The Glade 4.0

Is anyone else doing this? My brother and I set up our computers and are making the equivalent of $13-15 a day just letting them run. The exchange rate is currently 14.28 dollars to a bitcoin, and we can "mine" roughly 1 bitcoin per day.

Charts: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/
Most popular bitcoin exchange: https://mtgox.com/

i would like to make 14 dollars per day just for letting my computer run, but i apparently seem to be too stupid to figure out how to mine bitcoins.

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Ron Paul 2012

First of all, you need a good GPU. ATI happens to be much better for this purpose, just by pure chance. ATI cards are 5x faster or so for the hash generation.

If you do NOT have a good graphics card, then there is no point in continuing. If you have a Sandybridge CPU that is overclocked, then that can help additionally, but otherwise only GPUs are useful here.

Anyways if you have an Nvidia card, you need to download and install CUDA. If you have an (AMD) ATI card, you need OpenCL. Both are basically APIs that lets programs access your graphics card to do hundreds of operations in parallel. Note: Not all Nvidia and ATI cards are compatible and may be unusable for mining.

So step 1 if you want to proceed:

1) Download either CUDA or OpenCL depending on your graphics card
http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-40
OpenCL:
http://developer.amd.com/SDKS/AMDAPPSDK ... fault.aspx

2) Create an account at http://www.btcguild.com

3) Download the Bitcoin client:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin ... e/download

4) Enter your bitcoin address as your Wallet for your account on btcguild.com . This links your btcguild.com account to your wallet on your bitcoin client, so that btcguild.com can send your share of coins that you helped to mine (basically your computer becomes part of a cluster in a large mining effort). The bitcoin address can be found in your bitcoin client (the windows executable). This you must enter into the textfield on your web browser on btcguild.com in the "My Account" pane above your email.

It resembles something like this: 1A2KiPdXvJbhm515WTGHp9FVgawdC3TS1g

5) Create a worker on btcguild.com under your account (Manage Workers on the left). For example if your username is farsky, then make a worker called farsky_1 with password glade.

6) Download this: https://github.com/downloads/Kiv/poclbm ... 110521.exe

7) Extract it and run guiminer.exe from the main dir.

8) From the interface,

Select BTC Guild
username: farsky_1
Password: glade

Then start mining.

I hope I'm not missing anything. (edit: added a couple more steps). By the way I've never found any good guide on how to mine Bitcoins. I suspect it's intentional because they don't want people competing for them. It took me a lot of time to figure it out, and to see that it was even worthwhile in the first place. Tomorrow I'm going to Best Buy to see if I can get a new graphics card for my other computer, so it can help in the effort. It could realistically pay itself off in a month, if I find the right one.

Damn Lex, thanks for typing that out.

I'm in luck, I do use an ATi card.

I'll let you know in a few hours if I get it working


EDIT: I saw you said 13-15 dollars a day from doing this, so I took 14 and multiplied it by 30 to get how much money that was per month, and got 420. I took it as a sign.

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Ron Paul 2012

So, what is this project using the computation power to crunch?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

im guessing it's probably cracking passwords for the CIA or something.

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Ron Paul 2012

Waste electricity? Interestingly, the combined processing power of everyone doing this is over ten times greater than folding@home.

More technically it is making your computer calculate millions of SHA-2 hashes per second and validate these with peer nodes.

Lex, in GUI Miner, under device I have two options

[0] Juniper
[1] AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965


So I'm assuming either the [0] Juniper option is my ATi graphics card, or my graphics card is not compatible? (its an ATi HD5700 series...can't remember the exact model)



Regardless, with the "Juniper" option I get around 148 Mhash/sec and the AMD option I only get around 3....

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Ron Paul 2012

It's most likely the Juniper option. If necessary I can give you a way to test OpenCL (which I knew before any of this bitcoin madness).

edit: Nevermind about testing, unless you have the java compiler handy (I was playing with Java OpenCL examples many months back).

How many Mhash/sec do you get, Lex?

I'm getting around 148 with the Juniper option, my CPU only gives me ~3, I didn't leave that on for too long, though, so it might've went faster if I did.

