Quote from: 5atthebeach on July 21, 2013, 07:14:34 PM

I'm just learning about your world in the last few days. I stumbles across it while my son was looking at used gaming PC's and we came across one that was built for btc mining. So we researched what it is...

Geez I wish I had bought 100 jalapeños last year.

My son and I are considering getting in as a father son project.

My choices seem like:
1. Buy a PRE-order 60 single and wait...losing the best capture opportunity in the next couple months but spending only a few thou. I'm worried that by the time I get it, I'll get frustrated with the payback.

2. Buying In-hand 60 for 10k...but worried that I'll NEVER recover the 10k. Seems like a ridiculous gamble.

3. Buying a severely over-priced jalapeño in hand and call it cheap entertainment even if it never pays for itself.

4. Wait for a jalapeño from BFL and call it really cheap entertainment but mine almost nothing.

5. Invest in btc and let someone else mine, but that defeats the father son time thing.

Save my money, and buy some puzzles...lol, j/k really think this could be fun for us, cuz he's a gamer, and really into computers, and I love gambling, risk taking and investing.

Plz give me some basic advice...is it too late???

Hello 5atthebeach,

Like many others I just started with all this about the end of may. Mining Litecoins at a pool with my single hd 6970 was producing about 0.75 Litecoins (LTC) per day. During the next week I read as much as I could and went from the single HD 6970 to 2 dedicated GPU mining rigs consisting of 6 HD 7950's total, running headless (no monitor) on BAMT (specialized free operating system for coin mining). This modest 2 rig setup mines scrypt coins like LTC at about 4mh/s. Each of the 6 hd 7950's also came with game bundles as a promotion, which I sold on eBay (all but 1 that I kept for myself.) The game promotion is coming to and end but it can significantly reduce the cost of the cards if sold.

I have yet to mine a single Bitcoin but I have traded other coins for Bitcoin on the exchanges. If I were to trade all the other coins I have mined in the last month for Bitcoin today, they would be worth about 8 Bitcoin. In other words my first full month has (theoretically) made about 22% ROI not counting the ~$60.00 increase to my power bill. I am fortunate to have cheap power here @ $.05kw/h.

As mentioned in the 1st reply to this thread, ALT coins can be a great way to get into BTC while learning about the different coins and how the exchanges work along the way.

Only having low to moderate computer knowledge made it a bit of a challenge along the way and I would have never succeeded if it weren't for the excellent guides readily provided by others. That being said I'll try and post some links that I found/find useful.

Consolidated Litecoin Mining Guide for 5xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx GPUs: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=1f8c11f1558f2829cd4d6d71220b2f9d&topic=117221.0

Bitcoin Mining Rigs | How to Build a Litecoin or Bitcoin Mining Rig: http://www.coinminingrigs.com/

Litecoin BAMT - Easy USB bootable mining Linux distro: https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2924.0.html

Manotechnology: CGWatcher, a GUI/monitor for CGMiner and BFGMiner: http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgwatcher.html

http://coinmarketcap.com

http://www.coinchoose.com

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

https://btc-e.com

https://www.cryptsy.com

https://coinbase.com

Anyway hope that is of some help. It's definitely not too late.

OK that's my first post, hopefully it will qualify me for parole in a few hours Wink