Fpga bitcoin

Just released was the Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner  software.  This miner allows bitcoins to be mined using a commercially available FPGA board.

FPGA boards consume much less electricity compared to GPUs for the hashing work performed when mining bitcoins.

FGPAs might have a MHash/J performance level around 20 or more whereas the most efficient GPUs are closer to about 2 MHash/J.

There are fears that FPGA mining will force miners using GPUs today to either pivot and switch to FPGA mining for their operations or to abandon mining completely when the efficiency disparity makes GPU mining uncompetitive.

Those fears are likely unwarranted just yet though.  The cost of the equipment and not the cost of electricity continues to be the primary concern affecting miner’s decision on whether or not to add capacity.

Using commercially available FPGA boards to attain a certain level of hashing can require investment several times that required for a GPU-based equivalent.

Though a less costly FPGA board designed specifically for bitcoin could be built, there are no sources for such a product yet — at least not commercially.

GPU Mining Still Profitable And Still Growing

It will likely be many months yet before the FPGA would even start to displace the GPU as the technology responsible for significant increases to the mining difficulty measure.

GPU miners have been able to reach the breakeven point, on a per-dollar invested basis, within a couple months after bringing new capacity online.  Thereafter a decent profit continues to be returned though the profitability level can decline steadily with each subsequent increase in difficulty when there is no matching increase in the bitcoin exchange rate as well.

The Bitcoin network has continued to see capacity come online at an unprecedented and torrid pace — over 30 GHash/s of capacity was added each day during the most recent difficulty adjustment period, for example.

Because of the recent run-up in the bitcoin exchange rate mining is generally considered to be very profitable at the present time.  It will remain highly profitable until either the exchange rate drops or the difficulty level increases significantly as the result of additional mining capacity being procured and brought online by miners seeking those profits.

With so many miners active now, the global supply of GPU hardware has become constrained.  Even used GPUs found on eBay, for example, are becoming difficult to find.  If the now-discontinued ATI HD 5870s and HD 5970s were still sold, or AMD were able to keep up with demand for the AMD HD 6990s, the difficulty increases would likely be even greater than what is being seen now.

FPGA’s Edge

Even though the FGPA solution is extremely expensive relative to its GPU equivalent, FPGAs are widely available commercially.  If the bitcoin exchange rate were to spike further, FPGA mining may be about the only option for being able to add any significant amount of mining capacity.

The higher power efficiency that an FPGA provides is not just a factor for comparing the cost of electricity to mine but also when other factors are considered.

The total amount of electricity consumed by a miner with a GPU mining rig or two will add up quickly.  Individual miners are already popping breakers after exceeding limits on the amount of current available from household circuits used when mining with multiple GPUs in a single rig even.  Those with multiple rigs are finding limits to the amount of electricity fed to the property as well.

When power consumption limits are a constraint, then the FPGA with its significantly higher power efficiency might be the only method to increase mining hashing capacity.

Residential electric rates are often tiered to encourage conservation.  As a result the incremental rate for mining starts at the most expensive tier for the household.  Individuals mining from their homes should be the biggest beneficiaries from having an efficient FPGA alternative but the equipment’s high cost will remain a major limiting factor, as will the technical skill level necessary for FPGA mining.

Further out, if the exchange value of bitcoin rises much further the numbers begin to approach the level where building and producing an ASIC design might become feasible.

If or when that happens, then the clock counting the days left for GPU mining can start ticking.

Hack A Day - FPGA bitcoin mining

The board requires only 6.8 watts for 100 Mhashes/second, but [li_gangyi]‘s blog says the team expects to hit 150-200 Mhashes with some improvements.

Only four of these boards were built and the supply has already sold out.  Deposits are being accepted at Cablesaurus towards pre-orders for the second generation model.  The second generation units are priced at $420 (single FGPA) to $620 (dual FPGA) but those prices will likely be lowered before purchase due to volume discounts.  The number of boards produced will be determined by how many deposits (paid in either bitcoins or USDs) are made.

This board differs from the modular FPGA hardware project  but runs the same open source FGPA miner  that was released in May.

FPGA hardware is more expensive for mining Bitcoin than the hashing equivalent when GPU graphics cards are used but power consumption for FPGA mining can be nearly an order of magnitude less.  At current exchange rates and difficulty levels. the dual-FGPA board will produce just under 0.12 BTC per day, which is worth about $1.22 USD.  Calculated using the typical U.S. residential rate the cost of electricity to run the two FPGAs for a day is under $0.04 USD, or about 3% of revenue.  For comparison, when GPU graphics cards are used for mining in regions where electric rates are high the cost of electricity can exceed half the miner’s revenue.

Though mining profitabilty  is near all-time lows, these levels are still high enough that FGPAs are not yet price competitive due to the higher hardware costs involved.  At the same time, this board just brought FPGA mining one step closer to becoming a significant competitor to GPU mining.  Those likely to be the early adopters will be those hitting total power consumption limits, those running out of space and those unable to sufficiently remove the heat produced when mining with GPUs.

Product Comparison

Last Updated: 2012-01-25. For the latest product information, please check the forum.

Bitcoin in a Nutshell

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency based on public key signatures and an ingenious double-spend-prevention mechanism based on a cryptographic hash function (SHA256). Nodes in the Bitcoin network are rewarded for finding x, such that SHA256(SHA256(x)) is below a certain target (this is called mining). The first node to find a solution earns Bitcoins.

The Bitcoin network adjusts this target so that on average, a solution is found every 10 minutes, based on the total computational rate (MH/s) of the network.

A node's chance of winning is roughly equal to the fraction of total MH/s that it contributes to the network.

Mining requires the latest technology and/or low electricity costs to remain profitable over time. Only the most power-efficient survive.

In mid-2011, GPU mining was highly profitable, with many ATI GPUs paying for themselves in 6-9 months, counting power (but not cooling, maintenance, configuration, or other) costs. However, as an increasing number of GPU miners chased those returns, the difficulty adjusted and large-scale GPU mining inevitably became unprofitable.

Field Programmable Gate Array miners are under active development and use around 1/10th the power of a GPU, at the same performance level (MH/s). The upfront capital investment is higher than for GPUs; however, once made, the lower operational costs should enable FPGA miners to earn a significant monthly profit, even at price and difficulty levels where GPUs cannot. FPGAs are more power-efficient for mining, and over time are likely to make GPU mining unprofitable. Once the electricity to run a GPU costs more than the bitcoins it can produce, most miners will turn them off, and either sell their GPUs, or repurpose them.

A GPU process shrink does not change this situation; a 45nm FPGA still uses less electricity per MH than a 28nm GPU. And of course - 28nm FPGAs will arrive around the same time as 28nm GPUs, keeping FPGAs firmly ahead throughout 2012.

Now is the best time to switch to FPGA-based mining, to enjoy a major technological advantage over most other miners.

The FPGA End-Game

Large-scale miners who are willing to make the initial investment in FPGA mining should be able to mine a substantial portion of the remaining coins, with no operational threat from GPUs for at least the next 2 years. It looks likely that miners using GPUs will need to migrate to FPGAs to remain profitable during 2012.

Why not build an ASIC?

It's extremely expensive to build an ASIC that can outperform high-volume 40nm/28nm FPGAs. A 40nm mask set costs around $4M. Older technologies are less expensive, but above 130nm, probably cannot outperform a 28nm FPGA. At the current price and liquidity of Bitcoin, an ASIC would be an extremely risky investment. Most likely, the mining community will switch to FPGAs first and move to ASICs if/only if the Bitcoin ecosystem matures and expands considerably.

To Learn More..

Join #bitcoin-fpga on freenode. There's a small community of talented folks working on a variety of designs.

FPGA LOGi Family Bitcoin Mining Application

FPGA LOGi Bitcoin Mining Application

Foreword: This project allows users to easily experiment with and discover the inner workings of mining on a low cost multi-purpose platform. Note that there are currently much faster and more powerful options available for bitcoin mining including FPGA arrays and ASICS. The purpose of the article and project is simply to introduce to the processes and algorithms used for bitcoin mining, not to make money. The knowlege, algorithms and processes can be taken to larger scale platforms if the user wishes to seriously pursue bitcoin mining

logi-mark1-bone-beaglebone-pi-arduino

Bitcoin

Using FPGA hardware for bitcoin mining at home

So what is bitcoin? Bitcoin is an experimental, decentralized digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is designed around the idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities [1]. The more interesting aspects of bitcoin mining are in the details of the intricate protocols and algorithms being used that make up what is quickly being adopted as a new digital currency. Part of the beauty of the bitcoin protocol is that it uses technologies including encryption, hashing, client to client communication, all of which scream out for an FPGA implementation.

