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hello all, i like to see what you would think, if you had $250,000 to start your own farm, what eqip ? how much equip would you use? what software would you use? how would you set it up? and would you be profitable within 12 months?

i know power cost is one of the main factors, so pls assume average but not high,

so what would you build ? 

or list your dream farm as well , sure why not think big or go home is what i always say! so please help me plan a farm ! i cant gold mine in the yukon like on discover, so let me mine what i can while i can so please help me a lil info goes a long way

If your power rate is "average", you'll never make any money, and the halving next year will push you into bankruptcy. If you have no experience with hosting, you'd be better offer buying equipment and finding someone to host it for you cheaper than you could do it yourself.

 Listen to the others   your power cost is average  means you lose money.

Now your best real chance is to get some one to make you custom miners from good chips.

Sidehack and Novak have been playing with bitmaintech's chips and getting really good  efficient results.

If they built you miners that were more efficient in mass production amounts you may stand a chance.

   a .3 watt miner with .09 cent power is as good as a .6 watt miner with .045 cent power.  do the math.

This would be the only way you stand a chance to make money.

If you really actually have that much money and if I would put at your place and think, I would not go for mining, instead either look for cloudmining as there are a few good ones that exist and you can check them on the thread mentioned below:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=878387 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=878387)

Else, you can directly invest in Bitcoins by buying them, wait and watch for higher prices, and trust me, Bitcoins are very cheap at the moment considering what is coming in the near future... ;)

With your "average" power costs, I'd be looking into a hosting provider that could do it for me cheaper.  There are a number of options available to you in that realm.  Find out how much capacity those providers can offer you.  Just as an example, if you were to grab the S4+ from Bitmain, you could get about 250 of them (they're about $1000 each).  That's going to get you 642.5TH/s of hashing, and will have 370kWh power consumption.

The S5 is more efficient, but requires you to also purchase your own PSUs to power them.  With the same $250,000 budget, you could get 550 S5s and 275 APW3-12-1600-B2 PSUs from Bitmain (well... you'd be just slightly over your budget there).  You could probably find better PSUs... I was lazy and just used what Bitmain has for sale... :) ...550 S5s will get you 635.25TH/s for a power consumption figure of 324.5kWh.

Assuming $0.05 cost for electricity... (if you can negotiate that with a provider)...
The S5s would expect to make you $1739 - $389.40 = $1349.60 a day
The S4+ would expect to make you $1759 - $444 = $1315 a day

If we assume those expectations stay constant (which they don't, but for the sake of this discussion), you're looking at ~185 days to recoup your initial investment with the S5s.

If  power cost is less than $0.04, then all in cost of bitcoin is around $150 for large farmers. They can make some money. With the $250,000 investment, you will not make much money as your unit cost is too high.

This is some great math here, OP take note.

You should focus on the S5, or hold off a bit and wait and see what bitmain (should) be releasing later this month, as apparently it will be slightly more efficient.  If space is an issue then the S4+ is your best bet because of the integrated PSU's and the ability to stack them all up for a more dense application.

If I had 250k, I would be contacting hosting centers / bitmaintech / sidehack / maybe even the avalon people and see what kind of deal you could get

You probably should get a real number for electricity costs. "Average" really doesn't tell anybody much, and if you actually have $250K to spend, do some due diligence, and figure out what you are willing to do (e.g. move to another state/country, rent/build a suitable space, etc). Just dropping a message here isn't likely to get actually started in a useful way.

If you have no mining experience, then start with a single S5, and see what it's like to set it up, how it behave, how loud it is, how hot it runs, and so forth, That'll set you back a tiny fraction of your bundle. The you can decide what makes sense when you multiply that by 400 for example. Can/will you undertake most of the work, or do you need to contract it out?

There are so many ways to spend $250K on Bitcoin mining, the advice will be all over the map, literally, and perhaps wildly inaccurate for you and personal situation. A dollar figure and the phrase "Go big or go home" isn't really much of a business plan. Also figure the extent to which you can have your $250K "investment" and have turn into a $200K wild goose chase, and the impact on your life.

Just my opinion. 

Your going to need to move to follow cheap electricity.  Everything else comes after this.

