Nothing guaranteed, of course this is only a rough estimate! You can also calculate rented mining by setting “Power consumption” to 0 and “Cost of mining hardware” to the rent per time frame. Default values are for a 50 GH/s Bitcoin Miner .
Estimate Strategy
System D Media Interview Michael Parsons about Bitcoin
Extrapolating bitcoin difficulty or price is pure voodoo. It is much easier to predict the relationship of the two parameters in form of the Mining Factor. The Mining Factor 100 is the value in USD of the bitcoins you can generate if you let a 100MHash/s miner run for 24 hours. If the Mining Factor 100 rises above $2 or so everybody buys mining equipment and thus increases difficulty. If it falls people will stop mining eventually. The estimate starts with the current Mining Factor and decreases it exponentially such that the decrease accounts for the factor decline per year. Please note that a profit/loss by holding the coins is not accounted for in this estimate.
Things to consider that might eat into your profit:
The values above are only a snapshot. The network and markets are moving quickly. Check out these diagrams to get a feeling for it.Looks like if your mining operation is not profitable now, it probably will not be in the future.
With rising bitcoin exchange rates it might be more profitable to buy bitcoins than to mine. There are spreadsheets available in this thread or this one (with some FPGA data) for a more custom calculation.Bitcoin exchanges: MtGox. Tradehill. CryptoXchange .
The calculation is based on average block generation time. The closer the average generation time is to the time frame the more the resulting revenue depends on luck.
You will have to pay mining pool fees from close to nothing up to 3% depending on the pool. Unless you want to do pool hopping you should go to a pool with hopping protection. I recommend Arsbitcoin and EclipseMC (with namecoin merged mining). P2Pool is a new completely decentralized alternative.
You will get somewhere from 1% to 3% of “stale shares”. Thread .
When the block count will hit
200000 some time around December 2012 the generation reward will go down to 25BTC. This might partly be compensated by falling difficulty, raising prices, higher transfer fees, etc.
A mining computer generates a lot of heat as a byproduct. This can impact your heating/airconditioning costs depending on outside temperatures. Other byproducts could be noise and an angry wife.
Do you have lots of experience with and like working with computers during lonesome nights? You have to spend quite some time to set up the system (easily several days!) and watch it.
You will not get a 100% uptime.
You will probably not be able to reach the highest values in the Mining Hardware Comparison. Some bragging / measuring error and extensive overclocking of the cards is involved here.
Scaling effects: three cards in one rig do worse than a single card because it gets harder to get out the heat. Results in the list above do not reflect the number of cards.
A disruptive technology like ASIC chips could show up and make GPU mining less profitable.
Politics and legal issues might affect the bitcoin market.
Possible additional benefits:
For suggestions, infos or links on the topic to add, please contact me directly (info [at] bitcoinx.com) or in this thread on the bitcoin forum.
Datacenter connectivity issues have caused short drop in the hashrate. The problem has been resolved and all stratum servers are now reachable. This all happened when 900 Th/s was within a reach. We will get there again with your support and participation in mining ;-)
17.01.2014
We were having an extremely lucky yesterday's mining session. Unfortunately, around 1.30 AM UTC, we were experiencing stratum server issues that eventually spread across all our stratum servers. The problem has been resolved now and mining continues.
13.01.2014
The pool database backend has been successfully migrated to a new hardware. The website is now fully operational. The whole migration process has been accomplished without interrupting the actual mining.
13.01.2014
We are currently migrating pool database to a new machine. Mining will continue without interruption, only website will be down for 1-2 hours.
18.12.2013
Some recent payouts didn't go thru bitcoin network because of unsatisfied transaction fees. We're finding a soluton and all payouts will be processed soon
16.10.2013
In recent days we experienced some successful thefts of user's funds using compromised email accounts. We strongly encourage all users to change email passwords. There's no reason to think that pool security itself has been compromised.
08.07.2013
Getwork protocol support ended. Please be sure your miners support Stratum protocol. You can still use your old getwork miners with Stratum proxy installed on your mining rig.
21.05.2013
Bug in bitcoind caused many invalid blocks generated in recent hours. Thanks to cooperation with bitcoin developers, a bugfix has been deployed. Pool is now back in normal operation.
26.04.2013
Because the user database has been compromised in recent hack, please change password to your pool account!
25.04.2013
Pool is recovering to normal operation from previous attack. delayed payouts will be processed in the afternoon (UTC).
18.04.2013
Pool is recovering from DDoS attack.
14.04.2013
As announced in Getwork deprecation plan. the hashrate on Stratum is far above 90%, so workers which are still using the deprecated Getwork protocol are now charged by 10% fee. Please update your software and start using modern Stratum miners to reduce your fees back to 2%!
12.03.2013
Bitcoin network recently experienced global problems which caused some pool blocks to be invalid. Everything seems to be fixed now.
10.03.2013
Default mining URL for Stratum is stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 . If you're still using api.bitcoin.cz, please fix your URL to prevent fallback to deprecated Getwork protocol.
08.03.2013
Stratum proxy version 1.5.2 has been released. This is bugfix release which add compatibility with some old miners (phoenix, Diablo).
03.03.2013
Stratum proxy version 1.5.0 has been released. All proxy users are encouraged to update .
13.02.2013
ASIC mining become a reality. Jeff Garzik (bitcoin core developer) is testing first shipped unit of Avalon ASIC miner on our pool.
30.01.2013
Native IPv6 address is now available. You can use ipv6.stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 in your miner if your miners have IPv6 support! Please note that IPv6 works only for Stratum miners.
08.12.2012
If you're using old miners from early 2011 or you're mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz:8332", please update your miners and use "api.bitcoin.cz:8332" in your configuration instead. Mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz" is not working anymore.
27.11.2012
Only one day remains to halving block reward from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. Thanks to this change in Bitcoin world, mining income will be drastically reduced. As a countermeasure, pool is now paying block fees to miners. Everything you need to collect block fees is to use miner with Stratum support .
24.11.2012
Pool is now giving transaction fees to Stratum miners! Use miner with Stratum support (latest version of GUIminer, cgminer, bfgminer, poclbm) or use your favourite miner with Stratum proxy to improve your mining income!
19.11.2012
Guiminer with Stratum support has been released. Upgrade is highly recommended.
12.10.2012
All users are encouraged to install or update Stratum proxy to current stable version 1.1.1. Instructions are here .
12.10.2012
New version of cgminer has been released. Please update cgminer to version 2.8.3 . which fixes serious bugs introduced in previous versions.
10.10.2012
In effect from 01.11.2012, pool increases the lower limit for payouts ("send threshold") to 0.05 BTC (around $0.6) as a protection against high transaction fees for tiny payouts. If you have a balance of less than 0.05 BTC and want to withdraw them, please do so before November 1.
20.09.2012
New version of poclbm miner has been released. All poclbm users are encouraged to update their miner, latest version includes major optimization.
11.09.2012
I'm seeking for beta testers of new mining protocol called Stratum mining. If you want to join testing, please download the proxy and point your miners to it. Thank you!
08.07.2012
Do you have some bitcoins from the mining and do you want to sell them for cheap? Add your offer to localbitcoins.com and find a buyer in your neighborhood!
11.06.2012
Follow pool's page for recent updates and news!
05.02.2012
poclbm/GUI miner is affected by serious bug. If your miner is crashing on 'unexpected error' message, please follow miner forums for the newest versions.
