As an experiment, I started running a Bitcoin miner at around the same time I published my article How to Mine Bitcoins for Fun and (Probably Very Little) Profit. It’s participating in BitcoinCZ’s mining pool, which is where I got this report on its progress:
As I wrote in my earlier article, Bitcoin miners work by confirming Bitcoin transactions and competing to be the first to record them in the “blockchain”, a sort of general ledger of every Bitcoin transaction. These additions to the blockchain are called, quite naturally, blocks. A miner or pool of miners that successfully wins the competition to add a block to the blockchain gets 25 Bitcoins as its reward (creating the block also creates a 25-Bitcoin transaction), and in the case of BitcoinCZ, that reward is split proportionately among the various miners in the pool.
Looking at the BitcoinCZ report, I’ve made somewhere between 0.00036 and 0.00047 BTC since Saturday, depending on how pessimistic or optimistic you are. At the present Bitcoin exchange of 1 BTC = USD$94.13 (as of 11:57 a.m. today), I’ve made somewhere between 3.4 and 4.4 cents.
As you’re probably aware, I make a little “walking around money” through the ads on this blog. Here’s that StatCounter report on how The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century has been doing in terms of pageviews over the past week:
Click to see the graph at full size.
The most-viewed article for the past week was How to Mine Bitcoins for Fun and (Probably Very Little) Profit; it currently accounts for almost three-quarters of all the pageviews. While I can’t get a direct report showing how much each article contributes to my ad revenues, it’s possible to come up with an estimation. My estimates show that in the past week, the Bitcoin mining article has made me somewhere between 32 and 45 dollars.
To summarize: I made 1000 times more money by writing about mining Bitcoins as I did by mining Bitcoins.
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So there's the proof. You make a lot more telling people how to make money on the Internet, than you can actually make on the Internet.
You should see what I've gotten writing freelance blog posts about mining Bitcoins. Including ASIC mining units.
I expect the word "Bitcoin" will end up in Bayesian spam filter lists very soon at this rate. It just seems to attract the flake element.
What is he mining with, a Pentium 4 processor? Anyone with knowledge about mining should be getting much, much more. You have to have the right hardware, and know how to properly configure your mining software. I am using a $250 video card and mining around .05 bitcoins per day.
Uhm, with that low of performance you should probably stop mining bitcoins.
Even a single ATI 5870 can do more than that during a week.
you people have way too much frickin time on your hands
.05 BTC a week, that's almost enough to live on! Except for the cost of the electricity, of course.
If you're making 3-4 cents per week... You're doing it wrong.
With a single ATI 7970 I am making roughly 4-5 dollars per day. Maybe you should do some research and disclose the hardware you're using before posting how "unprofitable" it is.
@Joe: LOL. Works for "get rich quick" schemes, too. You make more writing books about how to get rich than you do by following the advice in said books.
@Andy/Mike, Yes, with a fast/power hungry computer, you can mine bitcoins faster. But it still amounts to less than a penny a day, and you've spent more than that in power mining them.
Bill: I disclosed exactly what hardware I was using in the linked article: an HP IQ526, and even linked to its spec sheet.
The article was for the beginner who might want to try mining using an old TPS Reports-grade computer just lying around the house. You will get better performance from a gaming rig -- around 2 orders of magnitude. That puts it on par with what I make from blogging, minus the ancillary benefits (jobs and other opportunities) that arise from having a blog that has a decently-sized readership.
Thanks Joey! Seriously the more people believe you, the more $ for me.
You ought to have addressed scalability: you can only write so many articles a day, only win so many freelance gigs a week, whereas I can stack a few dozen GPU's in a room and compound earnings, and this income rolls in all day. And when you power down your monitor and get into your jammies, while you saw logs and dream of winning the Man Booker prize, the money rolls in for me then as well.
Like I said, the article's aimed at the average person with an old Windows machine lying about home, hoping to make big bucks on a machine with an integrated graphic chipset and not the hardcore miner who's ready to run a bank of GPUs (or better yet, FPGAs, or ASICs). Besides, I'm a mobile app developer and consultant, and have other ways to make money in my sleep.