Bitcoin Forum

With all the difficulty increase, is it possible to even break even when buying miners anymore?

Pre-ordering a new miner by paying BTC/USD today for a miner which will likely not be delivered for 3-4 months?  No.
If you could get a unit delivered today (I mean in your hands hashing within hours of payment)?  Maybe it really depends on the price.

However that has been true for a long time and it hasn't stopped millions of dollars in pre-orders which probably will never has a positive return.  Pretty much any BFL pre-order from 2013 was dead money they day it was paid.

Remember a pre-order today puts you at the back of the line for the company you are ordering from.  Say you bought pre-ordered a BFL Single today and they promise delivery in 2 months.  Now lets pretend they magically deliver it in 2 weeks.  You are still fucked.  Why?  Because if you get YOUR order (pre-order #38,278) that means every prior order has also shipped ahead of you.  The difficulty skyrockets before you get your unit regardless if you get it in 2 weeks or 2 months.  Today many are simply holding out hope they will magically get their unit before difficulty goes up but it is a mathematical impossibility that "most" miners will get their units before difficulty goes up because the more miners who receive their units the higher difficulty will go.  Wait until December you are going to see the forums light up with FUD, doom & gloom, rants, threats, etc.   Until the difficulty actually goes up people can hold out hope (delusion), that it will go up slower that other predict and they will be massively profitable, once difficulty has ALREADY gone up and you can calculate a very firm negative ROI% form day 0 even assuming difficulty is flat then it becomes crystal clear and the hope vanishes.   It is going to be insane on these forums around December.

The most readily available ASIC is the Block Erupter USB which hashes @ 336MH/s. I paid BTC 2.6 each, but now you can get them for BTC 0.55 each. It's a much better deal, but you might still have trouble making ROI.

Check out my case study here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=224015.0

Of course it is possible to make money. The KNC units delivered in October-November should make money -- for a while.

The Terra-hash will become the new starter unit and hashing (and gnashing -- of teeth) will go on. (Edit: For clarity, By January 2014 is my best estimate when the Thash will become the new starter unit.)


Life goes on -- as will mining -- and even BitCoin mining.

hth

The higher the risk with the company (the greater the promise, the shorter the alleged delivery time, lack of demonstration of real hardware, the more unknown the company etc..) the greater the potential profit (along with the greater the risk of loss or being outright scammed). At the other extreme, the lower the risk, the less you can make, right down to a point where you may not even pay off the device (eg. asicminer block eruptors).

I understand your concerns but you can run the unit for long time like 5 years and add bits of BTC together. If you dont hurry, it can return your BTC in my opinion

If you can get a unit delivered before the 1st of next month @ ~$52/GHs with free electricity, you will break even in about a year.

Not quite how that works. When you're earning 75% less (compounded every 2 weeks!), if you don't make roughly 50% in your first month you can never ROI because every month your income is more than halved.

With 1 GH/s at current rates and free electricity:
Week 01-04: + 0.23 (0.23)
Week 04-08: + 0.13 (0.36)
Week 08-12: + 0.07 (0.43)
Week 12-16: + 0.04 (0.47)
Week 16-20: + 0.02 (0.49)
Week 20-24: + 0.01 (0.50)
etc

Guess we don't have to wait. All they have to do is deliver. That should be easy.

http://thegenesisblock.com/cointerra-500-ghs-chips-alydian-10-ths-hosting-and-icedrill-ipo-set-out-to-change-bitcoin-mining-landscape/

• After posting information about their well-credentialed team on their website earlier this week, Cointerra took to the bitcointalk forums yesterday to offer more detail into the performance and timing of one of their new ASIC chips. Titled the GoldStrike1, the chips are said to feature a 28nm process offering more than 500 GH/s at less than 1 Watt per GH and are expected for delivery by the end of 2013.
  

No sweat -- just wait three months... You too can have a baby THash unit.

so from all I have learned if I by KnCminer Jupiter today (estimated delivery October) and the difficulty increases about %15 every 10 days I might make about 4-5K correct?

the negatives the way I see them are:

- with no proven product who knows if KnC will deliver
- if KnC will be late by 20 days I will lose money
- if difficulty increases by more than %15 (which is likely given that most of the units will be delivered in September) I will lose money

the only positive is if BTC increases in value but I cannot bet on this

Question is it worth to given the negatives to get KnC (ie spend 7k) for remote possibility of 4K profit?

