Back in 2011 I used to trade some bitcoins at an exchange called Bitcoin7. This exchange got hacked and I lost all my bitcoins and euros in my account over there and I lost my interest in cryptocurrencies. However, since the exchange rate of the bitcoin got a lot higher then back then, I’ve decided to take a look at it again.

I’m also thinking about doing a bit of mining. I mean… there is a fancy graphics card in my laptop, and I am no gamer, so, mining is the only purpose of the damn thing. However, getting OpenCL working using free software only (free, as in open source. not using proprietary binary blobs as driver) is not a trivial task. The open source nvidia driver, nouveau, does not support OpenCL at all, therefore my HP EliteBook 8530w is out of the question. My HP EliteBook 8570w however, got an ATI/AMD graphics card. With this card, OpenCL should be able to work. However, support is not included in the mesa package available in the repository. In the AUR repository there is a package mesa-cl, however, it fails on compiling a dependency, the libclc-svn package, also from AUR. As I look at the build instructions for GalliumCompute, it seems they compile a llvm/clang with experimental r600 support. I suppose the repository version of llvm/clang misses this configuration option, which may be the cause of this build failure.

Therefore, I am compiling some stuff manually, according to the instructions on http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumCompute/. I usually prefer not to install software which is not managed by pacman. Having files floating around in my root file system that are not managed by any packet seems a little messy to me.

Anyhow. mining… I might have a look at mining both bitcoins and litecoins. Possibly other cryptocurrency as well later, but for now, bitcoins and litecoins will be the thing I will look at. I might possible also have a look at an ASIC for bitcoins. I am considering ordering an USB Block Erupter.

However… synchronising with the bitcoin and litecoin networks takes forever.