How about a few insubstantial catchy tv ads ...

to the upbeat tune of the shake-n-vac ...
[piano intro]..... to the bitcoin shack, you get yer bitcoins back, every time ya buy stuff with the bitcoin shack ....
people were dumb enough to buy that stuff for no reason other than liking the advert

or how about
[mother on the right and eight year old girl on the left both appropriately dressed and styled for the year, in the kitchen, both smiley; yuech]
mild green .. soapy bitcoins !

If you can think of a better one, tell us all here.

Sorry.  $1 per day from 2 cpu is not possible in 2016 from any coin.  If it were, somebody would have built a $10000 per day unit comparable to the KNC Titan, and then the difficulty would have gone up x100 or more.
Even five years ago bitcoin difficulty was climbing too fast for cpu mining to gain much by comparison to the other technologies.

As for mining on 32 bit hardware .. that's even worse and probably the cause of your missing dll missing drivers and a whole lot of red flag indications.

Don't despair.  Your 32 bit laptop is sufficient to comfortably run a lightweight wallet client such as "electrum".
You can easily verify your id and buy a 20th of a bitcoin online for about $24, if you need some in hand to do tests with.
Then you can sell the consultancy service to shopkeepers and small traders in your area for a small BTC fee to set them up as you'd learned how to on your laptop.  It is by doing work for BTC that anyone with a small 32 bit laptop or smartphone can make a little bit of money.  Nevermind that you don't have a kW or two of spare electricity for a proper bitcoin miner.  You can't be the mint but you can be the village accountant, and those tend to end up better off than average.

For smaller scale services sold such as mowing sombodies' lawn, I'd recommend getting people in your neighbourhood used to one of the faster sha256d altcoins, for which you can set up as a full node running your altcoin-qt and they can pay you in any of bitcoin, or your preferred altcoin, or your local $.  Your laptop can run electrum for BTC, and an altcoin-qt full node for an altcoin, and a spreadsheet, and look up your $ bank, all concurrently.

Doesn't this look like what one would need to send an email
"help me! my late grandfather the governer of northeast nigeria left a trust fund to help me through my fine arts and sculpture degree in Athens, and to keep it from being pilfered by the rebels in our region, he used an anonymous holding company in Panama to administer it.  Now you may have noticed in this week's news that some scandalous accusations about such arrangements have led to one Panama administration subcontractor being frozen.  That's where I need your help.  For a flat fee of $60000 for one day, I need you to be my nominee director, fly out to Bermuda, sign a few papers to release funds for my next term at college, and then fly out asap.  You won't get a chance like this again to make $60000 in a day.  To get the documents out of the escrow box in Panama and to commence this very important deal, just send your full name, postal address, date of birth, place of birth and mother's maiden name to ... and send 40 BTC to .... "

hmmm.  That sounds legit and I'm a purple spotted leprechaun in sparkly golden pointy-shoes.

F.F.


Thank-you for your considered reply.  Here I must go on a counter-offensive by asserting, without a proper survey of the Turkish-Syrian border woodlands, that there definitely won't be enough green twigs nor dry twigs to set up agricultural production to feed everyone in those camps, such that they can all go home with a pamplet, start farming, and have any reasonable expectation of not starving before net food production is sufficient. 

The starting point of all my considerations is that photosynthesis always includes a reaction starting from n(H2O)+m(CO2)
Given the chemistry understanding of photosynthesis, life as we know it will not ever happen without some water going in to build tree twigs.  From now on, I will always disagree with your assertion that waterless farming is possible, but I did read the book first before saying that and thank you for your efforts to try.

I also don't have the money for a desal plant and freshwater supply canal on the scale envisaged; I asked to see whether specialists and civil engineering students think that it could be done with $20billion, which is definitely less than the murderous problems out there, or needs a bit more than that, comparable to X months of US treasury overspend.  If it could rescue sufficient agriculture to help out several countries and regions ( Turkey, Kurdistan, Daish, Northern Syrian Rebels, Damascus-Syrians, Hezzbollah, and possibly Isreal, Gaza, Jordan and Egypt too) then they could shake hands and start digging canals instead of battle tunnels, buy reverse osmosis tubes instead of rocket-shells, and so on the scale of maximum effort by everyone who lives there.

