Bitcoin Mining

Forgive me for bringing up another sort of DC project, but for my potential application it would benefit SETI.

I have been aware of the phenomenon that is "bitcoin mining" for a few months now. It seems to have been a profitable venture especially for those who began mining early on. It is apparently so profitable that some people have set up "bitcoin farms" in much the same way that some of us (myself included) have set up SETI crunching farms.

I would like to be able to add GPU's to my SETI rigs as often as possible, and I am also hoping to build a monster cruncher as soon as possible. High end GPU's are clearly quite expensive, and since the crunching infrastructure is already in place for myself and others, I have thought perhaps dedicating some time to bitcoin mining in order to exchange those bitcoins for hardware. I have found that some sites will sell you a GTX 680/690 for a certain amount of bitcoins. As I plan on putting multiple GTX 690's in my new rig, I thought perhaps this might be a creative way of financing at least a portion of this rig and upgrading GPU's in my existing Seti rigs.

If anybody has any experience with bitcoin mining, would you please share your thoughts? I have no indication of how many dollars worth of bitcoins I could mine in a given amount of time with my current hardware, but if any of you know it to be lucrative or fast enough, I might give it a shot.

I hate to take my rigs away from crunching SETI WU's for even a moment, but as they say, sometimes you have to take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward- in the longrun this would greatly increase my SETI output if it actually affords me some decent hardware without me having to go into my currently sparse pockets. I haven't decided for sure if I'm going to do it yet, I first want to get a rough estimate of how productive my rigs (all the ones on my computer list here on S@H) will be, if it doesn't seem worth it then I won't them off of crunching at all and I'll just continue to come out of pocket for this project.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

I'm sorry, but I can't see for the life of me (or what's left of it) the point behind Bitcoin Mining.

Cheers.
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I'm sorry, but I can't see for the life of me (or what's left of it) the point behind Bitcoin Mining.

Cheers.

From what I understand, they are going to be hitting a wall with GPU mining when you factor in hardware, electricity and the ever increasing difficulty. It's going to move over to FPGA mining being the only way of keeping it profitable in the future. If you have enough to invest in an FPGA mining cluster right now and (again) you get free electricity then it could be a very good idea, otherwise, I wouldn't jump in.
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And not to mention all the cheating that is going on.

It's just one big scam, you can't make money out of nothing...

Got it guys, thanks for the info. I knew I felt like I was missing something when I first read and watched videos about it.. Electricity cost is higher than the value of the bitcoin then that makes it pointless right there. I must admit though, as a professional commodity trader/investment banker/stock broker, following currency fluctuations by the minute is one of the main things I look at to navigate my clients money safely- and I was intrigued by the idea of this so called project that is creating an alternative currency. I specialize in gold, silver and oil investments and as all western currencies are being aggressively undervalued day by day, I have done extremely well by pouring capital into gold, silver, and oil at the right timing of course. Bitcoins sound like they were conceived to be another alternative currency, something I strongly believe in these days from an investment standpoint. But as many of you have pointed out, it is extremely flawed, unprofitable, and likely unsafe. I'll keep my eggs in gold and silver coins/bars/stocks and continue to stick with what I know. I wasn't looking to make myself a return with the bit coins, I was just trying to be clever and use my existing crunching infrastructure to finance more hardware for SETI. Oh well- I guess you can't get something for nothing after all :)

I have a reasonable BOINC balance (600M) and have been doing bitcoin related stuff for the last year. Mining pays for all my electricity, my house is noce and warm and it keeps my CPU projects running quite happily. In addition, there is real money involved and despite the bad comments here, ignorance isn't universal.

oh yea and another reason i figured I wouldn't even bother with this is that only AMD cards seem to be worth the time. even top of the line NVIDIA cards dont compete with lower end AMD for the bitcoin tasks...I will stick with buying NVIDIA cuda cards for crunching SETI.

Currency is basically worth whatever people agree it is worth. Nothing more, nothing less. The definition of "worth" and "people" are open to discussion, of course.
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Frizz I couldn't agree with you more :)

Your words are pretty much exactly the same as the ones out of my mouth each day as I implore my clients to trade in their dollar and Euros for shares in gold, silver mining, and oil producing companies as well as ETF's that hold physical gold and silver. Those who listened to me are sitting pretty, unfortunately many are still too paralyzed with distrust and fear of the markets and investments so they under-invest, and those who I am pursuing as new business shrug it off and force me to call them back 3 months later to rub in their face how they missed out on a 60% gain in just a few months time. Personally I don't keep a savings account, I only use my checking account for medium term cash needs and check writing purposes. My savings account is in silver bars, american eagle and canadian maple coins, and a little bit of physical gold as well. (i believe silver will outperform gold tremendously over this decade and so far it has proved true, i am also young and willing to take the extra risk as silver is far more volatile compared to gold, so I am personally leaning much heavier in silver). sorry to get all financial lol

I'll be intersted to see how long bitcoins stay around and where their value goes in comparison to dollars, gold, euros, etc..