Bitcoin Q & A - Ask Me Anything

[Terminashunator]

Okay. I tried getting my 660ti and my 7770 to get along, but they're fighting eachother

 

Gaming, the GTX 660ti is the main. That's what i want.

The 7770 is running full time LTC farming. This is what i want.

 

MSI afterburner only can control the 660ti, the 7770 shows "0" for all the meters.

I get the "MOM" error on startup. Catalyst refuses to run. How can i get both cards to work. I know OP managed to get a 780 + 7850 to work.

 

TL;DR my 7770's fan is relaly loud and i want to change the fan profile, but MSI won't work right.

[RuecanOnRails]

 

TL;DR my 7770's fan is relaly loud and i want to change the fan profile, but MSI won't work right.

 

Add --auto-fan to your batch file to enable CGminer defined fan curves. If you go through the 3 readmes in the cgminer folder you can find many other settings for thermal controls with auto clock settings.

[Constantine]

What's with miners going for Radeon cards? Is it just the Nvidia architecture not giving much yield? Can someone explain what makes the Radeon cards so good at mining?

[RuecanOnRails]

What's with miners going for Radeon cards? Is it just the Nvidia architecture not giving much yield? Can someone explain what makes the Radeon cards so good at mining?

 

Nvidia make poor mining cards. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvidia-bitcoin-mining

 

Taken from the comments,

DiabloMiner author here. Nvidia keeps claiming they produce a product for GPGPU compute, yet they keep failing on integer performance. Bitcoin is not the only use of integers out there, and its not even limited to crypto research either.There is zero reason for Nvidia to have made this fundamental mistake generation after generation. This is why I don't support their product, its too slow to be useful and Nvidia doesn't seem to care. I repeatedly tried to reach out to that company, and I never got a response.

Another chunk from one of his other comments

Yes, integer instruction rates in Nvidia are horrendous, they seem be as slow or slower than double precision math, but on Radeons I can issue a single cycle integer up every clock cycle on every ALU (VLIW5 has 4 + limited 5th, VLIW4 has 4, GCN has 4 quad width SIMD ALUs plus 4 single width ALUs (and the driver/hardware manages ALU usage across multiple work items to maintain optimal instruction level parallelization).What also gives Radeons the leg up is they can do certain things SHA256 requires that would normally take 2-3 cycles in a single cycle, such as bitselect takes a single cycle as does rotate, Nvidia seems to be slower at these than simple integer ops (add, xor, etc).Nvidia needs to focus on code like this: https://github.com/Diablo-D3/D...If Nvidia was serious about Bitcoin mining, they'd make ZR25, ZR16, ZR26, ZR30, ZMa, and ZCh single cycle instructions, and they'd also make integers as fast as single precision ops instead of as slow as double precision ops.

[ANUPLUCIFERGAMER]

Which is better to mine? LTC or BTC? Or anyother coins?

[crazydog2580]

Very random question.. How much internet usage is required?

Is constant connectivity needed or just every now and then?

[Mentalguy]

Which is better to mine? LTC or BTC? Or anyother coins?

worldcoin is a good one

[DoubleY]

Very random question.. How much internet usage is required?

 

Is constant connectivity needed or just every now and then?

Constant internet access. But, it doesn't have to be fast internet. 

[SAV1OUR]

where did they come from? i have heard allot of ideas but i cant tell  

[danthaman1]

Just curious. would using Crossfired ATI HD6870s be viable to do mining?

[MariusJS]

Yes, but crossfire is not used, when mining

[ciprian97pop]

I have the hd 5670 from my sig and I can get another gt 240 in my motherboard

would it be feasable to mine bitcoins?

how much dollars could I make per day?

[NInety]

I have the hd 5670 from my sig and I can get another gt 240 in my motherboard

would it be feasable to mine bitcoins?

how much dollars could I make per day?

Mine litecoin or dogecoin.

[NInety]

How much money would I make with a 270X at the price of $24 per LTC? Disregarding power cost.

