Is it a waste of time and money to get into Bitcoin mining?

Is it a waste of time and money to get into Bitcoin mining?

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The gold rush is already over, you don't have a chance to complete anymore.

You're a few years late

>find out about bitcoin in 2010
>interested in the technological aspects of it
>talked to my dad about how neat the idea of it is
>dad talks somewhat excitedly about investing in bitcoin
>me: "nah, sounds too risky"
>mfw didn't invest in bitcoin in 2010

The "value" of "bitcoin" is backed in what exactly? Because it looks just like any old bubble, all of them do burst eventually.

low quality bait

Yes

Yes, it is being mined on an industrial scale now. The pool returns on consumer hardware is not worth the cost of running them, and you may not mine a solo block in your lifetime without significant investments.

>Didn't invest in bitcoin when they were practically free
>Listened to Sup Forums say it was worthless

>Early 2013 (or was it 2012?) bitcoins are starting to go up
>I tell a friend not to bother, it's already too expensive
>$1300 a month later

I just want to die. Please somebody murder me in my sleep.

No, please explain, what physical value does it hold or represent?

Paper money is issued by a central bank which backs it up with gold reserves and property. Bitcoin is issued by whom exactly and how is its value backed up? Anyone can come up with a meme "currency" and make people believe it's worth something and even make them use it for transactions if he memes well enough. But once those people realize it's just a meme, well...

It has little to none physical value, just like most currencies. It's valuable because there's a finite amount. It's useful as a currency because it's easy to divide, send to anyone, or receive from anyone.

...

>But once those people realize it's just a meme, well...
Then it's still more profitable for them to act as if it was worth something.

What physical value does the dollar or the euro hold? It's fiat money. The value is that you can buy stuff with it.

Modern currencies aren't backed by property directly. If your bank gets robbed, your government will just print more money to pay you and the bank back. Bitcoin is valuable because more of it can't be made, but it retains all the useful properties of fiat.

>It's valuable because there's a finite amount.
How and by whom has it been created? Where and in what form does it exist?

>little to none physical value, just like most currencies
The value of "most currencies" is backed up by physical property of the central banks which issued the currency.

Good job being a clueless idiot.

I only dont get one crucial thing. How do banks and whoever controls the economy and our standard money , can exchange bitcoins for real money? Why would they? I mean I understand if the online people agreed to give value to bitcoint and it works in their own "community" but when it comes in contact with real world why do banks acknowledge the bitcoin? Shouldnt bitcoin in their eyes just look like something untrusty and untraceable?

To be clear people have been saying this since the first time bitcoin blew up almost a decade ago. Saw a lot of this when coins were valued around $20 a piece...

>Shouldnt bitcoin in their eyes just look like something untrusty and untraceable?

The free market does not care about "traceable".

What do you mean by "untrusty"? I can spend some bitcons and get something in return just like with the dollar or the euro.

YES. It is a waste of money.

You need special ASICs to mine Bitcoin these days.

- You can't mine Bitcoin (directly) with GPUs.
- You can buy used ASICs but the only reason people sell them is that they are old ASICs which consumes more power than they generate in profit.
- You can buy new ASICs but only crappy ones which aren't very competitive.

Basically all the manufacturers who make efficient and profitable ASICs do it on contracts for mining farms or run their own mining farms.

If you really do want to get into mining then you could look into coins you can mine with GPUs like Ethereum and ZCash or the few coins that are only possible to mine with standard CPUs.

Do think it through before you get into it.

First of all, you need to carefully coinsider if your investment in hardware + power will generate a ROI or not. I personally live in an apartment and the power bill increased 4x when I started mining.

Secondly, do consider your living situation and the impact mining will have. Listen to your GPU at full speed when you're playing a game or go to a gamer friend and listen to his GPU when playing some intensive game to get an idea. Then imagine what 10 or 20 of those will sound like. If you live alone then it's only up to you how much sound you can tolerate but if you live in an apartment or a house with a waifu then you will want to talk to her about it. You should consider the impression it would give a potential waifu if you drag one home even if you don't currently have one. Lots of GPUs make lots of noise, they will be running at full speed all the time.

Use all your bitcoin to buy land on the moon, sounds about right.

>How and by whom has it been created? Where and in what form does it exist?
>How?
Math. Go read a book, nigger.
>Whom?
It's decentralized, so no one person creates it.
>Where and in what form does it exist?
Secret numbers.

>The value of "most currencies" is backed up by physical property of the central banks which issued the currency.
No, even before fiat a bank would loan out more money than it actually had.

They don't care enough. That's why they'll process payments for bitcoins, but they won't let you put them in your bank account.

