Quote from: GenesisSources on July 24, 2013, 11:57:11 AM

Quote from: Trillium on July 22, 2013, 02:23:18 PM

Quote from: glungnahund on July 22, 2013, 01:11:23 PM

Currently there are dozens of alternative coins. Some are just "copy&paste" coins, some do have a slight modification of the algorithm or some small extra features. However, in my opinion neither of these coins has a real advantage over bitcoin. Thus, why are you mining/investing your time into one of these altcoins?

Because GPU miners in particular can make a lot more money mining scrypt based altcoins than mining bitcoin. Litecoin is regularly in the realm of 100-150% profitability according to various altcoin comparison chart / stats sites. There are several other coins lately that have exceeded 200% profitability and stayed up there for a few days at time, far better than BTC even when they eventually pop in some cases.

So the short answer to your question is: "to make more money".

ASIC investment remains high risk, many won't ever see ROI. Many miners don't want to get rid of their GPUs just yet for various reasons.

If your idea of mining is squeezing every bit of coin out of your GPU hardware then altcoins are definitely for you. On the other hand if your idea of mining is to setup an ASIC or mine BTC shares with a GPU and check on it once a week or less then you have probably wasted your time reading this thread because altcoins are not for you.

Whether its worthwhile mining the other SHA-256 coins with an ASIC is another matter entirely that I don't think I'll go into right now...

Trillium, this is the first post I have seen in the newb forum area that was worth reading; but I suppose that means I did my homework before investing time in mining Litecoin. I don't really have enough GPU-power to do much good, but I'm not paying anything for power where I currently live. My best miner is a (uggh, I know) Asus GTX 550Ti, which I have been using Cudaminer with to get ~75kh/s (which btw is a lot better than what is shown with , and stability isn't great. Since I'm not paying for power, I'm shopping for a 7970 (maybe up to 4 of them...) and would sure like to get some input as to which 7970s people are happiest & fastest mining with.

My other concern should be one that all newbs want answered: What are the ins & outs of converting coin to cold, hard $$$ in your preferred form (as in depending where you live)? How is the final step of transferring funds into an account handled typically?

GenesisSources

I can't advise re 7970 but I see a lot of people seem to like the 7950 vapor-x cards so maybe they are the way to go? Not sure.

I live in Australia so the BTC->$AUD services are going to be completely different.

I personally have previously used services that convert BTC to Paypal, sometimes with very low fees, because I buy a LOT of stuff on ebay.

However, those services have since discontinued, in the future I might use a service called Coinjar, I have used their Cash->BTC service (coinjar filler) with success already and I'm happy with them so far.

I would be really happy if there was a new service available in Australia where I can send someone BTC and they'll pay money using BPay, which is like a electronic bill payment system that just utilises a reference number. The previous service I used to do this with ceased. If anyone knows of a service that still does this... let me know. (I suppose I could use this forum to find people willing to send money towards the reference number. But there are trust issues with that, it could go wrong, a tested service provided by a company or group would be better.)