Welcome :3333 with your user name and a dummy (x or 123) password.Or use a specific region: :3333 (United States) :3333 (United States) :3333 (Europe) A closer server can slightly reduce stale (rejected) work.A reject ratio around 0.10% is normal.Check live stats to see your reject ratio in the current shift.If you have firewall issues try port 443 instead of 3333.New users can mine with just the user name.That's because you start out with a worker that has the default setting enabled.To use a specific worker mine with your user name, an underscore, then a worker name, e.g.There is no password check.You can put X or 123 as password.Bitminter is a bitcoin mining pool that aims to make it easy for anyone to make bitcoins.Bitminter is one of the oldest pools.Since we opened in 2011 over 450 000 people have registered accounts with us.We hope that you will join us too!What do I need?ASICs took over in 2013.Mining one bitcoin with just a PC now takes millions of years.

You'll want a 1 TH/s or faster ASIC machine to start a small mining-at-home operation.Have a look at Antminer from Bitmain and AvalonMiner from Canaan.Used ASICs are available at ebay and similar places.Reward System Your work is recorded in shifts.When we create a new block you get a share of the income proportional to how much of the work in the last 10 completed shifts is yours.This reward system is known as PPLNS with shifts.99% of the mining income (including transaction fee income) is paid out to users.Donations are optional and will unlock various perks.The first thing I needed to do was to set up a wallet, or a place to keep my bitcoins.A wallet lets you engage in Bitcoin transactions—it lets you create Bitcoin addresses you can share and that people can send money to.In addition to being able to send and receive bitcoins to and from other Bitcoin users, you need a wallet so that you've got somewhere to keep the bitcoins you generate through mining.I wound up creating my wallet at Blockchain.info, though there are many alternatives.

Once you've got a wallet, you really ought to join a mining pool because Bitcoin mining is best done with shared labor.bitcoin silicon valley bankNothing at all forbids you from striking out on your own, but the nature of the entire virtual currency system is such that by sharing the work required for "discovering" the currency, you share in the reward as well.ethereum get richUnderstanding how bitcoins are brought into being requires understanding the network behind the currency.bitcoin rush reviewBriefly, the entire record of every Bitcoin transaction ever made stretching back to the currency's beginning is public.bitcoin fact fiction future

This is called the block chain.Bitcoin mining involves confirming those transactions by collecting several of them together into a group called a block and running specific cryptographic functions on it.bitcoin iphone widgetThe chain concept comes into play because every time a bitcoin is "spent," the spender appends a hash to the bitcoin derived from his or her own cryptographic private key, the previous transaction's hash, and the recipient's cryptographic public key.bitcoin wallet key fileAs each bit of data added to Bitcoin's history of transactions is cryptographically derived from previous data, altering earlier data would invalidate the entire chain.gratis bitcoin erhaltenWhen a collected block of transactions is confirmed by a Bitcoin miner—that is, when the SHA-256 hashing that the miners are doing on a transaction results in a very specific value that starts with a number of zeros—the block is said to have been "mined."ethereal crystal sword

The winning miner is allowed to reward itself with some number of bitcoins.iowa state bitcoinThat number is currently 25, and it decreases by 50 percent in intervals over time.If you're mining in a pool, you split the reward with the other members of your pool based on the pool's specific rules.If you're mining by yourself, you keep the entire payout.The issue with mining by oneself is that it's very likely to take you much, much longer to confirm a block than it would with an entire pool's resources.Joining a pool is the way to faster payouts of bitcoins.Because I can never do anything the easy way, I wasn't content with getting the BFL box working under Windows, which is a well-documented and fairly straightforward process.No, I wanted to make it work under OS X. That required a bit of help.I spent quite a bit of time talking with John O'Mara, creator of the MacMiner application for mining bitcoins on a Mac.MacMiner is a FOSS GUI wrapper that uses another FOSS application, bfgminer, to tell the mining hardware (be it video cards or separate ASIC-based boxes) what to do.

In the end, the solution involved a lot of work on John's part and not really that much on mine, except for me running commands and reporting back their results.Because Butterfly Labs miners are still relatively scarce in the wild, John didn't have one to test with.Still, using me as a (dumb) remote manipulator, we eventually got the BFL box correctly hooked up and mining.The release version of MacMiner supports the Butterfly Labs ASIC miners now, but since I had gotten it working first on the command line, that's what I stuck with.In fact, once it worked, it was a little anticlimactic.I typed in the command and the bash prompt to kick the miner off.Rather than spitting out an error like it had been doing, the screen lit up in a deliciously cryptic display.Lots of numbers everywhere.I stared at it for long seconds, watching the updates crawl upward from the bottom of the screen.Am I actually mining?I envisioned my little MacBook Air lighting up like a slot machine if I found an actual block.

