In b4 “You wont make a profit”… i know, i want to use my computer to heat my apartment. i figure that even if i’m making a “loss” each month on the mining it’s still cheaper than running my apartments electric heaters when you account for the sold (or not) bitcoin.
I’ve been doing well keeping things warm by Folding at home on the CPU but apparently AMD GPUs aren’t supported for that and i want to put my GPU to work too.
I briefly mined some litecoin in like 2013/14 when BTC was just about popping off. other than that i have no mining experience (and i would have been using windows back then)
Need to sort something soon, Jan and Feb are probs the coldest months in the UK and i have gotten this far this year without using the heaters
As others said, you probably want to mine something like Monero instead of Bitcoin, since you literally won’t even make a penny (even if you had free electricity) mining BTC.
Gupax (https://gupax.io/) is quite good for this, it makes it as simple as one-click run
Not to hijack this post, but since there are knowledgeable folks participating, could someone point to either an article or a video that explains the various crypto currencies, how they work, what role the mining functions, and explains them in language that most people can understand?
Thank you if anyone has a reference to provide. :-)
P.S. I’m aware Google exists, but I’d like one that’s at least vetted by someone knowledgeable. Between search manipulations and AI, I’ve found searching to be very iffy as it is in terms of finding good authoritative results.
Not aware of any, but I’ll do my best on my own.
Let’s abstract money to its bare minimum, in the most basic form money is an abstract fungible (i.e. 1 of it is the same as another one, they’re interchangeable) token that can be sent or received, and the most basic way to keep track of this is with a ledger. A ledger is in its most basic form a lot of entries saying stuff like “Alice earned 5 coins” and “Alice paid Bob 3 coins”, by looking at these 2 (and assuming they’re the only ones in our ledger) we know that Alice now has 2 coins and Bob 3. Therefore if now Alice tries to send 3 coins to someone else we know this is invalid because she doesn’t have that amount of coins.
Ok, so that’s the basic of what money is, but as a general rule the ledgers for most coins are centralized, e.g. your bank has that ledger for your account. For years people tried to have a way to create a decentralized ledger, so anyone could have a copy of the ledger and validate it on their own, that way this currency on that ledger could not be controlled by anyone. There are two big problems with that, first you need a way to ensure that only the owner of an account can give away those coins, and secondly we need a way to ensure no one cheats the system, for instance in the example above if Alice could remove her previous transaction from the ledger and input a new one she could convince Bob she paid him, but actually send the money to someone else.
Problem 1, ownership. This is a slightly difficult answer, so I’ll not explain this fully, if you’re interested read about public and private keys. Essentially in cryptography there’s a way to sign a message in a way that you can verify who signed it without being able to reproduce the signature, in practice this means each account/wallet has 2 numbers, one is the private one used to sign messages (anyone who knows this number can spend the coins) and the other is a public number used to verify who coins are sent to and that the spending of coins was properly signed. This has been a solved problem for decades and it’s a very secure and acceptable solution, we use it on things like ssh, SSL and the likes.
Problem 2, consensus. This is the hardest problem to solve, and this is the brilliance of Bitcoin. The way Bitcoin solved this issue is: A block is several entries in the ledger; The entries can be arranged in multiple ways, each way yielding a different hash for that block; Each block has a reference to the hash of the block that came before; Only certain hashes are acceptable (e.g. hashes that end with 0, or with 00), and this hash cannot be predicted, so it needs to be brute forced; Whoever creates a block can insert a transaction giving themselves some amount of coins. Phew, that’s a lot, but what does it all mean? It means that everyone sees every transaction in the network and try to build a block that will be accepted, the first person who does shows their block to the world, and everyone tries to find the next block after that. For Bitcoin the largest chain is the valid one, so if someone found a block it’s in your best interest to start to try to find the next one, it’s also in your best interest to show the world your block as soon as possible so others will build on top of it, the more blocks on top of yours the more unlikely it is that someone will be able to overwrite it (they would need to find more blocks that what has been built on top of yours, and even finding one block is hard because of the specific hash that needs to be generated). The difficulty (i.e. rules for which hashes are acceptable) are adjusted in order to make sure that on average one block is found every 10 minutes by the entire amount of people trying to find blocks.
All together now: Currently Alice has 10 coins, she uses her private key to sign a transaction giving Bob 6 coins. This transaction gets picked by several miners. One of them finds the next block and includes this transaction there. Now all miners are trying to find the next block from that one, and when they do this transaction will have been validated by 2 blocks so it’s way more likely to keep being validated. After 6 blocks it would take the entire mining network 1 hour to undo that block, and unless 51% of the random strangers mining Bitcoin decide to cooperate, the rest of the miners will keep adding blocks on top making this transaction impossible to be reverted. If after that Alice now tries to spend 5 coins no miner will include that transaction, because it would create an invalid block that other miners would just ignore.
