what software can i use to mine bitcoin - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: sony mavica
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 30, 2018, 10:45:25 pm
content: what program can i use for free to mine bitcoin?

author: Monkeh
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 30, 2018, 10:50:48 pm
content: You will simply be spending money on electricity for no gain.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 12:18:45 am
content: It's a case of if you have to ask, you're not in a position where you can mine bitcoin.Mining bitcoin on general purpose hardware is COMPLETELY dead, and has been for years. Nobody who wants to make any sort of short term profit does it ever. They have switched to ASIC resistant currencies like Ethereum. However, even those currencies need a large upfront investment in order to be profitable, and you run the very possible, very constant risk of this mining bubble popping. Money just doesn't come out of nowhere, and I am very skeptical of the long term stability of CC's.However, to answer your question properly, just look it up on Google. The only one that comes to mind is CUDA miner, but that's for nVidia cards, and possibly not even relevant anymore (I haven't checked). There are an amazing amount of resources on this topic, and while I can't accuse you of anything, it sounds to me like you made the classic mistake of asking a forum before asking Google.I apologize if this seems a bit harsh. CCs are not exactly on my love list recently, due to the now crazy GPU market. Although, who knows, maybe if this bubble pops, which it may never, we will get an inverse cheap GPU influx from everybody trying to bail out.

author: cloudscapes
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 02:42:27 am
content: A coworker of mine recently invested in a dozen GTX 1080 graphics cards (all on riser boards) to mine using nicehash. I believe he estimated he'd start making profit again after 4-5 months of mining 24/7, factoring electricity usage into it. A couple grand a month sort of thing.I tried nicehash once. You sign up to be part of a pool or something. I made three bucks by letting it run overnight on my 1070. Then I forgot about it, not personally that interested.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 05:07:31 am
content: I use cgminer for my Avalon 4. The only other mining software recommended for Bitcoin is bfgminer.Now for altcoins, there are a few times as many miners as there are altcoins. You basically have to research which coins are worth mining.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 05:49:18 am
content: There is a package called Awsome Miner that is a GUI front end for a few different mining programs. It is too hard to mine coins directly, so you want to join a mining pool. For many pools, you don't even have to subscribe. Just give them your wallet's public address, and point your miner at them, and then just wait for the money to come flooding in. You get a share of the earnings.Just search YouTube and there are plenty of guides.Now for the reality. If you are just using the CPU for mining, you would be lucky to be earning cents a day.If you are using a top end nVidia or Radeon card, you could earn 10c a day to maybe a few dollars depending on the coin. Last time I tried was with Electroneum and in about 3 weeks, it dropped from about $2 a day to perhaps 30c a day - if you left the graphics card running flat out 24 hours a day. So if you spend $600 on a good graphics card and are using 4.8kWh of electricity a day, it will take a long time to repay the costs if you can find a coin with a decent return.Even if you can find a coin that lets you earn, say, $5 a day, you will not be earning anything like that in 1 month.As pointed out, coins such as Bitcoin suit ASIC miners and there is not much point in even trying with your PC.It is much cheaper to take your $600 for the graphics cards and buy about 10 different kinds of crypto coins, put them into your own wallets and then just ignore them for the next 5 years. If history repeats itself, you could have hundreds of thousands of dollars by then. Or you could have $6.Don't leave the coins with exchanges or use website-based wallets.

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 06:15:10 am
content: May I suggest gridcoin? If you want to burn away electricity and receive a token of dubious value, you can at least contribute to science whilst doing it...

