Bitcoin Forum

I know i was i imagine anyone else running in the 300 and under mhash range is done as well if they are paying for their power. It basically cut my daily profits in half. I wish others luck but i feel like you remove the hobbyist and small timers so early in its development you remove a lot of interest in the coins just how this works i guess.

network hashrate wouldnt change srsly because of ppl <300mhash

Eh, Im only mining with 80mh/s, parents pay for power though, so any money earned is good money earned.

oh?  show your data please.

Until they find out. Then they will kill you.

No.

300MH/s = .67BTC/day
= $5.70/day
= $171/month

And anyone with that kind of MH/s is probably using no more than 250w of electricity, so 180kwh/month, or about $18 more in electricity per month.  Well, if you get decent rates on electricity, anyway.  $72/month at most though.

Mining is far from being unprofitable.  When difficulty hits 4M, then we'll talk about it being unprofitable for a good portion of hobbyist miners.

yes.

Meh, dads the one that leaves the computer on of a night, so I'll just blame it on that ;)

My margins are much lower but yes i see there is still some profit my power rate is almost double what you quoted for yours and my mhash is more in the range of 240mhash.  

Thanks for breaking it down, i feel like it will force some people out but we will see.

I pulled the plug on 600 mhashes, even though it would still be profitable. Can't stand the noise anymore :)

I'm sorry you missed out on the goldrush, you can't get a bunch of free bitcoins, and you are bitter about it.  Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

As above it's certainly still profitable, more so in $US terms than when I started a few months ago. You're also assuming that large scale miners are a lot more efficient than hobbyists. It may be somewhat true but they're using rigs that would (mostly) not be used for anything else, versus the hobbyist that probably has the PC on a good deal of the day doing other stuff where the GPU itself is the only added power cost not to mention capital cost.

With the current rate of increases, you've still got a few more increases before it is no longer profitable... a few weeks, perhaps 1 month

The difficulty will pass 4M:

Conservative estimate:
in late August. (30% increase for each adjustment and 10 days per round)

"Holy cow, look at that" estimate:
in one month. (75%, 8 days)

Ive been mining for 6 months but yeah i wish i got on sooner. I'm not bitter in the least bit just disappointed its ends for me now, i feel like it just hasn't grown large enough for the level of difficulty it has reached, but that's just what i think.   Now go get out of your moms basement spreg elitist.

Interesting - I was just thrilled with the prospect of seeing actual ROI on a GPU that I was going to be purchasing anyway to replace a noisy, tired old 8800GT.  I work an 8-5, so the idle time that my system was doing nothing is free to devote to mining, and I had no hardware investment beyond the new GPU.  So even with a comparatively puny 260-270Mhash on a factory clocked 6870, it makes perfect sense for me - as a hobbyist - and a payback period of 2 months at most, with 70-75% uptime spent mining.

You're certainly right that some people will choose to shut down because of it (as evidenced by this thread), but I think just the worst efficiency cards are being forced out at this point.  NVIDIA cards, certainly CPU mining, and a few of the really low-end ATI cards.

The worst ATI card for Mhash/watt is the 4550, which gets 7.23mhash for 25w.
7.23MH/s = 0.016147 BTC/day
= $0.14/day
= $4.21/month

These numbers are making me lol.

Anyway, electricity usage would be 18kwh, which would be roughly $1.80 at $0.10/kwh.  At $0.40/kwh though, you're looking at $7.20/month, so you're definitely losing money.

So if you live in California and are mining on a 4550, STOP.  :P

The way I look at it is that I get in on it and enjoy the benefits while it is still affordable. If it doesn't pan out, then the early adopters that hoard will have wasted their time anyway. I am willing to buy their BTC at affordable rates for now as long as I see that there is growth in the interest of this industry. I still may buy equipment to mine, but I am still learning about this.

This is a plausible scenario.  What cracks me up is the people who assume the BTC exchange rate will stay the same forever :)  Look at the historicals.  It's only going UP.

Given that entry line and enthusiast AMD gfx cards scale in their mhash per Watt, I see zero argument / sense in differentiating between "hobby" miners vs "pros".

How could there be? The MARGIN stays the same issue regardless of how much VOLUME you have.