Mining

Most of the work involved in bitcoin transactions is in the mining. The key part of the transaction is in the verification process that authenticates the bitcoin transaction. The verification process awards effective bitcoin nodes (or "bitcoin miners") with a limited release of bitcoins and the transaction fees (if any). This process requires intense computing power, electricity, and significant investment as it solves hashes through brute-force to verify transactions and add them to the network's transaction log [1]. So part of the fun of mining is getting a reward equivalent to hard cash money! You might have noticed the words brute force and solving hashes. These are two more keywords that are just asking for an FPGA.

Algorithm

The process of bitcoin mining is no minor feat and this is why FPGA’s have been widely adopted for the task. T he mining process, or proof-of-work process, involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits. Once this hash has been found, the block can be considered as being solved and the transaction can be verified. The average work required is exponential in the number o f zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash [2]. You can go through the links below to see more details about the processing, but the bottom line is that you are looking for a diamond in the rough. So, get to that number crunching, as the faster you crunch the numbers the sooner you will have a chance to wield that bitcoin cash earned by the work of that handy dandy FPGA.

The reality of solving a “block” or successfully mining the correct hash is becoming harder and harder with the advent of bigger and better processing work horses. The trend has gone from crunching the numbers on high end FPGA’s to now being able buy a custom ASIC which is designed to increase the total number of hashes/sec calculated while reducing the power requirement from that of running PC’s, GPU’s or FPGA’s. But this should not discourage you from getting started with an FPGA, as there are now pools of miner’s which all work together to solve the “block” and then share the loot with all who were working on it. So, even the humble 2.5 Mega hash/sec, as found in this project, can get you in the game. You will have bragging rights of be saying you did it, but it probably won’t ever get you rich.

The bigger motivational factor should be to do it because you can. There is only one place to start in learning to work with FPGA’s and create cool and interesting projects. My vote is to start off with the basics, learn to work with a basic FPGA, learn the algorithms involved that have the potential of making you some digital cash, and most importantly have fun while you’re doing it!

LOGi Family Bitcoin mining Application

The FPGA LOGi family has support for a bitcoin mining application that will get you up and running with a fully operational bitcoin miner in 10 cubic inches of hardware. The current hardware supported is the LOGi-bone in conjunction with the Beaglebone. You can simply extract and run the packaged application code or open and explore the open source project yourself, learn it, make modifications and then build and run your own custom version. After getting the application running, don’t forget to sit back and think, I just created my own bitcoin mining rig!

This mining project is based upon an existing open source hardware project that was customized and built to work on the LOGi family and Beaglebone. The project was created by Jonathan Piat. The LOGi team looks forward to porting the project to run on the LOGi-Mark1 and allow interfacing the Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi. When you are finished with the bitcoin minig project, don't throw out the board move onto the many other cool projects that the LOGi Family boards are capable of running, such as plug and play machine vision. Quadcopter, autonomous robot and many more. The LOGI team plans to continue working to make these projects as plug and play as possible, as was done with the mining application.

Running the Demo:

This demo shows how one can build a low power self contained mining platform using a Beaglebone and the Logibone cape. In this demo the Beaglebone executes a python client that Communicates with the mining pool to get share information and submit hashing results. A python class provides the interface to the Logibone to easily get/send information from/to the FPGA. The Logibone cape uses the GPMC interface of the Beaglebone and thus appear in the Beaglebone address space as a set of registers. These register provides information about the hashing status and an interface to write the share and read the result.

To run the demo:

1) Extract the logibone_mining_demo.tar.gz file to the beaglebone

2) Extract the tar.gz file (tar xzf logibone_mining_demo.tar.gz)

3) Go into the logibone_mining_demo folder

4) Add execution mode to the make_demo.sh script (chmod 777 make_demo.sh)

5) If you are running Ubuntu, edit make_demo to uncomment the “apt-get” lines and

comment the “opkg” lines (by default the demo runs on Angstrom)

minutes and the cape Led should be blinking)

Note: You will need to configure each mining worker to participate in a bitcoin mining pool You be given worker registration information username and password for each worker that can be used to configure your mining worker. There are many mining pool sites which can be referenced here: http://mining.bitcoin.cz/

References and Resources:

Fpga bitcoin mining

Just released was the Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner  software.  This miner allows bitcoins to be mined using a commercially available FPGA board.

FPGA boards consume much less electricity compared to GPUs for the hashing work performed when mining bitcoins.

FGPAs might have a MHash/J performance level around 20 or more whereas the most efficient GPUs are closer to about 2 MHash/J.

There are fears that FPGA mining will force miners using GPUs today to either pivot and switch to FPGA mining for their operations or to abandon mining completely when the efficiency disparity makes GPU mining uncompetitive.

Those fears are likely unwarranted just yet though.  The cost of the equipment and not the cost of electricity continues to be the primary concern affecting miner’s decision on whether or not to add capacity.

Using commercially available FPGA boards to attain a certain level of hashing can require investment several times that required for a GPU-based equivalent.

Though a less costly FPGA board designed specifically for bitcoin could be built, there are no sources for such a product yet — at least not commercially.

GPU Mining Still Profitable And Still Growing

It will likely be many months yet before the FPGA would even start to displace the GPU as the technology responsible for significant increases to the mining difficulty measure.

GPU miners have been able to reach the breakeven point, on a per-dollar invested basis, within a couple months after bringing new capacity online.  Thereafter a decent profit continues to be returned though the profitability level can decline steadily with each subsequent increase in difficulty when there is no matching increase in the bitcoin exchange rate as well.

The Bitcoin network has continued to see capacity come online at an unprecedented and torrid pace — over 30 GHash/s of capacity was added each day during the most recent difficulty adjustment period, for example.

Because of the recent run-up in the bitcoin exchange rate mining is generally considered to be very profitable at the present time.  It will remain highly profitable until either the exchange rate drops or the difficulty level increases significantly as the result of additional mining capacity being procured and brought online by miners seeking those profits.

With so many miners active now, the global supply of GPU hardware has become constrained.  Even used GPUs found on eBay, for example, are becoming difficult to find.  If the now-discontinued ATI HD 5870s and HD 5970s were still sold, or AMD were able to keep up with demand for the AMD HD 6990s, the difficulty increases would likely be even greater than what is being seen now.

FPGA’s Edge

Even though the FGPA solution is extremely expensive relative to its GPU equivalent, FPGAs are widely available commercially.  If the bitcoin exchange rate were to spike further, FPGA mining may be about the only option for being able to add any significant amount of mining capacity.

The higher power efficiency that an FPGA provides is not just a factor for comparing the cost of electricity to mine but also when other factors are considered.

The total amount of electricity consumed by a miner with a GPU mining rig or two will add up quickly.  Individual miners are already popping breakers after exceeding limits on the amount of current available from household circuits used when mining with multiple GPUs in a single rig even.  Those with multiple rigs are finding limits to the amount of electricity fed to the property as well.

When power consumption limits are a constraint, then the FPGA with its significantly higher power efficiency might be the only method to increase mining hashing capacity.

Residential electric rates are often tiered to encourage conservation.  As a result the incremental rate for mining starts at the most expensive tier for the household.  Individuals mining from their homes should be the biggest beneficiaries from having an efficient FPGA alternative but the equipment’s high cost will remain a major limiting factor, as will the technical skill level necessary for FPGA mining.

Further out, if the exchange value of bitcoin rises much further the numbers begin to approach the level where building and producing an ASIC design might become feasible.

If or when that happens, then the clock counting the days left for GPU mining can start ticking.

Product Comparison

Last Updated: 2012-01-25. For the latest product information, please check the forum.

Bitcoin in a Nutshell

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency based on public key signatures and an ingenious double-spend-prevention mechanism based on a cryptographic hash function (SHA256). Nodes in the Bitcoin network are rewarded for finding x, such that SHA256(SHA256(x)) is below a certain target (this is called mining). The first node to find a solution earns Bitcoins.