But with such a big investment you would need to follow the electricity.  But you might need partners to help offset the cost of building, cooling equipment, electricity setup, etc.

uhh, OP reading your questions, you should in first place try to find somebody from your country, who is somehow involved in bitcoin to help you, because you obviously had "only" capital for investment but nothing else..

good luck anyway

The sad thing is how often this is asked as speculation.  I'm guessing chances of OP spending 250k is very very slim.

Chances are someone just made a number in their head and asked what others would do.

with that amount i would not waste my time in starting a mega farm, instead i'll start a mega buy of bitcoin, which is growing nicely, and in few weeks or month, i might see already a +30% on my investment, which mean 75k

mining should be done very big from the beginning if you want to compete with china's farms, but unless you are very rich and your zone has basically insignificant electricity cost, it can not be done

the whle mining point in a nutshell

do you have electricity below 0.1$ per kw/h or below 0.05? yes go for s5 in mass, no buy bitcoin directly

About power cost if you invest part in power storage you can reduce cost maybe by only mining on NON-peak power , this without any renewable energy source connected

The power storage in my home project : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1071741 is only one of the power storage options as you can read in topic.

Cloudmining BTC is not profitable either. I agree the money would be better spent by buying bitcoin directly.

However if your goal is to support the network and not making money, by all means carry on and start mining

Here is the best strategy to earn big money with ASIC miners...

Take your 250k and use it to invent a time machine. And now forget how that invention has already made you the wealthiest man in the world and travel back to the summer of 2012.

Buy a couple of AMD GPUs just to familiarize yourself with BTC mining. Don't go crazy and build a massive GPU farm or buy those intriguing FPGAs you've been reading about. They will all be obsolete by the beginning of 2103.

Sometime during the summer of 2012 you will be reading here on BTCtalk about 4 companies who are planning to release ASIC miners by the end of the year... Butterfly Labs, bASIC, ASICMiner and Avalon. Now here's the really important part; the first two companies will completely flake-out and rip-off their customers, the third will produce functional miners that are super high-priced and the last (Avalon) will pre-sell their first batch 66GHs ASIC miners for $1300.

Order as many of the first batch Avalon miners as is humanly possible! And maybe slip those Chinese fellows some extra cash to skip ahead in line. Being first in line is VERY important. Order more than you can possibly host at home. You will soon be able to sell the extras for 20 times their original retail price. However, do not (under any circumstances) order from any later Avalon batches. The company will self-mine with them for many months before delivering the dusty miners to the customers.

Your shiny new ASIC miners will arrive nearly on time around the very beginning of 2013. You will now be the king of BTC mining! You will be mining hundreds of BTC every day (depending on how many miners you bought). Save those BTCs in a secure offline wallet and don't spend any of them until you hear about another company developing much more efficient ASIC chips... Bitfury.

Bitfury is important because soon everyone and their brother will have these loud, hot ASIC miners built by Avalon (and later, Butterfly Labs) that suck 6-8W/GHs and BTC mining difficulty will absolutely skyrocket. But Bitfury miners will use only ~1W/GHs. They will look like amateur crap, be finicky as heck, you'll have to buy tons of fans to keep them cool and probably quit your day job just to keep them running.

Now open your very full BTC wallet and preorder every Bitfury August batch card you can afford. Towards the end of August, sell every Avalon miner you have to clear space for your Bitfury gear. And surprise! Your Bitfury miners will arrive on time while people are still waiting for their year-late Butterfly Labs miners.

And now here's the really, really important part... sell every remaining BTC you have as soon as it reaches $1150 near the end of 2013. And keep selling every BTC as soon as it's generated by you quiet, cool Bitfury ASICs. Go outside and enjoy the weather, take that vacation you've been waiting to take, kiss a girl (or boy), walk the dog, etc. Do anything you want, you're rich! Oh and don't forget, you still have that kick-ass Time Machime to play with.  :)

Don't worry about buying BTC again until January of 2015. And certainly don't bother trying to keep up with the rising BTC difficulty by buying miners from KNC, Bitmain or Spondoolies.

i love this ^^
and i want to borrow your time machine... i promise to give you back in a blink of an eye, u wont even notice i'm gone... :)

If you do it right, you can return the time machine before you borrow it! Or will that cause a rip in the time-space continuum?

