Hello, I am involved for years to SETI @ home program. I read about Boinc of Bitcoin. Someone recently told me about these Bitcoin. There is potential to earn with our PC the Bitcoin currency? As well as leaving work day and night access to the PC for Seti, we can do the same with a Bitcoin project? So we recover the money we pay for electricity and maybe even earn something. Can you tell me if you can? Thank you.
Tonino La Bella
Appearance Your response

---

I'm delighted to see and/or hear about the project benefiting from this strange animal, "bitcoin". My interest was piqued because I heard that all of my 16 years of computing power I spent on SETI@Home numbercrunching could conceivably help me get a vehicle for personal transportation. I spent about 90 minutes trying to research and understand what it is and how it has "value". I got no practical, real-world understanding of it. Marzeedoats and doezeedoats...

From what I just read. even cursorily, about 5 bitcoins got you guys down in the mines, at the heart of the matter, a new disk drive. That's what delights me, in truth, and with all serious gladness.

So maybe you could help me understand ... Am I wrong in believing that there is some way to use my 51,259 hours to help me with buying a car, motorcycle, or a trip to middle USAmerica to see the solar eclipse this summer...?

Of course, I'll settle for a pointer to some place where the whole concept of bitcoin is clearly explained without reference to philosophical topics or concepts? --Thanks!

---

As I understand it, a pc is not a cost effective way to earn bitcoins, the cost of the electricity to earn a bitcoin will exceed the value of the bitcoin. To be cost effective you need to use an asic.

---

I do wish people would read all the posts.

To quote myself

https://www.hobbymining.com/mining-hardware/
Note this paragraph.


Bitcoin Mining Without Hardware?
It’s still technically possible to mine bitcoins without dedicated mining hardware. However, you’ll earn less than one penny per month. Mining bitcoins on your computer will do more damage to your computer and won’t earn a profit. So, it’s not worth it unless you’re just interested to see how the mining process works. You’re best bet is to buy dedicated hardware like the Antminer S7 or Antminer S9.

You will get nowhere with an ordinary PC even with a modern GPU. You do need a dedicated Bit Coin miner which in itself will set you back several hundred dollars/pounds/euros and be quite power hungry.

In the very first post Eric says

If you've got mining equipment and want to help out, please join the effort.

Ah:

Steve Hawker in another thread reported:

Anything for the Mac? I've got all the Campaign #5 options set to 'Yes' but no work - what am I missing?

Nothing for us OS X people. See: http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/apps.php

You could run Linux in a VM. I'd recommend Ubuntu 14.04.

But before you do anything else, please consider the following:
- there are NO CPU or GPU tasks for any OS and there won't ever be.
- you will need an ASIC. See FAQ: http://www.bitcoinutopia.net/bitcoinutopia/forum_thread.php?id=303&postid=2272#2272

Good luck!

---

I didn't know that Seti@home accepted Bitcoins.. I'll spread the word!

Tell them to provide WUs for other than ASICss, and I'd be glad to crunch for you

But I'm not gonna buy an ASIC just for that

---

Tell them to provide WUs for other than ASICss, and I'd be glad to crunch for you

But I'm not gonna buy an ASIC just for that

That's not gonna happen, CPU's and GPU's just are not efficient enough.

---

Correct... for those who do not know, they literally use BOINC as a front-end to distribute software used to mine Bitcoin. They discontinued CPUmining "campaigns" long ago and now have software like CGminer to just use ASIC hardware, instead.

I've been running pure CGminer for SETI on 6 New R-Boxes till the end.

Any idea how long this runs, so I can jump right into the new work by the time this quest runs! Maybe I missed a post earlier.

---

I didn't know that Seti@home accepted Bitcoins.. I'll spread the word!

I believe that SETI doesn't deal with them, however BitCoin Utopia runs this for funds to support it. So, if you do, you have to go for Campaign #5 for it to go to SETI. At some point, Bitcoin can, and will stop it.

