[thenomad]

Important note: this is not current information. Bitcoin and Litecoin mining have both changed a lot in the last few months, and this post is from April.

I spent some time looking into mining about three weeks ago - with the proviso that my hardware would be free, since I run a 3D animation company that's in the process of transitioning to GPU-based rendering - and came to the conclusion that right now, it still ain't worth it.

[pcl]

Was your conclusion that the power costs would outweigh the value of the mined bitcoins, or that the value would be marginal enough that it's not worth the bother?

[thenomad]

A combination of the two. Power costs plus wear-and-tear on mission-critical components weren't outweighed by the tiny amounts of money we'd make.

To be fair, there's a bit of a conflict between the best rendering hardware - Nvidia, because of CUDA - and the best mining hardware - ATI. Obviously, I'd have been mining on NVidia. However, the numbers didn't even make much sense using ATI.

Bitcoin mining has been screwed because of the dedicated hardware, which has meant a flood of miners into Litecoin - which has proceeded to screw the Litecoin ecosystem too.

I shall keep an eye on the situation - I suspect there will be pockets of opportunity in the future. But right now, not so much.

[nwh]

Curiously, CERN made the same decision and came out the other way. For quite a time they mined Bitcoin using the spare CPU cycles of their data processing farms.