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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 1893519, member: 27832"]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.[/QUOTE]