When you say he's earnt £20 do you mean 20 bitcoins? Because in value terms, they don't really equate like that I don't think

Bacon and me were talking about this on MSN, I understand you need hefty graphics card systems to make it worthwhile trying to mine them, and the return is slow + low unless you join a syndicate.

Plus, no one seems to know what's going to happen with them, there seemed to be some thoughts that they might be banned by governments because they are untraceable.

I'll have a go, but it's been a couple of weeks since I was looking at it so don't take this as gospel or nuttin', ya hear

The gist of it is, there is a collective pool of available coins that can ever be 'mined', something like 20 million, as they are mined by performing some complicated hashing mathematics and are only released to be mined every so often, and each stage is more complex than the last meaning it will take longer to mine coins in the future than it does now. A mined coin can be passed on to anyone using their key (which is also hashed to be completely unique - but you can have more than one key). Every person in the bitcoin chain is joined to the cloud and helps compute and authenticate transactions in the chain, and every transaction is computed anonymously (because its all hashed).

So basically, if you farm/receive bitcoins, you can then spend them anonymously either trading them for a service or as payment to someone for a good. Naturally, because of the difficulty and relative rarity of obtaining them, their value should increase in time, some sites will allow you to exchange them for $ for instance, but it would seem to me much wiser to hang on to them for now.

Yes, in the early days the hash collision space was much larger. To make anything now you need Beowulf clusters of GPU's/CPGPU's.

Unless you get your electricity from solar/wind it's going to cost you more now to make coins than you'll ever make back. Although Beowulf clusters are sweet for folding proteins.

He got 1 BitCoin a couple of times, which I gather is worth roughly £20 atm

I think he's folding for a group or something

Done some more reading about this, confusing stuff really, seems the difficulty increases significantly over time and unless you have a rig pretty much running now it's not gonna be worth it, plus my GTX460 according to charts would SUCK

I'll ask him later what the deal is, good luck to him though if it's working out, surprised nobody here's into it tbh 

googled it a bit.... we could have done will with a tek group when it first started out.... bit late now tho!

Is it though? it still seems to be working tbh though it may well be shortlived perhaps, most people here have at least 'reasonable' rigs, I think the kicker is if you have an ATi card or not seems CPU brute crunching even on a new i5/i7 is a shadow of what you get on a modern ATi GPU

Plus I think you can join groups with 'instant' payouts anyway rather than having to get a block/50 coins.

I've asked him to see what his take on it is

well... I'm happy to run it.... got 3 computers on 24/7 here :-)    (2 of them kinda suck tho)