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Ron Paul 2012

148 is working!! My top end nvidia card (GTX-580) gets 120. My brother has a pretty good ATI card and he gets 250. My processer gets me an additional 20-25 since it's an overclocked Sandy Bridge with 32nm node architecture.

148 might even translate to $10 per day, the exchange rate is crazy right now.

Awesome. That's what I like to hear, hahaha..

So what's this

"Shares: ## accepted"

..and how does that translate into BTC?

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Ron Paul 2012

Basically everyone in the massive computing group is hacking away, attempting to mine a bitcoin cluster. A cluster is 50 bitcoins. The way it's all set up is that only one cluster can be found... globally across the world... every 10 minutes. No matter how many machines are mining away. The network is always verifying eachother somehow and it apparently is impossible to cheat (or at least nobody knows how). It was all designed by an MIT professor in 2009.

In this large group we are part of, organized by the website, everyone connected is hammering away trying to find a cluster. The moment a cluster is found, roughly every 40 minutes (it's random since there's many other groups/machines), you get your share of the 50 bit coins. Your shares are basically the amount of computation you contribute, based on the number of hashes generated or something. So if you contribute 10 shares, and everyone else contributes 10000 shares, you get 50*(10/10000) bitcoins. Hope I made sense. One bitcoin is $14 or $15 I think.

edit: Clusters I think are known as "blocks", I'm new to this all.

So...what are the clusters actually, and what is all this computing being used for? I have no idea what "SHA-2 hashes" are and what they're used for. All I understand is that I'm getting paid bitcoins for running this, I'm not exactly sure why.

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Ron Paul 2012

It's all a virtual currency that is not controlled by the government and is peer-based like Bittorent. If you use it correctly it is untraceable and anonymous, and there's no banks or middleman standing in your way. This is the value in it, nothing like this has existed before. You can already gamble with it, and yes even buy drugs with it online and have them shipped to you. See: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/bitcoin/ (the website selling drugs is still up in case you were wondering). Many legitimate businesses are also adopting it at an increasing rate.

It's possible that the government will ban it (although it can't shut it down), as well as other negative outcomes. There's also a possibility that the value will soar up much greater since this form of currency is possibly revolutionary on a global level. The value fluctuates a lot: It was $1 per bitcoin a few months ago, I believe, and now it is $14 per bitcoin. It used to be 1 cent per bitcoin.

The computation is their way of deciding who starts out with the money, and makes people spend on electricity. I think it is kind of dumb to be honest, but I didn't design it. Right now 6 million coins have been mined out of a possible 21 million or so. Once there are 21 millions no more can be mined. SHA-2 hashes are a way for your computer to do 6 thousand or so floating point operations and not be able to cheat, since it's a way of encryption.

I think there's 60k-70k people using Bitcoin so far. The total value of it all is around $60 million now.

very interesting...i suppose for now I'll just set it and forget it

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Ron Paul 2012

Sounds good... if the price decides to go up 100x-1000x again, like it did since November or so, you might make a lot of money. I don't think most people know or realize the potential enough just to run a stupid program on your computer. Some people are going all out and buying dozens of computers with the latest cards just to do this.

It's very possible that it's just a giant bubble, but you don't lose much running software.

I'm still confused. So people are paying you in a virtual currency to use your processing power.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

No... the entire system *spawns* currency for you. By participating in a group, it reduces the chance factor, since you all share the spawned currency that one is lucky enough to create. Like participating in a lottery. 50 bit coins are spawned globally, to just a single lucky computer calculation, every 10 minutes.

So if this currency is spawned, created out of nothing, how is it that you can exchange it for real currency, US Dollars, Euro, etc?

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Ron Paul 2012

People see the value of distributed, anonymous currency. They want in on it. There's a cost to getting this currency without being a geek with a fancy gaming computer, so it can be exchanged for dollars. As more people see the value, the price (exchange rate) goes up. The articles about online drugs made it spike up 50% at least within the last few days. It's currently driven largely by speculation at the perceived value.

Ah. I see. I have a rather base PC so it probably wouldn't be worth my uptime.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Nev, make an address. I want to test sending money.

how?

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Ron Paul 2012

Click the new button and make a label. You can have as many addresses you want that point to your wallet.