ATI 6990 Bitcoin mining

In this post I am going to cover my experience with Bitcoin mining over the past 20 months or so. During this time I have purchased specific hardware for the task of mining Bitcoins in order to come out with a profit at the end. My journey started in June 2011 when I purchased 4 ATI 6990s and has more or less come to an end now in March 2013 when I sold my mined Bitcoins for a profit.

The aim of this project was to be able to purchase some cool hardware that could perform a high level of computation, that would eventually pay for itself. Hash cracking is a hobby of mine and I saw Bitcoin as a good opportunity to generate profit while I was not cracking hashes.

There is a lot of other Bitcoin specific terminology throughout this post so I will try to provide various links to describe these aspects as necessary.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer (P2P) digital currency that allows for instant payments between anyone, anywhere, in an anonymous manner. As Bitcoin is P2P there is no central authority giving it many advantages over many traditional currencies. For further information on what exactly Bitcoin is and how it works I suggest taking a look at the about page found here.

Bitcoins can be “mined” with computing power, for example you can use CPU/GPU power to collect Bitcoin. It is recommended to go with GPU power over CPU for Bitcoin mining as CPU is extremely slow in comparison to GPU. This is because the computation involves generating a SHA-256 hash and this operation can be much faster performed on a graphics card.

Generally AMD (Formally ATI) graphics cards are used for this task as they are much more efficient at this than Nvidia based graphics cards, you can find a comparison between the different graphics cards and what they can provide for your Bitcoin mining here.