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 06:50:39 am
content: Quote from: daqq on January 31, 2018, 06:15:10 amI mine Curecoin/Foldingcoin with my GPU.As for best efficiency, it used to be mining with (cheap) smartphones but that's becoming far less profitable the last few months. (The days of getting $100/month with 4 cheap smartphones ended about 2 years ago. Now it's like $15-20/month with 5 smartphones and the difficulty is still increasing.) HDD coins like Burstcoin and Storj seem to be be the ones where difficulty increases at a relatively slow rate.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 08:35:30 am
content: Honestly, we run BOINC on most of our machines in this house. It contributes to science, and makes use of your idle hardware. CC mining is a rather dangerous economical science. Like with stocks, if you aren't careful, you can loose your initial investment just by bad luck.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 09:56:22 am
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on January 31, 2018, 08:35:30 amMining crypto costs nothing apart from any hardware you decide to purchase and the cost of electricity. You aren't buying crypto so you have nothing to lose. You really need to do your homework if you decide to mine and to get decent performance, you really need to spend a reasonable amount of money. Depending on where you live and how much electricity costs, it's almost not worth it.I looked into it myself and with the gear I had already, I was going to make something like AUD$2.00 per day after taking into consideration power costs. On the flip side, I can save much more than $2 per day just by switching off my desktop machine when it's not in use and doing laundry/dishwashing etc... at the time of day when energy is cheap (or free from my PV array).

author: eevblogger
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 08:15:53 pm
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on January 31, 2018, 08:35:30 amYou may be interested in gridcoin (https://www.gridcoin.us/) then - it is a cryptocurrency built on top of BOINC. Mine CC by contributing to scientific research!

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 10:22:15 pm
content: IMHO it may be more worthwhile to speculate with the various coins. Trading between the various exchanges for example.

author: MT
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 31, 2018, 11:21:03 pm
content: How fascinating this mining of CC's are!Real mining companies only start a mine unless they can reasonably secure a certain gram per tonnes after along period of evaluating hundreds of drill cores out of bedrock and chemical analysis and indepth market surveys and prognosesof their find etc, etc, they take very few chances since starting amine is extremely expensive.

author: CNe7532294
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 02:44:20 pm
content: You're better off just getting out of bitcoin to be honest. Its crashing and will correct to "zero" eventually since its just a brand name with an evolutionary dead end. Its better to check out other cryptocurrencies and any related investments, see what they offer/who is backing them, then speculate/invest on those that can take crypto to the next level.PS: bitcoin =/= cryptocurrency as a whole even though it influences all crypto at this time.PSS: I do have some regrets of getting out early though. I didn't expect alot of people to be in the "mania phase". Lesson well learned.PSSS/related: I'm hoping for a crash so that video cards can return to $200 - 300 USD instead of $500 - 800. I wonder if its worth getting used cards though. Some say they won't last cause of daily bitcoin mining. Others say it would be worth it.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 03:52:48 pm
content: Printing money never ends well.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 04:11:47 pm
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on February 02, 2018, 03:52:48 pmThis is literally and figuratively not printing money, as opposed to actual fiat currency which is both. Fiat currency gets printed at will. Cryptocurrency can't be created without a non-trivial effort on the part of the creator.I'm not pretending cryptocurrency is without risks, but people are suprisingly consistently using arguments against cryptocurrency that either also apply to fiat currency, or apply to fiat currency alone. Don't misconstrue what I'm saying. I hate how people are currently going crazy, I hate what it does to the price of hardware and I hate how much energy is wasted on something that doesn't yield a more useful reward.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 09:05:42 pm
content: It was a bad attempt at a joke.CCs have a massive number of issues. In the same way having a lot of (fiat? like the car?) currencies in the world complicates things, having an abundance of different cryptos can only lead to people arguing about what to and not to accept. It is, however, easier-ish to accept a variety of CCs than it is normal currencies.I personally don't see them becoming truly mainstream, and the money-grab attitude does worry me to the point of humor. (You know it's bad when I am making jokes about it).

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 10:00:32 pm
content: There is a friend of mine in Wangaratta who mined about 90 bitcoins on a gamer's PC in 2009/2010. No great feat, no big power bill. He lost interest andmost unfortunately lost his hard diskafter he upgraded it and threw it in the rubbish bin about 5 or 6 years ago. That hard disk would have gone to Wangaratta transfer station and then to a tip somewhere. The hard disk may still be there intact. It is would be very difficult to find.Would it be profitable to mine the rubbish tip? Wangaratta district has about 17,000 residents. One bin full per week per household. Assuming 2.3 people per household, that's about 7,400 rubbish bins per week, or 385K bin loads per year. The 90 bitcoins peaked their value at about $1.8M. Assuming you narrow the tip dumping down to a 2 year window, that's roughly $2.30 cents cost per bin load. But for every hard disk, you would have to test it. And the price of Bitcoins has halved since the peak. Not worth trying to find it, I would say.