Yes, asking people if something is easy money isn't going to get anyone a 'Yes, join us!'.

Or, you know... $30

lunarland.com/

I cant explain it better. Like, why do banks give you real money on hands in exchange for bitcoin? What will they do with it? And who even controls the value of bitcoin? How is this even regulated and by whom?

>Secret numbers.

What intrinsic value do those numbers represent? What can you accomplish with them? Can you eat them? Can you build shelter out of them? Can you heal diseases with them? Can you use them as a power source? Can you use them as a weapon? I'm all ears.

wtf.jpg

You sound like you are too stupid to understand the concepts discussed here, I'm sorry.

> backed by gold reserves
Nope, fiat paper money is currently backed by NOTHING. It's been a while since the Nixon shock in *1971*

Some fiat currencies do have a form of backing, but it's not what you'd think. The US dollar is backed by the US military, if you refuse to sell your oil for it or even hint that you will sell oil for other currencies then you're invaded and killed (Iraq, Lebanon).

np

Do you eat dollar bills? Build shelter out of dollar bills? Cure diseases with dollar bills?

Bitcoin is regulated by the p2p blockchain.

You can trade the secret numbers for goods and services. The secret numbers are a biproduct of work so no one can make them up.

>backs it up with gold reserves and property

backed with gold? wtf you talking, the last guy to tried to back his currency with gold was Mister Gadaffi and hi is now dead.

The US has a petrodollar and its baked with petrol bro

>What intrinsic value do those numbers represent?
A portion of a finite resource.

>What can you accomplish with them?
You can trade them.

> Can you eat them? Can you build shelter out of them? Can you heal diseases with them? Can you use them as a power source? Can you use them as a weapon?
No. You can't burn them for fire either. You're pretty fucking stupid if you think digital money is worth less than paper money because it can't do things paper money can't.

Banks don't give you anything for Bitcoin.

You can go to exchanges and put bids and asks for your Bitcoin and other people will match your orders and give you fiat. They won't give you real money (Gold and Silver) for it, though, but you can get toilet paper like USD, EUR and CNY for it. You could later exchange those for real money elsewhere.

As for the value: It is controlled by the market.

And the market also regulates it. There are pushes for fascist regulation in many places. The US has special regulations which is why very few Bitcoin exchanges and banks in general outside the US accepts customers from there.

Thank you for a thorough answer. I've known about mining for many years and just remembered it.

I would like to get into it just for the techy side of it and I'm completely aware that I probably won't make my money back, but I'm okay with that.

And I won't mind the noise it makes and I don't think my gf would either. She would think it's cool actually. The only times it would be a problem is when I'm making music and need to hear it without any background noise.

So did we concluded that there is no way to start mining and actually making profit? How mucn do you need to invest and then wait until return the investment and actually rise above zero and start making profit?

>The US has special regulations
Like what?

Yes, was fun seeing Sup Forums get triggered by this topic.

For a normal user or even small setup you will struggle to mine enough to pay for the electric you used mining it.

Unless you're not paying for the elctricity.

>all the idiots hating on themselves for not investing in bitcoin in 2010
yeah man I too hate myself after losing the lottery for not picking exactly the winning numbers a few days back and want to kill myself

nice logic you got there fucking idiots

there are still coins being mined

But mining at home isnt really viable unless you have a sweet deal with your power distributor.

The assumption they're making is that it completely wasn't up to chance and that lots of smart people could tell it was a good way to make money. I don't see how that's wrong in anyway.

I bought my first 3 GPUs for mining right before the meme currency Dogecoin came out. I was mining it from day 1. Not that many were mining it the first month and then someone decided to do a pump (and dump). I made those 3 GPUs back and more during that month.

Fast forward 4 months and the price of LTC and DOGE was down to a level where mining with those GPUs barely made enough to cover the power costs of having them running.

Mining profitability is also a question of what you mine and when you sell. And also how you hedge, if the price seems high then you can lock in profit by selling futures contracts which are available for a lot of coins.

Yes, you are too late to it now.

Why doesn't whoever has the strongest supercomputer farm on the planet just mine them all? Or why aren't there crazy rushes for employing (actual) botnets to do it?

Running supercomputers is more expensive than the bitcoins that you might get out of them. There certainly are botnets mining coins though...

They can't just mine them all, because the more they mine the harder it is to mine new ones. There are botnets.

Okay, after reading your responses, here's my new question.

Would it be a good, or bad, idea to invest in a bitcoining machine and only run it when the stocks inevetably rise.

This way you will profit and you won't have a high electricity bill.

Dude, if you can know when the price rises you don't need to mine.

because hacking into bank servers would be both easier and more profitable.

