BitCoins, FeatherCoins, LiteCoins

[silverzx]

Firstly you might be thinking "WTF is he on about". Basically I'm reading into virtual currencies, it's all very interesting especially if you have a slight interest in technology.

I'm going to start "mining" some cryptocurrencies whilst my PC's running, I have a decent rig and GPU mining seems to be the second best affordable option after buying an independant mining rig.

I'm at work and need to store some addresses for my own reference to look at when I get home, so either way feel free to look or not look.. Discuss or don't..

My References:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9430.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15918.0
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getting_started
http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to...on-windows
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet


PC Spec:

GPU: XFX Core Edition Radeon HD 7850 AMD Graphics Card - 2GB
CPU: Intel i5 2500K @ Stock (4.5GHz OC was unstable)
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Non-ECC, CAS 9-9-9-24, 1.5V
MOBO: ASUS P8Z68-V LX Z68
HDD: 2TB Samsung HDD, 128GB OCZ Sata III
PSU: Tagan 530W EasyCon
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

[Midnightclub]

In my experience.. don't bother with Bitcoin mining unless you've got an ASIC, that ship has long set sail.. LiteCoin mining however is still a decent second option..

Still kicking myself for not investing when i first found out about bitcoin.. I'd be a literal millionaire

[4WayDiablo]

I dont get it? Someone uses your processing power and they give you some internet currencies?

[silverzx]

In my experience.. don't bother with Bitcoin mining unless you've got an ASIC, that ship has long set sail.. LiteCoin mining however is still a decent second option..

Still kicking myself for not investing when i first found out about bitcoin.. I'd be a literal millionaire

My friend at uni bought two coins for $9 each 3 years ago and advised I did the same, I ignored his advice - lucky sod!!!

I dont get it? Someone uses your processing power and they give you some internet currencies?

Kind of yes, it's a virtual peer to peer currency, ungoverened by any country or goverment.

4Way, if you want to understand it the best thing to do is read for a couple of hours. Even if its just the wiki. It'll make a lot more sense. If your not interested in technology then even the basic concept of cryptography could confuse or bewilder you.

[Midnightclub]

Mate, they were less than £3 each when I first found out about them! Actually gutted.. lost 50% of my BitCoins in a PC move :/ and all my LiteCoins..

Yeah, exactly.. it's not something that can be explained easily

[silverzx]

Mate, they were less than £3 each when I first found out about them! Actually gutted.. lost 50% of my BitCoins in a PC move :/ and all my LiteCoins..

Yeah, exactly.. it's not something that can be explained easily

That sucks dude. You've pushed up the price by remvoing them from circulation!

The only thing I'm confused about atm is where to setup/register my initial Wallet, but I haven't isntalled anything yet as I'm on the work PC so I think it might register my wallet when I install a client?

Edit:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet

Making a new wallet

If a wallet or an encrypted wallet's password has been compromised, it is wise to create a new wallet and transfer the full balance of bitcoins to addresses contained only in the newly created wallet. Examples of ways a wallet may be compromised are through password re-use, minimal strength passwords, computer hack or virus attack.

There are a number of ways to create a new wallet with Bitcoin-QT or bitcoind but this is a process that has been tested with bitcoind 0.6.3. We use the copy command to minimize the chance of any data loss but you are warned to make backups of any wallet.dat that holds a balance for you.

1. Shut down the Bitcoin program.
2. Find and make a backup of the "compromised" wallet.dat file and rename it, perhaps adding a short description:
wallet.dat -> wallet-compromised.dat
Depending on your OS, the wallet file will be located at:
Windows: %APPDATA%\Bitcoin\
Linux: ~/.bitcoin/
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/
3. Start the Bitcoin program and it will create a new wallet.dat. You may then encrypt the wallet as desired and make a new backup.
4. Once you've made a new wallet, you can obtain one or more addresses and copy them into a text editor. After obtaining the new address(es), shut down the Bitcoin program, make a backup of the new wallet.dat file and copy it to a new file named wallet-new.dat.
5. Copy the wallet-compromised.dat file back to wallet.dat, start the Bitcoin program and transfer your balance to the new address(es) you put in your text editor. Once the balance is back to 0 for your compromised wallet, you may want to wait a couple minutes or for a confirmation or check block explorer to be sure the transactions have been broadcasted. Then you may shut down the Bitcoin program.
6. Rename wallet.dat to wallet-compromised.dat.
7. Rename wallet-new.dat to wallet.dat.
You should now have a new wallet with all the bitcoins from the old wallet.

[Midnightclub]

Managed to recover some today.. and may be able to recover the rest from my formatted HDD (fingers crossed!)