26.01.2012
Pool is now supporting BIP 16 protocol extension, as described here. It is just internal change on the Bitcoin network, miners don't need to update anything.
08.11.2011
Implemented prioritization of long polling. Fast miners should expect lower stale ratio.
10.10.2011
Merged mining for Namecoins added. Please fill NMC address on your profile to start collecting Namecoins! Accounting isn't finished yet, but will come very soon.
03.10.2011
Bitcoin.cz is official sponsor of European Bitcoin conference 2011. See you on 25.-27. November in Prague!
26.03.2011
Second server added
Total hashrate at 60Ghash/s
Bitcoin Android
19.01.2011
We're over 20 Ghash/s
20.12.2010
Center for Financial Services
Description
The Center for Financial Services oversees the operations of the UBS Simulation, Learning, and Research Lab, conducts a Trading Challenge for students, and organizes an annual Wall Street on Campus financial strategy education seminar. The Center plays a key role in fulfilling the School’s mission of providing a comprehensive business and management education to students, by enabling them to gain real-world knowledge, practical skills, and the enhanced ability to research and analyze business issues. It is a vital resource for teaching, learning, and research, and it has been a showpiece for the School of Business. The activities of the Center enable faculty to integrate real-world perspectives into their courses and enhance the practical utility of education through experiential learning-by-doing for students. The Center has been instrumental in generating enthusiasm for School of Business students among recruiters. In recent years, several leading firms have been attracted toward hiring our well-prepared students, either for the first time or in larger numbers. Dr. Sandip Mukherji, CFA, Professor of Finance, has served as the Director of the Center since its inception, and he is supported by a second-year graduate assistant.
Mission Statement
The mission of the Center is to provide business students and faculty with advanced computer resources, access to practical knowledge and skills, and real-world environments, for researching and analyzing business issues. The Center’s goals are to encourage and facilitate use of the UBS SLR Lab by students and faculty, and student participation in Trading Challenges, besides successfully organizing and encouraging student participation in the Wall Street on Campus financial strategy education seminar.
Set up as a trading floor, the UBS SLR Lab has 26 computers with dual monitors, 3 LCD projectors, a live ticker, and an LCD monitor tuned to business news. The computers in the Lab provide access to an array of cutting-edge software programs and subscription websites for investment information and analysis (MorningStar Direct, Standard & Poor’s Research Insight, and Value Line); risk analysis using simulations, forecasting, and optimizations (Crystal Ball Professional Edition); statistical analysis (SPSS); technical analysis (Metastock Professional); and a Trading Challenge (Stocktrak). Use of the Lab has grown significantly since its inception. In the 2010-11 academic year, 20 faculty members used the Lab for 39 classes and 149 assignments in 34 courses. In addition, there were 240 student visits to the Lab for independent work on assignments.
The Trading Challenge is conducted for 11 to 12 weeks each semester through the dedicated website of the School of Business provided by Stocktrak. Several courses require participation in the Challenge, and it is also open to all School of Business students. Securities available for trading are stocks, bonds, mutual funds, options on stocks and futures, spot currencies and commodities, and most popular commodity, index, and foreign currency Futures. Initial funds of $500,000 can be leveraged with 50% margin, but the position limit is $100,000. The maximum number of trades is 500. Short sales and day trading are allowed. Students with the top five portfolio values share $2,500 in scholarship awards. In the 2010-11 academic year, the Challenge attracted a record 460 student participants.
The Wall Street on Campus financial strategy education seminar is held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on a Friday in the first half of October each year. The goal of the seminar is to expose students to practical knowledge and insights on financial strategies from leading professional experts, and to provide students with information about careers in financial services. The fifth annual seminar in 2010 had one-hour sessions on Economic and Market Outlook, Outlook and Recommendations for Stocks and Bonds, U. S. Municipal Bond Market – A Global Perspective, and a panel discussion on Careers in Financial Services. Mark Rosenberg, Chairman & CEO of SSARIS Advisors, the Hedge Fund Affiliate of State Street Global Advisors, delivered the keynote Brown Capital Management Executive Lecture. Bank of America, BlackRock Private Investors, J.P. Morgan, and UBS provided six speakers and panelists for the event, which was attended by 156 students and 8 faculty members from seven universities: American, Bowie State, Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, University of DC, and West Virginia State University. Other leading financial institutions, such as Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have provided speakers and panelists for the seminar in recent years.
Beginners Guide to Mining Bitcoins
One of the biggest problems I ran into when I was looking to start mining Bitcoin for investment and profit was most of the sites were written for the advanced user. I am not a professional coder, I have no experience with Ubuntu, Linux and minimal experience with Mac. So, this is for the individual or group that wants to get started the easy way.
First thing you need to do is get a “Bitcoin Wallet”. Because Bitcoin is an internet based currency, you need a place to keep your Bitcoins. Got to http://www.bitcoin.org and download the Bitcoin client for your Operating System. Install it the client will begin to download the blockchain. Downloading the blockchain can take a long time and will be over 6GB of data. If you have data caps, I would recommend ordering a copy of the blockchain on DVD to keep from going over as it is growing exponentially. Click to order the bitcoin blockchain by mail. Once the client is up to date, click “New” to get your wallet address. It will be a long sequence of letters and numbers. One of most important things you can do is make sure you have a copy of the wallet.dat file on a thumb drive and print a copy out and keep it in a safe location. You can view a tutorial on how to create a secure wallet by clicking the link on the top of the page. The reason is that if you computer crashes and you do not have a copy of your wallet.dat file, you will lose all of your Bitcoins. They won’t go to someone else, they will disappear forever. It is like burning cash.
Now that you have a wallet and the client, you are probably roaring to go, but if you actually want to make Bitcoin (money), you probably need to join a pool. A pool is a group that combines their computing power to make more Bitcoins. The reason you shouldn’t go it alone is that Bitcoins are awarded in blocks, usually 50 at a time, and unless you get extremely lucky, you will not be getting any of those coins. In a pool, you are given smaller and easier algorithms to solve and all of your combined work will make you more likely to solve the bigger algorithm and earn Bitcoins that are spread out throughout the pool based on your contribution. Basically, you will make a more consistent amount of Bitcoins and will be more likely to receive a good return on your investment.
The pool that I’m involved in is called Slush’s Pool so I will be giving instructions on how to join there but feel free to look at other options. Follow the link to go to their site and click the “Sign up here” link at the top of their site and follow their step by step instructions. After you have your account set up, you will need to add a “Worker”. Basically, for every miner that you have running, you will need to have a worker ID so the pool can keep track of your contributions.
If you are mining with an ASIC, please go to our Mining with ASICs page. The following will only pertain to GPU miners.
Most of the mining programs out there are pretty complicated to setup and will frustrate your average user. Recently a great program has come out to get the most basic of users started. The program is called GUIMiner. Click the link and download the program (Be careful, some of the ads are set up to look like the file download). Install and run the program and add in your information from Slush’s Pool. Remember that the user name is actually the worker name. The worker name will be your user name, dot, worker ID (username.worker ID) and the password from that worker ID.
Mac users should look into using Astroid
Now that you are set up, you can start mining. If you feel like you want to make more Bitcoins, you might want to invest in mining hardware.
To see how much your current hardware will earn mining Bitcoins, head over to the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator .
