This seems to be quite common with BTC. People like to run away with your money.

I've never heard of this. Buying and selling Bitcoins locally is a thing now, you say? I've gotta try this.

Before you waste your money, I'm going to stop you right there. nVidia SLI is a terrible idea, as nVidia GPUs just can't crunch cryptos as fast as AMD GPUs. This isn't fanboying, this is known fact. You can see here (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison) even though this is for Bitcoin the hashrates apply to scrypt-based cryptos like Litecoin if you divide the hashrate by 100. If you really want to get into GPU mining, I'd suggest buying some upper-end GPUs and diving into the alt coin market with Litecoin or Feathercoin. I don't know what's hot in the GPU/alt coin market since I've been out of it for quite some time. Good luck man!

IMO I don't think of it as unethical or immoral. Say you have a 5GH/s Jalapeno ASIC from BFL. Said ASIC can easily be powered by a 30-watt solar panel on one's roof, thereby consuming no electricity produced by the combustion of fossil fuels or other unrenewable resources. If you think the minerals and energy that went into producing said ASIC are wasted, they are not. An ATM machine, let alone a massive banking corporation's office buildings, computers, chairs, even the toilets are composed of far more metal than ever will be used in miners. Bitcoin and other cryptos are based on a system that could easily be turned into an eco-friendly system, and it's already halfway there as the clients do not require huge transaction servers. Bitcoin wallets are held on the user's desktops, laptops and smartphones, which are most often turned off or put to sleep when not in use. Why would it be immoral to use a device such as a PC's graphic card for the production of cryptos (obsolete now) when it would have just been used for playing games anyways? The purchases of such GPUs in the massive quantities that they were purchased in helped to fuel chip makers such as AMD and their efforts to design newer, smaller and faster chips than those that came before.

Back onto the topic of power use... I live in an area where power production is predominantly hydroelectric and wind generation. As long as the wind blows, rain falls, and water flows downhill, there will be natural power to juice up my miners. I think this is far more awesome than anything that could dare be considered unethical.

Actually, I've never bought a bitcoin to call my own that I haven't traded away within a day or two. I mined a few hundred of these back in 2011, and honestly I wish I'd saved them

I used the fan off of a Thermaltake TR2-R1 CPU cooler. It's pretty quiet, but you won't be able to fit the aluminum case on your miner! I just left the bottom piece covering the board (and of course necessary for protecting the ASIC board) attached and screwed on the cooler! It fit right into the 3-pin fan connector on the board but you will have to take the heatsink off. I recommend also using new thermal paste such as Arctic Silver 5.

To be honest, any 92mm computer fan will cool those 30w ASIC boards down to just a few degrees over room temp with minimal noise. If you go low profile, you can use the aluminum case!

MOSFET heatsinks may also help keep the thing cool, even if you don't overclock. All of these items are extremely cheap on Newegg, TigerDirect and Amazon, or at your local electronics store.

I don't bother with the banks that BTC-e accepts anymore. I do all of my Bitcoin-USD transfers through coinbase.com and just import the BTC into BTC-e. Coinbase is easy and they accepted+verified my bank instantly. I use Chase, a big bank, but they seem to accept all other big banks in the US as well as MasterCard/Visa/etc. Good luck man!

Credit/debit cards of pretty much any kind and links to select bank accounts. My main bank is Chase, which Coinbase logged into and verified instantly for me. No 3-day waste of time like Gox.

That's about all I use and know about.

I left the Gox about a year ago for BTC-e and Coinbase. All I had to do was give Coinbase my credit card and some ID - Once. None of the Gox BS. They are probably still paranoid after that security breach last year. Besides, I like the BTC-e layout and trading system a little better than Gox but that's just a personal preference.

Heh, I'm not too much unlike you. I lost a beautiful girl to relentless mining and trading. I'd sit here for hours and program custom algo traders, watch my holdings grow, and I'd sell when it looked like the stuff was gonna be totally useless. I think at one point she thought I forgot she even existed but that is beside the point. Whatever Bitcoin is, scheme or not - we're in this to make money, right? You're sitting here in the middle of a new-age gold rush. She can wait.


Besides, I'm out of mining altogether. There are simply too many miners saturating the system. TRADE! Trade HARD!

It took long enough... about an hour of mining with my old Radeon HD 5770 back in 2011. I sold it, and hundreds like it, for around $3.50 a piece. I coulda been a millionaire too