In case you haven't heard, there's this thing called bitcoin. Over thanksgiving the price went up to $1200 each. Kinda ridiculous for something that really has no conceivable value, and many expect it to fail miserably, while others expect bitcoins to be valued at a small percentage of the global black market (think billions of dollars spread out over 25 million maximum bitcoins by the year 2040).

What can certainly be said is that bitcoins are fun to play around with and gamble with stocks/money that you created yourself. There's just one problem: It's not feasible to mine bitcoins anymore. With so many people mining, and the difficulty so high, you have to spend $10000 to get any reasonable amount back, and even then it won't pay off.

Enter Altcoins:

altcoins are derivatives of bitcoins which are much easier to mine due to their age and for other reasons. The most prevalent of these is Litecoins, which are currently worth $20-$30 each, and they're actually feasible to mine (using a 7950 I can get 1 LTC a week). I won't go into details on how to mine, as all you need to do is join a pool and click their "getting started" link.

However, even these other cryptocurrencies payout very small amounts over time, and they're relatively old for a cryptocurrency. The price in USD may be unstable, but the mining speed is very stable (ie slow). There's a much newer currency which is definitely on the rise:


Dogecoin - such profit

All jokes aside, dogecoin is currently 10 days old, so if you start mining now, you can actually gain a lot. At the current exchange rate, I've made ~$600 in the past week, and I could feasibly cash out right now. Dogecoins have the advantage of being hilarious, very young, and a quick and easy way to make some cryptocurrency to play around with without actually spending any money other than electricity. If you can time the bubbles right, you can even buy low and sell high on a day to day basis. Places like coinedup.com, btc-e and mtgox will let you trade cryptocurrencies, even for real money.

If you let bitcoin pass you by, there's still time to get in for free.

much profits yes

I never really understood this whole cryptocurrency thing.
They are supposed to be used as an alternative currency, or they can be used to cash in with actual money?

I can mine coins and use my laptop as a space heater!

Some websites accept these currencies to buy things, and you can also sell them for real money.

EDIT;
How many do you have? O.o I've been doing this for a very short while, and calculating the dogecoin to bitcoin to USD, I almost have 1/10th of a cent. Do you just have an amazing computer and connection or something? xD

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Dec 17 2013, 6:02 am by FaRTy1billion.

I tried cgminer but it doesn't work.

Created an account + worker @ http://doge.scryptpools.com

I started it (as admin) with this command line: cgminer.exe --scrypt -o tcp://doge.scryptpools.com:3333 -u Doge -p [my PW]
also tried this: cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://doge.scryptpools.com:3333 -u Doge -p [my PW]

After about 20s the window just states
probing for alive pool
pool difficulty changed to 64
pool 0 slow/down or credentials wrong

and after a bit to goes blank and thats it. No GPU or CPU load. But I put in the correct username and PW for my worker I created. I copied the url / port from the website. So what's wrong? Or is it a thing that pools go down from time to time?

I was wondering when a thread about Bitcoins would come up.

Correction in the OP: there will only be 21 million Bitcoins produced, though that 21M will never be reached as the production is halved every 4 years. It is estimated to reach that amount by the year 2140.

You need to create a worker first. For example, I set mine to Apos.1 with 'x' as the password. If you have other computers, then you can create more workers such as Apos.2.

Essentially, once you create a worker, it doesn't matter if others know that password since if they use it, they'll just be working for you.

Edit:

So if you want to mine for me, here is the command you'd have to use:

Though I would suggest optimizing that command for your GPU, for example, in my case, I get a better hash rate using:


Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Dec 17 2013, 8:20 am by Apos.

I can't get cgminer to work. :\ It just crashes immediately after "[2013-12-17 02:13:55] Started cgminer 3.7.2". :\ I guess I'm stuck with the cpuminer.
And all the while I was trying to figure out cgminer I could've been mining (and heating my room!). D: I only have like 5 dogecoin.