If you found this information helpful, please donate to 1G1ehppEgjiFTUSHFz2xs9KLSQuWLPYF2o
How To Mine Bitcoins
Twitter Pushes Android App Update To Fix The “Me” Tab Bug
Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – is the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahua.
But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is currently wild. At $188 per coin, the direction of the bitcoin is anyone’s guess right now and, unlike equities, these things don’t split. In short, you should probably mine. But what is bitcoin mining?
Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file. You can read a lot more about it here but just understand that for every block mined you get 25 coins or, at current rates, $4,722.25. Currently a single bitcoin is valued at $188, an alarming result that is probably caused by money movements related to Cyprus and a general bubble-like excitement over the platform in general. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price.
As it stands, mining solo is very nearly deprecated. The process of finding blocks is now so popular and the difficulty of finding a block so high that it could take over three years to generate any coins. While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual bitcoins are worth.
Pooled mining, however, is far more lucrative. Using a service like “Slush’s pool” (more on that later) you can split the work among a ground of people. Using this equation:
(25 BTC + block fees – 2% fee) * (shares found by user’s workers) / (total shares in current round)
While this is simplified, it is basically how the system works. You work for shares in a block and when complete you get a percentage of the block based on the number of workers alongside you, less fees. Using this method, I have been able to raise about $1.50 over the weekend by running a dormant PC. The astute among you will note that I probably used twice that amount of electricity.
Being a neophile, I’m surprised it took me so long to start mining. My buddy Tom explained how to set up a pooled mining account so I thought it would be interesting to share the instructions.
1. Get a wallet. You can either store your wallet locally or store it online. Coinbase.com is an online wallet that is surprisingly simple to set up. Wallets require you to use or download a fairly large blockchain file – about 6GB – so downloading and updating a local wallet may be a non-starter. Like all wealth storage mediums, keeping your bitcoins “local” is probably a better idea than trusting a web service, but that’s a matter of private preference. There is no preferred wallet type and there are obvious trade-offs to both. Privacy advocates would probably say a local wallet is best.
You can download a local wallet here but make sure you keep a copy of your data backed up.
Once you’ve created a wallet, you get an address like this: 1BEkUGADFbrEShQb9Xr4pKPtM8jAyiNQsJ. This, without the period, is a direct way to send bitcoins to your wallet. Make a note of your address. In Coinbase, the wallet address found under linked accounts.
2. Join a pool. To mine in a pool you have to work with a group of other miners on available blocks. The most popular is Slush’s Pool found here. You can also try guilds like BTC Guild as well as a number of other options. Each of the pools is characterized mostly by the fees they charge per block – 2% for Slush’s pool, for example – and the number of users. Pools with fewer users could also have a slower discovery time but pools with many users usually result in smaller payments.
How can you be sure the pool owner doesn’t steal all your bitcoins? You can’t. However, as one pool owner, Slush, notes:
In theory, as the Bitcoin pool operator, I could keep the 25 BTC from a block found by the pool for myself. I’m not going to do this, but I completely accept that people do not trust the pool operator. It is their freedom of choice, and Bitcoin is about freedom.
For simplicity’s sake, I’m using Slush’s Pool and have created three workers. First, create a pool login. Then add workers. The workers are sub-accounts with their own passwords and are usually identified by [yourlogin].[workername]. I have three workers running, currently – one on my iMac and two on my old PC.
You must create workers to mine. The instructions are very straightforward for most services so don’t become overwhelmed. Like any online club, you can dig deeply into the subculture surround bitcoin as you gain experience. I like to think of it as a financial MMORPG.
Also be sure to enter your wallet address into the pool information. This will ensure you get your bitcoins.
3. Get a miner. There are a number of mining options for multiple platforms although OSX users may find themselves in a bit of a pickle. Miners use spare GPU cycles to power the mining operation, much like services like SETI@Home uses spare cycles for finding intelligent life. Miners, on the other hand, use these cycles to help handle peer-to-peer processes associated with bitcoins. Thus by doing “work” you are maintaining the network as well.
GUIMiner is the simplest solution for Windows users as it allows you to create miners using almost all standard graphics cards. You can download it here. 50Miner is also a popular solution. Both require you to enter your worker info and pool and they’ll start mining.
Linux users can run miners like CGMiner. An excellent guide to installing a miner on Ubuntu is available here .
OS X users can use DiabloMiner. a two-year old command-line program that will mine using OpenCL. Sadly, it uses deprecated calls to Bitcoin and is quite a bit slower. As a result, you need to run your own proxy, Stratum. that allows Diablo to connect with services like Slush’s pool. Both of these programs usually run without issue on OS X although you may need to install OpenCL for OSX .
To mine I’ve created a script that I run in Terminal that simply runs the proxy in the background and then connects Diablo. Note the last two arguments are necessary for Mountain Lion.
RPCMiner is far easier to run – you simply click an icon and enter some data – and both have very rudimentary, text-based interfaces. Running Diablo on my iMac has not had much effect on application performance under OS X although it does slow down my Windows 8 machine considerably.
4. Keep your mind on your money. Bitcoins are baffling in that they are wildly simple to use and mine. Speculators, then, would probably be able to throw hundreds of machines at the problem and gather bitcoins like raindrops, right? Wrong. As more bitcoins are found, they become more difficult to find. This profitability calculator will help you understand what you’re up against but understand that this isn’t a sure thing. I’ve run my systems for a weekend and seen a mere $1.50 – enough for a coke – but other users may have improved hardware and methods to succeed. In short, if it costs more to run your hardware than you gain in bitcoins, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Good luck in your journey and enjoy your first foray into this wild and wooly world.
Datacenter connectivity issues have caused short drop in the hashrate. The problem has been resolved and all stratum servers are now reachable. This all happened when 900 Th/s was within a reach. We will get there again with your support and participation in mining ;-)
17.01.2014
We were having an extremely lucky yesterday's mining session. Unfortunately, around 1.30 AM UTC, we were experiencing stratum server issues that eventually spread across all our stratum servers. The problem has been resolved now and mining continues.
13.01.2014
The pool database backend has been successfully migrated to a new hardware. The website is now fully operational. The whole migration process has been accomplished without interrupting the actual mining.
13.01.2014
We are currently migrating pool database to a new machine. Mining will continue without interruption, only website will be down for 1-2 hours.
18.12.2013
Some recent payouts didn't go thru bitcoin network because of unsatisfied transaction fees. We're finding a soluton and all payouts will be processed soon
16.10.2013
In recent days we experienced some successful thefts of user's funds using compromised email accounts. We strongly encourage all users to change email passwords. There's no reason to think that pool security itself has been compromised.
08.07.2013
Getwork protocol support ended. Please be sure your miners support Stratum protocol. You can still use your old getwork miners with Stratum proxy installed on your mining rig.
21.05.2013
Bug in bitcoind caused many invalid blocks generated in recent hours. Thanks to cooperation with bitcoin developers, a bugfix has been deployed. Pool is now back in normal operation.
26.04.2013
Because the user database has been compromised in recent hack, please change password to your pool account!
25.04.2013
Pool is recovering to normal operation from previous attack. delayed payouts will be processed in the afternoon (UTC).
18.04.2013
Pool is recovering from DDoS attack.
14.04.2013
As announced in Getwork deprecation plan. the hashrate on Stratum is far above 90%, so workers which are still using the deprecated Getwork protocol are now charged by 10% fee. Please update your software and start using modern Stratum miners to reduce your fees back to 2%!