Would sirens go off?Would money shoot out?I quickly shared a screenshot with the rest of the Ars team in IRC.No one really knew.I kept staring at the numbers, not yet willing to glance at bfgminer's documentation to see what they meant.All I knew is that there were lots of counters and things on my screen, and I wanted them to be higher.I had a sudden flashback to my first job out of college in 2000, when I dragged 20 unused Pentium II PCs into a corner and rigged them all up with the SETI@Home client and briefly became an ET-searching superstar.The BFL miner does precisely one thing: compute SHA-256 hashes as fast as it can.So from a benchmarking perspective, the main question to answer is whether or not it hits its rated target of five billion hashes per second.When hashing, the BFL miner actually hovers at between 5.4-5.6GH/sec, delivering a bit more than its rated amount of hashes per second.The device pulled about 30 watts of power when idle and 50 watts of power when actively hashing.

It reported internal temperatures as high as 80C.Some back-of-the-napkin math based on my Kill-a-Watt meter's readings show that the device would consume a bit under $100 per year in electricity.However, at current Bitcoin mining difficulty levels, it produces about 0.1 BTC about every 12 hours.It's impossible to speculate on BTC-to-dollar rates in the future since they're so volatile.But at the exchange rates that were current as I was piecing this article together, the miner had repaid its purchase price within ten days.If the value and difficulty of BTC holds, an ASIC-based miner like this could generate thousands of dollars of revenue per year.After a couple of days tinkering with the box to actually get it mining, it was kind of a letdown.The box made noise and consumed a bit of electricity; every 12 hours or so I would get a notice in e-mail from Blockchain.info, letting me know that another ~0.1BTC had been deposited into my account thanks to the combined efforts of me and the rest of the pool I'd joined.

It was not a scam.It was a legitimate 5GH/s miner.The Ars editorial team had resolved even before I plugged in the device that we'd be donating any monies it generated to the EFF.So after I'd gotten a representative sample of bitcoins, I was ready to stop and donate.However, there was still one major aspect of Bitcoin mining that wasn't terribly clear to me.How, exactly, does one cash out?Before I donated the fruits of the miner's labor, I resolved to actually take the bitcoin generation through to the end I'd been wondering about.At this point, which was the last week in May, the little BFL box had generated precisely 2.90220929 BTC.I would take those bitcoins and turn them into cold, hard cash.I quickly learned that transforming BTC into USD wasn't a single-step process.There's no "cash out" button; rather, you must either arrange a transaction yourself with a private party or sell your BTC through an exchange.I started with the list of exchanges on the Bitcoin wiki to get a feel for my options.

The most famous exchange is MtGox, but looking at its options for withdrawing funds quickly turned me away.Most exchanges allow you to sell your BTC for US dollars, but few provide a way to retrieve your dollars that I felt comfortable using.Many allow you to transfer dollars to a PayPal account, but I don't use PayPal.Others let you pull money directly into a personal checking account via ACH or wire transfer, but I wasn't willing to share my bank account details or open a new throwaway checking account.Some exchanges, including MtGox, allow you to withdraw dollars using Dwolla (no thanks) or Liberty Reserve (too late).Finally, a little way down the list, I noticed one exchange with the option to withdraw funds in the form of USPS money orders: Camp BX.I popped over to its site and established an account, then I generated an address to receive the bitcoins.Back over at my Blockchain.info wallet, I clicked the "Send Money" option, entered the address I'd generated for my Camp BX account, selected my entire store of 2.90220929 bitcoins, and hit "Send Payment."

The transaction went through.I'd just created some work for the legions of other Bitcoin miners to verify.Several minutes later, the balance showed up in my Camp BX account.Somewhere else, a new block of 25 bitcoins was awarded and spread around as incentive for helping validate my transaction.I was far more concerned at this point with actually getting some money out of the infernal machine.Without being too terribly sure what I was doing, I clicked "TRADE NOW" and then initiated a "Quick Sell" order.The ticker at the top of the screen informed me that the current bid price for bitcoins was $129.52 per, and it recommended that I sell my BTC at that rate.So I gamely typed in my maximum amount of BTC, entered the suggested rate of $129.52, and previewed the order."You are about to execute a Quick Sell order," the site informed me, showing me the details I'd entered on the previous screen.Feeling every bit the Internet tycoon, I clicked "EXECUTE SELL."The next screen informed me that my sell order had gone through immediately.