[RuecanOnRails]

How much money would I make with a 270X at the price of $24 per LTC? Disregarding power cost.

 

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator

You can estimate out the difficulty increment % by averaging previous difficulty adjustments. Last 15 adjustments average to 6.9% increase. Current and historical difficulty and network analysis can be found here http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty

 

If you have no idea what your cards can potentially mine at, look up the average hashrate people have reported to get.

https://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison

[ciprian97pop]

Mine litecoin or dogecoin.

I was trolling

[Ciccioo]

i have a couple questions

the things that are not explained in the holy sticky here are:

 

- where does the value come from? i am a total monkey when it comes to economy, but as far as i'm concerned to know, when i keep cash in my hands, i am only holding something that represents the value which sits in a bank, under form of gold or something. i think that who invented bitcoins couldn't just come out and say "hey look, i invented 21 million things and they're worth a bagillion dollars". so where does their value come from?

 

- what do they pay me for? for hashing stuff that is used for transactions? so, they pay me to make it possible for other people to be paid after having made it possible for someone else to get paid after...? payception

so, basically there is the biggest supercomputer which happens to be a worldwide network of 7850s and 290s with a scary amount of computational power, and nobody is using it in any productive way? it's just there to make money flow? i would feel offended if they wasted my gpu cycles like that

except NSA and NWO, who is using our gpus? what are they using it for? folding, for instance, is a smart thing to do. but mining? i'm confused

[Beefmaster]

How long would it take for me to mine a bitcoin/lite coin on a r9 290x overclocked the sh@T Unit959out of watercooled like could I just go to sleep and come back and my computer has made me 6 grand my house is off the grid with power and I am generating a lot extra so power bills are not the problem because if my gaming of can turn into a printing press that would be legendary

[beefalo]

i have a couple questions

the things that are not explained in the holy sticky here are:

 

- where does the value come from? i am a total monkey when it comes to economy, but as far as i'm concerned to know, when i keep cash in my hands, i am only holding something that represents the value which sits in a bank, under form of gold or something. i think that who invented bitcoins couldn't just come out and say "hey look, i invented 21 million things and they're worth a bagillion dollars". so where does their value come from?

 

- what do they pay me for? for hashing stuff that is used for transactions? so, they pay me to make it possible for other people to be paid after having made it possible for someone else to get paid after...? payception

so, basically there is the biggest supercomputer which happens to be a worldwide network of 7850s and 290s with a scary amount of computational power, and nobody is using it in any productive way? it's just there to make money flow? i would feel offended if they wasted my gpu cycles like that

except NSA and NWO, who is using our gpus? what are they using it for? folding, for instance, is a smart thing to do. but mining? i'm confused

The value of bitcoin comes from the same place the value of USD/Euro/GBP or any other fiat currency.  They are not backed by anything but the confidence that they have a value and can be used for purchases.  Bitcoin's value is determined by scarcity and trade volume.  It is probably more comparable to a stock  or commodity than it is to a currency in the patterns of it's value. 

 

What you're doing while mining is confirming transactions that are happening in the network.  Each time a trade is made transaction blocks need to be solved to confirm the transaction and permanently record it in the bitcoin (or whatever coin) network.  Everyone mining acts as the network infrastructure and keeps the flow of coin transactions going.

[Ciccioo]

The value of bitcoin comes from the same place the value of USD/Euro/GBP or any other fiat currency.  They are not backed by anything but the confidence that they have a value and can be used for purchases.  Bitcoin's value is determined by scarcity and trade volume.  It is probably more comparable to a stock  or commodity than it is to a currency in the patterns of it's value. 