12.03.2013
Bitcoin network recently experienced global problems which caused some pool blocks to be invalid. Everything seems to be fixed now.
10.03.2013
Default mining URL for Stratum is stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 . If you're still using api.bitcoin.cz, please fix your URL to prevent fallback to deprecated Getwork protocol.
08.03.2013
Stratum proxy version 1.5.2 has been released. This is bugfix release which add compatibility with some old miners (phoenix, Diablo).
03.03.2013
Stratum proxy version 1.5.0 has been released. All proxy users are encouraged to update .
13.02.2013
ASIC mining become a reality. Jeff Garzik (bitcoin core developer) is testing first shipped unit of Avalon ASIC miner on our pool.
30.01.2013
Native IPv6 address is now available. You can use ipv6.stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333 in your miner if your miners have IPv6 support! Please note that IPv6 works only for Stratum miners.
08.12.2012
If you're using old miners from early 2011 or you're mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz:8332", please update your miners and use "api.bitcoin.cz:8332" in your configuration instead. Mining on URL "mining.bitcoin.cz" is not working anymore.
27.11.2012
Only one day remains to halving block reward from 50 BTC to 25 BTC. Thanks to this change in Bitcoin world, mining income will be drastically reduced. As a countermeasure, pool is now paying block fees to miners. Everything you need to collect block fees is to use miner with Stratum support .
24.11.2012
Pool is now giving transaction fees to Stratum miners! Use miner with Stratum support (latest version of GUIminer, cgminer, bfgminer, poclbm) or use your favourite miner with Stratum proxy to improve your mining income!
19.11.2012
Guiminer with Stratum support has been released. Upgrade is highly recommended.
12.10.2012
All users are encouraged to install or update Stratum proxy to current stable version 1.1.1. Instructions are here .
12.10.2012
New version of cgminer has been released. Please update cgminer to version 2.8.3 . which fixes serious bugs introduced in previous versions.
10.10.2012
In effect from 01.11.2012, pool increases the lower limit for payouts ("send threshold") to 0.05 BTC (around $0.6) as a protection against high transaction fees for tiny payouts. If you have a balance of less than 0.05 BTC and want to withdraw them, please do so before November 1.
20.09.2012
New version of poclbm miner has been released. All poclbm users are encouraged to update their miner, latest version includes major optimization.
11.09.2012
I'm seeking for beta testers of new mining protocol called Stratum mining. If you want to join testing, please download the proxy and point your miners to it. Thank you!
08.07.2012
Do you have some bitcoins from the mining and do you want to sell them for cheap? Add your offer to localbitcoins.com and find a buyer in your neighborhood!
11.06.2012
Follow pool's page for recent updates and news!
05.02.2012
poclbm/GUI miner is affected by serious bug. If your miner is crashing on 'unexpected error' message, please follow miner forums for the newest versions.
26.01.2012
Pool is now supporting BIP 16 protocol extension, as described here. It is just internal change on the Bitcoin network, miners don't need to update anything.
08.11.2011
Implemented prioritization of long polling. Fast miners should expect lower stale ratio.
10.10.2011
Merged mining for Namecoins added. Please fill NMC address on your profile to start collecting Namecoins! Accounting isn't finished yet, but will come very soon.
03.10.2011
Bitcoin.cz is official sponsor of European Bitcoin conference 2011. See you on 25.-27. November in Prague!
26.03.2011
Second server added
Total hashrate at 60Ghash/s
19.01.2011
We're over 20 Ghash/s
20.12.2010
PyOpenCL bitcoin miner with a GUI frontend
Although not a concept embraced by everyone, bitcoins are a payment method that seems to spread rapidly in some corners of the Internet, while it is banned in other parts. Mining is practically the procedure of generating your own bitcoins and it involves solving a puzzle and getting a certain result with random hashes.
In order to become a Bitcoin miner, you need proper hardware and software to carry out the job. GUIMiner is a simple program designed to help you generate bitcoins.
If you have never used Bitcoin before, you have to install the original Bitcoin software, which is used as a server, as well as create an online wallet. Once you have done that, you can start using GUIMiner.
The program provides you with a user-friendly interface, which makes it suitable for any type of user. At the first run, the application tries to detect the available OpenCL device. If it does not find any, it allows you to mine using your CPU or GPU's capabilities. Moreover, you are able to even create a new customized miner. OpenCL miners are destined for AMD cards and CUDA-enabled nVidia devices.
You can choose the desired mining server from a predefined list. You have the possibility to mine alone, but it usually takes months to gather a 'block', which is worth 50 bitcoins. Thus, it may be much easier to enter one of the preconfigured mining pools. For every server, you have to specify the host, port, as well as your Bitcoin login credentials.
The main window of the application allows you to permanently monitor the mining process status, while the 'Summary' section displays the speed and the number of accepted items for each miner. The console allows you to view a log of the performed actions and their result.
The mining process consumes both time and computer resources, but if you decide to use this cash system, GUIMiner might be a good choice.
How to get started using your GPU to mine for Bitcoins on Windows
(In a slight departure from my normal content…)
Money for only running your computer. It's more likely than you might think! No referral pyramid scam shit, you can make as much money as you have computing power to devote.
***NOTE: Since the difficulty is very high, unless you have an ASIC mining device and/or a very significant aggregate hash rate (over several TENS OF Ghash/sec or more) you are probably going to spend more on electricity than you can recoup in mined bitcoins, even when mining in a pool! If you have access to free electricity though, then there really is no argument against mining (aside from the *possibility* of shortening the lifespan of your graphics card(s)/mining hardware). For solo mining, you may end up waiting for many months/years to generate your own block and get 25 bitcoins (plus transaction fees), or use lots of electricity to maybe not ever generate a block at all.***
This post is aimed mostly at people who are already familiar with Bitcoin (Wikipedia page ), and would like to get started using their GPU(s) to mine for bitcoins in a Windows environment.
Just some quick terminology: miner = program which is external to bitcoin-qt.exe that uses your graphics card to perform calculations; your GPU is much more efficient at the type of calculations bitcoin does than your CPU
First of all, you are going to need a graphics card that supports CUDA and/or OpenCL; most graphics cards from the past 2-3 years will support this.
*UPDATE*: If you are unsure, please download GPU Caps Viewer (I recommend the portable version) to determine if you have a compatible video device and a working version of OpenCL installed. If you are using an AMD/ATI card you likely need to install the ATI APP SDK (make sure you obtain the correct version for 32/64-bit Windows).
Please make sure you are using the most recent drivers for your particular graphics card.
Important: Make sure that windows explorer is configured to show file extensions and show hidden folders - In windows explorer go to tools(alt+t) → folder options → view tab → tick the show hidden files/folders button, and also make sure the box for hide file extensions is unchecked . This is very important or you may end up trying to create bitcoin.conf.txt without even realizing the .txt extension is still present!
Last Updated 7-November-2013 (This info should still *mostly* be correct, please leave a comment if anything is significantly wrong/missing)
Too Long; Didn't Read / Easy and somewhat automated version:
1. Go to www.bitcoin.org. download and install the most recent version of bitcoin (the default file path should be fine).
2. A GUI-based tool exists here which will help to speed this up and will automate a lot of the setup steps. Go to the linked forum thread, download and extract the archive somewhere, and then run guiminer.exe .
