Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

I'm a newbie who is considering mining, and I would like some help to make a decision. I've spec'd a few mining PCs using ATI cards, and according to the MHash-to-return estimator on 50BTC.com, most configurations take about 6 months to recover the investment costs.

Is 6 months a reasonable period before making a profit?

If not, what other approaches should I look into?

Thanks

To me, a 6 month break even time has been pretty standard in the bitcoin world. Some people recently have been getting greedy, and saying anything more than 4 months is unacceptable. I'm the real world, even 6 months is ridiculous.

One thing to keep in mind is the rising difficulty. What a cards earns now is twice what it will earn 3 months from now, at the very most.

I just created a site that might help with which coin would be most profitable to mine with your hashrate.
Take a look at http://www.WhereToMine.com (http://www.WhereToMine.com) and let me know if that helps you out.
I just launched it the other day, so totally open to comments/suggestions.

I don't have time to go through it thoroughly right now, but looks nice. You might want to take a hint from http://dustcoin.com/mining and include a few of their features, mainly a % based system, and a color code system that makes it easy to identify which coins are profitable, and which one's aren't.

As a general rule - shoot for 6 months and expect 10 months if you don't reinvest.

by any reasonable measure 120% a year is an insane return on investment.

I was shooting for 30 days but that pipe dream died a nasty death, 6 months seems about right

I think that would only be possible if you had a BFL miner at today's conditions :)

I did some calculation today about the break even time for BTC mining. The break even time is 6 month if I buy old 5850 cards and the difficulty stays at 14M. I use that constant difficulty because I think the BTC price will rise with difficulty level. If it does not rise, then break even time is infinity and will make a loss.

Six months is reasonable, but like with any newer 'unproven' investment, don't invest more than you can afford to lose. Check out some specs, price points and build guides I've listed for GPU based bitcoin mining hardware (http://www.coinminingrigs.com/) and make your own decision. I think profit margins will slowly decline (as more people become invested in mining), but as someone already said 120%+ annual ROI is insanely profitable by most measures. The average annual ROI for the stock market is less than 10% (as an example). For me its more of a hobby. I enjoy building things anyway, and the fact that they create a form of wealth is just bonus points for me.

I think it would be 6+ Months if you don't have free electricity.  Also depending on hashrate, seems a lot of ASICs will flow in this summer months.

Great article about your mining rig!

The 50BTC calculator isn't very useful for this. For starters, it rounds to bitcents.

Six months sounds like a lot if you go buy today's daily rewards. What exactly are you planning to buy?


Yes. Standard PC components (in contrast to specialized mining hardware) retain part of their value over time. Let's say you spend 1000 USD on hardware today. Six months from now, if your earned 1000 USD and the hardware is still worth 500 USD, you actually earned 500 USD.

However, keep in mind that the difficulty changes every 2016 blocks (roughly two weeks) and that the BTC/USD exchange rate is quite variable.

hi. I like this calc https://bitclockers.com/calc b/c it lets you enter the rate of increase in Diff - i would set it to 25%; but I wld still shoot for 3 months ROI. *remember ROI is based on when you pay, not get the asset - most people here calculate it based on mining time instead.