Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Cant wait to see the movie with those Silk Road guys, although that case is still wide open.

I'm a bit surprised that with all the money going into bitcoin mining, there aren't more attempts to go after the encryption algorithm -- or maybe there are and I just haven't heard about it.

ASICs are a significantly greater investment risk than GPUs, which is why I'd think mining scrypt based cryptocurrencies may be a better strategy. If the market crashes, you can still sell the graphic cards to people who use them for their intended purposes.

Are the R9 290s the current sweet spot for scrypt mining?

So can these virtual currencies just be day traded?

Sounds like some fun gambling.

Tirant_sl said:

So can these virtual currencies just be day traded?

Sounds like some fun gambling.

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Until they crash. So far anyone doing it has made a shit load. A lot of people say a crash is coming, and I tend to agree, but it could up another $5,000 in the mean time.

Several companies in china started accepting bit coins, that's supposedly what is driving the current run up in price.

I think I may try this out. Which exchange site are you guys using? And is it hard to sell the coins and get USD back?

I'm using campbx. No issues sending money to my bank via ACH

So... you guys have intrigued me with this stuff and running the calculators I should be able to snag $8/day (Only $240/mo but that's enough to clear a few bills or something) or something like that running my 7970 with Litecoins at current rates - but am I correct in how I've got things set up that it basically renders the PC useless while its running?

Like even just simple web browsing BAAAAARELY works with it active.

Vaclav_sl said:

So... you guys have intrigued me with this stuff and running the calculators I should be able to snag $8/day (Only $240/mo but that's enough to clear a few bills or something) or something like that running my 7970 with Litecoins at current rates - but am I correct in how I've got things set up that it basically renders the PC useless while its running?

Like even just simple web browsing BAAAAARELY works with it active.

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Its probably usug 100% of your GPU. That's what bit coin does.

Yea GPU based one GUIminer with Tahiti selected (7970 codename) - do have uTorrent in the background too with the wallet still setting up though.

Vaclav_sl said:

Yea GPU based one GUIminer with Tahiti selected (7970 codename) - do have uTorrent in the background too with the wallet still setting up though.

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Whichever GPU is mining is pretty much off-limits for anything else. If you want to web-browse or do other things, you should be fine if you lower the intensity. Even better, you could just use the integrated graphics on your mobo. If you don't have that or don't want to deal with cable swapping, you can try setting a lower intensity level in your mining software. Intensity 20 (max with cgminer unless you custom compile) is what people typically use for dedicated mining, but a lower level should let you web-browse decently.

We're looking at a difficulty bump in about 1.5 days which should bring us up to 2000 difficulty. (1) 7950 hashing at 650kh/s = .32 LTC per day. To do proper calculations on profitability, you have to consider that the price may rise or fall dramatically (historically, its been rising... hence why more and more people are getting involved). I shut my rig down for two months over the summer because I didn't like my room being so hot and LTC weren't trading very well. At current exchange rate, that cost me $3500 a month. Live and learn.

On a side note, we were seeing difficulty increases back in April when one 7950 would make $3/day. Right now, one 7950 is worth about $12/day. I anticipate FAST difficulty increases as rigs are deployed.

Tuco_sl said:

n00b question: Will the increase in mining difficulty apply a limitation on the currency such that a new currency will take its place? I know there's a variety of competing cryptocurrencies, but it seems like as the market increases so will the demand for minable currency, causing a constant shift in which cryptocurrency is used, making it a violatile market.

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April/May saw a enormous increase in the amount of cryptocurrencies. The huge majority of them were simple copies of BTC with a few variables changed, and all of them based on scrypt instead of SHA-256. Many miners rushed to get in on the initial blocks and mine up thousands of these new coins; some of them did it for the "just in case" principle, others were immediately flipping them at whatever exchange rate they could get from the "just in case" investers. I'm not sure what the alt-coin scene looks like right now, my interest waned in the summer due to work tempo and the heat making my rig obnoxious to deal with.

I may have misunderstood your question, though. If you're asking will a currency die out due to miners abandoning it solely because of high difficulty, then that seems unlikely. Example: LTC price plummets back to $4 prompting many new miners to say "fuck this, this isn't paying the bills". This causes the hashing power to reduce on the LTC network, then the difficulty will re-adjust downward, and miners that stayed will get more coins.

There are many many failed alt-coins, but it wasn't necessarily a problem with mining... it was that the alt-coin was developed for the sole purpose of mining a shitton and selling it for any price possible. Once the "gotta get some of EVERY coin just in case" investors stop buying, then no one gave a shit about them anymore.

BTC is the only coin right now that is actually gaining traction in the real world, and it still has a long way to go. I'm seeing SOME signs of a future for LTC but its still far behind BTC. 95 percent of the interest in Bitcoin right now is as a speculation. I don't necessarily disagree with those speculating... but this is the wild west of investing.

coinbase is another great site for getting your money out fast(US users anyway), you can send the money straight to your bank account when you cash out.