3. From the GUIMiner interface, click solo utilities → set bitcoin client path. Point the dialog box to bitcoin-qt.exe ; likely located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe or C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe. Next click solo utilities → create solo password. Pick anything arbitrary for username and password but remember it, as you will need to use this later. Then finally you want to click solo utilities → launch bitcoin client as server.
This will launch bitcoin ready to be mined with, you must first wait for all the blocks to be downloaded before you can start to mine, and this may take several hours; you can view the current block count here .
4. Once all the blocks are downloaded, select solo from the server drop down box, then enter the username and password that you used before, then click start mining. Congratulations, you are now mining for bitcoins
(Recommended) 5. Since the difficulty is high now, you will only likely see an immediate return if you mine as part of a pool. The GUI Miner will greatly expedite pool setup and you can find some more information about pools here .
Additional notes: The GUI Miner also does not display the actual console window of poclbm or whatever miner you may be using; this may be desirable for some people.
Long, manual set up version using batch scripts and the command prompt:
Please note that the long version of this guide will show you how to do everything manually and via the command line. This is somewhat advanced and only recommended if you are comfortable manually creating/editing text files and using the command prompt.
1. To start, head over to http://www.bitcoin.org/ and download the latest windows client. Install it to wherever you want, but it may be of benefit to keep the directory path somewhat simple, because batch scripts and launching from the command line will follow. For argument's sake, I will just assume you are using the default install path on the 64-bit version of windows, so your install directory may be:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin
At the time of writing, the latest version of bitcoin is 0.3.23, and your overall path to bitcoin-qt.exe should be:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe
To start, open up a command prompt (windows key + r → type cmd → hit enter), and then navigate to the directory where bitcoin-qt.exe is located. If you've been following along with my examples, you will want to type this into the command prompt window:
cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin
2. Put the command prompt aside for just a second, because before launching bitcoin, you will need to create a text file called bitcoin.conf (the location of this file will vary depending on which version of Windows you are using)
If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, navigate to:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin
If you are using Windows XP, navigate to:
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Bitcoin
(You will probably need to create the "Bitcoin" directory, as bitcoin-qt.exe will auto-create it on first run, but you haven't yet run it… This is also where showing hidden folders comes into play, because on Windows 7 the AppData directory is hidden; Application Data may be hidden on XP as well)
Inside the appropriate folder, just right click and select new →text document, then rename this file to bitcoin.conf
Once you have created this file, open it up with your favorite text editor and add the following 2 lines (don't forget to save it when finished):
rpcuser=youruser
rpcpassword=yourpw
Where youruser and yourpw should be any arbitrary username and password; this is supplied to the miner later on via command line so that the miners can communicate with bitcoin-qt.exe (these are the values that bitcoin expects, if the miner specifies different values at launch you will likely get RPC errors).
3. Next, you want to start bitcoin-qt.exe with the ' -server ' argument specified. This tells bitcoin that there will be external programs running and allows bitcoin to communicate with them. To do so, bring your command prompt back into focus and type:
bitcoin-qt.exe -server
(alternatively you can just launch bitcoind.exe from the \daemon directory, which is the GUI-less client, but I prefer to use the GUI client. Using bitcoind.exe is equivalent to launching bitcoin-qt.exe with the arguments -server -daemon specified)
Now you will see bitcoin start up for the first time. Your client must first download the block chain before you will be able to start generating coins, and this is done automatically on first startup. You will see the number of blocks begin to increase over time, and at the time of writing there are 130,805 blocks (you can view the current block count here ). This can take many hours, so be patient and let it do its thing. This process can be sped up if you forward port 8333 TCP on your router, but this is not required.
4. Next, head on over to this thread and download the latest poclbm_py2exe binary from the first post. There are other miners available which work in windows, but m0mchil's is the one that I use and this guide will instruct how to set up this particular miner. (poclbm stands for (I believe…) P y O pen CL B itcoin M iner)
If you have been following along so far, I would suggest that you create a new directory inside C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin to reflect the latest version of the windows binary. At the time of writing the most recent version is poclbm_py2exe_20110709. so you should create a new directory
and then extract the contents of the archive to this new folder. The executable which will be used is poclbm.exe. but this must be launched via command line and given several launch parameters. This can be tedious to do on windows, so we will expedite this with a batch script. (and your final path to poclbm.exe s hould be C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110709\ poclbm.exe)
5. You can place the batch script anywhere you like; I put mine on my desktop for easy access. Right click again and create a new text file, then rename it to whatever_you_want.bat. all that matters here is the .bat extension. Right click on this file and hit edit (double clicking on it will launch it). In this batch file you want to put the following contents (this is assuming you're following the convention of this guide so far - if you are using your own directory structure, then use whatever location you have chosen instead):
(Similarly, for using a pool you can do something like this: start /D"C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110709" poclbm.exe http://poolworker.1:pool_pw1@api2.bitcoin.cz:8332 --device=0 )
***( Important Note: Some people have been having issues with the batch script failing to launch initially. It seems that it may be important to specify your device number along with the rest of the launch parameters on each line of the batch script. This can be done by simply specifying --device=X. where X is the number of your desired video device; most likely 0. If you have multiple devices, then the 2nd device is likely "1", and so on; if you are using onboard video I am not sure how this would work…)***
"start" just tells the batch script to start a new process in its own window, the /D parameter specifies the directory that the program is located in (this allows the batch script to be launched from anywhere on your computer), and then poclbm.exe is just the target program, followed by the arguments it needs to run properly. Make sure to use the same user and password that you specified earlier in your bitcoin.conf file. Quotes are needed whenever paths have a space in them.
Now all that's left to do is save this file and wait until bitcoin finishes downloading all the blocks; you cannot generate until you have acquired all blocks .
( You may end up waiting a long time for this to finish, so if you want to take some time to go read more about bitcoins and how the system works, now is a good time )
Once all blocks have been acquired, make sure bitcoin is running with the -server switch, then simply double click on your batch file. A new window should pop up and after a few seconds. If all is going well, your hashrate will be displayed. When you want to exit just "x" out of the window or press ctrl-c.
You can make a batch script to launch bitcoin-qt.exe with the -server argument as well, its contents should look something like this:
By default, m0mchil's miner will use the maximum work size supported by your card, most likely 256 or 512. You can play around with different sizes to see which gives you the highest hashrate; the size must be a power of 2. You will know if you have exceeded your card's maximum size if the miner errors or crashes when you try to start it; going too small will greatly lower your hashrate. You can also play around with the -v argument as well.
If you notice your desktop is being sluggish you can mitigate this by adding:
-f 60
to the end of each line of your batch script.
Assuming you have gotten this far and everything works, you can add the totals of each individual hashrate from your GPU(s), and put the grand total into this calculator to get an idea of how much you can earn daily (if you use a pool). If you are mining solo assume that the expected average time to generate a block is easily 4-8 weeks several decades…or much longer (but this will get you 25BTC).