From now on, I do not agree with the claim of F.F. that waterless farming can be viable in arid regions, and ask everyone who lives there to go to maximum international co-oporative effort to build water desal and renewable energy systems (which may be daylight-only if that helps) to power farmwater production for the region.  Then use techniques from the book of F.F to obtain a multiplier of usefullness of that water by careful irrigation and mulching.  I read that the productivity of a Waitrose orange farm in southern Spain was 40 oranges per metric ton of water.  Please can anyone with agricultural experience in the middle east post here with figures for the water-efficiency of what they do.

I'm not at all sure that this would work.
How about changing it to "how'd we explain bitcoin to the subset of women who are genuinely useful, numerate, sensible with money ..."
The Angela Merkels of the female world could probably be fine with bitcoin.  Let's not waste time trying to make a KimKoin suitable for ones like Kim Kardashian, whose perception of money is that it is something to give to her to spend, and when it runs out give her some more.  Those ones can stay in the $ world thank-you.

Note that I define "genuinely useful" a little differently to how a gdp counting economist would.  I'd rate a hardworking wife engaged in childcare and household duties and who took the pill once she got to two as much more genuinely useful than a merc driving estate agent lady with four buy-to-lets and an offshore trust fund.  So lets leave those ones behind in the $ world too and consider only the needs of the genuinely productive sensible ones.  

In this postulation, what we need to make BTC appealing to sensible women is for sensible purchases; food ingredients, utility bills, washing machines, mainstream unilever products, to be available for a bitcoin price.  And for that to happen upstream at the manufacturer, we'd need oil, fertilizer and industrial minerals to have a bitcoin price without having to exchange back to $ for everything, because exchange is more lossy than a genuinely productive organization would tolerate.  I don't see that big a change going through overnight.  End-user purchase payment can go through a payment clearing place.  Paypal seem to have international multicurrency payment sorted for Amazon, Ebay and Ocado.  Why not have a Paypal for bitcoin too ?  

xavier77,

Go and have a cry about your romcom buddies not wanting to watch a weepie with you anymore.
Is it because of the internet, or is it because you've got fat and your tv room smells of pizza cheese?

Noting that Costa Rica and elements of Panama were the 1980's villian to Ronald Raygun's USA, it is probable that US cyber infiltration efforts will have looked toward Panama ever since it went online, but not necessarily gone public about what dirt they could find.  Has anyone seen a revelation against any prominent US citizen from these files yet?   Now rather than get bogged down in local wiretap requests to which the Panama law firm would always say "no, you can't go on a seize-n-sift fishing expedition to look for commies and Brinks-Matt robbers", I think that somebodies' white-hats just decided to make the whole stinking lot available to the most prim and proper uninvolved nation whom they could think of, so they sent it to the Krauts.  In this hypothesis, one of Noriega's henchmen and biggest stinking crooked revenue raising firms goes down, and for a white-hat being right according to everyone else about guessing who was a henchman of evil would be reward enough.

By the way, I'm a Brit, and quite a few British Overseas Tax Havens stand to lose their biggest money collecting activity if offshore tax avoidance goes the same way as dodo farming.
How about making genuine long-term agricultural productivity improvements for the middle east tax-deductable, so that any rotters who'd prefer to send money overseas than pay tax can do so forthwith.

I got something for the particular ASICminer hardware which I use, which has been fine for months.
If your .exe is not compatible with your laptop then sorry - I can't help.  Maybe try installing git, and see if you can find anything on github.  I'm used to linux and where possible prefer to compile from source.  Whilst some people might accuse nicehash of looking a bit suss, their software seems to have been ok and they seem to be a lot less bad than $ and Panama.

Let us know if you can get cgminer.exe to work on your hardware.  I'm not a windows person so sorry that I can't help much.

I concede that point.  It could indeed be an ASICminer single ASIC chip on usb which I was thinking of, at about 300 MHash/s.  It certainly was not a U1.

I still think that an S1 or something > 100 Ghash/s is the minimum which I could recommend for educational dabbling and gaining experience.

