Welcome to Thunderdome

Posted: **Mon Dec 02, 2013 12:01 pm**

Sign up for Coinbase. Of course, then you have to switch your $ back to BTC, then send them to Coinbase, then deposit to your bank account.

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 1:13 pm**

TPRJones wrote:As to mining, it's best to join a pool. I'm part of Deepbit.net, and I used to get about 0.01 per day for my meager CPU activity when my computer was idle. Time to fire that up again, now that that's almost $5 a day.

So do you still mine?

I added my home server to a pool today for the hell of it.

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:01 pm**

I do. I have a process that starts up on my main machine every weeknight after I've gone to bed and is killed in the morning before I get up. That's typically only about 6 hours a night and I don't have it set up to fire up the GPU so it's CPU only and thus not very many cycles. I'm running it as part of deepbit.net and typically I get 0.02 bitcoins a month out of it. If I didn't already have the system on and drawing power I'd probably not bother.

To really do a lot in mining you need a dedicated powerful rig or access to a big network of zombies. But as the price of bitcoin keeps rising even the little things like mine start to become worthwhile.

Edited By TPRJones on 1386097534

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:07 pm**

$20/month, not bad. I'm doing GPU mining... so I guess that costs me extra electricity. Does 187 Mhash/s.

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:10 pm**

Oh, in the post you quoted I should have said 0.001 per day. I dropped a zero. It's down by about 60% since then because I'm a smaller portion of the growing pool than I was, and the pool is hitting less often as the mining of bitcoins continues to grow (at a faster rate than the semi-defunct pool of which I am a part).

I should probably find a new pool that's more active than deepbit has been since March, but I'm too lazy to go looking for one.

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:12 pm**

TheCatt wrote:Does 187 Mhash/s.

Ah. I'm typically running closer to 7 Mh/s, I think. Much slower.

As to $20 per month, we'll see. I pretty much ignore those coins as they dump into my home wallet whenever I accumulate 0.1 of them and I'll probably forget to do anything with them for a couple of years. With a little luck they'll be worth even more by then.

Get rich quick? No. Get rich slow? Probably not. Have a surprise wad of cash for a trip to Vegas in two years? Maybe.

Edited By TPRJones on 1386098054

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 2:28 pm**

Call me for Vegas

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 8:41 pm**

I'm pulling out of MtGox. An comments on Coinbase as an option for converting to USD? Have you had a successful withdrawal? What methods do they use and what's their fees? I see lots of info on their site (before signing up, at least) about buying bitcoins, but little about USD withdrawals.

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 9:04 pm**

USD withdrawls on Coinbase (my referral URL, if you every buy any BTC there) work well. They are direct to bank account, so they need your bank account information. Purchases take 4 business days until you get instant purchase ability (which requires giving them a lot of personal information, and waiting 30 days). I did the instant bank account verification (they need your userid and password, or you can wait a few days and do the deposit verification scheme).

Withdrawls take about 2 days in my experience.

Coinbase appears to be based in the US, backed by some VC firms, etc. So they appear more reputable than the foreign exchanges to me. So far I have had no issues with them.

Fees are 1% for buying and selling, plus $0.15 bank fee.

Posted: **Tue Dec 03, 2013 9:16 pm**

BTW, all bitcoin transactional discussion on dtman.com requires a 6.25% cut for the house when said transaction is completed.

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 10:26 am**

I took an old GEForce 9800GTX I had at home and dropped it into a machine at work, and it's doing about 33Mhash/s. Nothing magic, but should help my processing... and not my electricity costs

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 12:50 pm**

Maybe I'll mine litecoins too... I setup a test to see how it goes over the next day.

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 3:48 pm**

I've seen various Bitcoin miners on ebay. Some are USB devices.
They seemed like a bad investment though, because if the seller thought he could make money with them (at his cost) why sell them?

Also, 96,000 Bitcoins were stolen:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article....etplace

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 4:12 pm**

I read a long time ago that there is a trade-off between how much you can mine vs. how much it costs you in electricity. This was long before bitcoins were worth 1k.

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 4:19 pm**

I was thinking of buying one and plugging it into a work computer to see what would happen...

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 4:26 pm**

GORDON wrote:I read a long time ago that there is a trade-off between how much you can mine vs. how much it costs you in electricity. This was long before bitcoins were worth 1k.

Thus the reason for using someone else's electricity

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 4:35 pm**

I made an offer on one, and bought it... so we'll see.

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 4:46 pm**

Oopps, I misplaced 0.223 BTC... found them today.

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 5:36 pm**

TheCatt wrote:I made an offer on one, and bought it... so we'll see.

Thanks for TOFT.
Let us now how it works out.

Edited By Paul on 1386196688

Posted: **Wed Dec 04, 2013 5:43 pm**

Will do. Will probably turn off the ones at home too, since they are my electricity bill

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