Now all you have to do is wait…
Note that it will likely take many weeks to generate coins, and you are likely to notice an increase in your power bill while you run your bitcoin miners (Please Note: if you are not using high-end hardware, it is likely that you will spend more on power than you can recoup via bitcoin generation and sales for solo mining). Additionally, you may want to look into doing something like this with [ RivaTuner NO LONGER UPDATED, SEE BELOW ] or a similar app to mitigate the temperature increase on your graphics device(s). (I think that rivatuner also works with newer amd/ati cards)
Troubleshooting: It seems that some people are having issues where the batch script just pops up for a second and then closes without anything happening. This usually indicates that whatever you are trying to launch is failing and quickly prints out an error message on the console window opened by the batch script, but since it fails immediately it closes too quickly for you to read it. In order to determine what the problem is, you will need to navigate to the location of poclbm.exe within a new command prompt; just use cd as is described somewhat in step 1. Once you are in the directory where poclbm.exe is located, you should now try to launch poclbm.exe with the arguments exactly as they are contained in the batch script. So assuming you have been following the conventions of this guide so far, and your batch script fails to start the miner successfully, you would type the following once you are in the directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\poclbm_py2exe_20110709 :
This is just how you would normally launch the miner anyway, the batch script simply does this for you when you double click on it. By entering this manually from within an already-open command prompt, if the miner fails to launch, the error messages will be printed to the console and will remain there for you to read. This should give you the specific problem that is preventing your miner from launching, and allow you to provide a more specific error message than "it doesn't open".
Also…please read all of the comments before making a new one asking for help, it is possible that your problem may have already been covered.
Once you do finally generate some coins, you can head on over to www.mtgox.com and create an account. You can now deposit some bitcoins into your account and get trading (there are other exchange sites but mtgox still the largest). More information can be obtained by talking with the folks in #bitcoin-otc on irc.freenode.net; people may be willing to purchase bitcoins directly from you for paypal or other methods of currency exchange. IMPORTANT NOTE: Paypal does NOT like bitcoin, you SHOULD NOT mention bitcoins at all in any correspondence with paypal, nor should you mention it at all when transferring money.
ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER: I am not an accountant/attorney, and any profits you derive from mining and selling bitcoins may be subject to taxes and other regulations. Check your local laws and consult with your personal accountant/attorney to find out how this may affect you.
If you intend to stick with this and help the bitcoin community grow you should also make a forum account on the bitcoin site as well as join the irc channels #bitcoin, #bitcoin-market, and #bitcoin-otc, all on freenode .
I hope that this tutorial helps, and it is only intended to be an introduction to getting a "no frills" miner setup working under windows.
***Yes mining bitcoins is legal but you may be subject to fees and regulation(s) if you choose to sell them
Please leave a comment if you found this post useful, have any problems, or if you notice any errors or inconsistencies. If you are feeling generous, I will gladly accept any donations of any amount at the bitcoin addresses 1J3UPhu8i5XCz7A5sPC4rRz99fPzFn3N5e
343 comments so far.
hmmm Said on December 1st, 2010 at 15:50:
Is there any info on how many dependencies need to be installed for this? Just following this blog didn't work out for me.
LobsterMan Said on December 1st, 2010 at 19:33:
I'll admit…my experience with it is probably atypical as it worked for me first try, just using the latest nvidia drivers, 260.99 I think. You may want to check to make sure that your device supports CUDA/OpenCL. If you still can't get it to work you can post a reply in my thread here and I can try to help you out:
Kiv Said on December 4th, 2010 at 14:10:
Thanks for the post! I got an error about not finding a DLL, but updating to the latest drivers fixed it and got it working great. 15 Mhash/sec on a Geforce 9600 GT. It sure does heat up the GPU though, mine was steady at 86 celsius… not sure if that is ok for the long term or if I should throttle it back.
Thanks for the great instructions! I sent you some BTC from my first block.
It's only going about 12-14M on a Sapphire 5450/AthlonX2-5000+/Win7-64, but that's 7 times faster than it was going on CPU alone. Not going to make me rich, but it's something…
Wow, very nice instructions. Thanks!!
Got about 4000Khash/s on (1) 2.33Ghz Quad CPU (Xeon e5345)
MC Said on December 14th, 2010 at 21:26:
Thanks for taking the time to help out with this post!
I did these steps with a GeForce 9600 GT, and got 8000 khash/s.
Then I noticed that my driver wasn't as up-to-date as I thought it was, and after updating, got to 14000 khash/s. Doesn't sound too great compared to others here….
Apologies for my typos that make it look like I don't know my acronyms very well Looking at a table of graphics card FLOPS, it might well be that my card is just that bad!
MC: That sounds about right, older cards don't do so well, especially nvidias
G Said on December 16th, 2010 at 01:07:
Another success…
Installing the ATI stream SDK didn't work for me, I had older ATI drivers. Uninstalled the stream SDK, downloaded & installed the latest Catalyst driver (the Accelerated Parallel Processing version), didn't need to re-install the stream sdk (it appears Catalyst 10.12 comes with stream 2.3). Doing 27M on my HD 4670, pretty good.
For interest I tried running the OpenCL on the CPU. I got about 1650 khash, compared to 3300 khash on the main client. So for me OpenCL on the CPU ran exactly half as fast as the native client on the CPU. I know that's not how you're supposed to use it, just interesting.
Thanks!
Edgar Said on December 16th, 2010 at 12:02:
Thanks for the informative write-up. You helped me go from 6mhash/s to 365mhash/s now that I’m using my 5870 as a miner as well as a 9800gtx+ which is in another machine that I’m using as a remote miner client.
Needless to say I’m very happy 8D
I have one concern though, when using the gethashespersec command on the bitcoin.exe -server, it only calculates the CPU hashes/s as per the bitcoin GUI. Is there any way to get a total hashes/s, including the external miners?
Maybe I’m being too skeptical but I’d like some confirmation that the work the external miner GPUs are doing is not being wasted as those numbers just sound too good to be true! That or I sorely underestimated the computing power of a GPU
LobsterMan Said on December 16th, 2010 at 17:29:
You can try launching bitcoin with -testnet which has a much lower difficulty for testing if your setup is working
i agree with edgar Said on December 18th, 2010 at 04:56:
it would be nice if there was some indication in either the bitcoin GUI or the debug.log that anything was happening, if not poclbm itself.
I connected to test and at least saw what it looked like to generate a few blocks, but my log looks very different on the test and the main. Main looks like
Although not a concept embraced by everyone, bitcoins are a payment method that seems to spread rapidly in some corners of the Internet, while it is banned in other parts. Mining is practically the procedure of generating your own bitcoins and it involves solving a puzzle and getting a certain result with random hashes.
In order to become a Bitcoin miner, you need proper hardware and software to carry out the job. GUIMiner is a simple program designed to help you generate bitcoins.
If you have never used Bitcoin before, you have to install the original Bitcoin software, which is used as a server, as well as create an online wallet. Once you have done that, you can start using GUIMiner.
The program provides you with a user-friendly interface, which makes it suitable for any type of user. At the first run, the application tries to detect the available OpenCL device. If it does not find any, it allows you to mine using your CPU or GPU's capabilities. Moreover, you are able to even create a new customized miner. OpenCL miners are destined for AMD cards and CUDA-enabled nVidia devices.
You can choose the desired mining server from a predefined list. You have the possibility to mine alone, but it usually takes months to gather a 'block', which is worth 50 bitcoins. Thus, it may be much easier to enter one of the preconfigured mining pools. For every server, you have to specify the host, port, as well as your Bitcoin login credentials.
The main window of the application allows you to permanently monitor the mining process status, while the 'Summary' section displays the speed and the number of accepted items for each miner. The console allows you to view a log of the performed actions and their result.
The mining process consumes both time and computer resources, but if you decide to use this cash system, GUIMiner might be a good choice.
