New to FTC, have some questions.

Hello all, this is all very new to me, so I figured I would join up to see what it’s all about. I recently stumbled upon an article about Bitcoin mining, which led me to an article about Litecoin mining and eventually Feathercoin mining.

Basically, I used to be a hardcore PC gamer but have since given up on the violent games and such, but I still have a lot of interest in high powered (and high efficiency) computer components. Hence the interest in using it to do some mining. I’ve also come to really appreciate the idea of having digital currencies like BTC, LTC and FTC.

After some tinkering, I was able to get my computer to earn about 3.6 FTC over the past 22 hours or so running Cudaminer on my GTX 660 (wonderful for gaming, no so great for mining). I’ve come to realize that CPU mining is sadly not worth the time… which is disappointing given that I have two systems with dual Xeon CPUs (two each). One with two Quad cores and the other with two duals (Core 2 based). I tested out CPU mining on the dual quads (8 cores at 2.5Ghz) and for some reason it only managed about 27KH\s, where my overclocked i5 2500K (4 cores at 4.2Ghz) managed about 25KH\s.

Anyway, long story short:

1. Is there any practical way to make use of CPU power for mining? It seems that the current value of FTC would make it not worth the electricity spent. Which brings me to…

2. The exchange rate of FTC for USD is hard to understand. For example, when I look at the “Mining Profitability Calculator” on this site it seems to auto update the difficulty, but the current exchange rate is shown as 21 cents per FTC… but when I go to Vircurex for example, the rate for buying them is about 12 cents, and for selling is about 8.6 cents. Is the default rate on the calculator just outdated, or am I missing something? Because I was going by the rate on the calculator, and now upon doing the research and finding that its actually worth less than half of that, I’ve actually spent more on electricity than I could earn right now, which is a little sad, because I was at least making a few cents according to the 21 cents per FTC figure.

I was hoping to get into this to test the waters and if it seemed like a good idea I could throw 2 Radeon 7850 cards in each of my Xeon systems… but it almost seems like it wouldn’t be worth it even then. It’d take me almost a year to break even if the exchange rate doesn’t go up significantly.

Any thoughts on this? And yes, I know that the primary focus of FTC (and other cryptocurrencies) is not to just make easy cash and sit on it. I would actually use the currency if it made financial sense. I’m just interested in mining because of my background in computer hardware and overclocking, and I’d like to try to get the most out of it if there is anything to be had.

tuneman1980

Don’t forget, the difficulty is about to drop, which should have an impact on the calculator.

Thanks for the feedback guys. :)

Just curious, how do we know when the difficulty is about to drop?

EDIT: Also, one more thing. Is there a big difference in results between mining pools? I’m using http://p2pftc1.d2.cc because I found it on a forum somewhere, and it seems to be giving me a little over the average of what the calculator says I’d be earning per day. I notice that there are very few other people using it though.

justabitoftime

https://www.feathercoin.com/netstats/

Current Difficulty 133.07021162
Next Difficulty 94.090048620202
Time to Retarget 0 day(s), 4 hour(s), 37 min, 0 sec

Current Network Hashrate 829,209 KHash/s (60 block avg.)

At this current network hashrate, we’re about 4.5 hours from the next difficulty.

So, now it has adjusted and the difficulty is going to possibly [i]increase[/i] slightly, rather than drop significantly as it said it was going to yesterday.

That’s a bit disheartening. At this point it seems like it wouldn’t really be worth it unless I already had several high end Radeons. Investing $600 in four of them would be a big gamble. With the difficulty and exchange rate fluctuating the way they do, the 8-10 months it would take to pay back the investment in cards at the current rate may increase quite a bit. I guess I knew this when I first started researching all of this, but seeing it now, I can certainly see how this is not an easy thing to get into.

Also, after the first day of earning about 3.5 feathercoins with cudaminer, the second day I earned [i]none[/i] in a 20+ hour period. No transactions at all. Which again, is probably not uncommon, but a bit disappointing given that I had to pay for that electricity.

Is it generally better to be in a pool with MORE or LESS people? I assume that a larger pool gets you more reliable payouts (less days with no earnings) but you get much smaller ones when they do come through, especially if the other people have very high khash\sec. Is this accurate?