If it somehow becomes unprofitable for the current AMD generation of gfx cards, it becomes unprofitable for _ALL_ of them.

Regardless of whether it is some dude running 10 machines of 6990s or one normal guy with a 5770 - setting aside other hardware components / power draw sources, of course.

Not true at all. Half the users on BTCguild contribute <300 Mhash and they account for over 10% of the total pool hashrate.

I'd wager that <300Mhash users have even greater representation in the general population.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing as well, just neglected to put it in writing.

It really depends on MHash/watts as far as whether a given setup will remain profitable.  But if you have a rig with 4 of the most efficient cards on the planet, then you could stay in business just as easily as a "professional" miner would.

i'm just waiting on the bounty for the cost effective FPGA miner to come through, that would possibly change some things

You're focusing on just the cards, not the infrastructure, power costs, or labor...  If you're paying $.25 per kwh and I'm paying $.08 kwh...  things become unprofitable for you, way before they do for me.

Also scale as well...  if you have 1 machine making $1 USD a day profit... it might not be worth the headache....  but if I have 200 machines making $1 a day profit it might very well be worth the headache.

As soon as it gets to $1 a day per machine I'll be out of here. That's how much it costs per machine, if each machine uses the full wattage available to it. I know that is unlikely as there is actually very little in the machine, but it's always good to have a limit set for my escape :)

I think most of these discussions would benefit from differentiating between profitable and "worthwhile".

To use an extreme example:

Few people would consider mining with a single device for a gain of $1.00 per day to be worthwhile even though it's technically profitable. However, the same margin at 2000x that scale might be equally profitable but widely considered worthwhile.

At that scale you could even hire a couple of employees to handle daily operations and set aside a fund to replace the 4 or 5 devices that would fail each week while still turning a tidy profit.

But if you think the rate will go up, it's more efficient to buy BTC than to mine them.

I'm starting to get tired of seeing this.

If buying and selling BTC were as simple and straightforward as mining has become, it would be a good point. As things stand it's nowhere near it.

A newcomer can start mining and take his first payout in minutes. An ambitious one can build an array of machines and mine for nearly a week before his payments clear through Dwolla and MtGox.

Instant, or at least fast gratification and ease of use is very important.

When mining earnings are about equal to power costs, I have been developing a plan to rectify the situation. If you can't increase your mining production, you should decrease your power costs. "But how can you do that?" you might ask, quizzically, turning your head sideways like a confused little precious puppy. The solution is in converting computer heat to power. I have created a system of heatsinks that directs all of my heat to a small turbine filled with methanol. Why methanol? Because it has a boiling point of 65 degrees Celsius, silly goose, which is a bit below the temperature of my video cards. The heat boils the methanol and the gas drives the turbine, which turns an electricity generator (and also is used to rotate a foot massager).

It's not very efficient, but that's where this plan gets better. I can drastically increase the money I get from power generation by directing the methanol vapors to my neighbor, who is a huge jerk who keeps birds in his apartment and lets them fly out his window as they please. The methanol will probably cause him to faint, and then I can take his birds and eat them. This will save me the $20 per month that I normally spend on dead birds, not to mention my normal $12 foot massage budget. This system might not work for you guys, so you'll have to find what works most efficiently for you. Go hog wild. Be creative. Have fun. For example, you might use cats instead of birds. The possibilities here are endless.

Or you could just use the heat to distill ethanol, and give that to hobos in exchange for whatever dead birds they might have found around town. This is a lucrative, untapped market and you've really got to get in early.

Also I have found a lot of large batteries just sitting under the hoods of cars nearby, and these are great for charging at the library, and then carrying home to use to power your computers.

Furthermore, I have found that my apartment is hot enough now that I don't need clothing anymore, so I sold my clothes and now I am a nudist. This has corollary advantages in that sometimes people will actually pay me money to leave from certain places! Don't tell them this, but I was probably going to leave those places anyway because I was getting cold. As a bonus, most bus drivers will let you ride for free if you no longer have pockets and pretend not to understand what they mean when they say "Sir, please pay the bus fare." I offer them one of my car batteries as a gesture of good will, but they never accept it.

there are THREE difficulty increases per month, so it is going to be nowhere near $171 per month, $5.70 for next 9 days is correct though

my estimate would be around $100 from 300MH/s (if running 24/7 until end of june)

This sounds more and more like my life  ;D

>This is a plausible scenario.  What cracks me up is the people who assume the BTC exchange rate will stay the same forever   Look at >the historicals.  It's only going UP.

