

Ask HN: Is it still a good time to invest time/money in mining Bitcoins? - sk2code


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pieterhg
Unless you want to do it on a huge scale (see
[http://theverge.com/2013/12/2/5165428/bitcoin-mine-in-
hong-k...](http://theverge.com/2013/12/2/5165428/bitcoin-mine-in-hong-kong-
uses-jelly-to-keep-cool)), it's not.

You might want to look into mining litecoin (LTC), which might still be
profitable and whose mining is CPU-based.

~~~
stevejalim
Having tried Litecoin CPU mining out of curiosity the other day, I'd not
consider it worthwhile. My 2.0GHz i7 MBP was getting around 4 khash/sec (and
running at 99C, so I bottled out). I then tried it on an otherwise pretty idle
server, which got a steady 2.0 khash/sec.

Feeling smug that I'd be using spare, paid-for server cycles to make money, I
looked up some expected earnings. (Warning: I'm an LTC noob, so may have
plugged in bad assumptions), but even at 4khash/sec, I was looking at less
than $3 a year

[http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/litecoin-mining-
calculat...](http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/litecoin-mining-
calculator/?h=4.00&p=30.00&pc=0.10&pf=1.00&d=1734.16053808&r=50.00000000&er=0.03581000&hc=0.00)

I'd like to be proven wrong on this, of course. However, talking to a couple
of people on IRC (hardly guaranteed 100% reliable info, but good enough for
me) it seems that even LTC has moved to GPU mining being a lot more realistic
than CPU mining)

------
RubberSoul
My understanding is that you need essentially free electricity to make it
worthwhile.

Also, Bitcoin is wasteful. People are using an incredible amount of energy
unnecessarily. It's a pretty selfish thing to do. This is a flaw in the
system's design. I'm not sure other coins are much better in this regard.

~~~
yebyen
Your point of view is incredibly short-sighted.

The ASIC revolution has turned the tide of energy wastefulness of Bitcoin, and
continues to do so. What formerly required a motherboard, connected to a 350w
PSU, and a high-powered video card that would (ok I don't know how much of the
PSU's amps it actually drained), can now be dwarfed by a 40w or 80w draw.
There is almost no point in running a GPU farm today, and around March, if the
BTC price is stable until then, it will make more sense to buy BTC on the
market than to run these machines. But today it's profitable.

Think of it this way: once all of the coins are minted, the only thing left to
protect with all of that hashpower will be the tx fees. If people don't want
to pay the fees, then the miners won't get paid, fewer people will be willing
to hash, the transaction volume may even have to go way down, and no, you
don't need free electricity in order to make it worthwhile.

I have two 5GH/s BFL Jalapenos and yes, they're only making about 0.2BTC or
$200/mo at current BTC prices, but they add about $10/mo to my electricity
cost in total. That means it even pays for my high speed internet connection,
for the time being. I don't know if I'd recommend it to a newcomer, due to the
difficulty of actually getting that kind of hardware (I waited 8mo)

But

Think about how many "web sites" I'd have to "host" before I could get that
kind of reliable return from running a server computer in my house 24/7\. And
as a side benefit, I get to use the computer to provide network services (for
a small profit, without sucking any... err having any customers to deal with.)