You don't have a terribly strong understanding of math, limits, or power costs, do you?

Your "opinion" is not backed by the people who have done "math" to determine that, no, you won't get a return out of it in almost all realistic cases.

But, hey, I'm sure there are half a dozen mining companies eager to sell you hardware based on that opinion!

I predict that by December with all the new 28nm devices showing up, the difficulty will explode to over 500 million (10 times what it is now).

I even made a little wager over at Bitbet for this: http://bitbet.us/bet/508/btc-network-difficulty-to-top-500mn-before-xmas/

Except that difficulty will never go that high.  Orders will stop coming in as the difficulty rises.  An equilibrium will be reached at some point.

The estimation is outright dumb.

Here's the evolution of mining tech:

1. CPU's - "everyone has them - but not so many people know about mining"
2. GPU's - "just a handful at the start, insane success, more people get involved" - you could still get profit even half a year after 7970 released to public.
2.1. FPGA's - a beast that only matters when you're limited by power (cost/availability)/thermal package (you plainly can't put 100 7970 into a small room) - otherwise the cost is on par with GPU's or higher.
3. ASIC's - again insane success at the start - but watch the dumbasses that have no understanding of what are they doing: doesn't matter what the hashing power is but you still get 6 blocks/hour distributed among all the miners.
3.1. "first generation of ASIC's" - like Avalon - low-end tech, insane success for Avalon and first owners. 66GH/s is still comparable to what was owned by miners (ah, ok, 20+ times more than I had). But GPU's still bring almost the same US$ they did a year ago.
3.2. "newer tech ASIC's" - similar numbers but lower power usage.
3.3. more investments and running towards the bleeding edge in lithography - with the potential of getting a lower cost, lower TDP and an order of magnitude faster units at the same time. But - this is almost the end of the technology race, after this point the situations like "for $1500 you get what the others have for $15k" will not be possible. Meaning not a "dead halt" of course but a serious decrease in hash rate GROWTH.
Remember, we still get 6x25=150 coins/hour?

W/o exchange rate growth - first-gen ASIC's that were obtained at the end of the summer/in autumn will not even bring their USD value back. Let alone BTC value. We know nothing about how long the units will be in working condition as well.

Wise words.  Very few people understand that the easiest and safest way to get rich with BTC is to just accumulate it and put it away, while ignoring all the noise and bubbles du jour (bots, loans, securities, and now mining) which promise thousands of percent return but at a significantly higher risk of losing "invested" capital.

I have one, its mining 0.35cents a day. That will still take me 200 days to get my $70 investment back. << Not counting complications

This could happened, unless BTC drop dead. Remember afew month ago BTC was at $250.00 each, but it might increase But I don't think it is, been dropping for a while now. 

You can get a blade for BTC10.24. up to 12GH. After the upcoming difficulty change to 49 million (about 3 days away), it'd make about $14USD per day.

Personally I believe the best option is to go in strong. If you're serious then spend big, rack up a few avalons, make some coins then sell them off, people pay a lot for them. You'll get what you paid for your avalons back and you've got yourself a little bitcoin nest egg for your trouble.

"If buying one unprofitable miner isn't appealing to you, buy a lot of unprofitable miners!  And then hope you can manage a net profit by selling them off to someone else who can't do the math!"

I dont know, do you count increase in difficulty every retarget?

70 / 0.35 = 200 - so no, that calculation assumes difficulty remains static.  In other news, "Hope is not a strategy."  If one assumes about 13 days per difficulty adjustment (target is 14, but we regularly are running well faster than difficulty and ramping up quickly), that's only another 15 difficulty adjustments away!  At... 20-30% per adjustment.

At a 20% jump per step, that's ~15x the current difficulty (1.2^15), so that 0.35/day is actually around 0.02/day.

Does that count as a "complication"?

Or should I just hope more?

I did this selling block erupters on ebay, just so I could keep one to hobby mine for free =D

Says the biggest miner in the universe....

"If buying one unprofitable miner isn't appealing to you, buy a lot of unprofitable miners!  And then hope you can manage a net profit by selling them off to someone else who can't do the math!"

+10000

This is really what happens right now.