What cracks ME up is that people think prior performance predicts future results... actually it does not crack me up - it makes me sad...

LOL, love it... nice bit of joviality :)

Right, because the USD is on the fast track to recovery and isn't losing valuation anymore ::)

You should have put up some photovoltaic panels, 2 or 3 of 600 W each would probably do the trick, and run your computer off of it.
During the 25 years lifetime you can earn a lot of money. First digging for the last remaining BTCs, then earning your transaction fees.

Please elaborate on that and show us the calculation of how profitable it will be  :P

I thought the ATI cards already are quite effective with their stream processors.
An FPGA needs to be developed, and will only be produced in small quantities, making production costs higher.
I don't immediately see the added advantage over GPUs.

If anything i'd worry more about "hobbyist" miners making it impossible for truly large scale and professional mining (as long as it's GPU based) to be profitable.  

That's a stupid statement
serious miners .. large scale are just that large
what a hobbyist does,  does not even count on the large scale
I'm a hobbyist My fraction of a coin don't mean SHIT

For you it may not but for others it will, some ppl will mine cause they believe in the project, other will mine for "fun", other might mine cause they like the extra fan noise or want hot air blowing on their feet. Just cause you wont mine when it get's to that stage doesn't mean that other wont. You truly believe every person who is running F@H for example is doing it because they want to try and help out cure world disease?

If I wanted to get into professional mining I would be truly terrified by everyone who has free power, idealists simply supporting the project, ppl who considers their hardware "free" or wouldn't mind mining as long as there is a profit no matter how small. And let's not forget about all the additional costs involved when someone has to take their operation out of their mom's basement into the real world.

Math is hard.

I estimate to be unprofitable for my single 6950 system in 40 days at a 4.6M difficulty rating (assuming no change in value of bitcoin) with a net income of $558, by the last 10 days though profit is only $3 though, so I'll quit at day 30.

I like how you are able to predict both difficulty and price so accurately.

Hopefully most of the addition of new hardware has slowed a little bit. Right now the projection shows a 23% increase it may end up being 30-40%. I don't think it's going to be 50+% this round.

The current explosion in difficulty was expected after the exchange rate rocketed up to 8.9$, when projections (back then) showed that you could recoup your hardware investment in about 2-2.5 weeks for cost effective rigs you knew something was going to happen >_>

The silver lining is that some ambitious people are going to rightly and successfully fork this project.

v0.3 is can be the right idea but it is rarely the right implementation.

The genie is out of bottle.

Well, might be true, but price could just as easily rise to match.

I use current numbers projected out because I really have no idea whether difficulty will continue increasing more quickly than price.  In the past, there have been times when difficulty outpaced price, and there have been times when price has outpaced difficulty.  Who am I to say which one will happen?

I wouldn't count on $171, but that's the best prediction I can make, without knowing whether price will outpace difficulty.

I'm guessing the jump won't be so bad next time, as this will scare off a lot of the people who just jumped on the bandwagon and are mining with their everyday gaming card.

Would you say investing in 2 5830s for $230 is a bad idea now though?

No you actually just skipped the part where I said margin. Margin being value made or lost after cost => obviously factoring in the price for the kwh. What else is there other than material degradation for cost?

As for who is spitting in the soup: the exploitative bungholios who build whole GPU farms and stuff their housrs full of PCs dedicated to mining are. If I in order to refinance my idle GPU cycles want to mine BTC with my 180 mhash and they run around 2ghash for a single person, who is the one greedily and grossly out of scale?

From a "just" / "fair" standpoint, it's like them taking up 10 seats in the cinema and everyone else being confined to the bad seats..there is no entitlement to getting rich off of BTC for anyone, hobby or "pro".


