Bitcoin Forum

What do you think? Too late or do you think the value will increase along side the difficulty as it has been doing for the most part?

The profitability of mining depends almost entirely on your hardware costs at this point.

Worst case, you end up with some sweet computer gear with high resale value if you end up not wanting it

At this point, I would reccomend using 6000 series cards. The 5000 series cards will lose ALOT of value if the bitcoin ever fails. The 6000 series can still be used as a gaming card

Like they said above. It all depends on your hardware. I've got Nvidia gear so mining doesn't make sense unless I want to invest in new equipment. Then it's a question of how fast you can make your investment back before the difficulty gets too high and the amount of coins per block decreases.

I'm probably going to start off with 4 rigs. I calculated 2 rigs in best and seemingly worst case situations and 4 rigs would pay off in twice as much time as a 2 rig miner.

It is never too late, but the early adopters have a large advantage: their hardware can be paid for by selling Bitcoin. Long-term, I expect Bitcoin mining to become industrial in scale*. We are currently at commercial scale as far as I can tell.

* If it lasts that long.

I agree. The uphill battle is obvious for bitcoin but I remain confident that bitcoin will do well in over the next year or so. Their will be a fork in the road at some point.

This is my take on it all.

For example, as a starter I have been a gamer for whenever I am using my computer so I have a GTX480 currently which is amazing for gaming, but sucks for mining (sad how it has to be this way LOL), so anyways I was thinking to sell this card, buy a single 6950 which I would unlock into a 6970, which is pretty much on par with a 5870, but with more headroom, and also higher clocks... AND it is still an excellent card for gaming with as well.

I play games like Aion etc which are more demanding on full settings, and it's also known that crossfire setups with the 5xxx series in Aion have issues and dont even work, so getting a 6xxx series card is a great single card option for me, and as I play games (and mine during any afk time), I will make profits to buy even another card. This will net ~750Mhash/s, AND double as a sick gaming rig AND ALSO retain a lot of it's value if I ever needed to sell out.

Demoncrest has spoken =]  lol

Nope definitely not too late

lol. I like the way you think sir. I'm not a gamer at all thought.

Yesiree. I bought a second 5770 to xfire and it works fabulous (works perfect in all games I've tried). I have aggressive miners, and then mine while gaming with non-aggressive miners. In just two weeks I'm well ahead - even if bitcoins lost all value tomorrow.  Winning.

Still can't play Crysis though.

It's all just a cost benefit thing. work out the cost and the benefit and if the cost out weights the benefit then yes it is too late

Since I started mining a few months ago, the difficulty has increased about tenfold, while the market price of a bitcoin has increased about thirtyfold. Doesn't sound too late to me.

That said, if I'd taken that $500 I spent on mining equipment and just bought bitcoins instead, I'd have turned something like a $14,000 profit (on paper), for a lot less effort spent. I haven't mined anywhere near the number of bitcoins I could have bought.

That said, any fool can predict the past. Mining is profitable right now, whereas buying bitcoins requires a lot more 'faith'. It's really up to you.

I had to use my first 2000 BTC to fund my video card purchases back in January  :D.

If you have the money to spare, or lose, go for it.

Im still trying to meet ends with it all, have 6 gpus, have met break even on 2.

I'm half-hoping I stop turning a profit on mining soon, just so I can finally play Portal 2 without feeling like I'm burning money.

It doesnt matter how much coins per block you get, the coin wil get more rare that way thus getting more valuable.

Hahaha...WOW.

It's interesting, the trade off between what amounts to currency speculation in the form of holding your bitcoins, cashing out to reduce USD risk, and purchasing services with bitcoins.

Personally, right now, I'm a currency speculator.  Haven't sold any bitcoins for some time.  I figure I'll hold on to them til they have a value I think is worthwhile, and then I'll spend them in what will then be a more mature market place.

I think it's never too late. There's still a huge amount of BTCs to be mined. As the general supply of BTCs will grow I think we will see stabilization of exchange rates that will be above the costs.

If you read this forum and other sources on the internet, many people think it would be wise too hold the btc because the value will probably rise.

it will.

I did some simple math to see if I could pay off just a GPU, and it didn't look good.  Then, in a few days, the BTC tripled in value, and suddenly there was a business case!  Doesn't pay for much, but it seems it would pay off the new GPU.

It will pay it off.  I am in the same boat just starting out.  i hope to just pay simple bills like water , power, maybe rent in time.

well my 6990 is chuging away should pay itself in about 30 days, everything else after that is profit, or i might buy another one if i can find one.