It is still possible to break even. Take KNC Miner for instance, they offer high hashing power ASICs at good prices. Assuming they deliver by October/November, you can definitely still make a ROI. You can find more information about their ASICs and prices at https://www.kncminer.com/

Good Luck.

Mod note: removed affiliate link

Cute.  Spamming reseller links.

Also, "Assuming they deliver by October/November" is a big assumption.  So far, all the ASIC vendors have been delayed, some substantially.  If they're delayed a few months, those calculations shift significantly.

What I love about this post is "all the ASIC vendors have been delayed, some substantially".  Throughout the forums and on this thread, the concensus seems to be that difficulty will skyrocket to 500m come Dec because of the huge influx of ASICs to the network hashrate.  Guess what, if all the ASIC companies so far have been delayed is it really logical to assume we will see an order of 10x magnitude in 3-4 months?  I seriously doubt Cointerra, Avalon, Butterfly, KnC, Hashfast, Bitfury, ASICMiner and every other little guy will deliver ALL their ASICs on time.  At best I think you see 2-4 vendors deliver solid goods in the next 3-4 months.

Take into account that a 10x magnitude would be roughly a 10x increase in hash rate, putting the network something like 4,000 TH/s in the next 3-4 months.  So 3,600 TH/s get delivered in 3-4 months, sounds like ALOT more happy customers than the ASIC community has been seeing lately....

The fact of the matter is, the assumptions about ROI and difficulty leveling off are also correct.  Once the industry realizes adding machines isn't adding to productivity/returns then orders will start to fall off and the craze will definitely fade back.  Until then, it leaves alot of room for companies to deliver on their ASIC promises.

mining altcoins can make a rig pay for its self every 50 days easly  ( as long as you pick a good coin to mine )

...unless someone just bypassed the customers and is now producing chips in mass for own consumption:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=272548.0  

On the bright side, you'll probably only be out about $35.



http://www.smokersinfo.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/article-0-093888B9000005DC-114_634x447.jpg

If we are going to be smoking weed and imagining things... "I have a litecoin miner that paid for itself in 144 hours".

lol if you pick the right altcoin you can make your rig costs back very quickly

It is true if you had mined IFC for the first week the rig you used would have paid for its self if you sold it now

( a 4x7950 rig getting 2500kh would have got you well over 1,000,000,000 IFC in 7 days right now that would be over 750LTC / $2,250 so the rig would have paid for its self in under 7 days )

its true as I have done it there are plenty of other new coins that will do the same I have 1 rig on paycoin I can see that making a fair bit :)

 Break Even?   Don't hold your breath.


https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin

One time bets that follow a specific hindsight path do not pay for a rig every few days. I "paid for my cpu" with XPM and QRK that doesn't mean I expect that to continue or ever happen again.

Right now 2500KH earns about $4.50 on a good day with the wind behind it's back.

no

You sir and GSnak, I salute thee for giving me one of the finest bitcointalk laughs ever.

You could try building a rig like these brave souls!  Fairly easy to ROI when you make your own shiz =)

Bkkcoins!
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=190731.0

BURNING!!!
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179769.0

The Quarter Stick! (May be dead)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=161715.0

List of all of the start up company and open source devs...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=192860

Good luck! Have fun! Learn a bunch!

Except that none of those designs work because Avalon is a scam and never sent their 1/2 million chips to the designers or end users.

I think that most of the people building mining hardware will likely use it for their own mining purposes as long as it makes a huge profit.

On top of that you have to keep in mind that mining profitability will drop first for the people having higher electricity cost. So if you are in Europe you will likely not be among the people that profit from buying mining equipment.

The weird thing is I know that man. That's Rich Paul from Keene, NH and he's a freestater originally from MI. I knew him fairly well when I lived in NH a few years back, he used to sell silver among other things. He's now in jail for a year for marijuana civil disobedience among other things.

http://www.avalon-asics.com/

We may be getting our nams naysayers =D

I've pretty much given up on buying any new ASIC equipment and breaking even.   My existing 2 rigs just mine LTC and even thats barely worth diddly.   I've resorted to buying btc between the exchanges as my primary source of all, if any, profit in this game.

So they made the world a little bit safer again by putting him away. I mean he clearly looks like a hardened criminal who's just waiting to go on reefer madness killing and raping kids and women. Just see the violent look in his eyes, well done law enforcement  ::)