Not the same thing user. Back in the day you didn't need whole rooms of dedicated ASICs to mine bitcoins you could do it effectively with consumer level hardware. Plus you could buy them for next to nothing.

It's a missed opportunity; they could have gotten into it but for one reason or another decided not to and now rue that decision. Whereas as the lottery is all down to pot luck with stupidly long odds.

The only time your lottery analogy would work is if after using the same numbers for years you decided to change them. So you change them and then that week your original numbers come up.

many smart people predicted many good outcomes
and many of them were false and ruined the lifes of people that invested in them

it was entirely up to chance and bitcoin might as well be already forgotten by now

Let's say I have a number and claim it's a secret number which has value. Obviously it took me some substantial effort to arrive at it, otherwise it couldn't have value. Now, how can you verify that my number is actually the secret number I claim it to be (or at least that it has the value you would think it has) without having to go through exactly the same effort yourself? If you have a file and wish to confirm its integrity based on its hash provided by another party, you have to make the exact same effort they had to make to calculate the hash. Am I missing something here? Or is it like with prime numbers where verifying that a very large number is prime is significantly easier than finding a prime number of that magnitude out of nowhere?

Pretty much.

But it's illegal and can be detected. Would Google rather mine bitcoin, or hack into bank servers?

Again, if banks are hackable and can't guarantee the integrity of digitally stored account information (which represents the property of its customers), then who and how can guarantee the integrity of so-called "bitcoin wallets" and of the meme currency in general?

Also, Putin supposedly completely banned the use of any meme currencies withing the Russian Federation - so bitcoin has value there, or doesn't it have any?

Is everything up to chance or is it just things you don't understand?

If you want to gain normal currency, you have to sell some goods or services, otherwise you are either stealing currency from someone else, or are counterfeiting it. Who is the owner of all the bitcoin which is being mined?

Generally, why would you want to make a currency out of something which doesn't require any actually useful work to obtain, but just some number crunching by computers?

>Mine bitcoin in 2010.
>Somehow make 23 bitcoin by just letting it run 24/7 for months on every AMD graphics card i can get my hands on.
>Lose interest and stop.
>Forget password to wallet, who cares only worth a few dollars.
>Bitcoin hits $1300 in 2013.

I curse my own stupidity every time i think about it.

Don't worry. I can sell you property in another galaxy very cheaply, but first you must buy some of my meme currency I have just come up with (let's call it nullcoin) and then resell it to at least a dozen different people. Deal?

well atleast you didn't store it on a HDD, bring the computer to the scrapyard and spend 3 weeks there trying to find said HDD

>who and how can guarantee the integrity of so-called "bitcoin wallets" and of the meme currency in general?

Exactly. Nobody. You weren't here in 2013 when Sup Forums fell balls deep into this bitcoin meme shit. Where there were threads of retards buying 20 Radeons hoping to get rich quick and asking how they can circumvent energy bills. Three years on, plenty of exchange thefts, hacks, government seizures and two fake inventors later this currency is just as memey as it ever was I'm just glad there are less of these shit threads.

This post shows how nonsensical the whole meme currency thing really is. Just because there's some complicated algorithms to which yield some results with some substantial computational effort doesn't mean that these results hold any actual value. They are just context-less binary patterns and nothing else. Ascribing value to them is just an illusion, and spreading the notion of them holding value is just a meme.

I read about that, that guy would have been a millionaire many times over too if i remember correctly.

At least i did pay off my graphics card investments, so i did get a few "free" HD5830s out of the whole thing.

you had your chance years ago, but instead you listened to Sup Forums cynicism. you missed the boat again.

I hosted miners back in 2013. As we were close to KNC we would pick them up for the customers and host them within the hour. The first ones to get their machines made 2 bitcoins per day. In total we did about $20k per day in bitcoins at around $100/btc. Had to buy some IKEA shelves for the data center as they were non-rackables.

Things only have value if people value it. Not unique to specific money or currencies. We live in a barter society still. Exchange paper money, raw metals, or digital currency doesn't matter. What matters is you have something that someone else values - you can use that to exchange for something you value.

If you mine a bitcoin, what prevents someone else from mining the exact same bitcoin?

The algorithm.
They'd just break into your wallet though. Or ransomware your shit.

>Exchange paper money, raw metals, or digital currency
The last one obviously is the most volatile of them all. You can hide money or gold and be sure it's secure, but how can you be sure of some impalpable bit patterns on some data carrier, especially if that carrier is not in your physical posession and nobody guarantees its security?

You'd make more money picking up a night stocking gig at your local grocery.

No. But I've made around $300 mining ether and trading it for bitcoin in the last couple months.

