Bitcoin Forum

Howdy, I'm currently mining around 50MH/s and would like to know if you guys think it would be worth it to purchase a K1 usb miner?

Only you can decide this for yourself.

Well have you read about the projected difficulty increases over the next 12 months and run some calculations with a few profitability calculators? You'll probably be very dissapointed. You'll probably not make back your initial investment (at least 0.89 BTC/ea at present).

On the other hand, if you want it for non-profit purposes then go for it.

Only if you buy 100 and get them tomorrow.

Not if you want to make money.  But if you want to help secure the network and make some of your money back, go for it.  Try paying for it in fiat and not BTC though.

I think a K16 is a better choice.

You have to know what you are doing with. Eruptor USB may be a good idea to target...

If fiat acceptable, then you may take a try. I notice some people seeking to throw the eruptor usb away by using fiat, if you unsure, consider the general first as There are people getting tricked by some suppliers except AMD's GPU ( a form of ASIC mainly targeted in drawing with accelaration of Integer calculation)

no, it is not.

no

if you look around the answer will be no, you have almost 0 chance of getting back ROI in 1 year

I'll throw in my $0.02 about these suckers.  Short version - I've got 20 on order.

I had to turn off my GPU farm because electricity vs. difficulty vs. price of BTC means I'm losing every month.  While I'd love to believe an investment in BTC is an investment in some utopian future, I'm realistic in that I represent a group who has combined put $12k into BTC at this point, split between hardware and trading.  And that's $12k, fiat currency, meaning that at the end of the day that is our "break even" point. 

We can easily pull our $4k out of trading, that's no problem, so ROI is ensuring we're not holding BTC when the bomb drops.  But hardware is a different story -

- If you weren't in early in the game, AsicMiner blades and Avalons are either out of reach or too expensive to validate the ROI for aftermarket
- If you're ordered from BFL, you're still waiting (like me!) or have a jala or early single
- KNC is still vapor until my shares are hashing :)

So what's left for a miner?  FPGA or GPU.  Both are quite frankly overpriced after the AM usb miners had their price drop.  As of right now I'm in the process of selling a handful of 7970's and 7950's, if I sell each one for the price I'm asking it'll cover all 20 USB sticks (and gamers are always out there to buy 'em). 

The difference, my farm was 3.6GH/s and at my electricity rate absurd to run.  My new farm will be ~7.8GH/s, 37.8 when BFL ships, with nearly zero power draw as I can run all my AM sticks off of the home server that runs all the time anyway, so my $200 => $350 => $425 > $578 electricity bill will go back to $200 (so net +~$300 for me each month, minus obvious difficulty increase effects), no longer have the loud hum of all the gpus, no more heat, and at net zero cost above my original hardware cost because I invested in GPUs I knew I could resell.  And for the same initial hardware investment (strictly talking GPUs) I have 2x the farm power that'll be live before two more difficulty changes push through. 

Not a great investment if you're considering the ROI of *one* stick, but considering I'm effectively performing a hardware / hashrate upgrade at zero additional cost while saving on electricity, it only makes sense.

THAT SAID...

If BFL tomorrow said that they're shipping 5GH/s Jala's for $274, I'd feel like the suckers who purchased the 2BTC usb sticks (greedy freaking bastards charging that much at first) only to see people who will get theirs from BTC Guild first and cheaper.  But that's the game.  This is the ideal, if not the perfect opportunity to recoup investment, get mining again, and have some fun new tech.

That's my story.  Time for video games.

No, not at all.

PS what on earth are you mining 50Mh/s with? And why? Surely you are just burning money unless you have free electricity.

Click on expert and look at the "break even considering reduction" field.
http://www.coinish.com/calc/#

350Mh/s @ 0.99 BTC will never break even with a 9% reduction per week.

The calculator shows that the purchase prices has to be at $59.00 or under to ever break even at power costs of $0.10 and a 1watt draw.

OP is talking about K1. There are assemblers for K1 doing it for $25. It can earn maybe 0.4BTC. I don't see a point in buying those for mining for profit. It's for fun - you have a GPU hashing power in an USB stick.  Or as a gift.

Gifts or novelty items are the only reasons I can think of.

So 10 or so would cost lets say $1000 USD.. granted the price is a bit low for btc to USD..

that gives you a guesstimated hash of 3500 Mh/s provided it can each one can do 350 Mh/s.