Having read the book, I'm rather more skeptical.  Whilst it does give a nice exposition of how to properly apply mulched green twigs, I don't think you'll find the required materials anywhere near to the exploitively irrigated desert farms pictured in Jordan and Arabia.  It presents methods for wooded areas comparable to Quebec.  In the middle east, I fear that it is either desert or irrigate, and this book does not, in my opinion, present a viable alternative waterless farming method for use in waterless regions such as Palmira, Syria.  If it did, then I'd be advocating translation efforts and distribution in the Jordanian and Turkish border camps.  Instead, I call on any agricultural planning group in any university worldwide to propose desalination from the eastern Mediterranean and freshwater canals or pipelines into Syria to provide sufficient (not exuberant) freshwater to grow crops within Syria to feed all Syrians presently at border camps or in horrid queues which won't get them into Europe.  Lets get some feasible plans up, which are not limited by the availability of fresh green twigs near Palmira, and find out how many bitcoins it would cost to get that built.

F.F. do you disagree ?

The first antminer usb stick really was 300 mega, and if plugged into a raspberry pi it could equal the output of an average gpu. That was good in 2013, but not so good now.  Look up bitcoincharts, and find a link to some more charts which show how the difficulty has gone up.

I use second hand S1 antminers, which are similar to 64 chips from the next higher model antminer-usb stick.  One S1 gets 160 to 200 Ghash/s depending on underclocking settings.  Whilst I do get hashpower envy every time I look up specs of an S5 or an S7, at least I'm within my power budget for home solar electricity experiments.
I can say that one S1 is about the minimum to see any output at all in a day from many BTC pools (or a month from some pools), and is better reconfigured with cgminer from hashnest and mining altcoins which appear in my home altcoin wallet quite frequently.  If for purposes of testing how it all works you need to see enough bitcoin to be allowed to transfer it to your home wallet, the S1 is probably the smallest sensible.  By the way, I also use it to help with warming up my computer room in the winter.

More specific advice from me I'll do for 0.1 BTC so pm me if you might want to buy configuration info.

One solution, if you can find a mining buddy who'll LAN across the dormroom, is to set up your own peershares based thing.  With only you and your mates mining, your difficulty goes to about right for whatever hardware you have on your network; in your case a 2-cpu laptop.  The resulting tokens will be useable only amongst yourselves, but there is no reason why you can't use peershares tokens within a campus 2nd-hand swapshop, a bookshop, or a a whole lot of other businesslike activities which are too small to register a companyname for but well worth doing.  Don't trade courseworks and essays though, as that would devalue your own degree, and certainly be a prohibited misuse of the computer networks.

So, to your "which altcoin may I mine with a cpu" question, my answer is your own custom peershares.

I'm interested in agriculture and chemistry.

It seems to be quite well baked in to the server.  I had a look at one of my own posts which I remember typing and spotted a uᴉoɔʇᴉq and a moondollars.  Retyping to correct found that as soon as the b word lands on the server it turns it to uᴉoɔʇᴉq.

Suppose that as a consequence of two smaller countries going full nuclear, half the world supported one side, and the other half the other, but thanks to the optimal strategy mathematicians on the centrally planned side, escalation to M.A.D. was held off by some sort of compromise including diplomatic handover of secret plans to make such things as internet modem-routers without the backdoor flaw used to read those by the cleptocratic oligarchy on the other side.  So six years on, we have two branches of the internet which mainly keep off one anothers' proprietary hardware on pain of getting bitten by the automated intrusion deathword dispensers which both sides managed to hide in immutable parts of designs passed to one another at the time of the great crisis.  In that situation of there being an Eastnet and a Westnet which cannot be linked, I think that each half would continue from the blockchain, but only doing transactions within its own half.  If ever the two blockchain forks could see one another, the shorter one would get annulled by the longer one, so both forks would need an extra twelve lines of code to formally hardfork and diverge to two branches from the blockchain of satoshi.  No doubt the oligarchs would assert that since there are more transactions going on and slightly more blockchainlength in their fork, the genuine productivity improvement payments and strictly truthful advertising signature campaigns on the other side should get annulled for being less profitable ... and so a new cold war and a world of daring physical intrusion in novel stealthcopters and other unheard off new vehicles becomes possible, for those heroes of the optimal path who have been given orders to introduce a hard fork against the wishes of the rich people on the other side.  To get those twelve lines into the other side's uᴉoɔʇᴉq nodes is a prerequisite step so that opening the new berlin wall and going to world peace and prosperity will not annihilate all the bitcoin earned from genuine productivity improvements and strictly truthful advertising.

