Bitcoin Forum

Just curious if people are actually buying their 1st and 2nd rigs still? isnt it a bit too late for them to get in the game this late given the diff level is just about to hit 1mil

Maybe if they expect to pay off their hardware the same day.  You gotta look forward though, maybe 30-90 days down the road.  Factor in difficulty increases as well as the BTC doubling or tripling in value.

There are a lot of people who probably already had their eyes on a shiny new video card, and view Bitcoin as a 'discount' off of the purchase price.

The math here is questionable as well, especially with summer heat and electricity costs factored in. Still, it's a psychological thing to convince yourself that you're going to get 10-30% 'off' your hardware purchase as long as you use it for bitcoin mining. Even worse is that you must buy now to get in on it.

buying more full computers for mining? no.

buying 5970 for less then 500 dollars to stick in an existing machine? yes.

i'm still considering buying a graphics card, but not building a full time rig....
just for 1 pc perhaps, but i still have the other hardware laying around :)

I buy a new gpu every other week and motherboards, RAM and whatev3r else I need every few weeks. Double my hashes every other week. Difficulty doesn't increase that fast so far so I still buy.

I read stories about people spending $10,000 on mining rigs and setups and I can't help but shake my head. I think their only chance at recovering their costs is to sell their equipment, or accept they're rolling the dice on the long game for bitcoin.

Personally, I spent $199 on a new video card a couple weeks ago when after watching the bitcoin market for a while, decided it was worth making the initial investment to see where it goes. In that time, I've recouped most of my investment and am looking at how to handle things going forward.

At the current (and upcoming) difficulty level, I think CPU mining should be a thing of the past (unless you have suuuper cheap electricity). Additionally, GPU mining will become less profitable and it will take people longer to recoup their investments.

So honestly, I think after the next difficulty increase, it wouldn't make sense to invest money for the sole purpose of mining. The people who stand to make the most money are going to be the early adopters who have already made back their investment and everything from this point forward is pure profit.

At the current difficulty level, even my home computer is able to pull in about $1,500/yr in profit. After the next increase, it's going to drop to an estimated $910/yr in profit.

So really, people getting into it after the difficulty increase need to bank on the value on BTC keeping pace with the difficulty increases.

Factor in difficulty increasing 50% every 10 to 14 days with no increase in BTC's value.  The last two 50% increases the average BTC/USD$ exchange rate has actually gone down, not up.  Yet the hash rate has doubled with more capacity being added daily.  People are adding capacity regardless of pay off.  I wager we're starting to see a major uptake of FPGAs.  Some on this forum will deny it, others have thrown about dates of September before FPGAs are likely to make a big impact.  I say it's happening now, and those mining professionally with FPGAs are not going to share their designs (why should they) and won't tell the world about what they're doing (don't want to spoil the party).

there has to be a something far mroe superior to gpus and cpus that will make mining worth while.

i thought the consensus was that FPGAs, while using less electricity, cost significantly more per hash and thus
it would take a severely long time to recoup your investment at this time. If i recall correctly.. i could probably
get started with a setup for around 600 dollars that will do 100 mh/s if i remember reading that correctly.

That is why ASICs became so interesting to folks around here. Same power usage about.. but many more hash
per second.

I can be completely wrong about FPGAs though and do not recall the main thread correctly.

Why? The difficulty will just increase fast enough to make those unprofitable also, it is the way the system was designed.

I think the catch here is the cost of development and production. What makes bitcoin super profitable is that it can be executed on multi-use hardware (your average video card).

The beauty of bitcoin too is that it will make ANY investment worth less and less over time. So if someone releases a FPGA that does 1 Ghash/sec and people buy it for $2,000, the difficulty will go up faster making their $2,000 investment less and less valuable dollar for dollar compared to a $200 ATI card.

Extrapolating profit from any difficulty level out to an entire year doesn't make any sense at all. Each difficulty period only lasts about ~10 days while difficulty is increasing.

1-2 months from now, you may very well be losing money by running your video card due to electricity costs and cooling costs if you're particularly unlucky.

I was wondering the same thing.

Last night, I found a guy selling 5850's for $199 shipped. (All of you are asking -- "WHERE?" lol)

I ran the numbers, and the 5850 (a better card than 5830, of course) gets 358 MH/s which is 0.37 BTC/day now.

But in about 24 hours, that's going to be cut to 0.244 BTC/day.

Assuming a $17 bitcoin, that's $4.15 a day.

But I don't live with Mom, so I have to subtract 4.5 kW/h for electricity, which (@ 8.8c per kWh) equals 0.40.

So I would make $3.75 a day with the card, assuming NO FURTHER DIFFICULTY INCREASES (yeah right!)

53 days to payoff.

That's too much. Maybe if my existing rigs were paid for I'd go for it -- but I gotta pay them off first. I don't want to be too far under water.

Moral of the story: The guy is selling his 5850 for what he paid! Yes, it's in great condition, but it's used! And he's not NewEgg!  He's preying on the last remaining (foolish) miners who are actually trying to start out/expand in the current situation where it doesn't make sense to expand.

I haven't expanded during this last difficulty. This is the first difficulty that I've watched in horror as the total network went up by 50%, yet I didn't contribute to ANY of that. I don't think it's a bunch of individuals -- most of it is probably the Big Boys.

Matthew

 :D

I thought it was silly to project MONTHLY income. It's downright insane to project YEARLY. Bitcoin might not even BE HERE for a year...

