Bitcoin Forum

Hi,
I'm new on this forum but I've followed Bitcoin for a couple of years and now I find myself in a particular situation and I wanna now your opinions since it's regarding mining Bitcoin.
Well let's say that I'm living in an apartment in which I do not pay electricity bill, do you think it
Would be profitable and a smart investment to buy Bitcoin Mining hardware and of course Start mining Bitcoin ?
Under this circumstances which miner do you recommend me to buy ?
Or is it a better idea to mine other cryptocurrencies that might be more profitable for a same price hardware ?
Willing to know your opinion  :)

Absolutely not, especially if you live in a large city. Chances are your electrical cost is way way over 0.10$/kWh, and even if it wasn't you'd have problems with roi with an S9. Warming by using the miner during the winter can help electrical bills slightly, though. Eth and alt coin mining might work out for you, possibly, but that's just a maybe and we need to know your electrical costs.

As I told you I do not have any electrical cost, so electricity wouldn't be a problem

But how much free power do you have? At what point will the person paying the power bill start to get upset about how much you're using without compensation?

I should have a couple of kW and they come from unused solar panel

You need to make some ROI calculations. You should buy any miner you can get your hands on which have 6-8months of ROI time. Don't buy anything longer 10months. Your miners will mine less bitcoin time and there will be a time that they will be mining satoshi's only.

might be a good idea to mine bitcoin or to buy some GPUs (whose price doesn't change so much during month) and start mining other cryptocurrencies ? that was my dillemma. Is there any other good producer except Antminer ?

https://canaan.io/shop/
Canaan Creative.
Their newest miner is AvalonMiner 721.
You need AvalonMiner 721, controller (Raspberry Pi) and a power supply.

Unless they've started accepting non-bank transfer methods of buying their miners, it's not really easy to purchase their miners. Plus, the efficiency of the A721 is just around that of an underclocked S7. I know some people like me support Avalon and other miner manufacturers, but it's not too ideal to buy one at this moment unless you want a nice starter rig and have nearly free electricity.

So do you think that it might be better to build a GPU rig and mine other cryptocurrencies instead of buying a dedicated hardware for bitcoin mining ?

Yep. Plus, you can mine several different algorithms and switch coins more freely to get the most money out of a rig instead of being bound to one algorithm with thousands of miners on it. Check out the alt coin mining section if you're interested in this, the trick is to find a good LGA1150 or AM1-2 motherboard with lots of PCI lanes, and a cheap but reliable processor and RX-470 or 480 cards for best efficiency. As with ASICs, don't cheap out on a psu!

Start reading this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1584973.0

It has a lot of good info in it. I posted a message in that thread with a bill of materials for an under $1,100 4-GPU mining rig build (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1584973.msg16971242#msg16971242) that could yield 600-800 sol/s depending on how aggressive you are with the BIOS mods and clocking, and which mining software you use (right now Windows 10 w/ Claymore miner seems to be best). Granted you may not be able to get that pricing (USA prices and some special rebates), but you can use that as a baseline.

Cheers,

- zed

The GPU rig is better and more profitable but you might need to baby sit it from time to time.

Bitcoin ASICs are just plug and play and you never have to worry about them. They also take up less space.

Never? Pfft. ASICS can overheat and break just as easily as a GPU can break in most instances; miners these days are especially susceptible to such issues as build quality goes down. Both need to be checked on occasionally. A well-built GPU rig can take up less space than a ASIC and has a higher resale value. There are also ways to put two GPUS on one PCI lane, which is slightly difficult to do but is possible.

Dunno about that. I have two different ASIC miners (GekkoScience Compac and a Bitmain S7LN) and both need to be checked on a regular basis. The S7LN will "lose" ASICs from the chains, while the Compac will start hashing at lower rates than the normal 17.8 GH/s. The S7LN requires a power cycle to "find" the lost ASICs and return to normal, while the Compac needs to have cgminer restarted to get back to normal.

Pick your poison, GPU or ASIC, both have their periods of profitability, and neither is completely hands-off.

Cheers,

- zed