Bitcoin Forum

The topic says it all/ I am an old returning miner. Had 2 HD 6970 and 4 HD 6950 on three machines.

They have been there for since 2009.all in all good investment with its ups and downs.but wondering what's best hardware now
For 1000 $  or basic miners or basic mining shares ?

Considering the HD cards are available in local market and I guess can be sold for fifth the price when used

You will likely receive a number of replies to this question - the bottom line is it depends on what you want to achieve...  I'd highly suggest using the mining calculator on thegenesisblock site to help determine future difficulty and ROI if that's what your going for - if your interested in this as a hobby and you just want to run a few miners and don't care about your return then it doesn't matter so much...

Here's MY view of what's happening in the market - take it for what it's worth, I have no stake in any of these operations:
 - BFL is the most expensive per GH but they are shipping (albeit very slowly) and you could pick up 4 5gh miners for $1000 - total hashing power of 20GH which in a few months won't be worth much and you'll likely be waiting about 6 months or more to get the hardware.
- KNC has a device for $2000 but they don't have any "solid" proof that they are going to meet their October shipping target date.
- megabigpower starts at $1300 and by all speculation appears to be a strong option
- asic sticks start at $60 for 300M and probably won't pay for themselves (however they have a sale going right now so you may see ebay flooded with sub $50 sticks which makes them a better deal).
- There are a lot of mining pool options out there but you have to be very cautious because many of them are scams.  Lab rat mining appears to have very good feedback and is available on bitfunder.

Bottom line - the difficulty is going to be rising very quickly and the lower hash power devices ($1000 range) won't make 'money' but they can be fun to run as a hobby.

wow that is very aggressive!

he have not even mentioned any GPUs!

umm what about shares in ASIC companies ?

ummm (make any money/low power miners/1000$) I believe your opinion is very subjective (not going to say aggressive). for me, if I keep getting like 10% of capital as monthly revenue (maybe 5-8% as profit) for the next couple or three years then that is a very good investment!


I dunno why i felt like you are talking doom day! tera, peta, exa, zeta! no .. no .. YOTTA hashes are added in the market every day ... no .. no .. every femto second! we are surrounded with hashes from every where sier! (or princess or whatever) ... then the the star wars episode 1024 goes in (maybe again back to London)!


yes hardware race is already on, just like what we had in the PC/laptop market (i am not sure if you have lived that era - like ancient people as myself - since it is all the mobile/tablet era now) and ended up with hardware 4 times the whole world would need and all the hardware racing companies are loosing or at bankruptcy edge!


if home miners are out of business i believe BTC will be out of interest too because we will be back to square zero of a centralized (or semi-centralized) and manipulated value holder units (currency).

farther more, we all know bitcoin should be approached as a hobby (yes even when we are talking business) because its value depends mainly and only in how much we believe in it.

But the point is, in any case, it would be very wrong to look for aggressive -get-rich-fast scam or pattern and i was not asking for that!

nothing right now

if you think the price is going to go up, then you should just buy bitcoins at market rate

people are paying about 5x value for ASIC stuff still

$1,000?

BFL: Will get you about 3 upgraded or 4 non-upgraded Jalapenos, or 20-211GH/s. You'll get them in 3-4 months? Maybe?
Avalon: You could order some K16 units. You could prolly get 4 of them, for ~18GH/s. Delivery in 2-3 months?
KNC: No miners for $1,000, but their $2,000 is 100GH/s. Actually with shipping it's closer to $2500. Delivery unknown?
BitFury: Starter kit is 25GH/s for $1300. Claimed October delivery, so 2-3 months. Advantage to this is you can buy add-on cards that add another 25GH/s for $500. You can add up to 20 of these boards, for a total of 400GH/s. This is the most expandable option out there. BitFury is also the most power efficient, so they're looking like a sweet deal.

Minor correction. 16 * 25 = 400. You can add up to 15 additional H boards(starter kit comes with one) to reach 400Gh/s.

Herpy Derp. Yes, you are correct. My mistake.

But the only hardware that doesn't cost more to run than it brings in and is available TODAY would be the USB Block Eruptors.

Maybe if you can get them for 0.15BTC. 0.45BTC is still way too high to make anything off of them, which is the reason I did not count those.

So you have the choice of buying something you can actually get that may not ever pay for itself, or buy something that you'll be waiting several months for (at best) that may also never pay for itself.  :P

Now you're getting it!

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8078201&CatId=7387

invest in that, you can pretend like you're using it for mining and just resell it on ebay instead

The only option for a HOBBY MINER is going to be Scrypt mining soon enough.

I would never recommend mining on any GPU that had a non-ref cooler that only had one fan. You're just asking to melt that sucker.