"The expected generation output, at 3.5 Ghps, given current difficulty of 21335329.113983 , is 0.0825016411333 BTC per day and 0.00343756838056 BTC per hour. "

so lets say btc is still at 100.. thats about $8 a day..

$1000 USD / $8 give or take is about 125 days for ROI and thats if it was 125 days of no diff change.

math is pretty simple.

The K1 which the OP is talking about is closer to $50, and won't be available for at least 2 weeks.  Probably looking at around 1 year to break even at $50.  That being said... $50 is much cheaper than a video card, and USB is a lot easier to deal with than PCIe risers and what not.  So... if you are just looking for giggles, a USB miner could be fun.  If you are looking for something more future looking, I would guess that 2 GH Bitfury USB miners will be available at some point... which would be just as much fun, but would help protect the network about 9x better.

It is for AsicMiner  ;D

I have one and I still think its cool.  Of course, when I first purchased it I was not expecting to get my money back from mining.

no see
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209750.0

It's a nice way to incrementally increase your hashing power to keep up with the increasing difficulty.  I think I'd buy and hold or trade BTC vs fiat if I weren't already mining and wanted to start.  If you're sitting on a ton of BTC, buying them and selling them on ebay or betting on larger scale asic rigs make more sense.  Most of us are not in that situation though.  My 0.02USD.

USB miners are somewhat of a novelty. However, at the current price, they may break even after a year. Maybe not. The answer to the OP question is that is in the eye of the beholder.

No

Yes,

If you are teacher and showing kids about cryptocurrencies.

Even build one with them K1 Nano's.

It would probably fly over most people's heads, let alone children..

+1 :)

We will see in September when we introduce it to our class of 13 year olds. I bet you are wrong.

I'd be very interested to see the contrast between the average South-East Asia classroom and the average North America classroom...

In my experience and observation, NA school system in general is less about learning and more about popularity and social status.

Sample conversation with a typical NA 13 year old:
Teacher: ... and this is a bitcoin miner. It performs millions of calculations every second to...
Student: (interrupts) Will it update my Facebook?
Teacher: ?? Well, no, but it has the potential to completely revolutionize ...
Student: (interrupts again) Useless.

 ;)

No, but if you want to make your self(or some one else) fancy gift, go for it ;)

We are a Montessori school... not much different than the 10000s of them worldwide. Our "typical" interaction is not anything like a traditional environment and that is why it works so well for students. I would not be bothered by 100 questions and I doubt that cryptocurrency is USELESS given the far reaching effects it will have on their lives in the next 10 years and they will be monitoring the BTC produced that goes into scholarship fund for students.

Thank you for the read. :)

How does the amount purchased affect profitability at all. Makes no sense.

D

Well it affects the absolute value

Losing money on each one but you will make up the profit in volume!

Ben Bernanke is here!

A loss is a loss, in this case the magnitude of one is greater than the other...

sometimes humor is lost on the internet... kind of like bitcoin dust.

Making the Sarcasm font is on my list of things to do.  ;)

Is it late summer 2011 all over again. Because everyone said don't buy gpu's. I bought gpu's and they got their ROI just counting april and may. Asking these types of questions is futile. But do realize that most of the ones saying definitely not are speculating a few things. That asicminer will bring up 1000 terrahash as they stated. That KnCminer is not a scam and will produce super cheap miners. That BFL labs isn't bankrupt already and will start shipping in mass.

I bought Block erupters. Its possible it could be over a year to see ROI. But then again its not the end of the world if that happens. If its one thing I've learned about bitcoin is that things do not stay the same. So expecting a 10-20% increase every difficulty change because that's what we seen lately is unlikely. Also remember there are still ALOT of gpu's running. People are keeping them running for a while longer, because some people are extremely bullish. People still kick themselves for not mining at a loss at $4 or after the block reward halving. Both who did missed out

Well said.

After the first major "crash", I did as you said and turned my miners off.  Instead of buying them when they were cheap, I believed the hype that the bubble had popped and that the ride was over.  I missed out on months of coins because I didn't think far enough ahead even though I believed in the technology.

The flat and downward parts of the difficulty curve are where the meat is.  I think if you are new to Bitcoin, you've never seen the difficulty drop.  For all you know, it always goes up.  A trip down to $20 at this point would make for some fascinating drama.