If you wanted some impressive numbers for Bitcoin mining, you have come to the right place.The Beast is a rig build around a Core i7 processor and motherboard and 5 GPUs working in tandem off of a single power supply.Here you can see three cards lining up to be utilized for profit computing: the Radeon HD 6990, Radeon HD 5970 and Radeon HD 6970.With a total of 5 GPUs in this configuration we were really pushing the boundaries of our power supply and office air conditioning.This screen grab shows you the 5 GPUs at work and the impressive (and dangerous) temperatures as a result.The HD 6990 card GPUs actually hit the 103 degree Celsius mark!Power consumption on this combination peaked at 1067 watts which actually tells how well built the Corsair AX1200 power supply is!The cards got HOT very quickly and the fans were spinning a much higher rate than we are used to.While the configuration did work for a while in our test bed I would not recommend anyone with a sane mindset build it for actual 24/7 usage.

So, let's look at some of the performance results from "The Beast"!Pushing nearly 1.6 Ghash/s, The Beast nearly doubles the performance of the overclocked ASUS ARES card.Somewhat surprisingly, even at an estimated cost of $1710, the GPUs on The Beast were a better value than most of our other configurations and were only bested by the HD 5750, HD 5830 and HD 6850.bitcoin faucet for coinbaseSo, yes, The Beast used about 1067 watts during peak power consumption but in terms of performance per watt, again it impressed us by coming in second in this metric!ethereum overtake bitcoinThe use of a pair of dual-GPU cards seems to be helping it out as those appeared to be the most power-efficient options.bitcoin p2p digital currencyAs expected The Beast earns the most with just about $14.65 entering into your virtual wallet every 24 hours.small litecoin miner

So it cost you $1710 to buy the cards but how long until you pay it off at that rate?A surprisingly modest 116+ days.Because of the high cost of the ARES relative to other dual-GPU cards, The Beast is able to out gain the overclocked version of it by a factor of 2.18x with a potential profit of $3,637 per year AFTER paying off your $1,710 investment.is bitcoin profit taxableWhen we first decided to build The Beast for this article we thought it would definitely be an outlier in the performance metrics with that much power but we also though it would be way to power hungry and costly to make sense.bitcoin lottery by hackingThat wasn't really the case though - not only did we reach 1.6 Ghash/s but the power consumption and costs, though very high, were actually better than expected in relation to that performance.This indicates the hashing and SHA256 key creation process scales VERY close to linearly on these GPUs; something gaming rarely does.

Bitcoin is by far the most famous – and biggest – of the cryptocurrencies.But its use comes with a few downsides: it has been proven vulnerable to hacks and fraud, and has become the currency of choice for black-market transactions.Plus, its size, popularity and age all mean that mining new bitcoins is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for all but the best-equipped.Instead, however, there are a number of ‘altcoin’ currencies in existence.Here’s a small selection of alternatives to Bitcoin – each of which has its own advantages.All of them share Bitcoin’s fundamental strengths, however – minimal or zero transfer fees, and freedom from traditional banking restrictions.Bitcoin Alternative #1: Litecoin Based on the same protocol as Bitcoin, Litecoin is the second-most widely-known cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.It’s designed to be much easier to mine, thanks to its use of an algorithm designed for Linux backup systems – so you don’t need a supercomputer to get started.

New ‘blocks’, or batches of coins, are mined at a rate of 25 per hour./ Value: $1.8 Market cap: $65.727,662 Bitcoin Alternative #2: Ripple Ripple currently has the second highest market capitalization of any cryptocurrency, and it has been compared to Napster for its ubiquitous presence – it accepts any currency, but also other commodities like air miles.The entire concept is trust-based; exchanges are fundamentally a series of IOUs.In fact, Ripple isn’t really a currency itself, but a portal that converts anything into its own currency – XRP – and straight into whatever else it needs to be.Therefore it also accepts Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.One of its big advantages is instantaneous transfers (Bitcoin takes 40 minutes) across any currencies, and the ability to pay for anything, anywhere, without a local bank account, and without fees./ Value: $0.013155 Market cap: $419,763,378 Bitcoin Alternative #3: Primecoin Whereas Bitcoin generates new Bitcoins by proving the validity of previous transactions, Primecoin generates currency by finding long chains of prime numbers, known as Cunningham chains.

This means that as well as creating money, you’re performing a scientific task.Unlike Bitcoin, there is no predetermined number of coins in existence.Primecoin’s difficulty increases linearly with each new coin mined, rather than every 2016 like Bitcoin (roughly every two weeks).Coin blocks are generated 10 times faster than Bitcoin, and payments processed equally quickly.http://primecoin.io/ Value: $0.03 Market Cap: 309,786.33 Bitcoin Alternative #4: Namecoin Created in 2011 to explore the record-keeping side of Bitcoin’s technology (Bitcoin’s entire viability depends on the public record of transactions), Namecoin generates .bit web addresses which are censorship free, and unregulated by ICANN, the governing body for domain names.It allows users to store secure data in very small amounts.Like Ripple, it’s not really a currency in itself, but the .bit DNS addresses change hands just like Bitcoin.It’s generally thought to be a better longer-term bet than many cryptocurrencies, all of which are notoriously volatile.