BE CAREFUL.  Go to www.bitcoincharts.com, follow the link to the difficulty chart and look up how much of a difficulty rise has occurred between the time of some advice which you are reading and the present.  The hardware which you have listed so far would be ok for bitcoin in 2012 but is a few thousand times underpowered by comparison to what you'd want to see much and have a satisfactory experiment.  Better to send off for an ASIC miner of some sort.  Buying second hand for the price of a competent graphics card gets you around 10^3 more hash/s for a given cost or 10^2 for a given power consumption, neglecting the more expensive later models which are even faster.

I'd suggest getting an older bitmain S1, as you can run the two halves of that off two "any old ATX" with the paperclip trick and often needing to snip off some 4-pin molex connectors to get at enough black and yellow power wires to screw into the miner.  Both ATX MUST be capable of at least 18 Amps at 11.6V off a single 12V rail (the sticker on the side will indicate >=18A 12V if it is enough) and these are usually 450W or bigger headline-power, bog standard used ATX out of a scrap pc.  At 180 Ghash/s, it is "too underpowered" to make much bitcoin but at least you'd see a bit of a result.  The ASIC is also good for various sha256d "altcoins" but you'd spend a few days downloading and sorting out the thing to make those.  I'd suggest going for an sha256d altcoin with modestly low difficulty, fast transactions, and not secret enough for illegal trade.  I quite like mazacoin MZC for that, and my S1 makes a few hundred of those in a few hours.

If you need procurement assistance in return for payment in bitcoin then pm me.  

look up "coloured coins" and "extranonce".  I think you'll find that in an evening longer than it takes to unwrap a shiney new asic miner, plug it in and start mining ordinary BTC, you could instead set to mining your own "coloured coin" distinguishable from others by an extranonce chosen by you in every block, and a 2016 genesis block started by you.  The unsolved problems are:
- how do other remote users know whether to trust the unauthenticated binary which you say to them does N-BTC tokens for your business empire
( miner and wallet applications both exist ) 
- what happens if your exchange between BTC and N-BTC goes down for a while ?
- is your exchange one-way "buy tokens here" or the fairer sounding two way trade which gets pounced on for arbitrage gains ?

N-BTC probably is not quite the best for small quick transactions; see how you go with looking at other altcoins.

I think that it is certain that this thread is inaccurate.

As with any freely traded market, there are times when the really big players have agreed amongst themselves to stabilize price within a narrow range and to spend money placing trades and spreading news whenever there is movement out of their expected range.  There was a period in early 2013 in which the $ printing institutions allegedly worked quite hard to spread any bad news which might depress the bitcoin price hence proving it to be a worthless computer science experiment.  The other thing which they can do is embargo a couple of months of good news in order to hold the price down.  Guess what happens in the end ?

Contrary to capitalist free market theory, what you get in a speculation dominated free market is a price dependent mainly on the sentiment of news in circulation at the traders; nearly nothing to do with production costs and product usefulness.  Try looking up "penny stock tips" or "tulips".

If you can get your boss to pay you a part of your salary in bitcoin, and bill some of his customers in bitcoin, you are doing us all a favour by moving BTC on from being a speculator curiosity, comparable to krugerrand collecting, to being related in price to its intrinsic worth.

To answer your "how long should I wait" question,
in 2013 it used to be "about one hour"
in 2015, for feeless pool to miner transactions, I put through three at the same time which took 10 mins, 1/2 hour and six hours, and arrived in a different order to what I sent them in.
So after checking that you didn't leave off the end character in copy-paste of your wallet address, nor the comparable blunders, I'd give it a rest and see if your 0.005 BTC is through in the morning.

Because my miner is a lot smaller than yours, I mostly mine altcoins these days, for which the output is more immediate and visible.