345Do mining contracts ever make sense?(self.Bitcoin)submitted by There's a lot of talk about mining contracts, but the prices are very high (i haven't found anywhere that's less than 3 months up-front), and in generally from calculations it always seems like a bad idea, unless BitCoin experiences a huge price hike.(Which I don't think will happen.)So, does it makes sense to buy mining contracts or not?Can you every make any money, if you consider that BitCoin may not increase past its current valuation?π Rendered by PID 14579 on app-404 at 2017-06-24 12:56:33.536011+00:00 running 3522178 country code: SG.Can data centers tap unused server capacity to mine for Bitcoins?The question occurred to the team at the online backup service iDrive, which performs most of its customer backup jobs overnight, leaving its 3,000 quad-core servers idle for much of the day.So the company ran a test with 600 servers to see whether Bitcoin mining could become a secondary revenue stream.The result: running Bitcoin mining software on those 600 quad-core servers for a year would earn about 0.43 Bitcoin, worth a total return of about $275.08 at current prices on major Bitcoin exchanges.

“Its a waste of time, so any other company thinking about mining with their infrastructure, learn from us,” said iDrive’s Matthew Harvey.You need custom machines to effectively mine bitcoins and generate a real ROI.” The iDrive test-drive reinforced a common theme on Bitcoin mining forums: To earn money by mining, you need to invest in highly-customized computers using ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to crunch data for creating and tracking bitcoins.Bitcoin is sometime referred to as the “Internet of money,” a platform using cryptography and software to offer an alternative currency and payment-tracking system.At its heart is a huge distributed computing network that verifies each transaction.Participants in this online ledger are rewarded with new bitcoins, which are issued about every 10 minutes.Over the past year, the computing power supporting the bitcoin network has soared.The cryptocurrency is now supported by a powerful global network backed by 150,000 petaflops per second of computing power, roughly 600 times the combined power of the all the supercomputers in the Top500 list.

Practitioners of Bitcoin mining – the term for using data-crunching computers to earn newly-issued virtually currency – are adopting more powerful hardware, pooling their efforts and seeking to slash their power bills.Most serious Bitcoin miners have graduated from CPUs and GPUs to specialized chips such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) or ASICs that can be optimized for specific workloads.bitcoin open source minerThis has led to the emergence of a new class of hardware vendors selling custom hardware for bitcoin mining.ethereum cpu vs gpu miningThe horsepower required to succeed in Bitcoin is highlighted by the iDrive simulation, which used 600 servers.bitcoin tagesvolumen“Our study projected a year of mining at 100 percent processing power 24/7 and the assumption that the difficulty of mining (the calculating of hashes) would increase linearly,” iDrive noted in a blog post describing its experiment.bitcoin atm reviews

“In the end, we learned a lot about the interesting process of bitcoin mining, however, for us, the pros did not outweigh the cons.So, IDrive decided to stick with that we do best.” They’re not the only ones who’ve contemplated repurposing powerful equipment to pursue cryptocurrency, The 4,000-core Odyssey supercomputer at Harvard was secretly used to mine Dogecoin, the ironic virtual currency used primarily for online tipping.my bitcoin saverThe covert miner has had their computing privileges at the university suspended.ethereum averageBitcoin, Dogecoins, and other cryptocurrencies have grabbed a lot of headlines for their explosive growth (and bust, and growth, and, well…).bitcoin generator poolThe trick is that generating this currency—"mining" it—requires an awful lot of computing power.bitcoin 2014 cz

Instead of computers, let's use lots of smartphones!Unfortunately, security company Lookout says that the math on mobile mining just doesn't add up.Mobile Mining Number CrunchThe numbers say it all.Lookout's researchers calculated that if you're mining for 24 solid hours on a Samsung Galaxy SIII, you'd only earn .00000007 Bitcoin or $0.00004473.In order to make just one Bitcoin in a day, Lookout says you'd need 14,285,714 phones working full-tilt simultaneously.ethereum current blockchain sizeBitcoins are hugely valuable (over $600USD per Bitcoin), and therefore require huge resources to mine.But even less valuable cryptocurrency, like Litecoin, are beyond the reach of mobile miners.If you took 3,752 SIII phones and let them work for 24 hours, you'd end up with a single Litecoin which is worth a paltry $8 USD.Malicious Miners Despite the overwhelming odds, Lookout's principal security researcher Marc Rogers told Security Watch he has seen numerous malicious Bitcoin miners targeting mobile devices.

He estimated there was a new mining variant detected every month."The kind of folks who are making mobile malware are very, very inventive," he said."Every new mining system has a new feature.They're trying every direction they can to make it profitable, and that's quite fascinating."Why then do malicious mobile miners persist?Rogers  believes that the benefits of the cryptocurrency (it's free, untraceable, and so on) are simply too tempting for malware creators.There's also a "cool factor" in trying to exploit this new technology."Early iterations of mining malware did not seem like serious attempts to be profitable, just playing with the technology and seeing what they could do with it," said Rogers."But it's pretty clear that the later versions are deliberate attempts to be profitable."Currently, Rogers says that Lookout is seeing mobile miners trying to be more discreet in order to distribute their malware to more victims and keep infected phones mining longer.According to Lookout, instead of working your phone until smoke pours out, sophisticated malicious miners only run when connected to chargers, or when the screen is off.

Of course, these kinder, gentler malicious miners can't mine nearly as much per day as more aggressive apps.There's a Better Way Of course, there are legitimate Bitcoin mining apps out there, and some developers may be tempted to include mining code in their own applications in the hope of making a little money.However, Rogers says that there is a much simpler way to turn a legitimate profit with mobile apps.Before you freak out, remember that Lookout is no friend to malicious or abusive advertising."Advertising gets a bad rap because we see ad networks that spoil your gameplay or your user experience, but there are good advertising networks out there that are responsible and careful," said Rogers."Advertising would be thousands of times more profitable for a developer than mining.There's a reason ads have powered the mobile ecosystem."Case in point, the surprise mega-hit Flappy Bird reportedly earned its creator $50,000 a day in ad revenue.Mobile Mining Here to Stay Though Lookout's numbers paint a bleak picture, Rogers that we'll see more mobile mining as phones become more sophisticated.