Exactly. I think from this point on, it only makes sense to invest in hardware that pays for itself. That's my strategy (barring another huge spike in value)

It would be myopic to lend so much credence to a microbubble that was largely from worldwide media hype and come to the conclusion that the BTC is on its way down.  Discounting the artificial spike, if you look at the 2 month curve up to today, the BTC has enjoyed a steady and substantial increase in value.  It was around $8 and change at the start of June IIRC.  Today it's $15.xxx.  That's nearly a 100% increase in a little over 3 weeks.

If you're going to factor in difficulty increases, you HAVE to factor in a logical valuation of BTC progression that follows each increase.  But then again the market sometimes has a mind of its own.  That's the risk we all take when "investing" in new hardware.  But if historical charts mean anything, I'd say it's not at all too late to build a rig and start mining.

If a person looks at the situation (like MousePotato), does his own analysis, and has logical reasons for jumping in, then go for it.

We're all (more or less) grown-ups; we're big enough to spend our own money and take risks.

I just don't like it when people are taken advantage of -- when they receive deceptive advice (usually from the seller of used video cards), so that they go into an investment with unrealistic expectations ("According to deepbit, you'll make $10/day. So you can plan on $300 a month, or $3600 a year! Heck, that's $36,000 over the next 10 years.")

Such hype and shysterism bothers me.

just bought 4x 5850 for $150 each

angelus = don't listen to that dude

Where did you buy (4) 5850 for $150 each?  The Hawaiian dude was selling them for $199 each, with possibility of combined shipping.

I'd be tempted @ $150, so what's your problem?

Why don't you READ my posts, and take issue with the facts, instead of attacking the messenger? I only say what is TRUE. Don't ever assume or put words in my mouth. If something is true, I'll agree with it 100%. Try me.

Matthew

Nobody buying gear now (if ever) can expect / plan for a profit. It's very high risk, and you have to be willing to lose what you spend. If that's ok with you, then go buy. If you'd rather be safe, then don't buy.

May I ask, then why buy "gear"?

If it's your 2nd or 3rd rig, you can't exactly call it your gaming machine.

Upgrading your existing video card to something more mining-friendly (even at a loss) is one thing -- but when you're buying/making RIGS, they have one purpose: MINING

And what, pray tell, is mining for, unless to make money?

I don't have a business degree, but I do know that you have to subtract your expenses before you can arrive at a "profit".

What, are some people so giddy about the concept of Free Money that they'll pay for the privilege?

"I'll buy this $200 card, so that I can make FREE MONEY -- $1 out of thin air -- every day!"
-- Kinda silly if you ask me.

i'm looking at way longer terms.
maybe because i come from hosting industry already.

Several weeks ago i had few Mhash capacity, today am running 1.3Ghas, and expecting 1.4Ghash/s worth of GPUs to arrive tomorrow, with another 1.4Ghash/s worth arriving next week.

We are also going to push out a business based on this (mining hosting, fully automated, really easy to use. look at HW section for more info), which offsets the risks to a degree.

But we work on way longer ROI expectancies. We do benefit from no sales taxes, industrial rate electricity, even tho still damn expensive, and most of the year is very cool here in Finland so no need for much of a cooling, infact we save some money on not needing heating at our location during winters. That is offset tho by overheads (accounting for one).

So we are going to keep heavily investing until 100Mhash/s is only worth about 1/4th of current, at which point we will try to save the situ by enhancing W/Mhash rate or swapping for better W/Mhash HW.

Ofc, we can afford to do this, incur barely any extra costs apart from investing in HW and Electricity by doing this and have guaranteed ways to recoup most of HW investment without any problems.

Personally I mostly did it because I find it interesting, and I like the concept. Of course part of it is I hope it can make me some money. If I happen to make a profit, then great. If not, it's not like I can't afford it. All I said was you cannot plan on making a profit, not that it isn't possible.

I think yo can find the answer for this question in here.....


http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=21559.0

Right now ive got 3x systems running, 2 dedicated miners, and my main system I use for everyday stuff, plus some mining. I started mining in early May, and at the current price I've almost broken even. I solo mined for a week and didnt find anything, so that hurt my profits a lot. Ive built up my systems so that over the three, Ill be pushing close to 4 ghash/s in the next couple weeks. If the 5850s from amazon come back into stock, or if I find someone selling cards for ~$150, Ill consider buying another system. As it is, at 1,400,000 difficulty, I expect to see about $400 in a 10 day period. The payoff for new systems is getting really long, the BTC value needs to come up to $30 or so to justify whole new systems.

You all forget that while used video cards sell for less than cost, if you have a whole rig you can stick in some LED fans, bump the RAM up to 4 gigs, upgrade to a phenom, then sell it on craigslist for a profit to WoW kiddies who don't know any better and would otherwise drop 3 grand on an alienware.

Unemployment is above-average for youngsters today.

The unemployment rate is record-high, but it's even worse for those looking for their first job, including recent college grads.

$3000 for a system? Not so much anymore. I wouldn't hold your breath.

If you are just now buying hardware, then you are going to have to run it for months at bare minimum just to break even, at which point you will be making shit per week.  If you jumped in a couple weeks ago you could pay off hardware in a week or two max.  I know because I did it.

Your perpetual disdain for those getting into the market is one of the main reasons I browse through these threads. I wouldn't slap the "troll" label on you, as I don't really care to read through your posts and make an arbitrary judgment, but your loathing of young people "living off mommy and daddy" is a constant theme that brightens my visits here.

Thank you.

I've plugged my brain in and am getting 6Thash/s - this is where all the new difficulty is coming from - it's me.