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Just for fun i decided to check out bit coins and do some mining. No visions of making millions or anything I just find the concept pretty cool. At any rate I have installed guiminer in windows and i have installed the bit coin wallet from the bitcoin site.

How do i get my address so that i can have someone send me funds and in the mining software how do i set it up so that it knows where to deposit funds? I have it up and running using btc guild pool but it has never asked me about how to send me bit coins.

I am confused i feel like i am missing the most important piece of the puzzle.

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You need to get a receiving address from the client (or from an e-wallet if you prefer) and copy and paste it into the address field against your account in BTCGuild.

Bear in mind that if you're using the Bitcoin-QT client there is a very long synchronisation process to wait for, though you may be able to get a receiving address before it completes (but you won't see any received bitcoins in your wallet until it's synchronised). Depending on your hardware and bandwidth, synchronisation may take several days to complete.

While there's no receiving address against your BTCGuild account, you'll just be accumulating bitcoins against your BTCGuild balance, so you aren't losing anything in the meantime.

Bear in mind that the "difficulty" level of mining for the network as a whole has risen to a very high level due to the arrival of highly efficient dedicated ASIC bitcoin mining hardware. This means mining on graphics cards is likely no longer profitable (depending on purchase and electricity costs) and CPU mining hasn't been profitable for a long time.

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    I spent pretty much all of last night reading up on this then came across litecoins. Would this be a better thing to "get into". Again from a mining point of view i am not investing "hard" currency on any of this beyond cpu/gpu cycles. I find it fun lol.
    – Ominus
    Apr 24 '13 at 13:13
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    @Ominus, if you can earn a profit mining them, then the only reason I can think of not to would be your principles. My guess is that the Litecoin exchange rate is somewhat on the high side, so if you do it I'd recommend exchanging them to another currency quickly rather than hold them, but that's just my personal opinion. I did a little Litecoin mining myself at one point and exchanged them for BTC on vircurex. Some would consider it a waste of time, because much of Bitcoin's value is in its popularity; Litecoin doesn't have that.
    – Highly Irregular
    Apr 24 '13 at 19:09
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Well I am new to this too, but already did research on it. The BitCoin client and Mining Client is two different software for two different purposes(They used to be same, I read it somewhere). The Bitcoin client is just for handling your wallet, safegaurding your private keys, creating public keys (aka receiving addresses). I'd suggest you to try an e-client for eg. BlockChain in beginning.

Mining is another thing where you lend your pc's computing power to Bitcoin blockchains in return of free Bitcoins. It really sucks out your processing power.

So in general you'll just need a BTC client which will generate a receiving address for you which you can paste on the site of the mining pool you're using for mining. You can generate different address for different pools (or senders), so that you can track who's sending how much.

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