Beginners Guide to Mining Bitcoins
One of the biggest problems I ran into when I was looking to start mining Bitcoin for investment and profit was most of the sites were written for the advanced user. I am not a professional coder, I have no experience with Ubuntu, Linux and minimal experience with Mac. So, this is for the individual or group that wants to get started the easy way.
First thing you need to do is get a “Bitcoin Wallet”. Because Bitcoin is an internet based currency, you need a place to keep your Bitcoins. Got to http://www.bitcoin.org and download the Bitcoin client for your Operating System. Install it the client will begin to download the blockchain. Downloading the blockchain can take a long time and will be over 6GB of data. If you have data caps, I would recommend ordering a copy of the blockchain on DVD to keep from going over as it is growing exponentially. Click to order the bitcoin blockchain by mail. Once the client is up to date, click “New” to get your wallet address. It will be a long sequence of letters and numbers. One of most important things you can do is make sure you have a copy of the wallet.dat file on a thumb drive and print a copy out and keep it in a safe location. You can view a tutorial on how to create a secure wallet by clicking the link on the top of the page. The reason is that if you computer crashes and you do not have a copy of your wallet.dat file, you will lose all of your Bitcoins. They won’t go to someone else, they will disappear forever. It is like burning cash.
Now that you have a wallet and the client, you are probably roaring to go, but if you actually want to make Bitcoin (money), you probably need to join a pool. A pool is a group that combines their computing power to make more Bitcoins. The reason you shouldn’t go it alone is that Bitcoins are awarded in blocks, usually 50 at a time, and unless you get extremely lucky, you will not be getting any of those coins. In a pool, you are given smaller and easier algorithms to solve and all of your combined work will make you more likely to solve the bigger algorithm and earn Bitcoins that are spread out throughout the pool based on your contribution. Basically, you will make a more consistent amount of Bitcoins and will be more likely to receive a good return on your investment.
The pool that I’m involved in is called Slush’s Pool so I will be giving instructions on how to join there but feel free to look at other options. Follow the link to go to their site and click the “Sign up here” link at the top of their site and follow their step by step instructions. After you have your account set up, you will need to add a “Worker”. Basically, for every miner that you have running, you will need to have a worker ID so the pool can keep track of your contributions.
If you are mining with an ASIC, please go to our Mining with ASICs page. The following will only pertain to GPU miners.
Most of the mining programs out there are pretty complicated to setup and will frustrate your average user. Recently a great program has come out to get the most basic of users started. The program is called GUIMiner. Click the link and download the program (Be careful, some of the ads are set up to look like the file download). Install and run the program and add in your information from Slush’s Pool. Remember that the user name is actually the worker name. The worker name will be your user name, dot, worker ID (username.worker ID) and the password from that worker ID.
Mac users should look into using Astroid
Now that you are set up, you can start mining. If you feel like you want to make more Bitcoins, you might want to invest in mining hardware.
To see how much your current hardware will earn mining Bitcoins, head over to the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator .
If you found this information helpful, please donate to 1G1ehppEgjiFTUSHFz2xs9KLSQuWLPYF2o
We take a Butterfly Labs Bitcoin miner, plug it in, and make it (virtually) rain.
Aurich Lawson
This is the second in a two-part series exploring Butterfly Labs and its lineup of dedicated Bitcoin-mining hardware. In part one, we looked at the company and the experiences customers have had with it. In part two, we share our experiences running a Bitcoin miner for a couple weeks.
Toiling in the Bitcoin mines
There is a whirring, whining presence in my dining room. I notice it every time I walk through. Every day, it sucks down about one full kilowatt-hour of electricity. In a year, it will consume almost $100 worth of juice—and that's on top of the $274 it costs to buy the box in the first place. Oh, and it's hot, too. If I moved it into my office and could stand the noise, I could keep a cup of coffee comfortably warm on top of the thing. Why on earth would anyone want such a disagreeable little machine in their home?
The short answer: every day, that machine magically generates something like $20 in bitcoins.
The BFL miner: A video intro
Allow me to introduce you to the Butterfly Labs 5GH/s "Jalapeño" Bitcoin miner.
A newbie and his miner
Ars Senior Business Editor Cyrus Farivar tapped me on the shoulder a few weeks back with a proposition. "I've got a Butterfly Labs Bitcoin mining box," he explained. "There aren't that many in the wild right now. I'm working on a story about the company, but I'm about to go on vacation. Do you want to see if you can get the thing working while I'm out?"
I was intrigued. Bitcoin? That's the electronic currency that's quickly rocketed from lame nerd project to ludicrously valuable hot topic, right? I didn't know a lot about the world of Bitcoin other than the fact that "mining" them involved people building custom PCs with tons of video cards to handle the math. I certainly didn't know how to "mine" bitcoins myself or what to do with the things once I had them. I just knew that people eventually try to trade them in for cash somehow (but how to do that was also a total mystery).
And yet here was the opportunity to take a piece of hardware I'd never heard of and see if I could use it to magically create some money out of nowhere. I told Cyrus to send me the Butterfly Labs miner. As he trekked off to Peru for his vacation, I settled in with the little black box.
Butterfly Labs is a company that has drawn a fair amount of controversy for what the Bitcoin community at large perceives as a string of broken promises. The company sells ASIC-based Bitcoin miners—machines that are built around customized chips that do nothing except compute SHA-256 hashes very quickly. Its smallest miner (the one I had to get working) is codenamed "Jalapeño" and computes a bit over five billion hashes per second (or 5GH/s). The problem is that Butterfly Labs started selling the machines long before it actually had a product to sell. It began taking paid-in-full preorders back in mid-2012, and thousands of customers opened their wallets for Bitcoin miners ranging from the small 5GH/s miner at $274 all the way up to the large 500Gh/s miner, which costs $22,484.
Butterfly Labs promised certain performance targets to customers—it initially felt confident that its application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs would deliver one billion hashes per second for every 1.1 watt of power consumed. This proved extremely optimistic. Hardware delivery slipped multiple times. Now, a full year later, the first few real live Butterfly Labs boxes are finally being shipped, though no small number (as many as 30) were sent to journalists to review rather than to paying customers.
New Miner, Radeon 4x5770 Linux Bitcoin Mining
But when the little black box showed up on my doorstep, I had no idea about the deep and extremely vocal Bitcoin community or the story behind Butterfly Labs. I didn't really even fully understand what the miner did. I simply knew that I wanted to get this thing working and make some money.
Out of the box
The 5GH/s Jalapeño miner is a black rounded cube with a brushed metal finish. The only connectors on the exterior of the device are on the back: a mini-USB port for data and a power plug. Near the power plug are a series of small red LEDs that the device uses to tell you its status, though there was no documentation in the box to explain what the LEDs meant. The front of the cube contains another red LED to indicate power.
There are two sets of vents, one low on the front and the other high on the rear. The device's internal 80 mm fan draws cooler air up from the front through the fins of the large heat sink mounted on the ASIC chip. It expels the now-warm air out through the top vents.
Front view of the Butterfly Labs 5GH/s Jalapeño miner. The understated Butterfly Labs logo is on the top of the device; visible on its front are the air intake vents.
Front view of the Butterfly Labs 5GH/s Jalapeño miner. The understated Butterfly Labs logo is on the top of the device; visible on its front are the air intake vents.
guiminer – An Extensive Tool For Bitcoin Mining
As of late there’s been a been a great buzz going around about Bitcoin. the latest P2P digital currency. One of the main activities of getting Bitcoins is through a process called mining.