author: daybyter
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 10:55:51 pm
content: Take a look at monero.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 11:24:03 pm
content: Quote from: blueskull on February 02, 2018, 10:23:14 pmThere's plenty of stories like that and they're plausible. Many people into computers heard about it around that time and mined for a bit until the novelty wore off. Bitcoins weren't worth much back then, so it was mostly academic. Of course, people have deplorable backup strategies, even those that should know better. Add them together and many people have mined Bitcoins worth nothing back then, worth a fortune now, yet lost forever.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 02, 2018, 11:55:35 pm
content: A friend of mine was a manager at a internet hosting company where a bunch of technicians were dabbling in Bitcoin. They all had multiple coins. Then everyone lost interest for years. I suspect they were probably using free capacity on the companies servers for doing the mining.Only one of those technicians actually could find their wallets - he bought a house in Sydney from his coins when Bitcoin was worth about $3000. He could have been a millionaire if he waited a bit longer, but still, getting a house for nothing was a pretty good outcome.It is easy to think now - "How could anyone be so stupid" but if you go back a few years, people had written it all off. The wallet keys were probably in an obscure place in the hidden "App Data" folder and it was easy to forget to safely back it up. The whole infrastructure was pretty crude. Of the people who dabbled in Bitcoin right at the start, more probably lost their wallets then kept them.At the start, you could mine on an ordinary PC and you could get 50 Bitcoin payout when you had a success. That was worth about $3.00 - if you could find a way to sell it. It was just a bit of fun at the time.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 12:10:30 am
content: I know a guy who made about $40K. He got out before the big hype started and could have been multimillionaire if he stayed in. I think the total would have been 25 or 30 million in December. But that's the name of the game. You can't just look at the ideal performance and cry over the difference. Well, you can, but you would be lying to yourself. Just like in the stock market, getting in and getting out at the perfect moment is unlikely. Some shares will fall, some will rise. There's a reason people tell you to spread the risk. As long as you gain more than you lose and come out on top, you win.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 12:13:22 am
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on February 02, 2018, 03:52:48 pmIt has to be done otherwise the economy cannot grow. BUT there has to be a balance between the size of the economy and the amount of money. Some people in an earlier thread on cryptocurrencies made an interesting point about how cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are useless as money just like gold is. If you can't make enough to keep up with economic growth then you get deflation which means the value of money increases without any work being done to justify the increase of value. That causes an economy to a grinding halt becuase investing money becomes a stupid idea. IOW: money has no intrinsic value other than the amount of work it represents.

