One Bitcoin By the Numbers: Is There Still Profit To Be Made? 239
massivepanic writes with an article that "runs through the logistics of mining a Bitcoin on everyday gaming computers while keeping an eye on power consumption, time spent, and return on investment. From the article: 'I have mined a Bitcoin. This was not much of an accomplishment a year or two ago, but in 2013, after the infamous early-April peak at $260, unearthing a Bitcoin is no easy task. Competition is on the rise and we are getting close to the end of the good ol' days of Bitcoin; the time when a desktop computer or two have any real mining capabilities.'"
Hopeless without a FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
Bitcoins earned: 1.00
Value today: $133.58
Total time: 14.5 days
Rigs operating: 2-3
Towards the end of the run I was getting impatient and ExtremeTechâ(TM)s Joel Hruska helped me sprint to the finish by giving me access to some of his machines...
The era of Bitcoin mining with off-the-shelf hardware is over. The serious people are already using FPGAs, and if the people advertising ASIC hardware [butterflylabs.com] actually ship working product in quantity, even that will be obsolete. Like most Bitcoin-related businesses, the people selling ASIC mining hardware are flakes [bitcointalk.org].
Bitcoin mining becomes exponentially harder as the 21 million Bitcoin limit is approached. Over 11 million Bitcoins have already been found, so this is already more than half over. All miners are in competition. The rate of Bitcoin discovery is fixed, so the more people mining, the less each miner makes.
Re:Heat your home by mining (Score:3, Informative)
Not compared to heat pump systems, that can often provide a lot more warming per watt than dumb direct heat generation methods. From Wikipedia on heat pumps [wikipedia.org]:
When used for heating a building on a mild day, for example 10 C, a typical air-source heat pump (ASHP) has a COP of 3 to 4, whereas an electrical resistance heater has a COP of 1.0. That is, one joule of electrical energy will cause a resistance heater to produce only one joule of useful heat, while under ideal conditions, one joule of electrical energy can cause a heat pump to move much more than one joule of heat from a cooler place to a warmer place.
On the other hand, ground-source heat pumps (GSHP) benefit from the moderated temperature underground, as the ground acts naturally as a store of thermal energy.[4] Their year-round COP is therefore normally in the range of 2.5 to 5.0.
Burning energy for 1:1 return on heat (+bitcoins) is still a terribly inefficient use of energy.
Re:Remember the old adage (Score:5, Informative)
Bitcoin mining is starting to move towards ASICs now.
But ignoring that even with FPGA while the FPGAs themselves are standard parts the boards usually aren't. Afaict most off the shelf boards for FPGAs fall into one of two categroies. Either they are PCIe/PXIe cards designed to move a lot of data over a bus system or they are hardware dev boards with loads of different interfaces for a developer to play with. Bitcoin mining needs neither of those, it just needs power and a way to get a tiny ammount of data in and out. The result is an off the shelf FPGA board is a poor value proposition for mining and a mining optimised FPGA board isn't much use for anything else.
I guess you could desolder the FPGAs from your no longer viable FPGA boards and then reball them and try and sell them but I think you'd find it pretty hard to find a buyer for such parts (afaict reballing voids the warranty) and if you did find one you'd have to sell them at a massive discount to fresh FPGAs from the manufacturer.