The difficulty is going up and the price of ether is going down so now is not the best time to get into it. Ether has purpose way beyond digital currency. It's not bitcoin, don't believe anyone who tells you it's just another altcoin or a bitcoin clone.

Why did the other memecoins fail, while bitcoin is still a thing?

When a bitcoin is mined, how is it "secured" by whoever mined it, and how it the information who mined it propagated to anyone (everyone?) else?

blockchains

en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work

A lot of them are just clones of bitcoin. Exact copies with just the name changed.

Some of them have better privacy/actual anonymity, which is apparently against the interests of several governments.

Look into the algorithm used by the coin, the structure of the network, the intent of the developers, and features that make said coin better.

Darknet operations are not using bitcoin, they use Monero or Dash mostly. Mixing is built into those coins. It's basically a money laundering feature.

>tfw you missed out on the best years there ever would be and it's only darkness from here to eternity

Memecoins don't need to be "laundered"? How can you prove that you obtained bitcoin by a means which is accordance to law?

>2016
>physical value

get with the time gramps, i bet you still buy music on cds

My CDs have physical value, I can RIP lossless audio off them, listen to them in a CD player, sell them for non-meme currency, and, if need be, I can also throw them at some faggot who comes by.

The value of bitcoin is based in the exact same thing as every other currency in the world.
And its nothing tangible if you dont know.

>The value of bitcoin is based in the exact same thing as every other currency in the world.

No it's not.

It's just another bitcoin clone plus gambling and pyramid scheme apps.

What a moron.

How do you even cash out these things?

You buy drugs on the dark net or donate it to ISIS

I know that feel, but instead of crying I went all in on the last January 2015 dip. Now im up 100k+ dollars and this is hasn't even begun yet. See you when im a millionaire in 5/10 years.

I'd say wait. Banks are already hopping into the world of blockchain technology and I would assume it would be proprietary and universal in the market where bitcoin is universal but didn't get a large enough outreach for adoption other than a handful of businesses.

Bitcoin is a meme and a hobby for the most part and isn't used for serious transactions on the market. When a guy buys a fucking rocket to go into space with bitcoin, then I'll take it seriously.

>cashing out
Big mistake. Get 21 BTC and hold, you'll be rich in 10 years and buy directly with them.

You sell them to someone for real money or trade them for something. Same way you cash out anything else.

This is the literal same hype up bait that caused the first bubble and subsequent crash.

Here's a pro tip, the crashes are not caused by panic sellers but just a couple coin wallets dumping their stash of coins when the price is high enough.

And here is the bitcoin red pill, 99% of coins are owned by the person who created bitcoin and the plebs trading their little coins are peanuts in comparison.

You are low IQ. The biggest strenght of bitcoin is that it's outside the system.

marketwatch.com/story/potential-gold-import-ban-by-india-could-be-biggest-bombshell-since-nixon-2016-11-22

For example, take this. If all those people held bitcoins, they would be unaffected. Bitcoin is the new gold. Nothing that the government controls can ever be the new gold.

The actual meme is going to be the "GovCoin" where it's closed source and everyone is controlled. Bitcoin is The real deal.

Wrong, it shows you haven't been paying attention. Things have changed a lot since then. MtGox was the only exchange in the world for bitcoin for fuck's sakes.

Marketcap is still tiny, for anyone with a brain this is good news since it means you didn't miss the train yet. Ups and downs are expected, so fucking what.


>99%
kys mong, it's not. And guess what, 99% of money is owned a few corporations/families in the world, the difference with bitcoin is, no one can make more bitcoin out of thin air, as opposed to fiat cuckrrencies.

>The value of "most currencies" is backed up by physical property of the central banks which issued the currency.
This hasn't been the case for decades. The gold standard was abolished a long time ago.
Fiat currencies work based on faith and nothing else.

memecoin has been, and always will exist just for autists. Nobody who deals with real world shit is going to use that shit on the frontend because there is no regulation, there is no way to get your coins back when somebody steals them, we have seen it time and time again when a large coin bank gets hacked and millions of dollars of coins disappear and are irrecoverable.

Time has passed for the bitcoin and make it big train. I'd look into bitcoin if you haven't already but be aware that it's quite likely it will be shut down by globalists and the USA. They don't directly control it and cannot borrow to infinity with it. World governments love digital currency and cashless society as it makes it easier to tax you and suppress you. Expect them to come up with their own "bitcoin" or digital currencies in which they make the rules and control. Bitcoin will likely be killed off with regressive legislation and oversight similar to cablecard and other formats.

t. owner of crystal ball

There's no need to get cucked by banks anymore. You can buy even a lambo directly with bitcoin without ever touching the deprecated banking circuit, too bad you are all poor morons.