The Bitcoin network adjusts this target so that on average, a solution is found every 10 minutes, based on the total computational rate (MH/s) of the network.

A node's chance of winning is roughly equal to the fraction of total MH/s that it contributes to the network.

Mining requires the latest technology and/or low electricity costs to remain profitable over time. Only the most power-efficient survive.

In mid-2011, GPU mining was highly profitable, with many ATI GPUs paying for themselves in 6-9 months, counting power (but not cooling, maintenance, configuration, or other) costs. However, as an increasing number of GPU miners chased those returns, the difficulty adjusted and large-scale GPU mining inevitably became unprofitable.

Field Programmable Gate Array miners are under active development and use around 1/10th the power of a GPU, at the same performance level (MH/s). The upfront capital investment is higher than for GPUs; however, once made, the lower operational costs should enable FPGA miners to earn a significant monthly profit, even at price and difficulty levels where GPUs cannot. FPGAs are more power-efficient for mining, and over time are likely to make GPU mining unprofitable. Once the electricity to run a GPU costs more than the bitcoins it can produce, most miners will turn them off, and either sell their GPUs, or repurpose them.

A GPU process shrink does not change this situation; a 45nm FPGA still uses less electricity per MH than a 28nm GPU. And of course - 28nm FPGAs will arrive around the same time as 28nm GPUs, keeping FPGAs firmly ahead throughout 2012.

Now is the best time to switch to FPGA-based mining, to enjoy a major technological advantage over most other miners.

The FPGA End-Game

Large-scale miners who are willing to make the initial investment in FPGA mining should be able to mine a substantial portion of the remaining coins, with no operational threat from GPUs for at least the next 2 years. It looks likely that miners using GPUs will need to migrate to FPGAs to remain profitable during 2012.

Why not build an ASIC?

It's extremely expensive to build an ASIC that can outperform high-volume 40nm/28nm FPGAs. A 40nm mask set costs around $4M. Older technologies are less expensive, but above 130nm, probably cannot outperform a 28nm FPGA. At the current price and liquidity of Bitcoin, an ASIC would be an extremely risky investment. Most likely, the mining community will switch to FPGAs first and move to ASICs if/only if the Bitcoin ecosystem matures and expands considerably.

To Learn More..

Join #bitcoin-fpga on freenode. There's a small community of talented folks working on a variety of designs.

Hack A Day - FPGA bitcoin mining

The board requires only 6.8 watts for 100 Mhashes/second, but [li_gangyi]‘s blog says the team expects to hit 150-200 Mhashes with some improvements.

Only four of these boards were built and the supply has already sold out.  Deposits are being accepted at Cablesaurus towards pre-orders for the second generation model.  The second generation units are priced at $420 (single FGPA) to $620 (dual FPGA) but those prices will likely be lowered before purchase due to volume discounts.  The number of boards produced will be determined by how many deposits (paid in either bitcoins or USDs) are made.

This board differs from the modular FPGA hardware project  but runs the same open source FGPA miner  that was released in May.

FPGA hardware is more expensive for mining Bitcoin than the hashing equivalent when GPU graphics cards are used but power consumption for FPGA mining can be nearly an order of magnitude less.  At current exchange rates and difficulty levels. the dual-FGPA board will produce just under 0.12 BTC per day, which is worth about $1.22 USD.  Calculated using the typical U.S. residential rate the cost of electricity to run the two FPGAs for a day is under $0.04 USD, or about 3% of revenue.  For comparison, when GPU graphics cards are used for mining in regions where electric rates are high the cost of electricity can exceed half the miner’s revenue.

Though mining profitabilty  is near all-time lows, these levels are still high enough that FGPAs are not yet price competitive due to the higher hardware costs involved.  At the same time, this board just brought FPGA mining one step closer to becoming a significant competitor to GPU mining.  Those likely to be the early adopters will be those hitting total power consumption limits, those running out of space and those unable to sufficiently remove the heat produced when mining with GPUs.

FPGA LOGi Family Bitcoin Mining Application

FPGA LOGi Bitcoin Mining Application

Foreword: This project allows users to easily experiment with and discover the inner workings of mining on a low cost multi-purpose platform. Note that there are currently much faster and more powerful options available for bitcoin mining including FPGA arrays and ASICS. The purpose of the article and project is simply to introduce to the processes and algorithms used for bitcoin mining, not to make money. The knowlege, algorithms and processes can be taken to larger scale platforms if the user wishes to seriously pursue bitcoin mining

logi-mark1-bone-beaglebone-pi-arduino

Bitcoin

So what is bitcoin? Bitcoin is an experimental, decentralized digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network. Bitcoin is designed around the idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities [1]. The more interesting aspects of bitcoin mining are in the details of the intricate protocols and algorithms being used that make up what is quickly being adopted as a new digital currency. Part of the beauty of the bitcoin protocol is that it uses technologies including encryption, hashing, client to client communication, all of which scream out for an FPGA implementation.

Mining

Most of the work involved in bitcoin transactions is in the mining. The key part of the transaction is in the verification process that authenticates the bitcoin transaction. The verification process awards effective bitcoin nodes (or "bitcoin miners") with a limited release of bitcoins and the transaction fees (if any). This process requires intense computing power, electricity, and significant investment as it solves hashes through brute-force to verify transactions and add them to the network's transaction log [1]. So part of the fun of mining is getting a reward equivalent to hard cash money! You might have noticed the words brute force and solving hashes. These are two more keywords that are just asking for an FPGA.

Algorithm

The process of bitcoin mining is no minor feat and this is why FPGA’s have been widely adopted for the task. T he mining process, or proof-of-work process, involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits. Once this hash has been found, the block can be considered as being solved and the transaction can be verified. The average work required is exponential in the number o f zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash [2]. You can go through the links below to see more details about the processing, but the bottom line is that you are looking for a diamond in the rough. So, get to that number crunching, as the faster you crunch the numbers the sooner you will have a chance to wield that bitcoin cash earned by the work of that handy dandy FPGA.

The reality of solving a “block” or successfully mining the correct hash is becoming harder and harder with the advent of bigger and better processing work horses. The trend has gone from crunching the numbers on high end FPGA’s to now being able buy a custom ASIC which is designed to increase the total number of hashes/sec calculated while reducing the power requirement from that of running PC’s, GPU’s or FPGA’s. But this should not discourage you from getting started with an FPGA, as there are now pools of miner’s which all work together to solve the “block” and then share the loot with all who were working on it. So, even the humble 2.5 Mega hash/sec, as found in this project, can get you in the game. You will have bragging rights of be saying you did it, but it probably won’t ever get you rich.

The bigger motivational factor should be to do it because you can. There is only one place to start in learning to work with FPGA’s and create cool and interesting projects. My vote is to start off with the basics, learn to work with a basic FPGA, learn the algorithms involved that have the potential of making you some digital cash, and most importantly have fun while you’re doing it!

LOGi Family Bitcoin mining Application

The FPGA LOGi family has support for a bitcoin mining application that will get you up and running with a fully operational bitcoin miner in 10 cubic inches of hardware. The current hardware supported is the LOGi-bone in conjunction with the Beaglebone. You can simply extract and run the packaged application code or open and explore the open source project yourself, learn it, make modifications and then build and run your own custom version. After getting the application running, don’t forget to sit back and think, I just created my own bitcoin mining rig!

This mining project is based upon an existing open source hardware project that was customized and built to work on the LOGi family and Beaglebone. The project was created by Jonathan Piat. The LOGi team looks forward to porting the project to run on the LOGi-Mark1 and allow interfacing the Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi. When you are finished with the bitcoin minig project, don't throw out the board move onto the many other cool projects that the LOGi Family boards are capable of running, such as plug and play machine vision. Quadcopter, autonomous robot and many more. The LOGI team plans to continue working to make these projects as plug and play as possible, as was done with the mining application.

Running the Demo:

This demo shows how one can build a low power self contained mining platform using a Beaglebone and the Logibone cape. In this demo the Beaglebone executes a python client that Communicates with the mining pool to get share information and submit hashing results. A python class provides the interface to the Logibone to easily get/send information from/to the FPGA. The Logibone cape uses the GPMC interface of the Beaglebone and thus appear in the Beaglebone address space as a set of registers. These register provides information about the hashing status and an interface to write the share and read the result.

