Well, after the recent purchase of a brand new video card I thought I would look into alternate uses other than gaming. These days, graphics cards can be used for more powerful number crunching compared to CPUs (between five to twenty times the processing power).
I figured the boat had already sailed on Bitcoin and Litecoin but thought I would have a look at Dogecoin. Having only been started on 06/12/2013 it is prime for mining while the difficulty is low and the processing power being thrown at the network is relatively low until those ASIC number crunchers start being fired up (at the moment they appear to be vapourware).
At the moment, Dogecoin has a market cap of one hundred billion Dogecoins that could be minted (although these can be split down into ten million sub-units). The fixed amount aims to create a deflationary currency similar to Bitcoin with its cap of 21 million Bitcoins. Off the bat, the potential value of a single Dogecoin (less than US$0.01) doesn’t stack up against a single Bitcoin which can fetch US$1000. Bitcoin has had a head start though but has also had the stigma of black market trading associated with it but could have had a lot to do with driving up the value of the currency.
Of the 100 billion Dogecoins just over 22% of them have been mined so now is a good time to get your hands on some of them before the deflation kicks in. Of course, that’s not a guarantee – the currency could fizzle out into nothing at all, it could boom or otherwise make a mediocre existence of itself. It’s all down to speculated value but I figure this will be a bit of fun either way.
Anyway, I have been mining for 2.5 days and have accurd about 45,000 Dogecoins. There was a bit of a flurry yesterday after the “forkpocalypse” where the Dogecoin blockchain forked several times after a huge transaction was submitted which older wallet clients prior to V1.3 rejected but V1.3 correctly accepted after an adjustment to the processing logic. This affected mining pools, faucets (where you can get free Dogecoin) and wallets which either got stuck on processing the block chain or went on one of the wrong forks. Fortunately, this has been fixed with V1.4 of the Dogecoin wallet available below:
Anyway, I might cover how to get setup for mining in a future post but at this stage I am mining just to see what happens.
4 comments
Skip to comment form
That seems like a very good return very quickly. What is 45k coins currently worth? Is anyone actually buying them for cash yet?
Happy new year BTW.
Author
Happy New Year as well!
Dogecoin doesn’t yet have the trading activity on the level of Bitcoin which could increase its value later on. However, there is quite a bit of regular trade for Bitcoin and Litecoin for Dogecoin (and vice versa).
At the moment, 1 DOGE nets US$0.0002444 so my 60k DOGE would get around US$14.66 at the moment. It’s small but covers the cost of the power the mine them with about about half leftover at that exchange rate.
I don’t plan on cashing them in yet anyway – I am doing it for a bit of fun and just to see what happens.
That seems to be a pretty good outcome. I will be building a mining rig for dogecoin but too green about it. Would you mind sharing your hardware components and specs. I’m noob and just started mining yesterday netting only 120 after 16 hours using a late 2012 MacBook Pro running Maverick with HD 4000 card.
Appreciate your help. Cheers.
D6YZrxJU2XdohTkWmp9jf8DceZpAhNa2zS
Author
My desktop is a bit long in the tooth but still powerful enough for most things. I have an i7 920 with 12GB RAM on a Gigabyte EX-58 EXTREME motherboard. My boot drive is an OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 256GB PCI Express SSD paired with a Seagate 1.5TB hard drive. There’s a 1500W power supply in the case (forget the brand but it is a good one) and the video card is an EVGA GTX 780 Ti Superclocked with ACX cooler.
The Intel graphics cards really don’t hold much of a light up to the AMD and NVidia kit so I would recommend joining a pool to better your return. At the moment, I am a part of RapidHash.