Not Only Luck.
An essay by John Melonakos

My Bitcoin Mining Experiment

I should have started playing with bitcoins much sooner than today (a la living in the future). This past week I felt much like Brad Feld described today in, “Bitcoins, Bitcoins Everywhere.” There is a frenzy of information on bitcoins everywhere you look the last few weeks.

There are two ways to get bitcoins:  1) Mine them, 2) Buy them with other currency in an exchange. The integrity of the bitcoin ecosystem is maintained by people who use their own computers to validate bitcoin transactions. In return for offering your computational resources to the ecosystem, you get rewarded with mined bitcoins.

As time passes, it becomes more and more difficult to earn bitcoins through mining. This is by design.

Early on, people would use GPUs t0 mine bitcoins, and as a GPU computing company, we heard a lot about that. Now GPUs for bitcoin mining is obsolete; people instead buy ASICs specially designed for bitcoin mining.

Today, I decided to experiment with bitcoin mining on my Windows laptop. Here’s what I did:

  1. Install MultiBit and Get a Bitcoin Wallet – Easy to do here. Provides a unique wallet address to use to receive payments when they come.
  2. Join a Mining Pool (like Slush’s) – I joined this pool.
  3. Install a Mining Client and Start Mining – I grabbed this simple mining utility for Windows. I added 3 workers for each of the 3 OpenCL devices on my laptop (described below). Each of those devices is cranked up full throttle.

My hash rates are:  15.8 Mhash/s on NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M, 2.0 Mhash/s on the Intel HD Graphics 4000, and 2.0 Mhash/s on the Intel i5 CPU. That’s a cumulative 19.8 Mhash/s rate on my laptop.

Using this website, it is estimated that I’ll earn $0.01 per day with my laptop. Ouch! The low-hanging fruits are gone.

So I’m just going to run my bitcoin mining long enough to officially own something in the bitcoin world. Then I’ll stop. It’s not worth playing with bitcoin mining on a small scale anymore. It was fun to learn how it works though.

I have no idea if bitcoins will change the world or not. But they are really interesting. Here’s an interesting post with more useful information (e.g. there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins and they cannot be inflated).

What experiments have you run in bitcoin mining? What are your thoughts?

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From the conversation

Comments preserved from the original post.

Ariejan de Vroom

Both the Intel and NVidia cards are not fast mining cards. Your CPU is a waste of energy. Using ATI cards, or ASIC mining hardware, you can get much higher hash/s. E.g. a 6870 ATI card can do about 300MHash/s, just like a ASICMiner USB Block Eruptor. Add three of thoses to your system, you’re already doing about 1 GHash/s.

Still, the difficulty of mining bitcoin has rised quite a lot lately, and mining is no longer a really feasible way of getting bitcoin these days. Especially so if you only have non-mining hardware.

Anon

My suspicion is that when you use OpenCL on an Intel HD 4000 you are actually using parts of the CPU at the same time although the OS is unaware of this. See if you your rate stays similar if you just CPU mine using the Intel or CPU andGPU mine at the same time. My Intel HD 4000 on an i5 got 9Mh/s when just using OpenCL alone…

Regardless, CPU mining for bitcoin is not a useful endeavour any more. Perhaps litecoin would be a better use of that power (although GPUs are faster there too)?

Sameer

Take it from a miner for the last 6 months, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to get into mining now. Simply buy the coins, you will almost always make more money. Mining is more technical, depends on the ever rising difficulty, and has very expensive hardware costs. Just buy the darn coins at a good price and watch them rise in price (or drop….)

melonakos

In reply to an earlier comment

Thanks for the comment and I agree that CPU (and GPU) HW seem obsolete with respect to bitcoins now. I heard about litecoin from someone else too. I don’t think I’m interested enough to give litecoin a try though.

melonakos

In reply to an earlier comment

Thanks for the comment! I don’t have mining hardware and don’t think it is the best way for me to spend my time. But I definitely think it’s interesting to watch!

Kaushik Pathak

well i have a hp-dv6-6121tx, which has a amd 6770m and i’m currently hashing at 66Mhash/s.
gpu-z temp readings max 68degrees!

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MarkJGuillen

It is a never ending debate if ASICs are a better approach than using graphics cards. Even on a greater budget, you are still spending quite a hefty amount of CPU/GPU. Just convert bitcoin to USD, which you have earned and you know if you are spending more than earning. Bitcoin