author: shteii01
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 12:31:57 am
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on February 02, 2018, 09:05:42 pmhttps://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 12:36:04 am
content: Unlike paper money where the lowest you could go is 1 cent in most currencies, it's technically easy to divide an Ethereum coin (or other coins) into smaller units, like 0.00001 ETH, so the total number of coins in the world is not a big deal : if the demand is high, the value of each individual coin can go up, and you use divisions of a coin to pay for things.Also, unlike Bitcoin, coins like Ethereum produce new blocks more often (for example 3 ETH reward for every block created, which is every ~15 seconds) and this amount of reward can be adjusted by developers but only if more than 51% of the miners agree to upgrade their software to follow the new "set of rules" of the coin.In the case of Ethereum for example, this happened last year, in October ... they decreased the difficulty to make mining easier, but lowered the reward to half the amount in return, you can see the chart here :https://www.etherchain.org/charts/difficultyThe point is, if there's a need to increase the number of coins to "keep up with economy", miners will vote and if more than 51% agree, then amount can be changed.Bitcoin suffers from the long block times (10m), small number of transactions per block (~2 transactions per second I think), high transaction fees, and the Chinese miners don't want to do anything that would lower their profitability. So they basically dug their own grave... the bitcoin is becoming less and less attractive.In comparison, Ethereum runs around Bitcoin and they have active team of developers who are working on improving things substantially, like working on having proof of stake and proof of work systems simultaneously (mine some blocks, validate some blocks without mining) and they're also working on sharding, which will raise the number of transactions the coin can handle exponentially.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 12:57:33 am
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on February 02, 2018, 09:05:42 pmYes, fiat currency is any money you use to buy a Fiat with. Can't be a Ferrari or Volkswagen, though.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 02:14:57 am
content: Quote from: CNe7532294 on February 02, 2018, 02:44:20 pmI have been running Folding@Home (what's used to mine Curecoin/Foldingcoin) pretty much 24/7 on my GTX 970 for over 3 years. Based on the thermal cycling theory, 24/7 Curecoin/Foldingcoin mining should actually be less stressful than idle most of the time with occasional VR gaming and upscaled-to-4K SexyCyborg viewing.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 02:44:03 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on February 03, 2018, 02:14:57 amWear is not just thermal cycling though, and increases with temperature and voltage. Both are typically maximized to increase the hash rate. I doubt regular or even enthusiast gaming with at least 98% idle time is worse than an all out voltfest trashing.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 03:23:38 am
content: It's not common for mining cards to be overclocked - on the contrary, they might actually be underclocked a little to boost efficiency.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 08:41:23 am
content: Quote from: mariush on February 03, 2018, 12:36:04 amYou are missing the point. The value of a coin going up is exactly the problem! The value of a coin should decrease by about 2% per year to be useful as real money in a real economy.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 09:58:46 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on February 03, 2018, 08:41:23 amWhy?Why should all the normal rules of paper money, where you have so many middle men (banks and all that) and a single issuer of coin (centralization) be the same with cryptocurrencies which are decentralized?It's just as easy to adjust the prices of products, instead of adjusting the value of a coin.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 10:02:49 am
content: Quote from: blueskull on February 02, 2018, 10:23:14 pmNope. The guy is and was extremely IT aware. I have know this fellow for 25 years. He and my son have both were online before most people had even heard of the Internet or even seen a PC. Today, their knowledge of what is going in the networking world leaves most of us, including myself, for dead. They told me about bitcoins years ago and I thought at the time "yeah, whatever". I could say a lot more, which includes associations with to Kevin Mtnk (sic), Assange and the Wizard of Woz but you would accuse me ofing so I won't.In any case, hard disks are not hermetically sealed in order for air pressure to be equalised. They typically contain an absolute filter, but these may break down and moisture will get in. My guess is after several years in a rubbish dump, the contents of hard disks will be destroyed forever. Of course a garbage compactor can do severe damage.Bitcoins is not the biggest loss when a hard disk crashes. I once was asked to repair a hard disk for a major software development company. The hard disk had the software repositories for projects that had 200 employees working on them over course of two years.No backup.Fortunately, the hard disk had a fractured r/w head wire and a damaged boot sector on track 0. I fixed the HDD, and used trusty old XCOPY under a OS/2 command shell to copy the entire user data contents to a new hard disk. I named the volume "LUCKY_YOU" and had the HDD returned.I concluded from this and other experiences that many IT managers simply don't know much about computers.In 1987, a colleague hurriedly put in a diskette and typed "del *.*" and answered "yes" to "Are you sure?". He lost his root directory.No backup.All his files created over two years were on that root directory. He did not know about qkuneras, and fooled around to the point the data would have been overwritten anyway.Many people did not back up their data, and maybe they still don't. But I know an engineer who has backed up every email he has sent/received since the mid-1980's BBS days... both private and business. EVERY single message sent and received. He backs them up on several media. He fires up the backup HDDs monthly to protect the HDD's from stiction. He is somewhat strange.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 11:45:33 am
content: Quote from: VK3DRB on February 03, 2018, 10:02:49 amI'm sorry but several decades in the industry, numerous qualifications and a Masters degree says something different.Failing to properly back up is a rookie error. I don't care how "aware" you are in "IT", if you don't create proper backups of your critical data, you might as well be working at a Level 1 IT help desk; telling people to reboot their machine to "fix" their problems.

author: ruffy91
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 12:04:31 pm
content: Critical data? A wallet worth 3$ IF you can sell it isn't really critical data.I also threw away a wallet with 14 bitcoin I mined myself on the CPU. I didn't care about them when changing harddisk. But to be honest I lost nothing.I would have sold them when they were 1$, 10$, 100$, 1000$, 10000$...

