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First question, yes, I think you'd be talking about a timespan of months before seeing a reward as a lone miner. Joining a pool is pretty painless though. You

First question, yes, I think you'd be talking about a timespan of months before seeing a reward as a lone miner. Joining a pool is pretty painless though. You just create an account, and probably give them an email address, and then start running GUIMiner or something. You also give them a Bitcoin address to send the rewards. That's it, no other personal information needed.

Mahn 14y ago
How does that work? I guess the resulting bitcoins are divided between the people who participate in the pool of there's any success?
- joeyo 14y ago
  That's right. There are a variety of different schemes that have been devised by the pool operators to enact fair compensation for the pool workers. Most pools pay proportional to the amount of work that the worker accomplishes with a fee for the operator. But there are many of tweaks and variations, some of which are to deal with bad actors (pool skipping) or to allow for a steady pay out to the workers in the face of the unpredictable variability in time between coins that the pool successfully mines. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools
StavrosK 14y ago
I just read about that and joined one yesterday, though. I ran it for an hour or so and made a ten-thousandth of a bitcoin or so, at which point I calculated that it's probably not worth the electricity and shut it down.
- jimktrains2 14y ago
  ฿0.10 is currently USD$13.47, that's almost double minimum-wage. I'm having a _really_ hard time believing your computer uses USD$13.47 of electricity an hour.
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    It doesn't, which is why I didn't claim it. I said 0.0001 BTC. Maybe it was 0.00001, though. Actual math: 0.00000336030223163 BTC per share, I generated 21 shares, so my balance is 0.00007057 BTC. Roughly the amount I quoted, yeah.
    - jimktrains2 14y ago
      Odd, I could have swore I read "a tenth" the first couple times I read it. Sorry for being nebby:-\
- yebyen 14y ago
  You are probably not an owner of a recent ATI video card, then. Or you joined a pool that showed you how to CPU mine, that's not the right way at all. If you go with today's exchange rate, the Bitcoins I've collected mining since January are worth between 3 and 5 dollars (US) a day. I only recently shut down my BTC mining to try Litecoin, which is reported to be about 4x more profitable to mine. http://dustcoin.com/ http://dustcoin.com/ The profitability of mining has gone down sharply in this time, if you ignore the fact that the exchange rate over time has made up for this fact. The coins I mined in January were worth more because there were more of them (and I didn't cash them in.) Last clean 11 day sprint of mining before the LTC experiment resulted in 0.2652BTC, same as the 8 day sprints in January. EDIT: I forgot to mention I have a video card that I bought from Best Buy about a year ago for $160. Not exactly top of the line.

Mahn 14y ago

How does that work? I guess the resulting bitcoins are divided between the people who participate in the pool of there's any success?

joeyo 14y ago
That's right. There are a variety of different schemes that have been devised by the pool operators to enact fair compensation for the pool workers. Most pools pay proportional to the amount of work that the worker accomplishes with a fee for the operator. But there are many of tweaks and variations, some of which are to deal with bad actors (pool skipping) or to allow for a steady pay out to the workers in the face of the unpredictable variability in time between coins that the pool successfully mines. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

StavrosK 14y ago

I just read about that and joined one yesterday, though. I ran it for an hour or so and made a ten-thousandth of a bitcoin or so, at which point I calculated that it's probably not worth the electricity and shut it down.

jimktrains2 14y ago
฿0.10 is currently USD$13.47, that's almost double minimum-wage. I'm having a _really_ hard time believing your computer uses USD$13.47 of electricity an hour.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  It doesn't, which is why I didn't claim it. I said 0.0001 BTC. Maybe it was 0.00001, though. Actual math: 0.00000336030223163 BTC per share, I generated 21 shares, so my balance is 0.00007057 BTC. Roughly the amount I quoted, yeah.
  - jimktrains2 14y ago
    Odd, I could have swore I read "a tenth" the first couple times I read it. Sorry for being nebby:-\
yebyen 14y ago
You are probably not an owner of a recent ATI video card, then. Or you joined a pool that showed you how to CPU mine, that's not the right way at all. If you go with today's exchange rate, the Bitcoins I've collected mining since January are worth between 3 and 5 dollars (US) a day. I only recently shut down my BTC mining to try Litecoin, which is reported to be about 4x more profitable to mine. http://dustcoin.com/ http://dustcoin.com/ The profitability of mining has gone down sharply in this time, if you ignore the fact that the exchange rate over time has made up for this fact. The coins I mined in January were worth more because there were more of them (and I didn't cash them in.) Last clean 11 day sprint of mining before the LTC experiment resulted in 0.2652BTC, same as the 8 day sprints in January. EDIT: I forgot to mention I have a video card that I bought from Best Buy about a year ago for $160. Not exactly top of the line.