To run the demo:

1) Extract the logibone_mining_demo.tar.gz file to the beaglebone

2) Extract the tar.gz file (tar xzf logibone_mining_demo.tar.gz)

3) Go into the logibone_mining_demo folder

4) Add execution mode to the make_demo.sh script (chmod 777 make_demo.sh)

5) If you are running Ubuntu, edit make_demo to uncomment the “apt-get” lines and

comment the “opkg” lines (by default the demo runs on Angstrom)

minutes and the cape Led should be blinking)

Note: You will need to configure each mining worker to participate in a bitcoin mining pool You be given worker registration information username and password for each worker that can be used to configure your mining worker. There are many mining pool sites which can be referenced here: http://mining.bitcoin.cz/

References and Resources:

Fpga bitcoin miner

Product Comparison

Last Updated: 2012-01-25. For the latest product information, please check the forum.

Bitcoin in a Nutshell

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer currency based on public key signatures and an ingenious double-spend-prevention mechanism based on a cryptographic hash function (SHA256). Nodes in the Bitcoin network are rewarded for finding x, such that SHA256(SHA256(x)) is below a certain target (this is called mining). The first node to find a solution earns Bitcoins.

The Bitcoin network adjusts this target so that on average, a solution is found every 10 minutes, based on the total computational rate (MH/s) of the network.

A node's chance of winning is roughly equal to the fraction of total MH/s that it contributes to the network.

Mining requires the latest technology and/or low electricity costs to remain profitable over time. Only the most power-efficient survive.

In mid-2011, GPU mining was highly profitable, with many ATI GPUs paying for themselves in 6-9 months, counting power (but not cooling, maintenance, configuration, or other) costs. However, as an increasing number of GPU miners chased those returns, the difficulty adjusted and large-scale GPU mining inevitably became unprofitable.

Field Programmable Gate Array miners are under active development and use around 1/10th the power of a GPU, at the same performance level (MH/s). The upfront capital investment is higher than for GPUs; however, once made, the lower operational costs should enable FPGA miners to earn a significant monthly profit, even at price and difficulty levels where GPUs cannot. FPGAs are more power-efficient for mining, and over time are likely to make GPU mining unprofitable. Once the electricity to run a GPU costs more than the bitcoins it can produce, most miners will turn them off, and either sell their GPUs, or repurpose them.

A GPU process shrink does not change this situation; a 45nm FPGA still uses less electricity per MH than a 28nm GPU. And of course - 28nm FPGAs will arrive around the same time as 28nm GPUs, keeping FPGAs firmly ahead throughout 2012.

Now is the best time to switch to FPGA-based mining, to enjoy a major technological advantage over most other miners.

The FPGA End-Game

Large-scale miners who are willing to make the initial investment in FPGA mining should be able to mine a substantial portion of the remaining coins, with no operational threat from GPUs for at least the next 2 years. It looks likely that miners using GPUs will need to migrate to FPGAs to remain profitable during 2012.

Why not build an ASIC?

It's extremely expensive to build an ASIC that can outperform high-volume 40nm/28nm FPGAs. A 40nm mask set costs around $4M. Older technologies are less expensive, but above 130nm, probably cannot outperform a 28nm FPGA. At the current price and liquidity of Bitcoin, an ASIC would be an extremely risky investment. Most likely, the mining community will switch to FPGAs first and move to ASICs if/only if the Bitcoin ecosystem matures and expands considerably.

To Learn More..

Join #bitcoin-fpga on freenode. There's a small community of talented folks working on a variety of designs.

Hack A Day - FPGA bitcoin mining

The board requires only 6.8 watts for 100 Mhashes/second, but [li_gangyi]‘s blog says the team expects to hit 150-200 Mhashes with some improvements.

Only four of these boards were built and the supply has already sold out.  Deposits are being accepted at Cablesaurus towards pre-orders for the second generation model.  The second generation units are priced at $420 (single FGPA) to $620 (dual FPGA) but those prices will likely be lowered before purchase due to volume discounts.  The number of boards produced will be determined by how many deposits (paid in either bitcoins or USDs) are made.

This board differs from the modular FPGA hardware project  but runs the same open source FGPA miner  that was released in May.

FPGA hardware is more expensive for mining Bitcoin than the hashing equivalent when GPU graphics cards are used but power consumption for FPGA mining can be nearly an order of magnitude less.  At current exchange rates and difficulty levels. the dual-FGPA board will produce just under 0.12 BTC per day, which is worth about $1.22 USD.  Calculated using the typical U.S. residential rate the cost of electricity to run the two FPGAs for a day is under $0.04 USD, or about 3% of revenue.  For comparison, when GPU graphics cards are used for mining in regions where electric rates are high the cost of electricity can exceed half the miner’s revenue.

Though mining profitabilty  is near all-time lows, these levels are still high enough that FGPAs are not yet price competitive due to the higher hardware costs involved.  At the same time, this board just brought FPGA mining one step closer to becoming a significant competitor to GPU mining.  Those likely to be the early adopters will be those hitting total power consumption limits, those running out of space and those unable to sufficiently remove the heat produced when mining with GPUs.

Just released was the Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner  software.  This miner allows bitcoins to be mined using a commercially available FPGA board.

FPGA boards consume much less electricity compared to GPUs for the hashing work performed when mining bitcoins.

FGPAs might have a MHash/J performance level around 20 or more whereas the most efficient GPUs are closer to about 2 MHash/J.

There are fears that FPGA mining will force miners using GPUs today to either pivot and switch to FPGA mining for their operations or to abandon mining completely when the efficiency disparity makes GPU mining uncompetitive.

Those fears are likely unwarranted just yet though.  The cost of the equipment and not the cost of electricity continues to be the primary concern affecting miner’s decision on whether or not to add capacity.

Using commercially available FPGA boards to attain a certain level of hashing can require investment several times that required for a GPU-based equivalent.

Though a less costly FPGA board designed specifically for bitcoin could be built, there are no sources for such a product yet — at least not commercially.

GPU Mining Still Profitable And Still Growing

It will likely be many months yet before the FPGA would even start to displace the GPU as the technology responsible for significant increases to the mining difficulty measure.

GPU miners have been able to reach the breakeven point, on a per-dollar invested basis, within a couple months after bringing new capacity online.  Thereafter a decent profit continues to be returned though the profitability level can decline steadily with each subsequent increase in difficulty when there is no matching increase in the bitcoin exchange rate as well.

The Bitcoin network has continued to see capacity come online at an unprecedented and torrid pace — over 30 GHash/s of capacity was added each day during the most recent difficulty adjustment period, for example.

Because of the recent run-up in the bitcoin exchange rate mining is generally considered to be very profitable at the present time.  It will remain highly profitable until either the exchange rate drops or the difficulty level increases significantly as the result of additional mining capacity being procured and brought online by miners seeking those profits.

With so many miners active now, the global supply of GPU hardware has become constrained.  Even used GPUs found on eBay, for example, are becoming difficult to find.  If the now-discontinued ATI HD 5870s and HD 5970s were still sold, or AMD were able to keep up with demand for the AMD HD 6990s, the difficulty increases would likely be even greater than what is being seen now.

FPGA’s Edge

Even though the FGPA solution is extremely expensive relative to its GPU equivalent, FPGAs are widely available commercially.  If the bitcoin exchange rate were to spike further, FPGA mining may be about the only option for being able to add any significant amount of mining capacity.

The higher power efficiency that an FPGA provides is not just a factor for comparing the cost of electricity to mine but also when other factors are considered.

The total amount of electricity consumed by a miner with a GPU mining rig or two will add up quickly.  Individual miners are already popping breakers after exceeding limits on the amount of current available from household circuits used when mining with multiple GPUs in a single rig even.  Those with multiple rigs are finding limits to the amount of electricity fed to the property as well.

When power consumption limits are a constraint, then the FPGA with its significantly higher power efficiency might be the only method to increase mining hashing capacity.

Residential electric rates are often tiered to encourage conservation.  As a result the incremental rate for mining starts at the most expensive tier for the household.  Individuals mining from their homes should be the biggest beneficiaries from having an efficient FPGA alternative but the equipment’s high cost will remain a major limiting factor, as will the technical skill level necessary for FPGA mining.