Btw, you must kill Hitler if you borrow the time machine. But everyone already knows that. It's Time Travel 101.

And clearly, nobody's invented the time machine yet since history records Hitler causing havoc.  Speaking of rips in the time-space continuum, wouldn't killing Hitler cause a pretty nasty one?  Of course, there's always the problem of the paradox... imagine I create a time machine that can only see 1 minute into the past.  I see myself and decide on a whim that I can't take it anymore and shoot my former self.  So, now my former self is dead, which in turn means I died a minute before I shot myself.  Wait... who pulled the trigger then?

You could start a real farm with that much and probably make more long term.

Mining for large profit is no longer an outcome. As time goes on profit margins will fall to barely profitable.

Travel back to 2009, use some spare desktops, laptops and servers. Save yourself the trouble of a mining farm. Buy pizzas for 10KBTC a pop with the coins. Don't forget to Hoard 50% of your mining stash in an offline wallet.

https://i.imgur.com/zYSVsFm.jpg

Alright, you have got many good suggestion, what i would suggest is taking care of cooling systems, try to keep for a long time all the hardware that you want to use.

I HIGHLY suggest finding an area with low electricity and can use evaporation cooling.  At 250k a full evaporation cooling might be excessive but I would find others to team up and get it.

If you have cheap electricity, and a way to cool that does not kill profits yes it could be highly profitable.    I do think OP was not serious though, i think this entire thread is a "what if" type situation.

Even with cheap power, $250,000 is not enough to get a serious mine up and running.  Look at HaoBTC, for example.  They just relocated 4PH+ of equipment they already owned to a new facility and they spent $600,000-$800,000 to set up the new mine.  They have cheap power and 0 equipment cost and spent almost a million bucks.

Save your $250,000, I think it would be wasted trying to build a mine, especially if you have to come on a forum and ask basic advice.

Just one word... Venezuela! I spend like 3 USD  in electricity for 4 Antminers s4+

That is why I mention teaming up with partners.  To do it properly it is not cheap, it's a massive investment.

250 is not to be laughed at it can bring a lot to table on setup, but I think you are right would need multiple with that amount to build proper one.  I have seen much cheaper ones, but you do get what you pay for.   

HaoBTC is like the top notch benchmark as far as dataceters.  There are some that are not near that quality.  If you were willing to risk low quality yes 250k could do a cheap building with some fan's internet, and power, and leave money for some miners even.  I know of a few old A1 data centers that were pretty .... basic is nicest word for it.

But long term ..... basic is not what you really want.

very good rate indeed, do you offer a hosting there? it could be profitable for you if you charge something on top of that

because even at 0.05 it is very profitable let alone at 0.03, but i'm assuming that this not include other cost like maintenance ecc...

Part of it also is the political atmosphere.  Just looking up Venezuela lots of not amazing new's in recent articles ex - https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/07/13/venezuela-guyana-esequibo-maduro-granger/

So I'm not sure I would want to invest and build a proper data center there currently.  Although that price is promising.

One thing I do not know is power reliability.  Some countries have very cheap power, but reliability is a issue in some regions.  You would really need to go there first and make sure you can get lots of power, and it's reliable.

Haha, i have been thinking about it. Genesis cloud mining service charges 45usd per each terahash a month, and that crazyy! I could charge like a half or less for just plugging it another miner but that would mean a lot of responsability too, I have a room with an air conditioner 24/7 for those miner.  I started mining recently and I know many people have been making serios money here! There are many places with power issues but thats not a problem in Caracas, which is Venezuela´s Capital btw.

You can read more about it here http://www.elmundo.com.ve/noticias/tecnologia/internet/venezolanos-recurren-a-bitcoins-para-eludir-contro.aspx

En una casa llena de aires acondicionados en Caracas, un "minero" de bitcoin yace rodeado de equipos especializados valuados en miles de dólares. Pidió no ser identificado por temor a robos.

That is more or less what ive been doing heh...

