While some of you may have been doing it for quite a while, to others this could possibly their first time hearing about Bitcoin.
Put it in simple terms – Bitcoin is a digital currency, Bitcoin mining is where people use processing power to generate the coins in the currency.
Whether you’ve just heard about it or even thought of doing it – here’s my thought on BitCoin mining.
If you’re thinking of making a side income from it – NO, you won’t.
Cost vs Profit
If you’re looking for consumer-ready mining equipment – the best out there are the AMD graphic cards, their GPU comes with a whole lot of stream processor to do the job. They produce quite good hashrate (the term to indicate amount of work done per second), nVidia GPU based graphic cards and processors from Intel and AMD are of no match.
Even so, graphic cards aren’t cheap. An RM 500 GPU like the HD 7790 produces about a little short of 300 Mhash/s after overclocked. That’s about 85w – 100w for 300 Mhash. Now let’s go into some mathematics.
1 BitCoin (we’ll call it BTC) is valued at 108 USD at the time of this article (reference http://preev.com/), that’s approximately RM 344.
Wow, wouldn’t it be nice to have 10 coins per month? Yes it would but at 300 Mhash/s you won’t even get 1 coin a month. You’ll get about 1 coins in 2 – 3 months perhaps. Not exactly profitable considering the cost of a HD 7790 is already at RM 500, and we haven’t consider your electricity bill.
Perhaps you’re thinking to go for 3,000 Mhash so you’ll get 10 coins in 2 – 3 months. That’s RM 3,440 per quarter. Would that be alright? Think again, 10x RM 500 graphic card, not counting the amount of computer you need to setup to host the amount of graphic cards.
If you already have an existing setup, perhaps you can consider using your GPU for side income but to setup everything from scratch – I’d say you’re better off spending money elsewhere. Perhaps do a buy / sell of the coins instead.
ASIC Miners
What are ASIC miners? ASIC miners are machines that produces tremendous hashrate at far less computing power. At the time of this article, ASIC Miners are being delivered across the world. http://imgur.com/a/fqpME
A low-cost miner from Butterfly Labs costs only RM 750 and produces 5,000 Mhash! It’s way more cost effective but it’ll take months before you’ll get a hand on it. I’m not sure if Butterfly has delivered any but from what I saw so far, it’s been delayed a lot.
Avalon offers a 65,000 Mhash miner at 72 BTC (that’s around 7200 USD mind you).
Final Words
Yay or Nay to Bitcoins for Malaysian? I’d say Nay ….. unless you already have a GPU that can do a bit of mining.
If you really want to mine, maybe you can look into LiteCoins – just bear in mind that there’s no guarantee that you’ll cover your cost. I’ve have some friends that made quite some money out of this coin thingy but there’s quite some cost involved.
For more in-depth view of this whole MINING thingy – Have a read at this article from Tom’s Hardware.
Wiki on BitCoin – Click Here
great article, but the reality is that the amount of coins you can mine is a function of your ‘relative’ processing power as compared to the cumulative processing powers of all other nodes in the system.
So at any time if someone discovers a more efficient and effective way of performing these hashes, the system automatically adjusts the difficulty of finding the hash–and at that point any system you purchased to perform the mining would have it’s value severely drop.
I didn’t go into that detail but yes, that’s correct. that 1 coin every 2 – 3 month on 300mhash is based on current difficulty.
Last year, 300mhash could generate probably 2 – 3 coins every month! A few more months down the road, and with the ASIC miners already in placed, difficulty settings will increase and 300mhash could probably get only 1 coin every 4 – 6 months.
In short – it’s getting less lucrative by the day.
2 years ago, mining is a good thing to do
now, if you have extra, uh well, i dont know how you end up with extra graphic card.
and living in university hostel, why not to bitcoin mining with “free electricity”?
Honestly, for me, if i had extra graphic card, i would sell them as mining in Malaysia, i seriously dont know how to withdraw the coin into MYR.
Even a year ago it was alright but if the graphic card isn’t powerful enough, it’s quite a waste of time.
There are other mining options.
Free electricity you can have if you add some renewable energy sources.