Given that the current outlook for miners is better than when I started, you might wonder why I'm not putting more money into it now. Believe me, I'm wondering the same thing.  :-\

as long as you're patient, mining will be profitable for the foreseeable future.  You have to remember that you don't HAVE to sell at a low price.  You can hoard and sell at the spike points just the same!

I worry about doing that and hurting the market, however.  If too many people go about doing that the price could plummit, which hurts the long term goals of bitcoin.  (If the market fluctuates too much)

I guess if you havent started yet mining, its allmost not profitable anymore especially if the bitcoin will fall down.

Most PC enthusiasts replace their PC once every 3 years i guess. Atleast I do anyway. I discovered bitcoins about a month ago and looked into it.
Turns out my gaming rig is not all that good, its an nvidia GTX 470 and pretty power hungry. I get about 90mhash/s out of it and can get 110 if I overclock it.
But then I wouldnt be able to play games on it, so I did a bit of research and also some digging in my attic. I found my old PC and dusted it off.
It is only an AMD X2 6400 with a single slot PCI-E mobo, but realised that if I buy an AMD/ATI 5850 then I would at current rates only need to mine 6 bitcoins to get my money back, considering that the old PC was just going to sit in the attic forever.

I have got a nice wireless dongle for it and will stick it back in the attic soon. But overclocked(memory underclocked) it runs at 55 C and pumps out 350mhash/s


I should get my money back in a week or so in terms of bitcoin value.

Although the guys that discovered it last year are very luck and probably have 1000's of dollars worth of bitcoins, I still think there is money to make in mining, even if its just a bit of extra spending money to give you a few hundred dollars. For me that would come in very handy for doing basically nothing.

I have just started. All I hope to do is pay for my computer building addiction. I just bought a 6870 right before I knew about bitcoins so I hope it will pay itself off and then more.

Few hours ago I had no idea why so many were saying its too late to start mining. So I did some reading and calculating..  :)

We are at the crucial point where it is still OK to start mining, but you will basically mine to get free hardware and maybe a cheeseburger. Before the end of this week difficulty factor will change again from current 567269 to something bigger. Before I did all this reading and calculations I had no idea difficulty factor is going mega crazy as of late. Here is a chart http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png)

Every 2016 blocks difficulty factor is recalculated and is going to increase more and more eventually to a point of breakeven with electricity cost and after that even more so we will be running with a loss hoping for Bitcoins to be worth a lot more in the future. It takes only approx 10 days for difficulty factor to change and it can change by a lot. Here are past few changes with dates and factors:

2011-04-30            109670
2011-05-09            157416
2011-05-18            244112           
2011-05-26            434877         
2011-06-06            567269

Next difficulty change will be at the block 131040 which you can monitor here http://blockexplorer.com/ (http://blockexplorer.com/) This thing might happen by Thursday of this week and my prediction is we are going up by 15 to 20% to about 660000. Before the end of the month we will get another move to 750000. Difficulty factor is going up so quick that it will soon be at electricity costs vs making Bitcoins. I know and understand there are other important factors to be considered but mining for a true newbie like myself is just not worth it any more.

To calculate your approx earnings you can use this calculator http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php) You can do approx calculations for every week if you are estimating the difficulty factor change. Keep in mind the difficulty factor changes every 10 or so days, so you are basically interested in a weekly earnings ONLY. Don't be fooled what it says you will be making per month because factor will change twice before the whole month is over.


Why did I do all this research ?

Personally I got money to burn and I wanted to go big with this. I could start with approx $75k of hardware and add about $10k per month, but after my research I'm 100% sure we missed the easy cash in this thing. Start of this year difficulty factor was around 15000 and it would be a sweet run if I picked it up then. I would run it all the way until I was breaking even with electricity costs with I'm predicting will occur next year depending on the base electricity price for an individual.


So what can a small scale newbie do ?

You can buy a fancy Radeon gpu and do the mining whenever computer is idle and I can guarantee you will eventually get your investment back plus a cheeseburger every once in a while. Which is not such a bad deal for all the gamers out there who couldn't afford high end card so far.


All of this is just my research and personal opinion on the matter.

Good luck to all the newbie miners out there.

skyhigh

if you are going to get into it, begin NOW! i started 1 week ago with just a 5850, when i saw that itwas working i went to my local reseller and asked him the components...just what i needed, motherboard, ram, cpu (a sempron 140 lol) and 2 ati 5850 extreme, unfortunately the 5850s have not arrived yet, they should arrive tomorrow or wed. in the meanwhile he gave me a 6850, so now i'm mining with a 5850 and a 6850 at a 500Mh/s waiting for my other vgas to arrive..and i've already got some cash from bitcoin to recover the inversion...so...go for it

But how does difficulty factor affect the value of the bitcoin?