Great advice. Reminds me of the Back to the Future II movie. Only with Bitcoin instead of sports betting

Depending on how much work you're capable of doing yourself, it shouldn't be terribly expensive to set up a decent facility. Sure you'll need a crew to put up a building, but if you can do shelving and wiring and HVAC you don't need to pay up the butt to have someone else in there. Labor is usually half the cost of a building project. I had a building already but had to do all the internal wiring for the hosting room, and put up 50KW worth of metered power with ventilation for about $3k in materials.

Here is our $1,000,000 mining farm installation: https://www.facebook.com/StartHash/photos_stream

If you can get electricity lower than 0.1 USD/kWh, you're good to go. We use about 1kW for cooling, 10kW for ventilation and up to 500kW is available for miners. Everything is designed to fit 1 PH of mining equipment.

We are also green energy conscious, so we installed LED lighting and run our pool and monitoring system off a Raspberry Pi. We monitor temperature and humidity and adjust our miners and cooling systems for maximum efficiency. Our in-house alert systems allows us to react to events and check all aspects of our farm's activity. Drop me any questions, I'm sure we can provide some solutions.

Looks like a good setup, are you currently at 1PH?  How long did it take you guys from start to mining?

No, we are currently nearing 100TH, our previous location was only able to host 40kWh of equipment. We are planning to sell our futures contracts to acquire more mining equipment and infrastructure (like networking, PSUs, PDUs) and grow to our final target. There are still some kinks and events affecting our operations but we manage 4-5 days of uptime without human intervention (usually to reboot some stuck S5).

About innovation why nobody mentions oil cooled setups ?

http://www.grcooling.com/bitcoin-mining/

http://i60.tinypic.com/juep3l.png

The one thing I would reccomend for your farm is pigs. They are an absolute must.

One big reason I believe would be price.  Also very easy to put new gear that is nothing special in aircooled data centers.

I think it is going to be very very hard to beat a data center that can do evaporation cooling.  That is huge being able to do that large scale.  Other option is putting ton's of CFM of fan's and exhust it out.

I think price is reasons that site does now show a real unit just rendering of what it could do.  It's been a long time but there was one that had a immersion based at decent scale I believe, but it was a good while back.  Like asicminer blade days.

Because:
- miners are not servers and are actually built to be air-cooled, at least current designs
- oil is costly to buy, air is free
- you need special receptacles to buy, air is free
- you need heavy duty pumps, fans are cheaper
- you need to be able to retool quickly, miners come in all shapes,
- miners get obsolete quick and they might be thrown out in 1 year, unlike servers
- evaporative cooling can actually lower ambient temperature
- oil cooling STILL needs a fan to cool the heat
- redundancy costs and failure risks...

Yes of course, because the hardware only works with electricity, then this is essential and must be cheap to profit.

So you take container oil cooled filled with miners x funds you have or want to spend
http://www.grcooling.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Fig4CONTAINER.png
Add this
http://i60.tinypic.com/28hhag7.jpg
And a bit of this
http://i58.tinypic.com/rbxsat.jpg
Wouldn't it be more profitable to mine then?

If we speculate anyway why not underground for location , Sahara , dunno how much it cost m² but can't be a lot , enough sunshine and temperature variation to generate electricity , at first glance the only big problem would be a stable internet connection.

Anyone has free satellite ?

If you have solar power station, then it is better to sell the power to make profit with subsidies and rent a farm to mine a coin of your choice.

Take 50% for gear and 50% for hosting and get the most efficient hardware you can buy reasonably. 

Hi guys,


My company offer 50% partnership on mining equipment. I host miners we split profits. zero electricity cost.


I have references, company is a registered for more than 10 years. I can posted business relationships, contracts, and registration info.


Zero electricity cost to partner we split profits. 50% of miners to your bitcoin address and also you can rent your miners to other customers to double your ROI.


Also i have to possibility of financing customers in USA and Canada with a finance partner. The only company in the market. I started my LED business back 10 years ago and have relationship with three financing companies.


Requirement for financing: Option
They usually ask for a 2 years in business and check credit that's all.
If best option if you are thinking of making money using the bank and since you don't have the electricity risk factor. We can set up a way to pay equipment in 6-12 months.
 


if you are thinking of using your funds you can start small guys... paid your equipment and keep moving forward together.



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