Bitcoin Forum

The price of bitcoins at present is ~$600.

What do you think: Is it more profitable to mine a viable altcoin ( ETC, XMR...) and then exchange them for bitcoins or invest in an S9 and mine bitcoins?

this may be moved from btc to alt coin.

I suggest both but with a lot of caveats .

An s-9 costs about 1800 to 2000 to be fully set up

A solid 4 card 100mh eth card build is about 1500

  I have a four card build it does about 97mh and pulls about 600 watts.



 right now it is better then an s-9  but shit happens in crypto coin

so one of each is okay to do as you are more diverse that way



many ways to do builds.
here is an open case 4 card build does about 96 mh to 101 mh power used about 600 watts
this was about

4 x 250= 1000 for the cards
1 x 130=   130 for the psu
1 x   80=    80 for the m2 ssd
1 x 130=   130 for the mobo
2 x  35 =    70 for the  ram
1 x ?   =     ? for windows 7 pro
1 x 40 =    40 for open case mount
1 x 150=   150 for cpu

total cost = 1600
my thread with a lot of info

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1429151.0

 you may not need a lot to start as you may have gear in your house


https://i.imgur.com/VuCtJO7.jpg


the rigs stats at the pool

https://i.imgur.com/DSMgmia.png

That is an impressive build you got there. ;)
And your comparsion just goes to show you how much it can save you in doing a DIY system which can compete with those ready made store bought units.
Excellent setup you got and will be following your thread to see it's progress.
Thanks for this Philip! ;D

Altcoins may be a better option, but it mostly depends on what you like more. For example, DASH is a nice X11 coin, and there ARE ASICS for it now. You could invest in an ibelink X11 ASIC and try getting profit. Then there's Ether, which is pretty profitable right now, but unfortunately due to Casper it'll become unviable pretty soon. It's still going to take a few months, though. Keep in mind many ASIC'S profitable lifetimes are right around a year as well, though. Altogether, it just depends at what time you ask, but currently, Ethereum can be a better choice than Bitcoin mining. You'll need a good GPU for Ether, though, and I recommend the RX 470- nearly the same hashrate as the 480, with slightly better power usage, I believe. Good luck mining!

I wanted to get into mining some altcoins about a year ago and I really wish I did start mining Etherium.
It seems so risky now. After the fork, all the turmoil and everything that has happened...

Maybe mining ETC is still profitable but I feel like unless you can predict another alt-coin that will go up in value,
you are probably going to be making just a few dollars a month for a large investment, and the ROI will be a while.
(Depends on how much disposable income you have and how long you can wait to get it back I guess.)

Interested in Philipma1957 or someone with a similar setup on how long the ROI for your $1600 is.

well you need to know I earn 850 a month and spend 250 on power.

so 600 a month . I have 3 rigs so 4800  .

so 8 x 600 = 4800  but all my rigs have 1,2,3,5 year warranties  on various parts. and all parts keep resale value far better then an basic does.

my earnings are based on 18 cent power thats right and to mine a profit  at 18 cent power is hard to do with an basic.

My power drops to 9 cents on oct 1st so I go from 250 for power to 125 for power.
The key is how long does it last?

wow, I really did not think mining was viable with that sort of cost per kw...I'm gonna have to think about mining altcoins

its a good rigs that i want to build later. with that vga cards, it should give a good profit to mining eth. i think mining eth is still profitable than any other. but we should have more budget to build the rigs.

@philipma1957, what would you recommend a newbie in mining with disposable income? Let's say I want to start mining Ethereum with plans to shift to other coins once I have gained experience. What kind of hardware would you recommend that I start with as a hobby and to gain experience with?

how total expenditure to buy the card?
and how your income per day / month ?

Usually i mine 12 hours with gpu rig and 12 hours trading daily.

I think I will stick with daily trading, observe market trends and make something worthwhile. I don't have access to cheap electricity and the cost of those rigs are way beyond my budget, at least for now :)

Its better to mine alt coin which give better exchange rate and have low difficulty level.nowdays it is useless to mine scrypt based coin as they need high hash power.s o stick with dash or peer coin.

altcoin is better, they give you roughly double of the earning that you can earn with a s9, a s9 was dead when the halving come out, so it did not last much

Another option for you is to only buy BTC and hold its.

In my opinion, all we know the Bitcoin halving is implemented now so for me its not profitable for now.Yes you can try mine other altcoins its more profitable for now and trade them with exchanges.

I think it is better to mine the altcoins such as Ethereum. When you use the GPU to mine the coin, when they become not profitable, you can sell the GPU.

XMR might be the next altcoin that is worthwhile to mine. There is news coming out that Roger Ver was actually considering XMR starting 2 months ago. He must have been buying at low prices anticipating a rise in price. Maybe they are using the same formula as they did with BTC?

I hope they do not do it the same as they did not to BTC. XMR is just a small anonymous coin without big community support.

XMR has sky rocketed in past couple of  days and worth .013 BTC now. is that small , anonymous enough for you ??? damn people got rich!!!

putting all of the hardware aside, all of the gains are in alts right now. it all depends on how much of a betting man you are.

if you include the hardware, bitcoin's relatively predictable but you can also predict that you're guaranteed to get outgunned fairly soon.

If I were you, I would try to get in on Z-cash mining. Likely to be more profitable than BTC mining.
https://forum.z.cash/t/crowdfund-gpu-miner/1324

I think monero mining is profitable, and you see the price is skyrocketing, they increased from 0.003 to 0.018, almost 6X. Which is a huge pump because their market cap is already very huge, monero is stable top 15 coin, now this pump makes monero a top 6 coin. The market cap is larger than dash now. So monero is no.1 anonymous coin.

When will zcash be released? Also is it sure that the current planned algorithm for the testnet will be used in the official release? That is the problem if you plan to commit resources to mine zcash. There is no final and definite word in what shape or form it might be released. There is also the "trusted set up" argument. If they go through with that I do not think zcash will be as big as we think because there is a possibility of fraud even if there is none.

Stick with altcoins and maybe add some bitcoin when the prices correct a bit. Mining with S9 is long gone if you want profit. Now I have heard of Antminer's R4 or R9 something like that. Check out their site. They say they want to bring back mining backs to homes. Yeah, but for how long?!? All miners get outdated in max 2 years time.

So, stick with promising alts like ETH, XMR, DASH, NXT, etc. Wait for ETC to get stabilized before jumping into it. All the best.And why don't you consider investing in some good ICO (DECENT, ANTSHARE, SINGULAR DTV) bet their coins will fetch some $$ when it hits the market or invest and wait for some time. All the best!

I trade the Ethereum, Monero, Dash or other coins such as Decred or litecoin. They are quite profitable at the moment.

I think yes now it is more profitable to mine altcoins and to convert them to bitcoin as now we can see that the price of bitcoin once again started to increase, but still if we are mining some altcoins which have the potential to increase more faster then we should have to keep them also.

I mined the Etheruem in the past, it was very profitable for me. But now, it is get less profitable day after day.

Even though the Ethereum mining difficulty is rising, it is more profitable now. It is mainly due to the higher price.