Is this something where the higher the difficulty, the higher the value and therefore people who are still chugging make up for the lack of BTC generation by simple virtue that the BTC is now more valuble?

Or will more difficulty make BTC prices drop?

I've never done anything economy related before so I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of this. The only real world parallel to Bitcoin and mining that I know of is the Gold Rush

I think the issue of "too late" requires looking at the following.  I have ordered this list based on my own opinion:

1.  The future value of BTCs
2.  Your ability to set up and configure machines to mine efficiently
3.  How much you are willing to invest
4.  How much you expect to gain
5.  What value do you place on your free time ($/hr)
6.  What kind of hardware you purchase

Good luck.

N

don't forget the graphic cards are getting better.

VPS servers would not work at all since most VPS servers I know don't carry video cards, which are pretty much required in order to mine.

Someone would probably make a killing though, starting a server rental service just for Bitcoin that specilized in servers that use specific video cards good for mining with average components for everything else.

I would not agree to this generally... I have compared Sapphire HD5850 xtreme with Sapphire HD6870 vapor-x:

When mining, the 5850 keeps really cool and quiet, around 72°C evene overclocked to 775 MHz, giving around 290Mh/s. The other, 6870, becomes REALLY hot and so loud that I can not sit in the same room. I've never had such a loud beast. The 6870 gives around 260Mh/s, and I don't dare to oc this one at all. After this experience, I would not even think about to have a 6870 in my desktop PC, I also will send back the 6870. I love my 5850, and it's worth its money also as gamer card.

just my 2 cents  ;D

PF.

Greate post, Skyhigh.

I believe xaxistech is reffering more to the thought of re-selling the graphics cards assuming a bitcoin crash.  I had the same idea, as much as I wish I was apart of the original 5830 purchases, I went with the 69xx series since I could resell them assuming a drastic market failure.

It's tough to say, but the valuations do not appear (at present) to have the enormous payoff for simply buying the coins. Plus, you will at least have your equipment if you go that route, but it definitely looks slower.

Yeah, I just started a couple days ago, and just ordered another 6950... considering power consumption vs the 5850 and that I already have one 6950... a cross fire rig mostly paid for (gpus anyway) if the mining does dry up is perfectly fine for me. However, i am not gonna jump in with hardware that would require a long amortization period... No real point if the difficulty ratchets like I think it will considering the new comers that will start mining. However, if i had it to burn, and then say an outlet for it.. (a gaming cafe off hours per se) then I would totally take the time to build out a lab to mine... as long as I had a fall back revenue generation stream.

i do not think it is too late. In fact i think it is very early in the game yet. I have spent the last 44 hours straight doing math and mining with a laptop. Yes i said mining with laptop. I did this mainly to see if it could be done. My lappy gets about 166 mhash/s and gpu stays around 100 C. Next week im building a rig that will output about 6ghash/s the price is steep but it will pay itself off rather quickly.  Oh and btw lap uses 155w of power or so under full load. Just as a side note it is going to take quite awhile for the block count to reach 21m but what i cannot quite get my head around is how it is going to be limited to that. I mean in the process of creating blocks you are encrypting the transfer data will there no longer be transfer data at 21m or will the same block be recycled over and over again?

The blocks will still be created, there just won't be any block generation awards (currently 50BTC, but this gets divided by 2 every 210,000 blocks). Once all 21M BTCs are "created" miners will only get compensated with transaction fees.

Could you please post your math, I would really like to see it. I'm not saying don't do it or that you are wrong or whatever. I would just like to see your research and math behind it and would be interested in talking over whatever areas we would disagree on.

Thanks

you know you are an addict when you take a power nap and the first thing you do is check your creation while sleeping and the second thing is check this forum. lol

@helo ok this may affect my math a bit but assuming the difficulty will grow by x amount as to keep block creation at 2016 per 2 weeks how do you think the value will increase based upon @210k blocks reward per block drops 25 BTC? At first blush it seems that halving the reward per 210k would be extremely detrimental to the BTC's viability.

The factor of new people mining as a hobby would drop as the coin reward drops unless the value per coin were to rise exponentially. It would seem that the difficulty would have to fluctuate wildly to compensate for computing power gains and losses which would also lead to constant market corrections and volatility . That being said it would very difficult to determine profitability over time.

This directly affects my specific right now as negotiations began yesterday between myself and investors. hmmm i think i need to invest in a chalkboard or two.