Further out, if the exchange value of bitcoin rises much further the numbers begin to approach the level where building and producing an ASIC design might become feasible.

If or when that happens, then the clock counting the days left for GPU mining can start ticking.

Fastest way to get bitcoins

Fastest Way To Get Bitcoins

Fastest Way To Get Bitcoins

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Fastest Way to Get Bitcoins

The fastest and easiest way to buy Bitcoins is by looking for sellers who accept cash deposit at  Local Bitcoins .  Go to this site, create an account, log in, and go to the  Buy Bitcoins online in the United States with Cash Deposit  section (or to your relevant country's site), and find a seller who is asking for a cash deposit to a nearby bank.

Once you find a seller who has a price you like with a good trust rating at a nearby bank, and click on [Buy]. Then enter the dollar amount and click [Send Trade Request].  At this point, the bitcoins you are buying are deducted from the Seller's account on Local Bitcoins and placed into Escrow  for 4 hours.

You will see information or receive an e-mail with the sellers' name and account number at that bank. Once you have this, go to the bank with your cash.  Get a deposit slip if needed and fill it out with the account number (some banks just have the teller take your account number verbally) and bring it to the teller.  Tell the teller you want to deposit cash into the seller's account.  Hold onto the receipt for the cash deposit from the teller as proof that you made the deposit in the unlikely case of any dispute.

Go back to your computer / phone and mark the transaction on Local Bitcoins as [Deposit Completed].  This will automatically notify the seller that you've completed your deposit.  They will log onto their on-line banking website, and confirm that you made the deposit.  Because the trader may be accepting multiple trades at the same round dollar amount, it is a best practice to add a few cents to the deposit so that it is a unique dollar amount and less likely to be confused with other depositor's deposit.

Get Bitcoin: 20+ ways to Earn Free Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a new and quickly spreading digital currency system. What it means is you can send and receive money, pay for your snacks or pizza, buy an Android for your loved one, etc. using bitcoins. Recently, bitcoin exchange rate has gone as high as never before – about $15 per bitcoin. Just imagine to get bitcoin free coins and you’ll be having enough money to buy you a computer game or a software! Interesting, isn’t it?

Image source: sylvar at Flickr

Whoa! Bitcoin is not only of some worth but also anonymous (till some limits, if you follow guidelines to maintain anonymity), i.e. no one can know about you at time of sending or receiving payments. It’s possible as you don’t need to provide any of your details like name, address, country, etc. to use Bitcoin system. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency system which is not governed by any central authority tracking you and your money. Then how Bitcoin is managed? Bitcoin is maintained by peer-to-peer network of contributors who run Bitcoin software on their computers and become part of the system, and help the system to grow and run.

You can get bitcoin free coins by doing small works like doing surveys, reading posts, signing up forms, clicking on ads, etc. There are also people who give out free bitcoin to people who are thinking to start using Bitcoin system. Why they give free Bitcoin? For a simple reason – they like Bitcoin system and they want it to grow and become popular, and so they want you to use Bitcoin. By giving out some amount of free bitcoin, they encourage you to use Bitcoin system and once you come to know about the benefits of it, you’ll use it by yourself – no need of encouragement then.

Recommended Reading:

Note: I’ve removed some of the sites that were not good to be included in this list.

Here are some of the services where you can get bitcoin for free or by doing little work:

This site give out free bitcoins to users for visiting its site. You get free bitcoins only once per day and you can visit this site again tomorrow to get some more free bitcoins. I suppose this site runs on ads and they want you to visit their site to increase their ads revenues and in return, you too get some free coins (mutually beneficial for both). They also have a referral program, which you can use to maximize your free earnings. PS- don’t forget to click on ads on their site, may be you can get bigger amount of free bitcoins this way.

This site pays you bitcoins for shortening your URLs with its service. What happens is after you shorten your URL on this site and post that shortened address, then people visiting that link is shown ads and you’re paid for it.

This site pays you free bitcoins for visiting their site.

This site provides free bitcoins to you for completing offers and surveys.

This site also offers free bitcoins for viewing other websites but this site do it in a different way – you’ve to see a website and then answer a question related to the shown website to redeem your free bitcoin. It don’t make you see website for any particular time – you just need to answer the question, no matter you take 5 seconds or 5 minutes in doing the same.

This site offer you small amount of bitcoins for visiting their site.

This site gives you 0.0001 BTC for just visiting their site. It also offers jackpots which can be upto 0.01 BTC.

This site give out free bitcoins to you for browsing other sites for a minimum of 5 minutes. It’s not a poor thing – you get paid for working – in this case, browsing their advertisers’ sites. You don’t need to create an account for this, just enter your bitcoin address and start browsing sites, and you get paid as you finish browsing the sites. Simple and direct!

This site also offers you free bitcoins for just visiting their site. It give out coins every 1 minute.

This site give you free bitcoins for re-tweeting sponsored ads present on their site. It claims to pay you bitcoins at most in an hour, no matter where in the world you are. Along with the sponsored ad, payment amount is shown so that you can select which ads to re-tweet if you want to get maximum earnings.

This site give you free bitcoins for completing ads and it announced to give away free bitcoins without showing ads as the site grows.

This site provide you free coins for completing offers on their site. Offers can be completing surveys or buying something from one of their advertisers.

This site gives you 0.0001 BTC for every public bookmark you make on this site. This site is a public social bookmarking site and you get some rewards for sharing good links on this site.

This site is a online gaming site. It is a real gaming site where you play Urban Terror online and whenever you kill a player, you get his/her bitcoins. On the contrary, if you die, you lose some of your bitcoins. Amount of bitcoins that you get or lose depends on the game that you’re playing. These amounts are shown on the homepage of Bitcoin Terror.

This site gives you free bitcoins for visiting and browsing sponsored websites for some set amount of time.

This site pays you bitcoins for doing small works like surveys, search items and submitting reports, etc. You make points from doing work and once you’ve reached 200 points, your points get converted to bitcoins and are paid to your bitcoin address. If you ask me, I won’t recommend this site as it will take a lot of time and effort in earning 200 points.

This site is a question and answer forum. This site rewards you small amount of bitcoins for answering to questions asked by other members.

This site pays you bitcoins for completing advertisers’ surveys.

This site pays you bitcoins for watching their sponsored videos.

This site give away 0.0005 BTC for just visiting their site. You can redeem free bitcoins only once a day.

This site pay you free bitcoins for completing the offers on their site. Offers may include signing up for various free services or something similar. But of course, you need to provide correct information about you when completing their offers, else that offer won’t get verified and you won’t get paid.

This site give out free bitcoins for viewing other websites.

Bitcoin Faucet give out 0.005 bitcoins to each visitor. You must have a Gmail account to claim your free bitcoins on this site and you need to solve a CAPTCHA problem to prove it that you have living cells, i.e. you’re a human and not a piece of code (automatic bot) trying to steal free money from the site.

Bitcoin is new and many people show concerns about its usage or future. I won’t say it’s going to rock but I agree it’s going to live. I’ve been closely researching about Bitcoins for some time and you’ll be amazed to know that 1 BTC worth of $1 some months ago is now equal to (approx.) $15. I have observed that Bitcoin is being quickly adopted by people and demand for bitcoins is rising day by day, and that’s the reason behind its growing exchange rate. Well, I hope you’ll like these above given sites and get some free money to buy you a chocolate!

Do you know any other site to get free bitcoins?

What is your experience with above given sites?

I’d love to listen from you via comments.

How do I get Bitcoins? (For Beginners)

It might be a question for beginners, but the answer to how you can get Bitcoins isn’t obvious. Where you live, how technical you are, and what you want to do with your Bitcoins are all determining factors. We have plenty of people coming into the Bitcoin community each day, so WELCOME!

(For those wanting to learn more about how Bitcoin works, a podcast called Security Now did a great show a couple years ago that covers the basics. The explanation starts at the 42 minute mark and gets technical after about 10 minutes.)

There are 4 main ways to get Bitcoin.

Firstly, there are Exchanges, where you can buy and sell Bitcoin for fiat currency (which is Muggle currency like USD and Euros). There are many new options for buying Bitcoin, which will vary depending on where in the world you are. These are changing pretty rapidly, but the main players have remained pretty constant so far.

