Bitcoins are based on blocks. Blocks are data containing information about past transactions and contain a hard to solve mathematical problem. To add a block to the block-chain demands some serious processing power. As an incentive whoever solves this problem and sends the solution to the network (i.e. is able to produce a block) receives (at the time of writing) 25 Bitcoin as reward. If somebody solves the operation before you do it, your work is lost and you receive no reward. Furthermore the difficulty of the problem is increased or decreased every 2016 correct solved blocks, depending on the total amount of calculation power available in the mining network. In addition, the reward per block is halved every 210.000 solved blocks. For that reason, also the number of existing coins is limited to 21 millions. Given the current progression in mining capability the last coin is conjectured to be mined between 2033 and 2140.Summarizing: Who offers calculation power to the Bitcoin network is rewarded with coins. Hence, every day new Bitcoins are created from miners and new miners join the network every day. In order to keep the complexity of mining steep self-regulating algorithms have been included to Bitcoin to adjust to new processing power.
Therefore the work or mining becomes harder for each block. Assuming you had decided decided to start mining in 2009 and never sold a mined coin prior to 2013, you should be rich by now. If you want to you can start today, you can still make some money, but keep in mind: the golden mining era is past.Let us give you more details about why that is: The amount of total existing Bitcoins is limited and the amount of Bitcoins that can be mined per successful solved block is also fixed. The performance when you are mining Bitcoin is measured in MH/s, meaning millions of hash operations executed per second by your PC. In 2009, a normal PC with a common CPU was able to produce hundreds of Bitcoins per day, basically because the network had low computing power and there were almost no transactions (A geek hobby). But with the success of Bitcoins, the rising of brokers and the increasing value in dollars per coin, more and more users discovered this fascinating world. Hence, mining became ever more unyielding. To counteract this trend CPUs were replaced by GPUs, which were replaced by Multi-GPU rigs and now ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), hardware specifically designed with only one purpose: mining Bitcoin.For this reason, mining Bitcoins with a common CPU is useless today. Mining with a good AMD distinct GPU (AMD 78xx, AMD 79xx) is ok, but will not make you rich. Making money heavily depends on your local energy price, hardware costs, and (obviously) the exchange value of Bitcoin. Using an NVIDIA card at the time of writing also seems to be useless, since there are no good GPGPU implementations
Get Your Automated Bitcoin Trading Robot at www.btcrobot.comfor mining for this manufacturer. To give you an impression about the current situation, at time of writing, an AMD 6970 is able to produce 0.0077 BTC per day, this is less than 0.8$ at an actual Bitcoin price of 100$.We recommend to do the math before you start mining.A Tip: Use a mining pool where you can share the work (and also the reward) based on the provided calculation power with other miners.The links at the end of this chapter give you information for mining pool pages and Bitcoin itself. We suggest you make use of BTC Guild or Slush’s pool. They provide as a good starting point.Links:Here some comparisons and calculation links to give you an idea and help you to make your math.[1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf[2] Hardware comparison for GPGPU mininghttp://mrlithium.blogspot.co.at/2013/02/bitcoin-mining-hardware-comparison-7850.html[3] To give you an example of the power of special mining hardware in comparison to GPGPUhttp://bitcoinexaminer.org/7-awesome-asic-bitcoin-miners/[4] Calculation sheet to determine how much money your mining rig brings youhttp://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/[5] Bitcoin Mining poolshttps://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools
Get Your Automated Bitcoin Trading Robot at www.btcrobot.comConclusionIf you want to start with Bitcoins and you don’t want to spend money on brokers, you can still mine coins. But this is pretty much to search for gold nuggets in a river or trying to find the needle in a haystack. Maybe you find something, maybe you waste your time. Our suggestion: if you want to make money with Bitcoins, don’t mine them, trade them!