I think that it's all about the float. By the time we reach block 210,000 there will be 10.5M BTC in circulation. Wheter 150 new BTC get mined per hour (25BTC/block) versus the current 300BTCph will probably not amount to such a big deal. Don't forget that currently MtGox averages 30K+ BTC/day in volume. The volume will likely be much higher if Bitcoin survives to see block 210,000 :)

Also hardware will be more powerful, cheaper and less expensive to operate in the future. Someone will always have access to powerful machines and figure out a way how to make some $$$ with them - as long as they're mining for the network, not trying to overpower it.

1. There is no laptop gpu capable of outputting 166mhash/s. Radeon 6970M is the fastest one and fully optimized it yields 110-120mhash

2. 100C 24/7 will kill your chip within weeks

3. A single rig with 4ghash/s would require 12 gpu's = 6x radeon 6990. Not possible by any other combo, even if your mobo has 8 slots, filling them all with 6970s would give about 3200

There isn't even an XL-ATX motherboard that can accomodate 6 dual/triple slot cards without using a bunch of extenders (you'd then be drawing 450 watts from the motherboard power connector just to feed the PCI-e slots which isn't very healthy)

Man I hope not, got 2x5830 in the mail today, but don't think my power supply will be able to handle it!

@xonar

 The base speed with the flags of -v -w 128 on my 5870m is 140 base clock 700mhz memclock 1000 leaving the memclock the same as it makes no difference on this particular card even lowering all the way to 300 base temp is about 90c .

when i run i overclock to 810 temp hovers around between 100-102c and Mhash goes between 163 and 166

http://i1227.photobucket.com/albums/ee440/whenhowwho/Mining.png

incidentally when i play games such as bad company or vietnam temps hit about 105 and i tend to play for a long time or used to before this whole mining thing :)

Isn`t 100+ temp too high? As far as I know temperatures above 95 Clsius are strongly not recommended  :-\

Isn`t 100+ temp too high? As far as I know temperatures above 95 Clsius are strongly not recommended  :-\

Well, you are overclocking a laptop circuit above 100mhz it's base frequency and running it at 105 celsius. Maybe the hash rate really is possible.

I'm thinking that's a big waste of a laptop though. Most people don't like to run their hardware at even past 80 degrees due to long term damage.

Your temperature would likely go down if you underclock your GPU memory. It doesn't impact MH/s, but saves greatly on heat and energy use.

I don't believe mining is too late yet.  Only 1/3 of the coins have been found so far, meaning the 2/3s are still up for grabs.  Although those that have been mining for the last few months and longer are way ahead of the game, but doesn't mean you won't get a piece of the pie, albeit a smaller one.

To everyone who thinks, they could turn around and resell their gpu and recoup some money back if bitcoin were to collapse...well you might want to think twice.

1. If bitcoin collapsed, everyone else will be selling their GPUs at the same time, especially the previous generation cards, and we all know when supply is greater than demand...

2. Computer hardware rarely ever keep their value since newer models come out all the time with the 7xxx series being just around the corner, so for a gamer's perspective you aren't going to get top dollar for the current 6xxx gen cards, esp if the market is flooded.

So if you're going to get in, now is always better than later.  I wouldn't be putting my life savings on either, just what you can afford and see if you get at least a return on initial investment before you dump serious cash into it.

Another thing to keep in mind is would you benefit more with just buying the coins outright vs spending the money on the hardware...

For me I have a system lying around all I needed was to get a couple of GPUs and a bigger PSU to accommodate, and at the current difficulty I should recover my investments in a few weeks.

Yes, it's too late to start mining unless

a) You have a sizeable FPGA cluster that can be configured to run all day long

b) You have a ASIC cluster that was built to hash all day long

Just like CPU mining, barring awesome increases in GPU hashing power (which will be purchased by all the already-profitable miners here), GPU mining has almost had its day.

Onward and upward, not sideways.

People have been saying this for months now.  Yes, it's getting harder and harder to generate blocks of bitcoins, but being that bitcoins are by nature deflationary, the value should be going up as well. 

Your statement requires you to "put your money where your mouth is."

As this is the n00b forum, and you're a n00b, you might want to check out the awesome mining calculators that exist; put in the numbers you think will happen. Good luck...

or

Just admit you're a late adopter (relative to those who are not), and invest.

The two cases I'd recommend attempting to mine: 1)If you needed a graphics card for gaming and were going to buy one anyway, it might not hurt (the economic value is different then. Also, notice I didn't say rig.). 2) You know the "f" what you're doing.

Theoretically it should increase in value indeed. But last increase in difficulty it didnt increase so you cant just blindly rely on that.