So anyone selling bulk usb block erupters for cheap? :)

hmm, I have on a lot.  I guess it would be a bit tougher if you're going litecoins and can't drop the memory to 120-160..    but even in 100oF ambient, none of my cards ever went over 80o.  they're rated for 95oC, the 79xx anyway

I'd look at used Jalapeno or Blade.

So the bottom line is go away miners stop stacking hardware and think about buying some bitcoins Instead ? Because


- mining power as of today , and going up exponentially, are at least 100 times the demand for the BTCs ?(supply)
- daily add ups of actual and planned additional compete-against-each-other giga hashes (supply),
- crazy 5x-actual-value investments are being added to the hardware (supply) with nothing in the horizon for the demand,
- daily added governmental restrictions and sniff in regulations over trading and exchanging to cut off the original attractiveness  of BTC idea, (demand)
- ....... .

I am not sure of the numbers but do we have actually a sum up of total investments in dedicated hardware that is three times the total market cap of BTC itself ?

You can make a profit on the AM Eruptors at .45 It's just a year plus ROI, not some quick 3-6 month thing. It's not easy to make a quick profit unless you plan on reselling hardware. Sadly that's the ONLY option right now till they announce the prices for the new Eruptor Blades in a few days.

ummm after some research I believe the answer is two words Scrypt! (yes two words)  ;D

So,basically for BTC you guys suggesting the USB miners in bulk/ like 100  piece instead of the unsure other basic options ?

I would buy $1000 USD\LTC @ the moment  ~($2.28  thats cheap and very underpriced)  and sit on them for the UNICORN release of ltc on gox

ASICS -- dont touch any of it for at least 3 months and then u will see the real prices that you should be paying

SO the the answer is wait and buy ltc...i know its boring .....i just want my sweet sweet ASICS !!!! ...sorry boring is the un-emotional smart money move  8)

looks like the smart answer!

umm but I am a techie guy, I mine! if no place for me i switch off machines and sleep or go whatever else i wonna do!

it is a good thing that  i have to admit i am not a spectulator and i do not have the stock sense.

hell no

if i was mining BTC, I wouldn't buy anything.  if you insist on buying something though, you should buy 7790's or 7950's.  there have been 7950's for under $200 in the last 2 weeks or so.  i'm thinking they're a better buy than the 7790's now.

why?  because the USB crap will lose its value fast, and it's good for nothing but bitcoin mining.  while your video cards will basically mine two things (jack and shit), at least you can resell them for a good percentage of their original purchase price

Correction, USB miners can mine anything with SHA-256 algorithm. So, it`s not just for mining bitcoins, but also for alts. I say mine alts and just sit on em for a bit.

Personally, at $1000, forget about mining Bitcoin as their difficulty shooting up the roof, especially the USB and payback is more than ONE year at CURRENT difficulty. Imagine in 6 months time when even more ASIC is released into the market.

Best BET is buy some coins, maybe Litecoin cos it's cheap and predicted to go up.

But IF you must go into Mining, scrypt mining is the best bet. Maybe Litecoin or some other Alternate currencies.

Use your existing hardware to mine litecoins and exchange them at btc-e

You can make an extra machine with 7950's.


I would recommend just mining litecoins to exchange them and once ASIC's are common and ship within weeks, only then get yourself an ASIC.

Eh, isn't 2000khash on litecoin a whole $150-$200/mo?

For $1000, wouldn't the best bet to invest in ASICMiner or one of the other IPOs?  Check the Securities forum.  For a small amount of money, I think buying shares in a mining pool is a better way to go than buying your own hardware as there isn't really anything in that price range.  If you had $2k to $10k, then I'd say buy some hardware.

Best bet right now is just to buy $1000 worth of BTC over a few weeks - much less risk and probably better ROI than buying hardware atm.

I came here to get answers and chew bubble gum.  And well, I do have this gum to chew.

But seriously, there are some great suggestions here. 

I am one of those suckers who spent around $60 each for ASIC block erupters.  Just got 3 of them last week.  It ended up costing about $185 total, which I put on a PayPal BillMeLater account.  Everyone told me how stupid I was, but if my math holds up these things will *just barely* pay for themselves in time for me to pay the PayPal bill off and not owe any financing (6 months same as cash deal).  And then what?  They might make a few bucks a month?  Oh well.  It's still a few bucks a month.

I had this idea that I would start mining other coins and then sell those coins for BTC.  But all the coins seem to be going the way of scrypt, and I didn't realize at the time that my little USB ASIC's were worthless for mining scrypt.  Oh well.  Lesson learned.

Still, at the moment I am doing well mining Primecoin.  But I too would like to buy some better hardware for mining.  Still seems like video cards are the best bet for what you can buy RIGHT NOW, and as others have stated you can sell them on eBay to a gamer when you are done beating them up and they have stopped making you money.