 

What you're doing while mining is confirming transactions that are happening in the network.  Each time a trade is made transaction blocks need to be solved to confirm the transaction and permanently record it in the bitcoin (or whatever coin) network.  Everyone mining acts as the network infrastructure and keeps the flow of coin transactions going.

i did some more research and i found out that the gold model was used some time ago, i had ancient informations. well i'm scared now, i don't like this new way of determining the value of a currency, but i guess it somehow validates cryptocurrencies' way of creating value out of nowhere

 

i'm still not sure about the second part of your answer though, because if mining were just to validate transactions, it would mean that transactions could take very very long, and the amount of stuff that the network has to do could vary with the amount of transactions going on. plus, NCIX conveniently published a video with linus in which he classifies "mining" and "validating transactions" as distinct processes

 

and thanks for the answer, i had lost hope in any explaination after a couple days i posted

[beefalo]

NCIX conveniently published a video with linus in which he classifies "mining" and "validating transactions" as distinct processes

You're right about that.  Mining adds a record of each transaction to the total "block chain" of the network.  This allows transactions to be confirmed but isn't the process of actually confirming transactions.  Also thinking of bitcoin as a commodity rather than a currency is more in line with it's design.  It is more similar to gold than currency because of how it is created.  Mining is called so because a certain amount of work needs to be done to create new coins similar to how mining actual gold slowly makes more available to the market.

[Analog]

So I'll be getting a R9 280X just for mining, the rest of the rig is already assembled (8GB RAM, i7 4770K and Maximum VI Impact). However I don't know the first thing about mining. I have seen a few tutorials and I have downloaded Cgminer, AMD-APP-SDK and made a registration at https://www.coinotron.com/coinotron/AccountServlet?action=register. Do you have any other nice tutorials or something which can help me make it work, because there is so much information available that I don't know whom to trust. Also if you have any suggestions in regard to better software for mining, please share. Any other tips and suggestions are welcome as well.  

 

PS: I want to join a pool, preferably a free one (if it is possible).  

[yoshimitsu666]

Is anyone still actually making money at this, specifically litecoins?

I am very tempted to try it out, and thought I would maybe use it as an excuse for a GPU upgrade. I am currently running two NVidia 650ti boosts in SLI and had planned on picking up two of the 6gb 780ti's when they arrive but this bit/litecoin has made me contemplate AMD's cards.

I could sell my 650's for $150-200 and pick up two used 7970's for $600. This means an investment of $400. At the current difficulty in Litecoin and using an average rate of 700kh/s per card and free elec I would only be making a maximum of $83 per month.

This isn't exactly going to set the world on fire, only breaking even after 5 months. This is also not taking into account the increase in difficulty of obtaining the coins.

Am I missing something? Do you take inflation into account or does this not apply to cryptocurrency?

[Judahnator]

So I'll be getting a R9 280X just for mining, the rest of the rig is already assembled (8GB RAM, i7 4770K and Maximum VI Impact). However I don't know the first thing about mining. I have seen a few tutorials and I have downloaded Cgminer, AMD-APP-SDK and made a registration at https://www.coinotron.com/coinotron/AccountServlet?action=register. Do you have any other nice tutorials or something which can help me make it work, because there is so much information available that I don't know whom to trust. Also if you have any suggestions in regard to better software for mining, please share. Any other tips and suggestions are welcome as well.  

 

PS: I want to join a pool, preferably a free one (if it is possible).  

 

BitCoin Mining is no longer profitable. Better stick with F@H or something like that.

[Judahnator]

Is anyone still actually making money at this, specifically litecoins?

I am very tempted to try it out, and thought I would maybe use it as an excuse for a GPU upgrade. I am currently running two NVidia 650ti boosts in SLI and had planned on picking up two of the 6gb 780ti's when they arrive but this bit/litecoin has made me contemplate AMD's cards.

I could sell my 650's for $150-200 and pick up two used 7970's for $600. This means an investment of $400. At the current difficulty in Litecoin and using an average rate of 700kh/s per card and free elec I would only be making a maximum of $83 per month.

This isn't exactly going to set the world on fire, only breaking even after 5 months. This is also not taking into account the increase in difficulty of obtaining the coins.

Am I missing something? Do you take inflation into account or does this not apply to cryptocurrency?

 

Dont do it, you will just lose money. It is just barely profitable to mine LTC, but you will not see a ROI.