Bitcoin Forum

see
http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

since Feb'13

Well, this was bound to happen.
Technology is advancing   ;D

Yeah, and I keep wondering why people even bother asking what GPUs to buy when it doesn't even matter anymore.

you do realize that for people with free electricity, gpu mining will always be profitable, right?

Electricity is never free, there is always a cost somewhere to someone. And the more difficulty rises the less profit you make from puny GPUs, making that cost less bearable at whatever point it comes in from.

Let's speak about CPU mining  :)

Would a Pentium 3 be awsome at mining :O?

Most people are buying new GPUs for Litecoin.

That's not true.  If I buy a 7970 3 months from now and mine BTC, even with my free electricity I would probably lose more resale value in the card then I would be able to generate in BTC value. Only with the recent BTC price run has GPU mining stayed alive, otherwise everybody would be on a different coin.

Only the idiots who mine at a loss would mine BTC rather than just buy it for cheaper than electricity costs.

For me it doesn't matter if i use 1w or 1miljon miljons w. I pay the same no matter what, It is the company that i rent my apartment from that make less money. So i don't care about electric cost.
My 7970 brings in $135 per month not so much maybe but with only 3 of them running 24/7 my rent would be free :D


I bought a Asus gtx 680 3 months ago and sold it last week, i lost $95 on that. so resale value lost $32 per month but a 7970 card make $135 per month and it does not lose more value per month then a 680.
So you still have $100 profit :)

It is not a loss if you don't sell what you mine . If you sell after years probably it is not a loss .
I mined something years ago and if I sold at that time it was a loss but now it is very profitable.

The *only* way this logic makes sense is if you did not specifically buy equipment to do mining with.  If you did, and were betting on the price of bitcoin to rise, you would have been better off simply using the money spent on hardware to buy bitcoins directly.

Again.  If you're buying mining equipment hoping the price will rise to make you profitable, you're doing it wrong.  Buy actual bitcoins instead, and you will make a larger profit in almost all scenarios.

That assumes you're not intending to diversify. I just placed a modest order for some ASIC mining hardware. My plan is as follows:

Pay for equipment at 100%. If it takes the first month to pay back my investment, or 6 months. 100% of profits go to breaking even on the equipment. After that, 50% goes into a reinvestment account, which will be used to continually upgrade and acquire more equipment (which will then be paid back at 100% of mining, etc, etc).

The other 50% gets split two ways. 25% will be held in cryptocoin. I'll devise an investment strategy that probably includes litecoin, bitcoin, and maybe a couple of other 'altcoins'.

The remaining 25% will go in my pocket to be used to "invest" as I see fit (probably paying down my mortgage, or other debt. Maybe a small amount invested in other stocks or commodities or IRA.

IMHO, throwing ALL of your profits into a volatile market (bitcoin) is too risky. But pulling it all out in cash is risky in itself, because of the risk of lost opportunity. If bitcoin doubles in value, or even increases 100 fold, my 25% investment will be a comfortable return. If it loses all value, at least I got back the cash that I did.

Diversification is your best option, in the long run, IMHO.

People who invest money nowadays in "classic normal regulated" markets would consider 10% interest per year quite lucrative.

People who gripe when their investment (in the BTC arena) doesn't pay for itself quicker than in one year (which would be the equivalent of 100% interest) do this for one of two reasons:

1. They have lost grip on reality to some extent or are very avaricious.

or

2. They have understood the very high RISK of this investment, which can only be mitigated by having a very high ROI or BEP.

Apart from the greedy ones out there, I think the most of us would hope for lower returns in favor of more stability/reliability. I could certainly live with less risk and a good return over the next (say) five years.

The bottom line for any technology (GPU, FPGA, ASIC) is BTC Revenue against power cost - sadly each are valued in a different "currency", thus you have an exchange rate problem as well, which affects the predictability of your returns.

You can predict that ASICs will make difficulty rise, but I find it more than difficult to predict the fiat exchange rate of BTC, thus your returns when using a GPU (and even for an ASIC, actually) are still unpredictable.

But why should your life be easier this way than when you buy futures on the price of rice, for example?

It is a personal thing also - I have read threads where miners stated they paid "nothing" for electricity - it being part of their lease. That sort of allows you to use GPUs for a long time especially if they are close to being paid off already.

The point I am trying to make is that very probably you are right - GPU mining will fizzle out, but it won't die totally.

The biggest risk of all for the ASIC users is the total loss of the investment in case of a protocol change - remember how the concentration of processing power in a minority of users is hated by the online community. If the "few" ASIC dominators play this wrong, the cryptocurrency public will flock to LTC, for example.

If you want to keep your foot in the door, point a few GPUs at LTC and see: the GPU's won't die.

Just my 0.1BTC

GPU miners are going in altcoins where not even FPGAs really exist yet (unless BlockBurner has something to say about that 8)), let alone ASIC devices. Bitcoin is going pro, only those with more daring and deeper pockets can mine effectively, leaving coins like Litecoin fertile ground for all manor of lower end investors that missed the Bitcoin wave. ASIC will push GPUs out of Bitcoin, but not the rest by far. GPU mining will be fine until FPGA or ASIC is simply the starting standard for new coins.

WHats to stop every iphone or laptop or desktop from having chips capable of asics or intel from having asics type of tech built into the chipset and do away with all the crypto and run the whole thing without even you knowing a bout it.  Low power your device can be used for its own sake and you dont even need this type of thing maybe i dont know.  But if asics is so powerful and energy effecient why would anyone need to create a market tied to currency for it. 

Litecoin and maybe what, feathercoin? are the only altcoins that are resistant/immune to asics and fpgas.  all other litecoins can be mined by asics..

I fully agree with your plan, and have been following a nearly identical one myself for ~2 years. You've got it dialed in.

I think everyone forgets that compared to classical investments bitcoin mining has amazing returns. The community seems annoyed that they're "only getting 120% per year" but if you any normal investor could buy a fund/stock/bond that would return 15% a year they'd be in heaven.

As for me, I'm focused on growing the income stream via mining and staying in the game as far as asics go... and I'll take a "measly 10 month roi" and just laugh at people freaking out because it's not fast enough.

I completely disagree - alt coins (most especially scrypt based) are a long-term dead end. The entire idea is flawed... it amounts to trusting obscurity to secure your network while at the same time using growth of the network as a metric to determine value.

The only reason that ltc hasn't been destroyed is because nobody with the skills or the time has the inclination to design a device for it. That will happen if the alt-coin ever gets to be worth enough. It would take someone with fpga experience all of 2 weeks to design an fpga based ltc miner (especially if they've done btc fpga development in the past). I'm sure there are some other older geeks who're capable of making their own boards who've been considering ripping apart some of our fpga units and making something for ltc.

The only reason I haven't is because I haven't got much free time, and don't really need another project on my bench.