There’s a bit more to Blockchains, for example each transaction also pays some amount to the miners as an incentive, so you can have a transaction be more priority than another by paying more to the miners.
What about other coins? There are lots of them out there, I’ll only mention one, Ethereum. Ethereum takes this concept to the next level, instead of a ledger storing transaction it stores programs, so one can have a program that if you pay it X coins it gives you Y other tokens, or any other number of complicated stuff. Also recently Ethereum changed from the proof of work (i.e. finding the hash) to proof of stake, in which people pay some amount of coins to be allowed to validate transactions, but if they generate an invalid transaction they lose those coins.
I strongly recommend you read the Bitcoin white paper, it’s not as difficult as you would think, and it will go into a lot more details on how things work.
I found this article (and related site) from a quick search: https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/what-is-a-cryptocurrency
Binance has a vested interest in providing accurate information, they are a major exchange. The information seemed easy to understand and correct at a first glance, they also link to supporting articles.
Other references:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency (among other more specific pages)
- https://jacobwsmith.xyz/stories/cryptocurrency.html (thanks wiby)
- https://dither8.xyz/blog/crypto-opinions/ (thanks again wiby)
Mine ravencoin instead.
Head over to moneroocean.stream or unminable.com and mine whatever GPU coin has the highest return.
Avoid nicehash, they used to be popular but recently started nickle and dining fees for all kinds of stupid reasons.
Thanks
Bitcoin is basically only mined via ASICs now. You can still mine something like ETC but honestly chains have (rightfully) been moving to far more efficient consensus using Proof of Stake.
For the amount of electricity you would need to mine a meaningful amount of BTC, you’d be much better off buying spending $50 or $100 worth of BTC or ETH every week. Either hodl or DCA sell when prices bounce up.
if you can get a heat pump (maybe a window unit) it’ll get >100% efficiency bc of heat pump magic
I’m one floor up above a shop in a busy town in the UK. i’m not allowed to attach anything to the outside of the property without (expensive) permission from the freeholder of the building.
that’s unfortunate :(
🤷♂️ it is what it is. I also don’t get gas so electric heating is my only option
Or maybe don’t participate in bitcoin.
care to elaborate?
That’s like compiling a list of all of the hacks that happen on the internet and jump to the conclusion that the internet is bad because of it.
Some of those are just people falling for old scams/phishing that could have happened anywhere and are not a Cryptocurrency problem. Pyramid schemes are much older than Cryptocurrencies, people falling for it there would fall for it elsewhere.
Crypto Cult Science
“Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin’s shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won’t change the world for the better.” —https://www.arscyni.cc/file/crypto_cult_science.html
Aren’t you still running at a loss, when you count in the wear on the GPU? Anyway, can’t help with mining, but if you want to use your GPU for some heat, you can try joining AI Horde and let others generate images using your GPU. You won’t make any profit though (except for virtual credits that can in turn be used for generating images yourself).
My understanding is that mining it’s self doesnt actually wear out the GPU, thermal cycles do.
That doesn’t sound right, I’d say both isn’t very good, especially because the common desktop GPUs weren’t really created with 24/7 usage in mind. Anyway, GPUs do get hot during mining, so thermal cycles will happen too.
Anyway, I just offered an alternative which uses your GPU more or less the same as mining and IMO makes more sense (giving access to AI to the poor instead of it being yet again another tool of the rich), but if you’d rather offset your costs by mining, that’s very fine! Just make sure to do your calculations correctly.
if i kick off a job at the start of January and and then finish it when it starts to warm up in March then that would be one thermal cycle over the course of three months.
rather than kicking off a game every day. IMO mining would cause less issues than casual gaming. I am reasonably prepared to take the risk on this though for the sake of experimentation. if i have to replace a GPU it will have been a bad day but it won’t break me
Judging by what others have said though it’s probs a better idea to mine more profitable alt coins and then exchange those for bitcoin for medium - long term storage.
There was one i was looking at earlier which uses GPU for AI as you suggested. I don’t think it’s a philanthropic endeavor though and i’m not sure i’m comfortable with people possibly using my hardware/internet connection to generate potentially illegal stuff.
I live in a 5 eyes country and don’t fancy explaining to the police why such material may have been coming from my network in that scenario
You might get better luck at lemmy.ml/crypto
Nicehash is an easy way to get started.
Perhaps you’ve not uses them in a while but nicehash is absolute garbage now.
Ah no, I haven’t mined in years. That sucks to hear, they used to be an easy thing to point people at.