Easy way to earn Bitcoins by playing games, No Mining or Surveys

Second, Bitcoin “mining” remains a primary vehicle of attaining the currency. Bitcoin “mining ” has proceeded to increase in difficulty. Currently, the value of BTC is more than keeping pace with this increase in difficulty, but the costs of entry in terms of hardware are high.

Thirdly, you can send and receive Bitcoin, for whatever reason, between individuals, using a Bitcoin Wallet. Again, there are many options for your wallet, which acts as you might expect from the name, as a place to keep and compartmentalise your Bitcoins. You will also need a Bitcoin wallet to spend your Bitcoin from once you have them. You can keep your Bitcoin wallet online (although it might not be as secure as on a piece of your own hardware), on your phone, or on your desktop.

Finally, you can make Bitcoin through content or services offered online. In order to do this, you will need a wallet, and you might choose to use a tool on your site that stores your wallet address as a QR code, to make payments from mobile phones easier.

EXCHANGES

Exchanges are places where you can buy and sell Bitcoin for fiat currency. Three of the main players in this space are Mt.Gox, BitStamp and CoinBase.

Regardless of where you live, Mt.Gox  remains a good purchasing-point for Bitcoin, although their service is currently suffering from some holdups, they are still the largest of the BTC exchanges. Their prices are about $10 higher than their largest competitor, however, due to the difficulty in getting USD in and out of the exchange. If you are a first time buyer, check out BitStamp.

MtGox is, at the time of this writing (updated August 2013), is allowing the following funding sources:aurumXchange , BitInstant. Euro Bank Transfer, Bank Transfer, Liberty Reserve, OkPay

If you plan on transferring money from your bank, expect (4-5 business) days of wait time. For withdrawals in fiat currency (if you want to sell your BTC for Dollars, Pounds or Euros) Mt.Gox is currently painfully slow – they are in the process of changing banking partners, and are only allowed a very limited number of wire transfers per day. Expect to wait 3 weeks for your money, if not longer.

MtGox is, at the time of this writing (updated 2013), is allowing the following funding sources: aurumXchange. BitInstant. Euro Bank Transfer, Bank Transfer, Liberty Reserve, OkPay

If you plan on transferring money from your bank, expect (4-5 business) days of wait time.

Second largest of the BTC Exchanges, and quickly gaining on Mt.Gox, is BitStamp, who take wire bank transfers and usually operates at a lower USD purchase and selling price then Mt.Gox, due to the difficulty of getting USD in and out of Mt.Gox. BitStamp is based in Slovenia, and (currently) is able to operate relatively freely due to the EU’s ruling that Bitcoin is not money. This will most likely change as Germany’s decision to classify Bitcoin as “Private Money” becomes a precedent for the rest of Europe, but as Germany has treated Bitcoin in such a reasonable way, it’s unlikely to cause BitStamp users much disruption.

US citizens should also take a look at CoinBase. which offers simplicity and credibility as a business.  (Recently, it has received a large investment from Silicon Valley venture capitalists.)  It is also faster than going through an intermediary to MtGox.  What you get in simplicity, however, you lose in terms of exchange rates which are currently at 1% at Coinbase.

Please be cautious and do plentiful independent research before choosing any exchange–as many have opened and closed over the last few years.

MINING

A note on “mining” (using computer hardware to generate) vs. buying Bitcoin:

Mining is always getting more computationally expensive per Bitcoin generated.  This is because fewer Bitcoins are generated over time and more people are trying to “win” them.

If you want to go ahead and mine them though, we’ll be setting up a

Opinion: Because fewer Bitcoins are being generated, this means fewer Bitcoins are being “dumped” into exchanges.  This means that, over time, downward pressure on the value of BTC has lessened.  I believe this scarcity is a contributing factor to the rising value of BTC.

WALLETS

Three of the most popular wallets recommended by Bitcoin.org are Multibit. for your desktop, and BitcoinWallet for the android, whilst those holding large amounts of Bitcoin might want to consider Armory for high security.

Be sure to set good passwords for any wallet that you choose.

ECOMMERCE

Receiving tips on your website is straightforward, once you have a Bitcoin wallet you just need to display your Wallet address.

For eCommerce, consider BitPay for your website shopping cart.

A NEW ECONOMY

Up until this point, the Bitcoin economy and its participants have been somewhat reliant on making money through mining.  It’s been some peoples’ hobby, others’ full-time job.

Another practical way to earn Bitcoins has become to provide goods or services to others. You know, like people do with a normal currencies.

So, where would you go to sell goods and services?  Get it listed on the Wiki Trade Page !

KEEPING UP WITH BITCOIN

If you are invested in Bitcoin, you should be hyper-aware of the news affecting the currency, especially considering how volatile it is.  I highly recommendwww.bitcoinnews.com.  For three years, it has offered pretty fair reporting on all things Bitcoin.  I also encourage you to sign up for the Bitcoin Bulletin newsletter, on the right hand panel.

Like this post? Tip us with bitcoin!

Get Bitcoins – The Fastest Way

The fastest way I know of to currently get bitcoins with cash (aside from having a friend ship you some btc) is to use “BitInstant “. Basically you will need a wallet first (hosted or hard drive it doesn’t matter - see the basics ), or just use your poker account. and set up your wallet later when you want to cash out. Then set up a deposit on BitInstant. Walk, drive, hitchhike to the Walmart/CVS and deposit the cash. The bitcoins will show up in your wallet within a few hours after making the deposit.

Since speed is the key here, we will use our Poker account on Seals with Clubs as our wallet in the steps below. CAUTION: Be sure to set up a real bitcoin wallet afterwards. You do not want to use Seals as your permanent wallet! That’s not smart bro.

Create a Seals with Clubs Account

Copy the Cash in Hash Address

Create a Payment Slip on BitInstant. Pay to Bitcoin Address (pay to your “ Cash in Address”)

Deposit the cash at Walmmart, CVS etc.

Bitcoins will show up in your Seals account within a few hours.

Create an account on Seals with Clubs

Go to Your Account and copy your “Current Cash In” address to your clipboard (Ctrl-C)

Go to http://www.bitinstant.com

Choose where you want to deposit to given the choices in the “Pay from”. (example Walmart). There is where you will be taking your cash.

Choose Bitcoin Address in the “Pay to” drop down.

Fill in the rest of the form. Paste the hash address you got from your Seals account into the “Bitcoin Address field”

Click “Send Funds” and Click “go” on the following page after confirming the info.

You are then presented with a list of places close to you to deposit your cash. (They use a service called zipzap for this, a lot like Western Union.)

Fill out the info, select the location, and click “Create Payment Slip”.

Download and print out the payment slip. It will have all the info you need.

WAIT! The deposit is for more than I specified! Yeah, we know, ZipZap charges a fee, on top of the fee that BitInstant pays. This is the fast method for getting bitcoins, not the cheapest.

Head to the deposit place and make the deposit.

Within a few hours, your Seals account will have the coins available for play.

SET UP A WALLET. Don’t forget, once you crush the games, you will need a way to get your money off the site. Go ahead and set up a permanent wallet now, and also think about how you will convert you funds back to your local currency. You can get a software wallet that is stored on your computer, or use a hosted wallet service like Coinbase and Blockchain.info. Our Bitcoin Basics page has all that info.

Fastest way to buy bitcoins

BC changer

Currently, the safest, fastest and easiest way to purchase Bitcoins is by using coinmama.com Western Union & MoneyGram accepted.

This is a breif overview of how to buy Bitcoins using PayPal® credit.

Most major Bitcoin exchanges do not allow funding through Paypal. I'm yet to find anywhere that reliably sells Bitcoins using PayPal®. This is largely due to repeated cases where someone pays for Bitcoins with Paypal®, receives Bitcoins then fraudulently complains to Paypal® or their credit card company that they never received the goods. All too often Paypal sides with the fraudulent buyer, understandably most Bitcoin exchanges will no longer allow this method of funding due to the high risk of fraud.

