What is this Bitcoin business?

[SkyLinx]

Do you guys own bitcoins / do "mining" and that kind of stuff? Can someone ELI5 how it works and how to get started?

[Eduard the weeb]

you can buy it similar to stock or mine it I believe also someone should move this to the Mining, and folding section 

[SkyLinx]

Oh sorry I haven't noticed there's a section dedicated to the topic. My bad

[knightslugger]

You can buy it like any traded commodity, or you can support the network by verifying transactions (mining). There are a lot of different kinds of coin out there just like there are different kinds of currencies around the world used by every country and they are traded in similar fashion (through an exchange).

 

Anyone can mine cryptocurrency if they have a GPU capable of doing so, and some GPUs work better at working one algorithm than another. If you have a single modern GPU, you could mine alongside a pool of other miners and get paid. how you get paid depends on the pool's rules. Some payout bitcoin, others payout whatever it is you are supporting (Etherium, Litecoin, Zen, etc). However understand that doing so is basically using your GPU at 100% the entire time and your GPU cannot be used for any other purpose durring that time, so if you wanted to mine a crypto AND game at the same time, you'll need two separate cards and you must configure the software to only use one of the two cards. some software makes it easy to accomplish this, but on the whole it takes a little bit of know how to accomplish.

 

General consensus is that for single GPU mining, with today's highest power GPUs is hardly worth the effort and inconvenience it brings. You either don't do it at all, or shove $5000-6000 into a dedicated build. anything in between is generally a burden.