Bitcoin Forum

me: $3.11.  At a price of $15 mining stays profitable for me until a difficulty of 7.5 Million

my electricity rate .125/kwh

I know some people out there pay half that.

Card, MHash, Mothly BTC Production(and in USD), Cost to run per month

HD4850, 68, 1.33 ($19.95), $6.78
HD5830, 300, 5.87 ($88.03), $11.23
HD6950, 340, 6.65 ($99.77), $8.99

I'll be profitable for some time...

HD5870x2, 844, 15 ($225), $0.00 thanks to solar panels :D even at night.

Power consumption and 2 year linear depreciation on cards, $8.92 / BTC

what % will be worth your card in 2 years ?  Zero ?

About 30 minutes at my job. (after tax)

NOOOOOOOOO!  :o
You solar panel people are going to drive the rest of us out of business.

Yes, that is the assumption.  Actually I do a quick depreciation to %65, then linear depreciate to 0%.  

I do consider 2 years to be conservative, but not without a realistic basis.  If a card craps out at month 16, my depreciation cost estimate would instantly become 33% too low.  Also I'm unsure how far factors such as ASIC development and a flood of GPUs into the market following a confidence crash could lower GPU prices.

Those things are not cheap. They cost multiples of $10,000 to install, even for a modest system.

So it's not "lucky you -- you get $50 in free bitcoins every month" but rather "lucky you, you could afford a $25,000 solar panel system".

What I'm saying is -- the free bitcoins is the LEAST of that person's good fortune.

Just like those who got into BTC mining in January 2011 (or earlier!) are better off, likewise those who got into the game of LIFE earlier have an advantage.
Every year, inflation eats everyone alive. Those who got "established" in the early 80's, for example, will have paid less for everything, even relative to their lower wages at the time.
Everything's more expensive, and "harder" now, since our dollar has lost more of its value than it had lost in, say, 1985.

Those people got to buy their houses when real estate was much cheaper, for example.

Plus the longer you've been working the more disposable income you tend to have, all things being equal. That is, comparing the same kind of person at 20 vs. 50 years old.

I live in a predominately college town so this may not apply everywhere.
A lot of landlords here offer some or all utilities included in rent as an incentive to the college kids. Being an apartment dweller at the end of my lease this summer, I specifically found an affordable place I could rent with utilities included. My landlord pays my electricity for me, therefore my he pays my rent for me! He can't be making any money off me, I imagine the power bill is pretty ridiculous with the AC and Bitcoin rigs running all day. Fortunately he can't do anything about it until my lease expires in 12 months. ;D

If you have a big mining farm that eats up a few hundred dollars/month in electricity, it may be worth finding a cheap, electricity-included apartment just to house your rigs. Of course if you are spending that much per month in electricity, I imagine you've probably already considered this option as well as a hundred others. Just be prepared to get tossed out on your ass as soon as your lease expires. :P

Don't be surprised if the circuit breakers get "tripped" once in a while, and you have to go restart all your miners a few times a week -- or a few times a day.

"Oh, those power surges are a real pain!" he'd say.

I'm sure the landlord wouldn't just take it laying down.

You're right, you will probably be getting angry calls from him every other day if you are pulling any real amount of current but there still isn't anything he can legally do about it, depending on your specific lease and any loopholes included I suppose. If you are running a farm out of your apartment, he could probably get the fire marshal to come by but as long as your setup isn't unsafe, they can't really do anything either. No law against having computers.

If he does resort to those sort of "guerrilla tactics" like flipping breakers or otherwise interrupting services to your place, you can try to get evidence of him tampering with your power and have a pretty easy to win lawsuit against him. I personally live in a duplex though so the landlord can't get to my breaker-box without me letting him in.

Just throwing the idea out there since it has been working great for me so far.

And how much do you think he needs to mine to pay off that solar panels  :D
Thought about solar panels too (not particularly for mining, just for the house), but if I count everything, the panels and the maintenance. I actually get a lot of years electricity for that and when they are paid off I probably almost need to replace them.
I wait a little longer before getting solar panels  ;)

When you start talking about legal recourse, you should keep in mind that the average renter doesn't have deep pockets -- no offense to renters.

If renters had the resources to win a lawsuit, they probably would just BUY a house, or at least get a mortgage on a house of their own.

As they say nowadays -- "Jus' sayin!"

If it's a larger complex where many many units share the same meter, it probably won't look too out of place.

About $2.77/BTC.

amusing, albeit highly unethical. I personally don't think I would ever go this route, though I can understand it. I suppose that's the real free market for you.

Anyway for the OP, where I live probably has some of the highest rates in the nation. It costs me roughly $6.67 to produce a bitcoin based on my last bills and calculating forward my current rate of generation. It will likely become unprofitable for me to mine at around 3million difficulty. Fortunately that will only occur when another ~11THash of computing power comes online, which I suspect will not be for a long while, unless someone busts out some crazy ASIC cluster, which will rape everyone anyway.

EDIT: Not to be too complainy though, where I live it is currently 57F outside, in mid july, that's pretty darn good for a big fat bitcoin farm. No AC for me :)

Where do you live, Alaska?

counting solar panel cost as a cost of production is silly.  the marginal cost of using the electricity for BTC is zero assuming he is generating a surplus.  counting the costs of the solar panels would only make sense if he installed them specifically for mining or mining made them more expensive somehow.

No, ignoring the opportunit cost is ignorant. Stupid.

