cutefix wrote:
kulukuy wrote:
I have actually been considering to devote my available computer resources by participating in a worthwhile distributed computing project like Folding@home but I had been procrastinating because as worthwhile a cause it may be, I also believe that the medical breakthroughs resulting from this collective effort would only end up in the hands of the "pharmas" which in turn would create their pills and eventually profit from human misery by selling their poison to us at an exorbitant price for what cost them a fraction of a penny to manufacture. I've got this thing with pharmas so don't get me started on it.
By utilizing my computing resources to mine for Bitcoins, I at least would get tangible results that I can actually spend for myself and not fattening up some pharma suits some more.

kulukuy wrote:
I have actually been considering to devote my available computer resources by participating in a worthwhile distributed computing project like Folding@home but I had been procrastinating because as worthwhile a cause it may be, I also believe that the medical breakthroughs resulting from this collective effort would only end up in the hands of the "pharmas" which in turn would create their pills and eventually profit from human misery by selling their poison to us at an exorbitant price for what cost them a fraction of a penny to manufacture. I've got this thing with pharmas so don't get me started on it.
By utilizing my computing resources to mine for Bitcoins, I at least would get tangible results that I can actually spend for myself and not fattening up some pharma suits some more.

Don’t be so hard pharma companies... As a chemist I know the complexity and difficulty of synthesizing new drugs, the high cost of investment of running such extremely technical operation plus the several years of animal testing and even evaluation on human volunteers, in some cases it can even take decades before that new drug is approved by the regulating agency for distribution for sale to users....As a whole its not a “mere walk in the park” making a new drug from the scratch actually....
Therefore from the hindsight , the cost of the creation of new drug is astronomical so its reasonable that this companies would recoup their expenses from such monumental effort..that would take years for the ROI( return of investment).
Now how does bit coin come to this picture...what can you do to appease your apprehension about your so called profiteering efforts of the drug firms...?
Does doing the so called bit coin mining, and lending your powerful PC for such would do something...?
How can you profit by being an intermediary or a tool for bit coin transaction?
By the way as you started this thread with good computer hardware for such purpose...
What would be the minimum configuration for such PC to satisfy a profitable bit coin participation...? Is it beyond the typical gaming rig....? Is it more graphic than CPU intensive..?
Does it need server class computers with hexacore chips, multiple RAM and series of Terabytes of hard drives....?
My being hard on the pharmas is a personal thing. I understand the process of R&D and that it takes years to synthesize these compounds. I have no problem with all that especially if it benefits mankind. I just don't like how the pharma suits do their business. The reason how it came into the picture was already clearly indicated on my post; the reason why I personally decided not to participate in the Folding@home project and instead opt to devote my resources to BTC mining. That's all. For all we know, Folding@home could have been sanctioned and clandestinely funded by the pharmas themselves. Who knows? Anyway, without dragging this deviation along and run the risk of hijacking my own thread, I leave it at this for everybody to decide for themselves -- the reason why I don't like them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_lobbyAgain, it's a personal thing and should not be discussed any further; at least not on this thread. It's a discussion that should be on a separate thread if someone cares to start it.
Anyway, back on topic. I don't see mining for BTC is akin to lending my resources to any entity. It's more like my tool or resource to aid me in prospecting for BTC much like the gold prospectors during the gold rush. One of the features of Bitcoin is to get rid of the intermediary or centralized control - central banks, the banks and other traditional financial institutions. Hence, it is maintained through P2P networking/infrastructure.
Just like mining for gold, the better equipped prospectors who can dig faster have more chances of finding more gold in a given time. That translates to a lot of hash power to increase the chances of successfully landing on blocks that result in rewards (a block of 50 BTC at a time).
The rig I posted at the beginning of this thread is really not a powerhouse. It's only an old C2D E6600 Conroe with dual-channel memory on a micro ATX with only one PCIe 16x slot. It's just a test rig to experiment with BTC mining and hoping to build a full on dedicated mining rig eventually (I got my shopping list already). But then again, you don't need bleeding edge CPU and memory to get good hash rates. In fact, RAMs are clocked down as low as 300MHz to save energy and reduce heat in a mining rig. It's all about GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing unit) which the Radeon GPUs are good at.
The general rules in building a mining rig are: get the cheapest mobo with a lot of PCIe 16x slots (to fill them in with preferred Radeon cards for each of them is a miner), the cheapest CPU (they are useless for mining) for such mobo and 1GB of the cheapest memory (just enough to get the system fired up), a robust certified PSU to support those cards at constant full load and a lot of ventilation (preferrably an open setup like a test bench or a rack system or a homemade setup but an open box with a desk/floor fan directed especially towards the GPUs also works).
Anyway, I'm gonna be posting more links as I find them. Like I said, I should not rewrite how to make a wheel; there are already excellent instructions out there. I'm definitely not an expert on this subject. I'm new at this too.