As for whether to do it or not - as long as I come out even +0 profit, but am fully paid for my power useage, I'll do it. Simply because this is my work PC which is used for actual real world stuff and it will mean "free" work hours for one half of the day, "free" watching of movies, listening to music, etc for the rest.
The mining is just the icing on the cake to make it a "free" PC to run.

Staking my livelyhood on something like this would be fairly stupid in my eyes(people are "investing" 10s of thousands of real world currency, going into debt to build "rigs" etc..good god).  

Anyway.
On topic: I would actually like to flip the argument.
Due to the "pros" staking their real food/rent/etc income on this fun game, THEY are the ones who will be in debt, evicted and unable to pay for food first when the margin drops to 10-50 cent a day profit per machine total, instead of anyone who only does this on the side for a hobby.
As they need to rely on the income.

And ironically they are the ones causing the huge difficulty bumps in the first place(because of taking up 10+ spaces instead of 1 etc, buying tons of 6990s and so on).
So they may regulate themselves out once the "run" gets frothy / peaky, then the people that still think it makes sense after that trickle back in and we may get an equilibrium around the point where a balance between some money made to live on and not enough made happens.
Theoretically.

Then people find out about margin trading and blow up the whole pricing mechanism thanks to leverage fun and games.


-
I also approve of Horkabork.

It would be more efficient for them if they just gave you an allowance...

Everyone's laughing at HorkaBork's post... but I'm actually considering how the methanol-containing-heat-turbine-electric-generator idea could work....


...........................


He may just be a crazy genius!

it's inefficient.  and dangerous.

look into the Seebeck effect...

It's an estimate, not a prediction.

After investing in 600 Mhash/s, water cooling would be a comparatively small extra investment which enable you to silence the miner and run it 24/7.  A cooler miner also means better stability, longer life and lower power cost (colder silicon leaks less power).

You don't have to by an expensive water cooling kit.  The expensive part is the GPU water block.  Everything else is cheap.  A cheap low powered aquarium pump, a radiator from an old car, cheap plastic hose, etc.

yeah, sure... & 'in soviet russia bitcoins calculating you!'
how exactly your bitcoins are better than artforz's (or anyone's else, including me)?


there is no FAIR in bitcoins, it is HARD & UNCHANGEABLE


we paid for those tickets, just FYI, some rich people have their own cinemas and they don't allow other people to use it, bastards!
don't be mad just because you can't afford more miners :P


says who?

Don't know about power and business and all that jazz, but as a hobby miner with 67Mh/s, im still in the game. It's all about the pool.
Anyone who's complaining about people with nGh/s killing their profits, and the profitability vs electricity costs and all that other jazz aren't really "hobby" miners anyways.
With my 5570 and 67Mh/s my electricity bill has gone up somewhere like $5 over my normal PC usage, and even i can manage to make 4-5btc a month, even at the current difficulty level in a decent pool.

Long story short, anyone who got forced out was either too serious about bitcoins and too broke to do anything about it, or, well, thats all i can i think of, because as a hobbyist, nothing has hurt me really, and the guys with the capitol to invest in larger mining operations, well they arent complaining either.

Ding.  We have a winner.

Either that, or you could just solo mine and hope to get lucky and score $400 block (at current prices).  $5 worth of electricity isn't going to kill anyone.  It's a perfectly reasonable way to play the lottery (way better odds than state lotteries in fact).

It's always going to be on the side of hobbyist miners over more serious operations: in most cases the hardware is paid for, in many the electricity cost is a low concern. Hobbyists would mine, even at a loss.

Yup.  People don't really understand what "hobbyist" means, or they are deliberately misusing it.  

Anyone who claims "hobbyist" means making a big investment in hardware, building out a farm of mining machines, worrying about the relationship between electricity costs and BTC earned, and generally hoping to consistently make a lot of money needs to reexamine his assumptions.

If the income matters to you, you aren't a hobbyist.

well said, i bought two small setups to run until one or both of the games i want come out, so any money recouped until then is just a bonus, but not why i am doing it. the project looked fun and exciting and i was gonna build two machines to play games on, just did it earlier than anticipated. will i get all my money back, no, do i really care, no. would have spent it anyway when my games arrive.