DISCLAIMER: Electricity and cooling does not apply in my situation and does not factor into my expense VS rewards.  :-)

I shut my GPU miner down after my wife saw the power bill. I'm getting ready to put the video cards on ebay, but I'm seeing that the price is dropping even brand new. I was hoping to sell a 7950 for $225, and Amazon currently has that exact card for $225 after rebate.

I'm now running 4 USB miners on a Raspberry Pi. It's bringing in about $2 a day. I do expect them to pay for themselves, but it will take a while. Meanwhile, I started doing solo mining on Primecoin last week, and was pulling in $10 a day per machine. But that was short lived. Now I'm lucky to bring that in between several machines doing pooled mining.

So mining for a profit really isn't working out, but it's still a fun hobby. :)

nine point whatever bitcoins

ASICMINER Blades or Jalapenos in the Auction section if you can get them ASAP. Or just buy BTC.

ppl will pay too much for them

you'd be better off buying GPUs in the auction section then selling them on ebay

Pool money together with other people to buy shares in a larger ASIC minger. But this might mean you don't get the machine yourself. If its something your are wanting to see an be proud to look at then buying erupters in bull may be your best bet

let's see, for $1000 you could get maybe 30 max, 10 g/hash.

At current rates (or last I checked) that would produce one bitcoin every 6 days, so IF THAT STAYED CONSTANT you'd get 15 btc in 90 days.

But it isn't going to stay constant, so the return might be half or 7.5 btc...

well, we all know it won't stay constant

it's going to go up another 20-30% here in a week or less

plus you're not including any costs incurred to run the things (or equipment failure), and if it's something you're doing for profit rather than a "hobby", the value you place on your time

i have not seen an ASIC w/ a price that is worth buying or even taking a risk on (ala avalon 1 and avalon 2) in a long time

Agreed more or less.  But I think it's 100% certain that the argument that GPU cards are the 'only way to go' because you can resell them for a large percentage of cost is completely wrong.  The hash rates are simply ridiculously low and the hassles and maintenance fairly high.  There is no way to approach 1/3 the production of even USB Eruptors and those are poor in production.

There is no 1000 dollar rig even you have much space. Let me share you one thing. How the 40 meter square can do the most? For me, Only mineral oil (or vegetable oil) or water can do the thing.

In my solution, This should be raised to 2,000 for accoustic control and high performance.

If you don't care, Malta variance(including ares 2 or powercolor demonic one) may be the solution for your current rig.

However the rig is not designed for SHA-2, it is designed for scrypt mining. It looks like the scrypt is more reasonable for as there is no scams at a moment.

For a little over $1000 (10.5 BTC), you can currently buy the old model 13GH/s ASICMiner blade and have it delivered to your door in 2 days if you live in the US. I estimate that it would make back at least 5 BTC over 6 months but will probably never achieve ROI. I did buy this because I have a little bit of excess BTC that I don't want to hold or convert to USD.

I would tend to agree with this.  The only problem is that a readily available ASIC is not a very profitable ASIC.

Just to put my 2 cents to the story i have in total 10 Gh but my income from that is not really massive
especially since the diff jumped like a rocket upwards on many days i make 0.003 btc and on some days i get 0.02 btc spread over 2 to 3 pools so in total i make not nearly they predicted numbers which the current calculation tools give.

This all is being caused by the massive increase in hash power each week, ofcourse we know we can expect it only to getting worse for the small miners.
The lucky big spenders do still get a decent amount of income but will soon feel the hurt as well. since more and more powerfull machines will enter the arena and in bigger numbers

So long story short the investments we make now into mining equipment will probably hardly return the invested money.
Those who have made a fortune in the paste are again the big winners because they can buy the newer and faster machines first and thus make again some more then the ones who enter the arena later.
Because of lack of the needed funds this is become again the rich boys game from now on at the sha256 coins.
Even the worthless coins are soon hard to get without huge mining power because of the merged mining.

Look at this
http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Notice something... Almost ALL Scrypt coins will beat out BTC

Pick up a few 7950's and mine the hot alts. Dump everything and exchange for LTC DAILY!

Besides.. Fall and Winter are right around the corner!! Double Dip - Mine Alts + Heat your house!!

You could also just point your scrypt miner toward Middlecoin.com.  They automatically switch to the most profitable coin of the day - and then pay you in BTC.  The pool fee may seem high (nearly 4%), but think of not having to manage all of your miners and re-point them ... or pay BTC transaction fees to convert your currency.

Also - I can vouch for the administrator.  He spent considerable time trying to help me on something that was basically me being a n00bie retard (and he was very kind not to point that out).


RIGHT!  :-)  You could even mount your rig in one of those little fake heaters that are supposed to look like a fireplace.  Fool your spouse!