While fraudulent PayPal® transactions may occur, there is also another major reason selling Bitcoins via PayPal® is not widespread. Some Bitcoin sellers have had their PayPal accounts frozen by PayPal®. From what we understand PayPal has taken this action because they consider Bitcoin to be a "ecurrency" (e.g. similar to PayPal), and depending on which PayPal® department you speak to is against PayPal's policy to sell other e-currencies using PayPal. According to coinpal's founder "Someone inside PayPal specifically decided that Bitcoin was a big enough risk that it should be prohibited". PayPal frowns upon alternative currencies.

Buying Bitcoins from individuals using PayPal® is still possible, but requires mutual trust. We encourage Bitcoin sellers to limit PayPal transactions to trusted bcchanger.com buyers only, sellers should be aware of the buyer's feedback scores before accepting PayPal® transactions.

Fastest Way to Get Bitcoins

The fastest and easiest way to buy Bitcoins is by looking for sellers who accept cash deposit at  Local Bitcoins .  Go to this site, create an account, log in, and go to the  Buy Bitcoins online in the United States with Cash Deposit  section (or to your relevant country's site), and find a seller who is asking for a cash deposit to a nearby bank.

Once you find a seller who has a price you like with a good trust rating at a nearby bank, and click on [Buy]. Then enter the dollar amount and click [Send Trade Request].  At this point, the bitcoins you are buying are deducted from the Seller's account on Local Bitcoins and placed into Escrow  for 4 hours.

You will see information or receive an e-mail with the sellers' name and account number at that bank. Once you have this, go to the bank with your cash.  Get a deposit slip if needed and fill it out with the account number (some banks just have the teller take your account number verbally) and bring it to the teller.  Tell the teller you want to deposit cash into the seller's account.  Hold onto the receipt for the cash deposit from the teller as proof that you made the deposit in the unlikely case of any dispute.

Go back to your computer / phone and mark the transaction on Local Bitcoins as [Deposit Completed].  This will automatically notify the seller that you've completed your deposit.  They will log onto their on-line banking website, and confirm that you made the deposit.  Because the trader may be accepting multiple trades at the same round dollar amount, it is a best practice to add a few cents to the deposit so that it is a unique dollar amount and less likely to be confused with other depositor's deposit.

How to buy and sell Bitcoins -- Part 2: Practical

In this two part series I'm looking at the practicalities of buying and selling Bitcoins.

In Part 1, I looked at the theory of Bitcoins

In Part 2 (this part), I'll take you through how I bought and sold them.

Off we go

As I mentioned in Part 1. "mining" is no longer a practical way to get into Bitcoins because of the requirement for specialised hardware and because it's very difficult for small scale operations to get any money to drop out in that way.

The easiest way to get started is to send some "proper" money to a Bitcoin exchange.

There are a few of these, the most famous being Mt. Gox. I used Bitstamp -- my method of selection being "random". I went to Bitcoin Charts to find a list of exchanges, and went through a few until I found one that made me feel in some way vaguely confident.

You can't get started on this journey with a credit card -- you need something more like hard cash. I had to phone my bank to incept a wire transfer to Bitstamp's bank. This happened to be a bank located in Slovenia.

HOW TO BUY BITCOINS NOW

The problem with credit cards is that they can be clawed back on the lightest suspicion of fraud. Everyone involved wants Bitcoin to feel and act like cash -- if you have Bitcoins, the premise is that they are definitely yours. (Plus, if you could use credit cards, the whole system would be absolutely slapped to pieces by credit card fraud.)

Thus the first step on this journey was to wire EUR 200 (USD 260) to a company I'd never heard of in a country I'd never been to. But I guess it's my problem that I'd never been to Slovenia.

This did, I should say, work and within a couple of days my Bitstamp account showed some USD.

My Bitstamp account showing a USD balance as a result of the wire transfer.

Next step was to buy some Bitcoins. I spent my whole allowance, and Bitstamp took a small commission. Notice the amount in BTC. This isn't really a system where you buy round numbers of units -- everything is done to eight decimal places.

Placing an order to buy Bitcoins.

And there we have it. The trade went through almost instantly and I had some Bitcoins.

My Bitstamp account now showing a Bitcoin (BTC) balance.

So now I had to have something to do with them. In order to spend them, you have to download them to a wallet. I used Bitcoin-Qt. for the simple reason that this is the one that is listed on the official Bitcoin site .

Wallets are slightly odd things in that in this era of put-everything-in-the-cloud, this is very much a "device local" arrangement. You end up with a "wallet.dat" on your device that contains the references to your Bitcoins. Lose the wallet, lose the Bitcoins.

Sending money requires an address. Each wallet comes configured with one address, but you can create as many addresses as you like. This is to get around some of the issues with regards to lack of anonymity -- creating multiple addresses against one wallet supposedly makes it harder to trace transactions back to real people.

Anyway, I initiated a withdrawal from Bitstamp and after some time, the money appeared in my wallet.

The money now showing in my local wallet after being transferred from my Bitstamp account.

I should stress "some time". This actually took ten hours. The wallet has to synchronise itself with the Bitcoin network. This seemed like it too an oddly long time -- I'm not confident it would always take this long.

Part of the issue appears to be that every wallet downloads the entire transaction history for every Bitcoin transaction, ever. That's useful, I suppose, upon the eventual coming of the zombie apocalypse. If you happen to have a wallet on your laptop, you're in a position to reboot the world's Bitcoin currency should you be asked to do so.

The next thing I tried was sending the Bitcoins somewhere. This time I used Mt Gox.

Like when I transferred money from Bitstamp to my wallet, sending money to Mt Gox requires an address. All of the exchanges provide for funding through Bitcoins. I plugged the address into the wallet and transferred my entire balance.

To increase anonymity on the system (remember, the system is not anonymous although people tend to assume this) wallets have multiple identities. The idea is that you create separate identities for each party that you want to work with.

This worked fine, but it also took hours. As discussed in Part 1. all of the transactions have to be mashed up into this giant distributed transaction log and this process takes a long time. However, eventually it did appear in my Mt Gox account.

(I must say though, this is a little stressful as it disappears from your wallet immediately.)

Buying things

In Part 1. I touched on the issues around actually buying things. In the first instance, there is a lack of merchants out there that accept Bitcoins. (It would be nice if Amazon accepted Bitcoins, but they do not.)

I did want to buy something as part of this guide -- although this was tricky. Most of the small merchants don't peg Bitcoin prices to a proper currency. This results in companies that set their prices up on a Monday, but by Friday the market has moved so much the prices are so adrift from the underlying currency that the whole thing falls apart.

BitcoinStore is one of the more advanced merchants with systems that do peg prices to USD. So I bought a mousemat and shipped it to one of the ZDNet editors. (They wanted $50 to ship a $3 mousemat to the UK.)

BitcoinStore uses a system called BitPay to handle the Bitcoin payments. You can implement this on your own site if you like.

It works just like you'd expect. You're given an address to send money to. All you need to do is go to your wallet and send the money.

Checking out of BitcoinStore. All I have to do is ask my wallet to send Bitcoins to that address.

After a short while, the money transaction processes through. On this transaction log I took some Bitcoins out of my Mt Gox account into my wallet and sent it from there. Technically I didn't need to do this -- I could have sent the Bitcoins from Mt Gox directly to BitcoinStore through BitPay.

The transaction log in my wallet showing various transactions, including payment to BitcoinStore.

Conclusion

Once you get your head around it and set-up, working with Bitcoins is actually very easy.

Exchange bitcoins for cash

Not So Anonymous: Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Tightens Identity Requirement

Mt. Gox chief executive Mark Karpeles

Since the crypto-currency Bitcoin hit the limelight, many libertarians and privacy advocates have heralded it as anonymous, digital cash. But the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange–and the U.S. regulators breathing down its neck–see things differently.

On Thursday Mt. Gox announced that it would begin requiring “verification” for all accounts seeking to deposit or withdraw currencies other than Bitcoin, a measure that means users would need to submit government identification and a utility bill or information about the company they work for to trade Bitcoins for traditional money, in effect ending anonymous use of the service.

The Forbes E-book On Bitcoin Secret Money: Living on Bitcoin in the Real World . by Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill, can be bought in Bitcoin or legal tender.

“The Bitcoin market continues to evolve, as do regulations and conditions of compliance for Mt. Gox to continue bringing secure services to our customers,” reads a statement on Mt. Gox’s site. “It['s] our responsibility to provide a trusted and legal exchange, and that includes making sure that we are operating within strict anti-money laundering rules and preventing other malicious activity.”