In order to successfully conduct Bitcoins mining, you’ll need a working “miner” that will make good use of your hardware (more about that later). There are a handful of miners out on the Web, but many of them have a narrow window of hardware it can work with, or it is difficult to (easily) control because it only runs via a command line.
No need to fear, though, because there’s a great program that comes with a GUI that does all the dirty work!
What are Bitcoins About?
Before we start, we need to understand a little better what Bitcoins are and what the mining process consists of. Bitcoins are pieces of virtual money that can be traded around just like regular money, but with extremely low transaction fees (paid in Bitcoins). Bitcoins can also be exchanged for other currencies such as the US Dollar, Euro, etc.
Their value changes based on demand, which can be tracked at Mt. Gox or BitcoinCharts. At the time of this article the BTC to USD exchange rate is $10.90/1 BTC, but this rate can change every 5 minutes. Bitcoins are created by solving a puzzle that involves getting a certain result with random hashes, which is effectively what mining is all about. Another important feature of Bitcoin is that everything is done anonymously.
More information about Bitcoin can be found in this well-written article .
Starting guiminer
guiminer is essentially a GUI interface that can control multiple different mining applications at the same time, which come bundled with the program on download. It is available for Windows, and also offers early support for Linux. If you’ve never used Bitcoin before, you must install the official Bitcoin client to have a wallet and Bitcoin address (where you can send and receive Bitcoins from). Once you’ve done that you can go ahead and launch guiminer.
Interface and Miners
The interface is pretty simple. The default miner that opens will use your GPU’s OpenCL capabilities (if it’s from AMD). Otherwise, you can choose to create a new miner. Here you can also choose “Phoenix” (a miner from a different developer), a CUDA miner (meant for nVidia cards), a CPU miner, and a custom option.
I highly recommend you choose OpenCL for AMD cards and CUDA for nVidia cards. You should probably leave the CPU miner alone because the hash rate will be very low compared to your GPU, which is capable of doing many parallel computations at the same time.
For example, my AMD Phenom II X6 1100T processor gets roughly 3.5 Mh/s (megahashes per second) while my AMD Radeon HD 6950 graphics card gets on average 320 Mh/s.
Whom to Mine For
Once you have your miner selected, you can choose where to mine for. You can try doing things solo, where if you manage to land a block, you’ll get a total of 50 Bitcoins, all to yourself. That’s, at the time of this writing, about $545! However, you’ll either have to be very lucky to get a block, or you’ll either have to spend many months running 24/7 before you finally get one. You could also increase the horsepower and add multiple GPUs or even additional mining rigs to get the number of megahashes higher so that it won’t take months and months.
Another choice is to choose to enter a mining pool. Mining pools combine the efforts of all the members involved in order to get blocks a lot faster. The resulting Bitcoins then usually get split proportionately among all the involved and active contributors. It will most likely take you just as long to get 50 Bitcoins through a mining pool, but you’ll get paid after every couple hours of work you contribute instead of waiting until you get a lump sum of 50 BTC. guiminer comes with a number of preconfigured mining pools, so you can choose any of them, register beforehand, make sure you entered your Bitcoin address in your profile so you can get paid, and then start mining for that pool.
Extra AMD Graphics Card Settings
If you’re an AMD/ATI graphics card holder, you’ll want to be aware of the AMD Overdrive feature in your Catalyst Control Center software. This feature allows you to overclock as well as underclock your graphics card, to give you either more performance (and more megahashes) or more power and heat savings (and less megahashes). If you feel safe to do it, you can play around with the settings on that page, but please stay on it for a while and monitor the stats about graphics card, especially the temperature. If it starts climbing too high, you’ll either need to change your settings or manually adjust the fan speed if you can (should be on the same page).
For more information, you can check out this article .
Conclusion
Despite all it’s criticisms, Bitcoin seems to be picking up speed at a rapid pace. There are also an increasing number of online stores that accept Bitcoins as a valid way to pay, so keeping some in stock may be a good idea. However, if you have the time and resources, getting Bitcoins from almost nothing through mining is quite a reward. If you stick to it (and possible add some extra omph to your hardware), you’ll have a nice sum of money at the end.
What do you think of Bitcoin? Are you interested in or do you already do Bitcoin mining? Anything else you want to address on this matter? Let us know in the comments!
If you have any questions related to what's mentioned in the article or need help with any computer issue, ask it on MakeUseOf Answers —We and our community will be more than happy to help.
Beginners Guide to Mining Bitcoins
One of the biggest problems I ran into when I was looking to start mining Bitcoin for investment and profit was most of the sites were written for the advanced user. I am not a professional coder, I have no experience with Ubuntu, Linux and minimal experience with Mac. So, this is for the individual or group that wants to get started the easy way.
First thing you need to do is get a “Bitcoin Wallet”. Because Bitcoin is an internet based currency, you need a place to keep your Bitcoins. Got to http://www.bitcoin.org and download the Bitcoin client for your Operating System. Install it the client will begin to download the blockchain. Downloading the blockchain can take a long time and will be over 6GB of data. If you have data caps, I would recommend ordering a copy of the blockchain on DVD to keep from going over as it is growing exponentially. Click to order the bitcoin blockchain by mail. Once the client is up to date, click “New” to get your wallet address. It will be a long sequence of letters and numbers. One of most important things you can do is make sure you have a copy of the wallet.dat file on a thumb drive and print a copy out and keep it in a safe location. You can view a tutorial on how to create a secure wallet by clicking the link on the top of the page. The reason is that if you computer crashes and you do not have a copy of your wallet.dat file, you will lose all of your Bitcoins. They won’t go to someone else, they will disappear forever. It is like burning cash.
Now that you have a wallet and the client, you are probably roaring to go, but if you actually want to make Bitcoin (money), you probably need to join a pool. A pool is a group that combines their computing power to make more Bitcoins. The reason you shouldn’t go it alone is that Bitcoins are awarded in blocks, usually 50 at a time, and unless you get extremely lucky, you will not be getting any of those coins. In a pool, you are given smaller and easier algorithms to solve and all of your combined work will make you more likely to solve the bigger algorithm and earn Bitcoins that are spread out throughout the pool based on your contribution. Basically, you will make a more consistent amount of Bitcoins and will be more likely to receive a good return on your investment.
The pool that I’m involved in is called Slush’s Pool so I will be giving instructions on how to join there but feel free to look at other options. Follow the link to go to their site and click the “Sign up here” link at the top of their site and follow their step by step instructions. After you have your account set up, you will need to add a “Worker”. Basically, for every miner that you have running, you will need to have a worker ID so the pool can keep track of your contributions.
If you are mining with an ASIC, please go to our Mining with ASICs page. The following will only pertain to GPU miners.
Most of the mining programs out there are pretty complicated to setup and will frustrate your average user. Recently a great program has come out to get the most basic of users started. The program is called GUIMiner. Click the link and download the program (Be careful, some of the ads are set up to look like the file download). Install and run the program and add in your information from Slush’s Pool. Remember that the user name is actually the worker name. The worker name will be your user name, dot, worker ID (username.worker ID) and the password from that worker ID.
Mac users should look into using Astroid
Now that you are set up, you can start mining. If you feel like you want to make more Bitcoins, you might want to invest in mining hardware.
To see how much your current hardware will earn mining Bitcoins, head over to the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator .
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