Bitcoin Forum

Hello.

So i am relatively new to the whole mining game. Coming in at an interesting point in the whole thing it seems. I currently have 4 7970s churning away. I'm looking to invest some more into mining and wondering what people think the wisest next purchase would be considering the imminent onset of the ASIC era. By my calculations, buying more GPUs will give me a higher Hash per dollar spent ratio, but then factoring in power, and ease of use etc, its seeming like getting some of the Block Erupter USBs might be a better choice at this point. I know they are not hugely exciting when compared to whats coming with the bigger units, but i do very much like that they are available now! ... A huge plus in my opinion. What do you guys think? More GPUs or Block Erupter USBs?

Barntech

Depends on power costs in your area. The Block Erupter USB's are nice for not taking up much space or power, GPU's will easily get a higher hashrate, though. Also may have to take into account resale value. GPU's are fairly easy to resell as they have many purposes, whereas ASIC's only have one and may drop a bit more in price over time.

Short answer: If electricity isn't an issue, GPU's is my vote. Or a more a more efficient ASIC (efficient being hashes per dollar).

Thanks for the response.

Yeah i've been leaning to GPUs mainly because as you say, if mining with them ceases to be valuabe, they can always be sold for a decent percentage of the purchase price.

Power is a consideration though. I am in australia and the power here is expensive. Do you think taking that into account, maybe the USBs are a better go?

Also, do you think there's value just in the fact that they are available now? ... I know that better ASICs are coming but by the time they are available, the difficulty will be way up there. Feels like its a good idea to smash as much now before it all goes crazy.

Cheers

I kinda want a couple of erupters just because they are so portable/cool? (or even just give them to friends to let them have a taste of bitcoin).. but at the moment they are quite overpriced.  :-[

Yeah pretty expensive. Don't wuite seem worth it, but you're right, they are cool. Nice and easy to move around, plug in at work etc. I'm feeling like i'd like to get a few even if they aren't the most cost effective. Still kind of hard to beat the fact that the same money will give me twice the hashes from a GPU though. Torn.

Well, if you want to check, http://www.coinish.com/calc/
Mess around with the Expert mode and put in your own electricity costs.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#ASIC
For stats not on that calc to manually put in.

Hey Spiral.

Thanks for that. Cool calculator. Unfortunately it doesn't have the Blade USBs on there, but it is neat to see those calculations.

At current difficulty it puts the break even point at about one year for 4 7970s. When you add the difficulty increase, the break even point becomes never!

I guess thats when we hope for LTC ming to be profitable, or sell the GPUs and let them get back to rendering and running gaming systems like they're supposed to. :-)

Cheers

The specs are here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195004.msg2025318#msg2025318

Just plug in 300MHash/sec, 2.0 BTC and your electric costs. Be sure to use expert mode to include the difficulty increase or else you'll get a wildly overoptimistic payback time.

Definitely choose the GPU unless electricity costs are the deciding factor. Each individual really needs to do the math on their own equipment IMO.

Coinish Calc say you will never make your money back... guess that just about does it then... unless anyone can give me an argument why they are still a good idea?

id say buy a avalon if you can OR a BFL early preorder

Agreed. but not really sure how to get my hands on either of those. Any ideas?

GPUs are OK, but eat up a lot of electricity. If you don't pay your own bill, still good enough for a few GH/s.

MF

Go with a gpu. Block erupters will take a long time to get your ROI with the predicted difficulty jump. Gpu's can mine scrypt and play video games. Much better investment

+1 - GPU's have more than one use whereas ASIC Miners are made for one thing and one thing only. It is an obvious no brainer if you are making a small investment (<=5K)

The other missing factor is heat.  Depending on location heat can be a big problem with a lot of GPUs.

Hey all.

Thanks for your thoughts. I am tending to agree that the USB asics are not seeming like a particularly smart option. I have decided to go with some more GPUs for now, because as a few of you say, they have more than one use and can be resold after they are no longer any use for mining... and, because of my line of work, i can write them off on tax. Hooray. Haven't really sorted the power situation out. I do have to pay for mine, but i'm sure i can come up with an ingenious plan.

That should keep me mining away for a while until i can perhaps get my hands on a more serious ASIC down the track. Though i do kind of feel like it is now or never to a certain degree. If i finally get an ASIC in a years time say, its feeling like it will be about as profitable as a GPU is now. What so you guys think about that. Will the incresed hashing of the ASIC just end up being balanced out by the difficulty rises?

Cheers

i think imma just buy 1 of the usb things and a rasberry pi, leave it and forget it. lol check back once a month and order pizza with the winnings :P

Granted the question is GPU vs. Eruptor USB, but has anyone considered how fpga(s) stack against the Eruptor USB.  I'm actually using fpga(s) because:

1) They're similar to the Eruptor USB at ~ $1 per MH
2) They use more electricity than the Eruptor USB, but not that much compared to GPUs  (my Lancelots use 28W compared with GPUs at 100W)
3) And this is the key point for me... fpga(s) can be repurposed (assuming you know how to edit bitstreams) and have more resale value compared to the Eruptor USB.

Unless the Eruptor USB comes down more in price... it's not worth it from my viewpoint because it has no resale value and the amount of time to recover costs is not significantly better than fpga(s).

Anyhow my 2 bitcents...

Thats a good way to look at it ...but even then you might not have enough for a pizza lol

Here's some more food for thought...

Assuming the difficulty doesn't increase too much (it's already climbing pretty fast) and that you're part of a fairly lucky pool (a lot of ifs), at ~300 MH you should see something like 0.01 BTC a day.

That fastest way to get pizza is to use a service that takes BTC (and charges a fee) to buy pizza because you'll have to wait a long time to hit minimum amounts to do money conversion at most exchanges.  Now let's say the pizza costs $10 and the fee is $2 @ a rate of $100 per BTC (for simplicity), you'll need 0.12 BTC.  That's 12 days at the previous rate to be able to get pizza, so 2 pizzas a month which is not bad.

However, considering that you spent 2 BTC on the hardware you could just buy yourself 16 pizzas to begin with.  That's 2 pizzas for the next 8 months.

Asics suffer from even more severe heat issues than gpu's. The first BFL labs units were errible for heat and even the block eruptors suffer from heat issues. They run fine but are not running at there top end due to heat concerns

Yep. 10 vs 13 GH/sec...? Quite some difference with ample cooling.

MF

You also have to factor in that the Block Eruptors are an easy way to add hash to an already overloaded 15 AMP circuit. You can milk ALOT more hash out of a residence! Running them on a desktop already being used for normal purposes is alot easier. I tried to add a 7970 to a Dell and it was a fail due to lack of BUS power. I did not know about powered-risers at the time so maybe it would have worked that way...

Hi all

My first stupid post as I'm a Newbie how is just try to buy some USB or Block Eruptors items. Seems I can't do this without get out of my Newbie state? Or does someone sell some items?
I will pay with wire transfer, after I got the items  ;)

Regards Patrick

Ebay...

Ask to be whitelisted (see the README). If you say its to participate in a block group buy at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=76.0 then you'll probably get OK'd.

Oh, PS. You do know these are a very bad deal don't you (popular though nonetheless). Are you expecting to make a profit or just laundering bitcoin?

You can buy Block Erupters for 1 btc from btcguild.com if you're so inclined.

Getting a good GPU is always a nice investment just because of better quality graphics on your computer, mostly with games. Also, if you like mining altcoins, GPUs are still pretty much king around there.