You don't, when you install the program you get an initial BitCoin or litecoin etc.. address.. that address is then your wallet.. I HIGHLY recommend reading up about paper wallets before doing anything though. You can then create more addresses for different things etc.. kinda like a paypal address..

[silverzx]

Paper wallets. Ok thanks for heads up.

[Scott]

The ship definitely seems to have set sail for bit coin mining, unless you already have a decent rig (from what I've read) it's just not cost effective to get into it. It's very volatile though, when Mt. GOX went down a couple of months back the change in price and losses were staggering.

[silverzx]

I'm not in it for the money, just for fun. I find the whole concept quite fascinating.

[Midnightclub]

It's a fascinating concept indeed.. although BitCoin was never really a 'fair' currency. People who started out with it got literally millions of coins and every now and again flood the market, the price will plumet and they make f*ck tonnes..

The algorithm used for LiteCoin is much fairer and you'll get more of a return

[silverzx]

It's a fascinating concept indeed.. although BitCoin was never really a 'fair' currency. People who started out with it got literally millions of coins and every now and again flood the market, the price will plumet and they make f*ck tonnes..

The algorithm used for LiteCoin is much fairer and you'll get more of a return

Exactly this.

I'll certainly be looking into mining an ALT coin such as Lite.

[Midnightclub]

Lite is what i'm going for.. f*ck feather, ru, tr etc etc etc.. they're not too bad atm too at just under $7 per coin

[silverzx]

Lite is what i'm going for.. f*ck feather, ru, tr etc etc etc.. they're not too bad atm too at just under $7 per coin

Hook a brother up. I'm pressuming you use a GUI Windows based miner?

[Midnightclub]

Yeah, i used GUI miner.. I didn't have much luck with a few others i tried.. that one seems best and easy to add flags etc.. for your GPU..

Also, when starting out.. keep the aggression setting low'ish if you even remotely want to use the PC whilst it's mining

[Ruan]

Just for the record, we were looking at this at work, since we often have access to entire TOP500 Supercomputers, so would be a good way to do some burnin testing whilst making some money, at least maybe to cover power costs...

Supposedly a 4 socket Opteron 6174 does 115MHashes/sec, make that say 120MHashes/s for the...

One node running flat out all day would generate $0.06....

The entire Supercomputer running - $13 per day...

This machine let's not forget is about 840 Watt per node... That's (190KW basically...) So at 16p per kWh that costs £30.40 per hour to run, that's £729.60 per DAY to run...

That's how shit the workload of Bitcoin is - it's just insane... As said earlier, unless you're running ASIC, don't even bother, not worth the time or the effort.

[zx_volcane]

You're in the butter zone now baby!

[Eeyore]

I have read about this and have seen all about bitcoin in the news. I have no intention whatsoever to get involved with it.

[silverzx]

Makes sense Ruan.

However, if you don't pay "extra" for your power usage e.g. pay a fixed rent regardless of utility costs then thats not really an issue as your not anymore out of pocked from having a rig running.

Like I said, I'm just interested in doing it a bit for fun, not for profit.

[fuziduck]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south...s-25134289

Ooops!

[Midnightclub]

Was waiting for someone to post that.. talk about a 'FML' moment

[silverzx]

Mmmm, LiteCoins have more then quadroupled in the last four days!

[r3k1355]

It's historically very volitie and you know full well the price is being pumped up by cyber crims and/or unscrupulous types.

There's absolutely no control in the market, so people can use every little financial trick in the book to manipulate the market for their own ends.

I think the price will come crashing down when the US decide what they want to do about it all.
Still if you can mine a few coins in the mean time and make abit before it all falls apart then get on with it.

Whats it like mining other coins, is it as hard as bitcoin or can you still generate a decent number of coins?

[silverzx]

BitCoins are virtually impossible to mine, LiteCoins and ALT-Coins still rely on Scrypt rather then SHA256 so GPU's are the most used method therefore is still very competitive.

[lolsteve]

Awh tried setting up litecoins the other day and gave up because I couldn't get it sorted with my gpu
wish I'd bothered

[Dean]

Price of the coins has went up to £825 per coin.. f*cking hell.

[Eeyore]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south...s-25134289

Ooops!

shiiiiitttt

[r3k1355]

Price of the coins has went up to £825 per coin.. f*cking hell.

The price is being pushed up and up by speculators (dirty financial types)

because there is Zero regulation and more importantly zero laws governing bitcoins they can do pretty much whatever they want and not get in any trouble for it.

So people are doing their best to manipulate the market and make a quick buck - someone's going to be left carrying the can in the end tho.