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 12:09:11 pm
content: Quote from: ruffy91 on February 03, 2018, 12:04:31 pmI have data sitting on my archives which is worth "nothing". Not everything has a dollar value. But to me, its loss would be devastating, regardless if the data was created now or 10 years ago.Likewise I have data in backups which is classified a certain way, that in itself is valuable, depending on who has access to it.Whether it be a photograph from a family BBQ in 1990 or an Australian Government document, it has value.

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 02:10:06 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on February 03, 2018, 11:45:33 amWith that amount of experience you know that people suck at making consistent backups, including those that should and do know better. Practising and preaching and all that, and let's not get into the qualifications versus quality debate. People not making proper backups is a fact of life regardless of who they are and what they do for a living.Don't overlook the humble reboot either. It being a trope isn't mutually exclusive with it being helpful.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 02:20:27 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on February 03, 2018, 11:45:33 amWrong. Let me back up my claims of "aware in IT". Trying not to blow any trumpets here. The guy has a degree in Computer Science. He has run his own IT company and has been the key support for a major part of the state's IT infrastructure in school education. My son has two degrees - Engineering and Computer Science, and works for a large globally well known company as the leader in anti-hacking, cyber-security and network architecture. My son earned an award from the Premier of Victoria for being only one of three students in the entire state of Victoria earning a perfect score in Systems and Technology in his final year of high school. In his last few years of high school these two were writing code part time for companies on the side.The fact the guy lets his Bitcoins be lost when they are worth cents without backing up the data, no way implies they are help desk level 1. The guy didn't have the foresight and definitely neither did you. Your "several decades in the industry, numerous qualifications and a Masters degree" failed to provide you the foresight to invest heavily in bitcoins in the early days. As with all of us.I agree with you on one thing. Backing up important data is basic. Bitcoins were not considered important at the time, and no-one would have known their future value. Not even you.

author: amspire
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 03:32:59 pm
content: Quote from: VK3DRB on February 03, 2018, 02:20:27 pmThis is the truth. I remember listening to a podcast "Security Now" where Steve Gibson was describing how Bitcoin worked. At that time, anyone could have bought Bitcoins for $1 or less. There was a website where you could log in and they gave you a whole Bitcoin for free.Do you think anyone would be giving away free Bitcoins to total strangers if they had any idea that a Bitcoin might one day be worth 10's of thousands of dollars? The attitude was "This is a bit of fun. Here is a free Bitcoin so you can try it out".

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 03:40:22 pm
content: Obviously, the Bitcoin wouldn't be worth today what it is if everyone started hoarding it from the start. That's not how these things work.

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 05:08:15 pm
content: This is a nice overview of the evolution of mining, from software to cutting-edge ASICshttp://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mbtaylor/papers/Taylor_Bitcoin_IEEE_Computer_2017.pdf

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 03, 2018, 06:41:37 pm
content: Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on February 03, 2018, 05:08:15 pmToo bad they didn't go in depth of how the ASIC logic is designed. And also about the algorithms used in altcoins and how some of them are ASIC resistant. One example was Scrypt with a N factor high enough to make it difficult to make an ASIC with the required amount and bandwidth of RAM to have a substantial advantage over GPUs. Another example is Curecoin/Foldingcoin where the problems being solved are wide enough in scope that an ASIC designed to solve them would basically be a GPU.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 04, 2018, 01:35:37 am
content: Quote from: mariush on February 03, 2018, 09:58:46 amNo it isn't because the value of the cryptocurrency has to decrease constantly (inflation) to make an economy work. Adjusting the prices of products should be an effect of the decrease in value and not the scarsity fof the cryptocurrency. It is not about the rules of money but it is how every economy works in it's fundamental principle which is like the laws of physics. You may see cryptocurrencies as something providing freedom but the ones which have scarsity built into them are just not useful to replace the money issued by central banks.