Bitcoins

[Rathji]

Right now, the easiest way to get in small is the Bitcoin Erupter. It is not at all economically viable to mine with a CPU/GPU anymore, even if you were to get your power for free.



They cost about .17 BTC each (about $20), or you can get discounts on orders of 5, 10 or 50. (I get mine at wtcr.ca)

They run off a power USB, and most people jsut run them in a hub like this:


Some people get creative with it, and do it like this though, as the devices do run a bit hot.

[MrCallahan]

Hmm...those actually seem like a pretty decent option to go with. Although, if I'm doing my math right, I would need about 15 of those to equal one of these butterfly labs units, and the cost would be a bit higher.

Do you have a dedicated box to handle all those USB hubs?

[Rathji]

I have no idea if Butterfly labs is even shipping those units right now, and even if they are they are heavily backlogged. Any money you save on purchase will be lost in decreased production due to difficulty increase.

I run the hubs off my server, since it is already running anyway, but you can rig a Raspberry Pi to do it if you like. The most cost effective, is likely to run them on a machine that is always on anyway, and using these 13 port USB panels. I opted not to, since my server is located where my kids could just grab them out, and I decided that was a bad thing.

[photon]

Can you even make money with those (the USB ones) now? Assuming $30 each, get 10 of them for $300, at the current rate you'd make $40/month or so not counting electricity cost. 7.5 months to break even, but difficulty goes up, so even if you assumed a 25% per month increase in difficulty you wouldn't even break even after a year, if ever.

[MrCallahan]

The USB option does seem like the quick and easy way to get in it, especially when you look at getting larger USB hub, such as this one at Monoprice.

[Flames89]

Originally Posted by Rathji

... BTC are getting to be pretty mainstream now.

You can even buy Humble Bundles with them, which is what I use most of mine for.

That is not a great example of "mainstream"

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by photon

Can you even make money with those (the USB ones) now? Assuming $30 each, get 10 of them for $300, at the current rate you'd make $40/month or so not counting electricity cost. 7.5 months to break even, but difficulty goes up, so even if you assumed a 25% per month increase in difficulty you wouldn't even break even after a year, if ever.

If you reinvest all the coins you get, you pretty much keep ahead of the current rate of increase. Which means you likely won't make large amounts of money in the long term with these particular units, when you factor in the cost of USB hubs.

The real money is in custom hardware, where people have designed boards to work with these same (or similar) chips, so you get a lot more power for your money invested, but it is more complex to evaluate and you need to buy the parts, and either flow the board yourself or send it to someone else to setup, which is why I wasn't going to recommend it for someone who was a beginner.

You can make money playing the market as well, and if you sign up to a pool where you get NameCoins (another crtypo currency that you essentially get for free as a byproduct of BTC mining) as well, it helps a little.

[Regular_John]

Originally Posted by Rathji

They cost about .17 BTC each (about $20), or you can get discounts on orders of 5, 10 or 50. (I get mine at wtcr.ca)

Alright help me out here, I've never mined a single bitcoin and I currently have none. It appears wtcr.ca only sells those Erupter for bitcoins... how would I go about purchasing them?

[Rathji]

https://www.cavirtex.com

Go there, sign up. Do the verification thing.

Put money into your account just like you were paying your phone bills online, as a payee on your banking. Buy btc.
It's a local company which I like.

[Daradon]

World's first Bitcoin ATM opens in Canada!

http://business.financialpost.com/20..._lsa=73b6-2528

So how's everyone get rich quick schemes going? Still as much excitment over this as before? Wish I had known about it late last year.

As a bit of an environmentalist I do get a bit sad seeing those bitcoin mining set-ups though.

[Rathji]

The environmentalist in you should not fret as badly as it used to. The new Asic miners use about 1% if the power.

As for the getting rich quick thing, I did all all my bitcoins for $200 each last week. Thinking of putting the funds into a new PC rather than reinvesting in more equipment though, so long term my production will go down.

If it drops again before I decide, I might buy back in.

[hmmhmmcamo]

The meteoric rise in bitcoin has meant that within the space of four years, one Norwegian man’s $27 investment turned into a forgotten $886,000 windfall.

Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.

Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten. After eventually working out what the password could be, Koch got a pleasant surprise:

"It said I had 5,000 bitcoins in there. Measuring that in today's rates it's about NOK5m ($886,000),"

http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...rway-oslo-home

[rubecube]

I bought in again last week, but not for very much. Oh what could've been 8-10 months ago...

[Azure]

Should have bought in after it originally went up to $250 and crashed back down soon after.

[MrCallahan]

http://www.bitcoinplus.com/

Interesting ways to create some bitcoins if you're a web developer and run a few websites. They have an API that you can add, which will generate bitcoins using visitors of the site.

[return to the red]

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitco...nishes-2013-11

[QUOTE]A Chinese Bitcoin exchange that held up to $4.1 million in users' accounts has gone offline and everyone involved with it has vanished, according to CoinDesk

[/QUOTE]

[Rathji]

That's part of the reason I am using a local company.

[Azure]

BTC-E is Russian run, but they haven't had many issues and are relatively stable.

[rubecube]

If I were to punch out today, I will have doubled my initial investment. Is it worth it do that and buy back in at another drop, or just keep holding?

[Tron_fdc]

This is fascinating. I've been reading about BTC for a few days now.

Is there a central exchange for them? There doesn't really seem to be. I found a few sites where you can trade them, but the price is all over the map. Theoretically I could buy them on one exchange, then turn around and sell them somewhere else for a 25% premium (or more).

Seems to me that if someone spent a lot of time exploiting all the unregulated areas of the currency there is quite a bit of money to be made.

It's also pretty tempting to put together some cash, and order up some mining equipment. It really is like a gold rush.