So crunch while you can! I'm running pure Campaign #5 (for 20+GH/s ASICs) on 6 New R-Boxes.

---

I down loaded this to my system, but I did not get anything for a week. I can not afford to buy what I think is a hardware computer add on so I removed it. if it can not be run on "normal" computers why push this?

---

They didn't "push" this. They merely mentioned it so those that are willing and have the hardware can be made aware of this offering. The exact wording from Dr. Korpela spells it out:

Eric Korpela wrote:

We've started a new mining effort on Bitcoin Utopia. If you've got mining equipment and want to help out, please join the effort.

The ~5 bitcoins that were donated last year went primarily to buying replacement hard drives. With the number of drives we have running we lose quite a few over the course of a year. It was nice not to need to dip into cash to replace them.

My emphasis added in bold. [Edited to make larger since bold wasn't standing out enough]

Actually ASIC miners (Application Specific Integrated Circuit Miners) only mine bitcoins (BTC). However GPU mining can be quite profitable if your mining something like Monero (XMR). For example, I have an R9 270 GPU, its 2GB and very cheap. I mine Monero on minergate.com at a rate of 424 h/s and make $1.00/day before subtracting the electricity expense. That same card gets 333 Mh/s mining Bitcoin which only adds up to 4 cents a day. This speed difference reflects the difficulty set by miner volume. The more miners the harder it is to mine but the value of the coin rises due to popularity. An ASIC miner that uses 65Watts (Antminer U3) and is around 60GH/s is only $20.00 from a company called Bitmain. The more active ASIC miners there are the more Bitcoin will be worth. I recommend the Antminer S5 for serious starters and the Antminer U3 for hobbyists. Here is an ASIC miner comparison chart to help with the math of Return On Investment. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Knowing this you can see where CPU and GPU mining Bitcoins would be undesirable. You can mine in "pools" and split the reward with the pool. Pools are the most common way to mine successfully. It is like a stock market also, next month something other than Monero will be worth the most to mine per h/s. Mining any crypto currencies with CPU is the slowest way to mine and will not even cover your electricity expense currently.

Mining is not going to make me rich but it is profitable, especially if you look at the potential value of the currency itself rising. There is ROI potential if you get involved and its directly proportional to your investment of setup costs. There is a company called Genesis Mining that rents out Hashing Power for mining bitcoin and mining things other than bitcoin if you do not want to mess with the equipment side of things or get stuck with obsolete equipment as tech improves and competition rises.

There is a man in Eastern Washington that was making 8 million dollars a month mining BITCOIN using ASIC miners on a grand scale. This was not too long ago, here is a video of his setup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8s3d5dSEyc

I love SETI@HOME and contributed for years with my Xeon Blade Servers. I heat my garage doing this. I will continue to contribute CPU power to Seti since it has little potential for mining Bitcoins. I also love the idea of decentralization of currency and telling the banks we do not need them anymore someday, this is far more valuable than the currency itself. So I will help Seti with my CPU's I will mine XMR with my GPU's and I will only mine Bitcoin with ASIC miners. Hope this helps your understanding of Bitcoin. I wish I could have read this to myself on day one of my Bitcoin experience.

Rich Collins

---

Gridcoin Official Website = http://www.gridcoin.us/
Gridcoin Pool = https://www.grcpool.com
Shared Computing Research Platform = https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Info = http://wiki.gridcoin.us
GRC Donations = Rx6ZC4TeAThcVugRfDx7pxkM99288t3L1a

Unfortunately I am unable to mine bitcoins, my virus and my firewall have reported the executable as malware. I tried to go to the website where the executable is stores and Norton blocked me.

---

I mine bitcoin with asic miners. I run 30th. (s5 and s7 miners). I tried to run this from here utopia for fun with no luck, Mining bitcoin with anything other then asic miners is a waste of electricity and time. CPU/GPU mining went out a long time ago for bit coin. However some altcoins use this method (etereum,litecoin, ect.). Maybe try to do one of those with a group.