I think I'm turning into an old man. "I got no use fer no newfangled bitcoin, or whatever thar called!"
Unless you spend the big bucks for dedicated mining machines, you'll probably never be able to mine anything of consequence. I read an article recently where a hosting company (which has tons of available CPU cycles) tried mining bitcoins during idle times. The amount they were able to mine wasn't even enough to pay for the increased electricity bill. Bitcoins could be (can be) mined with a standard desktop. The problem is that the algorithms are so complex that it takes a long time. Bitcoin mining machines have purpose-built chips that process the logic much faster than a standard CPU can, but they're far more expensive.
...and the best machines always seem to be a few months out on production, so one would have to have a lot of confidence in the future of bitcoins to invest in the hardware needed to turn a profit. Which goes back to the age old economic risk/reward principle. If there's no risk, there's very little profit. To realize larger profits, one has to assume larger risks.
ok.. I have a separate desktop I just want to use for mining.. I don't care how slow it clogs but as long as it makes money im n ot paying anything for electricity so I don't care
Someone is paying for the electricity. Short version, as there are plenty of sites on the Internet that will allow you to read more. Point 1 - there is a finite number of bitcoins available. Point 2 - each "solved" bitcoin makes subsequent bitcoins harder and harder to mine. Point 3 - Most standard desktops do not have enough power to keep up with dedicated mining machines. Here are just a couple of articles: http://cryptojunky.com/blog/2013/03/26/absolute-beginners-guide-to-gpu-mining-bitcoin/ http://www.businessweek.com/article...ps-gear-computing-groups-competition-heats-up
Here's a real quick analysis: From many sources, mining bitcoins with state-of-the-art equipment gets you enough to cover the cost of electricity, plus a little bit. In other words, you can't get two dollars worth of bitcoin for one dollar worth of electricity, no matter how good your rig is. A standard desktop will do much worse than a specialized mining rig -- it'll take much more than a dollar's worth of electricity to get a dollar's worth of bitcoin. Figure your desktop draws, I don't know, 200 watts of power. That's 1/5 of a kilowatt, so you use 1/5 of a kilowatt-hour of electricity per hour. If you've got pretty cheap electricity, that means your machine costs two cents an hour to run. Do you see where I'm going with this? You'd be earning, most likely, much less than a penny per hour, best-case, even if you're not paying for electricity, or air conditioning, or replacing the parts of your PC that wear out early because of continuous full-load operation. But it's even worse than that, because you're not earning a continuous trickle of bitcoin -- you have to search for a long time in order to find a block. At this point in the "currency"'s lifecycle, it's most likely that your desktop would never turn up any bitcoin at all. Don't bother.
Bitcoins can be mined with a High configure CPU. It needs more power and specially made for mining bitcoin.
The bottom line is: You will not only "never get rich" doing this, you wouldn't make enough alone to be classified anything else but poor or destitute. Pencils and a hat may be more productive.
