Bitcoin Plus Miner
So bitcoins are a digital currency, cool. Currently bitcoins are worth about $10 USD/CAD but they move quite often. Now the video mentioned mining.
***UPDATE*** Coin prices have spiked and are now worth about $1240 USD/CAD
What is Mining?
What is mining? well mining is using your computer hardware to verify other transactions. Now I don't understand mining very well so instead of explaining it and getting it horribly wrong i will send you to Now what i do know about it is that CPU mining is virtually dead and if your not running not running a mac pro or a PC with a decent video card (AMD Radion are the best for this) don't even bother. Even the dual xeon 8 core mac pro's will only get about 25 mhash/s and that is about .01 bit coins every 2 days. I wouldn't bother unless you have a vid card that can do at least 200 mhash/s (these numbers will be explained soon).
***UPDATE*** These days FPGA miners and ASIC miners are the best choice if you have the cash as they use less power than an ipad charger.
What is a hash/sA hash is a search or "check" so your hash rate is how many checks per second you are doing khash/s is 1, 000 checks a second a mhash/s is 1, 000, 000 checks per second so when i say you need a video card that can do a minimum of 200 mhash/s it means that it has to be capable of 200, 000, 000 checks per second.
here is an example of what my mac can do
My mac MBP 13" base (late 2011) can use it's CPU to do 1792 khash/s or 1.792 mhash/s with nothing else running. my mac can not do hashing with it's vid card because it is an integrated card and not a dedicated card.
However my old pc with an upgraded vid card (amd 7770) is doing just under 200 mhash/s so it is good for what I'm doing
here is a list of vid cards that have been tested
Now if this is something you want to get involved in i will have links below with the mining software you'll need
What is a mining pool?
A mining pool is a bunch of people who get together and put all of there hash/s together to do the work faster. Unless you have/planning to build a huge mining rig (4 x 600 mhash/s cards or more) you should join a pool here is a calculator to show you why leave all the numbers the same except change the hash rate to what ever it is for the card your using we will use 200 mhash/s like in the example above you can change your electricity rate if you know it but mine is .106 per kilowatt so i will use that. the wattage we will use if for the card so in this example it is also 200w. change the time frame to 12 months change the cost of hardware to 0 and the profitability decline to 1 then hit calculate.
