Bitcoin Forum

after you specifically warned them not to?

My one friend bought cards at inflated prices after I ran some numbers and told him that the break even point was too far in the future.  $800 for a rig that gets .4 coins a day is ludicrous.

I kind of agree with you :) .

Some people expect BitCoin price to skyrocket soon.
Surely difficulty (which is a measure of value, despite of price) is quite high compared to actual BTC rate.

Starting an investment with mining rigs right now is risky.

What? He has under 100 MHash/s of power??

I have 320Mhash/s going and make between 0.2 and 0.25 per day.  How do you get 0.4 with 100Mhash/s with today's difficulty level?

That's what I get for posting before the morning coffee...

My bad, carry on.

actually not even .4 coins.  2x 5830's is yielding .38 at 600Mh

What is this, everyone jumps on board now?

I thought I was the town leper for saying this a couple weeks ago, and only one person agreed with me.

I'm going to be very blunt with you. You have very little tact and this causes things you say to be disregarded even if they may be true.

Nobody builds rigs now in order to pay them off at today's exchange rates.  They build rigs in hopes of paying them off with next month's exchange rates.  The only person who can say whether building a rig now is foolish or not is Nostradamus.

Well put. If you build a new rig today specifically for mining bitcoins, then that's a gamble on bitcoin's future. Mining and selling the bitcoins immediately would take a long time to pay back the hardware at today's difficulty and bitcoin value. Mining and keeping the bitcoins might be a success though, depending on whether the bitcoin is a success.

I wouldn't advise a friend to build a new mining rig today if they didn't think it was fun and wanted to take a gamble on the bitcoin. But some do think it is fun, even CPU-mining, to be part of a bit of a revolution.

Hey, come one, he's no MarvinMartian  ;D

At the time of the MtGox hack, I nearly ran a pool to see who people were the most annoyed with, the MtGox Peeps ro Marvinmartian. But thought that would be too cruel. It didn't even cross my mind to include Angelus. His stuff is factual, but perhaps a wee bit to negative for most to handle.

I you really expect the price to skyrocket soon, buy the coin and do not waste your money with rigs and what not.

 

Yes, if they got super-valuable, wouldn't a bunch of people sell and bring the price back down?

And, if so, which would be better:

A) owning a $1000 rig that produces 0.64 BTC a day.
B) buying $1000 of bitcoins, or 70 BTC (at current market rate).

Because I think there would be somewhat of a "peak", which could only be capitalized on if you had your money all at once.

Yes, if you're in it for the long haul then we're not even having this discussion. Some people really want to mine -- and nothing's going to dissuade them. I personally would go with "A" because I don't mind the hassles of mining. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme for me.

But when people say "I mine, even though it's not very profitable, because BTC will quadruple in value in the next couple months", they're really not thinking it through. You'd be better off buying BTC if you really believed that -- and if making money was your motivation for mining.

You could always "cash out" when the price quadruples and then cash out and buy PC equipment if getting PC equipment is what you're after.

Matthew

Thanks for that. I've been trying to say something similar, but you hit the nail on the head much better than I have. All the threads debating whether or not mining is still "worth it" are about as pointless as all the threads debating where the price of Bitcoin will be in a few months.

Incorrect.   I can accurately say whether or not mining is "worth it" for me, with my hardware, day by day.  I can't say whether *investing* in BTC, whether through purchasing more hardware or BTC directly is "worth it", but I can tell you within 10% at what price to difficulty it will no longer be "worth it" relative to selling the hardware.  Let's just say at $.046/kwh and an expected ETA of early 2012 for ATI 7 series that day looks to be far, far away (in bitcoin time, anyway).

I have six 6970s @ 420mhash each for a total of 2520mhash/sec... Currently make abut 1.5/day