The new restrictions from Mt. Gox–which controls well over half of all Bitcoin trades–comes on the heels of an online currency crackdown. An indictment unsealed earlier in the week against Liberty Reserve, another digital currency service, alleged that it engaged in $6 billion worth of money laundering through its anonymity-friendly payment system.

Bitcoin Trading Robot ➨ Way Better Than Mining/Harvesting Bitcoins

Mt. Gox itself has faced new legal problems, too. Earlier this month Mt. Gox’s American intermediary for trading dollars and Bitcoins known as Mutum Sigullum had its accounts seized by Homeland Security Investigations for failing to register as a money transmitter. That move cut off one of the main paths to buying Bitcoins with dollars through the American payment service Dwolla, rather than by using cumbersome bank transfers.

Bitcoin has attracted many users with its privacy properties: Although every Bitcoin transaction can be traced and verified in the payment records that the distributed currency system uses to prevent fraudulent transactions and forgery, Bitcoins can theoretically be used without a bank account or any online registration, potentially allowing total anonymity. That’s led to Bitcoin becoming the currency of choice for sites like Silk Road and Black Market Reloaded. online underground markets that sell drugs and other contraband.

Until now, Mt. Gox has tried to strike a careful balance between anonymity and money laundering laws, allowing anyone making trades under $1,000 to do so without a verified account and only demanding identification for larger trades. But when I spoke with the company’s Tokyo-based chief executive Mark Karpeles earlier this year, he emphasized that his first priority is to legitimize Bitcoin as a mature currency, not to preserve its anonymity. “If you try to enforce Bitcoin as an anonymous currency, it’s only going to bring more issues,” he said at the time. “I believe Bitcoin can be anonymous. But it’s too early to go this way. Government entities aren’t ready, and we’re working with banks that want everything to be done correctly.”

Even so, Bitcoin users have anonymity options: One service known as LocalBitcoins helps users find someone near them that will swap their Bitcoins for cash, or vice versa. Even if users continue to stick with Mt. Gox, they can always use a so-called “laundry service” like Bitlaundry, Bitmix or Bitcoinlaundry to mix their Bitcoins with those of other users and prevent their transactions from being traced. A project launched by John Hopkins University known as Zerocoin is also seeking to add new code to Bitcoin that would allow users to swap out a Bitcoin for an anonymous “Zerocoin token” and vice versa at any time, essentially integrating that laundry service into Bitcoin itself. That means a drug seller on a site like Silk Road could, for instance, collect Bitcoins from the site in exchange for drugs and then launder them before cashing them out from Mt. Gox under his or her real name.

The Bitcoin market doesn’t seem particularly troubled by Mt. Gox’s move, at least. After the exchange’s announcement, the currency’s value crept up $2.90 from earlier in the day, to $131.90. It seems Bitcoin users would rather sacrifice a bit of their anonymity than risk the biggest hub for their currency being shut down by the long arm of U.S. law enforcement.

What's a Bitcoin?

It's the state-of-the-art in money. It's a new form of electronic money . It's already become "the gold standard" of digital currency.

Ya know how email changed old-fashioned mail forever? Well, Bitcoin is changing money forever.

Based on some old technologies, and some new technologies. Bitcoin is the result of combining. the very state of the art in cryptographic security + the idea of a limited quantity commodity similar to gold and silver (where there's only so much of it) and using it as money + the idea of massive numbers of computers connected by the internet. forming a strong, resilient, indestructible peer-to-peer network. It's called a cryptocurrency.

Since the invention of Bitcoin. Money will never be the same.

Why would I use Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is the world's first completely decentralized currency . This means it has no issuing entity . therefore, no single point of failure . In many ways Bitcoin is more secure than your bank. If your bank were to fail, your money could be gone forever. The Bitcoin network is made up of millions of computers all over the world, connected via the internet. The entire Internet would have to go away, in order for the Bitcoin network to fail.

As easy as sending an email . Just one click. Bitcoin payments are sent with one click - just like email. And transactions are always as free and as fast as email.

Zero transaction fees . In the United States, merchants pay 45 billion dollars per year in credit card transaction fees. And for what? So that the transactions can be reversed as "chargebacks" up to six months later? That doesn't seem fair at all. Bitcoin transactions are free. Whereas credit cards and other online payment systems typically cost 3-5% or more per transaction, plus various other exorbitant fees. Bitcoin usage and transactions are always free. It doesn't matter if you send $0.01. or $1,000,000.00. the transaction cost is always the same: free *

No such thing as a chargeback . Payments are irreversable. No matter whether you accept Bitcoin payments for your business or otherwise, payments can not be reversed. There's no such thing as a "chargeback". No way to get a "bounced check". No "reversed transactions". Not with Bitcoin. Payments can only be "refunded" if and when the recipient, voluntarily, as a separate new transaction, decides to send the money back. This protects merchants from fraud. Credit cards and PayPal can, and often do, reverse transactions up to six months later.

As anonymous as you want it to be . Just like with cash, transactions can be totally anonymous. Transactions are only identified by your Bitcoin address, and you can have as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You create another new Bitcoin address with one click any time you want to. Bitcoin transactions can be made to be: anonymous ***

Financial privacy . Gone are the days of "Identity theft". In the old days, credit cards required merchants to have proof positive of your identity in order to shop there. Because a Bitcoin address can only be used to receive money, and it cannot be used to extract money. with Bitcoin, the merchant only needs to know two things: Did you pay? and, Where do you want your stuff sent to? Isn't that the way it should be? Does your banker really need to know what you buy online?

Your account cannot be frozen . No one can freeze your account and keep your money. (as long as you keep control of your bitcoins yourself and don't keep your bitcoins in an online bank or wallet service. See the Security tab for recommendations)

No big brother . Third parties can’t prevent or control your transactions. Transfer money easily through the internet, without having to trust middlemen; no central bank, nor central authority.

No censorship of who you're allowed to send money to . No more blocking who you can make payments or donations to. just because someone doesn't agree.

It's not a bank. It's not a paypal . What may be the best feature of all? "Bye bye, PayPal." "Bye bye, Bank."

More secure than online banking existing in the world today. Traditional banks use encryption when you log on to your online banking. The cryptography technology used in Bitcoin is even more secure. In other words, if it were to ever become possible to hack in to it. Then ALL the world's banking would be compromised. With today's known technology, experts all agree. It is absolutely un-hackable and un-breakable: secure Ŧ

Bitcoin is transparent and verified . Bitcoin is a free open source software (FOSS) project, which means it has total transparency. Millions of programmers all over the world see every bit of the program's source code. They constantly monitor it, study it, and report on it. to verify that there are no flaws or irregularities.

Send payments to anyone worldwide . Bitcoin has no artificial national boudaries or limitations on where money can be sent, or on how much, or how little, can be sent. You can now use Bitcoin to shop online for millions of items, or make a donation to a charity or organization, and you can even make purchases at physical stores. shops, and restaurants that now accept Bitcoin. using a free app or any device with a web browser.

No central bank . No privately-owned Federal Reserve central bank can print more money for themselves. not Bitcoin anyway. The value of each Bitcoin does not go down when the privately owned corporation known as "The Fed" decides to print more dollars. In fact, it might even go up in value. as it triggers more people to seek out alternatives to storing their money in the world's fiat currencies.

There will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins . The number of Bitcoins is limited by the design of the network. This number can never be increased. Also.

Bitcoins are virtually infinitely divisible . Currently, Bitcoins are divisible up to 8 decimal places. For example, you can send someone 0.00000001 of a Bitcoin. In the future, as the value of Bitcoin goes up, you might be sending your favorite coffee shop 0.00000003 Bitcoin for that cafe latte. Also, in the future, Bitcoin could become even more divisible, if needed. as the value of one Bitcoin becomes larger and larger.

How much is a Bitcoin worth?

The value of a Bitcoin (as measured in US Dollars or any other currency) is determined by the automated online markets. These markets operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. They match buyers and their "bid prices". with sellers and their "asking prices". automatically.

Normally, what we call the "value of a Bitcoin" is simply the last amount a Bitcoin sold for on one of the major markets (or an average of several).

See the Value tab for links to web sites that give real-time value information.