I put this on my desktop as another worker too, and my laptop gets like 14x as much hash/s. xD I haven't tried cgminer on the desktop. ...

Does it matter what pool you join?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 17 2013, 9:57 am by FaRTy1billion.

I can't get cgminer to work either . How do you run cpuminer to the correct settings?

I'm running GUIMiner, which is a GUI for mining (that command line stuff is so lame).

Host: doge.cryptopool.it
Port: 3322

Link for pool here.

Edit: updated pool.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 17 2013, 4:47 pm by Sacrieur.

Looks interesting, I'll give it a shot.


1 US dollar is 10,000 Dogecoins, so how did you get so many Dogecoins?

I've been running it with:


Does it work better than cpu mining? I'm only getting ~30 Khash/s, and my other computer gets ~2 with the cpu miner. I tried cdminer on my other computer and it works, but I don't think I have it set up correctly. I lowered all the parameters because it kept giving an error and saying disabling GPU mining. I think I got it to work and the site reports ~7 Khash/s.

And does it matter what pool I use? xD I now am aware of 3 pools. Is there a difference?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 18 2013, 12:12 am by FaRTy1billion.

Awesome, I'm finally mining. Whatever that means. such profit. wow. very thanks.

I tried that pool and it said it couldn't connect. ;o

How can you tell if a pool is a good one to be in? Or is it better to be in a bunch of them? I don't have a lot of processing power, so I want to just stick to something that isn't going to be completely unreasonable. Should I try getting litecoin?

On Mac OS X 10.7, neither Asteroid, cgminer, or MacMiner work properly (even command-line doesn't work). I'm going to update to Mavericks since it looks like those programs aren't supported on my OS version.

I've also considered just buying a bunch of dogecoins and hope that they'll eventually increase in value, rather than slowly mining them.

Or in video:


Edit: To answer your question, you can use it as an alternate currency, or you can exchange it some for actual cash locally or at an exchange. In Canada, Vaul of Satoshi would be an example of an exchange.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Dec 18 2013, 6:15 am by Apos. Reason: Found a typo...

They can be used outright to buy things online from dealers who accept crytocurrency.

Or you can trade them on an online market for conventional currency, works the same way as would switching between currencies.

For more intricacies about how currencies work, see Spice & Wolf season 1.

Okay, solved my problems.
The first site/pool I tried seems to be down / not work.

The 2nd one (from Sac) works, but seems to be a scam. Looks exactly like the first site and I can enter any user/pw and will start mining. So who do I mine for if I just chose random letters for username?!

I just started at http://doge.cryptominer.net/index.php and it seems to work. However My Worker Page still says the worker is inactive. Does it mean I made a mistake with username / PW (unlikely) or do I just have to wait until the site updates?

EDIT:
What GPU do you have? Without optimizing the settings I only get ~20 KHash / s with cg miner. Actually my accounts says 60KHash / s, cg miners realtime data says ~20KH/s (not KHashs?). What's the "correct" value?

Also why not run cgminer and cpuminer on the same computer?

Update:
My worker now also shows to be working on my account.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Dec 18 2013, 7:17 am by NudeRaider.

After you create a worker with a password, your login on your guiminer is Login.Worker (For instance, mine is Sacrieur.Doge1), then the password is the password for the worker (not the password to login to the website). Under your settings there's a payment address box that you put your wallet address in, it will automatically deposit the coins into your wallet.

So how it works is that the entire pool works to solve the block, and when they do, the coins are split up based on shares (determined by how much work your computer did). So you won't get paid until the block is solved.

Four questions:
- How does the actual mining work? I have to run a program actively to be mining? (Which would then mean leaving the computer open 24/7 is an advantage?) Would it use bandwidth, and at what rate if so?
- Why is there a charge for transfers? What is it used for/Who receives it?
- How different are the other alternative cryptocurrency? What are their advantages/disadvantages? Why did people feel a need to create other ones?
- What happens once all the bitcoins have been generated?