that at some point in the future [probably months], there will be another influx of hardware and the race to 21M BTC will pull that calculated value back to an earlier date. 

You do realize that some of the really early miners have in all likelihood tens of thousands of bitcoins in their wallets [unless they cashed them out continuously]?  They do have the ability to buy a lot of new equipment if they deem it worth while.

NEVER is too late 

One thing to remember in reading all the pro-mining posts is that most posters have a vested interest, that is, they will be better off if mining continues to be profitable.  This isn't to say they are being deceptive - just that nobody likes to believe the gravy train they are riding will stop.

5850 is the most cost effective card, in terms of performance/$, but they're rare, even more rare than 5970, or 6990. 5830/5870 are the next best cards. use 5830 if you don't have much money to invest with, or 5870 if you have lots of cash.

did your calculation include the diminishing returns on solved blocks? last i heard the estimated time frame for the end of minting was around 2036 or some jazz?

Mining stops at 21 million BTC.  At best, there is 5.6 years left.  However, that is theory based on 6 blocks generation per hour which is the premise behind the setting of difficulty levels.  If the BTC/USD rises significantly and confidence in it is strong, then there will be a flood of new hardware once again and we may see 13-15 blocks / hour.  Also, if new hardware becomes available [i.e. the next greatest mining hardware, GPU or not] and it is cost effective, then there will be another flood of hardware causing another spike until difficulty catches up and brings it back down to 6 blocks / hour.

So, 5.6 years is almost certainly not how much time we have left; I am guessing 1 to 2 years at most and it is highly speculative since it needs to have a real world application when coin mining ends [there are still transaction fees ... but that isn't mining] which means a real market of some type has to grow around this, not just trading coins for cash (that would just be a bubble ready to pop).  Fortunately, there are signs that some smaller vendors are getting into this, but we need to see much more growth around the bitcoin economy to support it when mining comes to an end.

Even if it doesn't pan out in the next few months because of difficulty increases Im still having fun and that's well worth it  in my case.

Regardless of Bitcoin price, those who have ways of not paying for electricity, will certainly have a huge advantage over those who have to pay.

Also, GPU development is entirely graphics focused at the moment. Folding and Bitcoin is extremely niche.

In 2 year, yes, the difficulty will be ALOT higher, however, GPU's are faster and need less power to run. Software has gotten better. Bitcoin price has risen (maybe?). More stores online (and offline?) will be taking Bitcoin.


All in all... If you have the money, it's a fun hobby. One that could potentially pay off. The worst case scenario? You spend $1.000~ on a hobby that doesn't pay off

It's a gamble, but it's a gamble you have a degree of control over and it's a gamble that you can somewhat tilt in your own favor by making the right choices at the right times.

Have fun  

This "floating point Nvidia myth" keeps being repeated, but it is not true.

I am the author of: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU#Why_are_AMD_GPUs_faster_than_Nvidia_GPUs? The same 2x-3x performance advantage that AMD has applies to both integer and floating point GPU instructions. It used to be that Nvidia had a (slight) fp advantage, but not anymore. Even when comparing against Nvidia's professional Tesla range which has a fully unlocked double precision unit:

* HD 6970 = 5100 single precision GFLOPS and 1275 double precision GFLOPS
* Tesla 20xx = 1030 single precision GFLOPS and 515 double precision GFLOPS

You only missed the boat if you are looking for an insta rich solution here. Bitcoins are still young in their existence, minting wont be exhausted for decades to come if the concept lasts that long. The boat is still leaving harbor if you care about more than just making money. Every day more and more services and companies are accepting bitcoins. Every day the word gets out more and more. Every day i make a little bit more bitcoins to spend as an alternate currency for things like pizza and amazon products and cheesy gambling.

If you only need to buy 2 couple of GPU's, I'd say it's not too late. If it was a whole rig it'd be harder to say, but 2 GPU's aren't that risky of an investment.

Sure profits have diminished with exponential difficulty growth, but the growth seems to have stalled for now (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png). Who knows what the future holds, but if the hashrate stays around where it's now, the next difficulty jump won't be very big. Current estimate is something like 512k, only a 18% jump whereas the last one was 80%.

With 2x 58xx being able to do some 700-800+ MH/s, you wouldn't need many weeks to get your investment back, if difficulty and price stay around where they are. I'd say go for it.