Put 25.000 USD into a bank account and you get money. Sell the electricity and you get money. Use it for mining and you loose that - this is a cost. It is  called opportunity cost. Same with depreciation - yes, aldo solar cells dont live forever.

The cost of capital and loss of other income sources is a cost. For example every hour I spend tending my farm is a cost of 100 USD (actually more) because I loose an hour I can invoice a customer for.

DERP marginal cost.  Most people aren't set up to sell back the electricity from their panels.  Overage is often mostly wasted.  BTC is monetizing the overage.

The setup in the signature = 0.800kWh = 19.2kWh a day x 0.10306p = ~£2

So 1BTC costs £2 ($3.18) to produce

I didn't buy solar panels just to start mining. :p I'm still a student and live with my dad. Our government was promoting solar panels last year and encouraged everyone to buy them by refunding almost the entire cost of installation over a long period. I believe we will actually start making money from them after 2 or 3 years. So yes it's an investement but it will definitely pay off after a couple of years.

According to BitcoinX.com's calculator, My revenue/day is $31.96 for 3500 mhash/s. It gives "Less power consumption" @ .17/kw, 2000w as 23.80. Meaning it costs about $8.16/day for 2.252 bitcoins.

TL;DR= $3.62/bitcoin

Maybe I'm getting old. Ok, I *know* I'm getting old, and I'm still in my 30's.

What is the world coming to, when they can't read two sentences, and need a "quick version" or "Too long, don't read"?

Cliff's notes for a 2 sentence post? Is there really anyone who can't be bothered to read the "entire" post? Come on!

Matthew

TL;DR: old guy says young people are lazy, news at 11.

You know, there must be some truth to the stereotype or it wouldn't be so persistent...

Admit it -- behavior like that isn't going far to dispel that "false stereotype" of young people today.

"I don't read books. I don't read entire articles. Heck, even on a forum on a topic I'm into -- whose material is such light reading I could handle it when I'm tired -- I don't even read whole forum posts!"

Pretty pathetic, if it actually applied to anyone. I have my doubts that anyone is actually that far gone.

Matthew

Paying a flat-rate for electricity here in Germany.  My condo and all the other condos in my building don't have separate meters, so we pay flat-rate, and everyone pays an adjustment once a year, or, gets the adjustment cash back.  I got 110 Euros back this months for overpayment of the past year :)

So I guess, 100% profit for a Ghash :D

I get about US$1 profit per day on costs of US$1.25.  320Mhash/s.  I've cut back mining and sold most of my hardware on eBay while it was still worth something.

Solar power being installed soon, so I should make enough power with my 1.5kWh system to make mining costs nominally zero.  Thank you, tax payers of Australia :-)

Hmmm, you sure about that? I have rentals and I pay for utilities but I put a disclaimer in the lease that says I only pay up to $50/month for water or electricity and the remaining balance gets added to next month's payment.

About 30 hours and $3 in electricity.  :P

Higher power consumption and a busted lamp. LOL ;D

Costs me an arm and leg, in future maybe kidney.

I'm running two miners with a power consumption of roughly 1300W, doing about 1.4BTC/day. 0.22€/kwh =
1.3kw * (24h / 1.4BTC) * 0.22€ =
4.90€/BTC =~ 6.90$/BTC

Germany definitely isn't the best place for mining...

No problems for me!

I will rent you a spot in my storage room in the kellar for 0.3BTC/day flatrate :D

I'm in Western Germany

Running at about 1.2GHash/s it takes me roughly 31 hours to generate 1 BTC.

My rig sucks up in an around 575w and here in Northern Ireland we pay £0.129/kWh.

So I make that to be £2.30 / 1 BTC. At current exchange rates that's about $3.67 USD.

Who's your electricity provider? We're pretty shafted for choice across the water in NI.

i'm doing about 2000 shares per kWh (only counting gpu consumption because the computer is on anyway). 1 kWh is 0.22€ ($0.31) here. you need about 31000 shares per coin, so 15.5kWh or 3.41€ (or $4.80).


edit


with your 2500Mhash/s, you should be doing about 2100 shares per hour, or at 1.3kW 1625 shares per kWh. that's 4.16€ or $5.85. still not too great. 19kWh per btc is probably not the most efficient mining setup. did you increase the voltage on your 5830s? if yes, that's probably not efficient (in my case it's not), undo it. go with whatever clocks your stock voltage allows.

I think you did a little too much theorycrafting. If you mine at a pool, just check how much BTC you produced over the last 24h. Those are the real numbers, including pool downtime etc. deepbit shows that directly at the account page. If you calculate with requirered shares, that does not include difficulty increases.

I was just going by the lastest numbers deepbit provides, which varies between 1.3 and 1.5 BTC/day. The MH/s rate deepbit shows me (actual number for a solved block) varies between 2100 and 2300 since overclocking is not quite complete yet. Btw I did not change anything on the voltages.

Shares look different though, I took some of the numbers from deepbit and divided it with the time it took to solve the block, result is 32-33 shares per minute, which is 1900-2000 shares per hour.

You left out all other parts of your system except gpus so you can't really compare to my rigs. CPUs are 50W each, HDDs 15W each, Mainboard itself 10W each, RAM 2x15W each = 105W per rig.
I've disable all I could like second lan, sound, firewire etc. and I don't know what else I could do, besides probably underclocking/volting the CPU which I will do soon.

of course i didn't include difficulty increases. i didn't include variance, either. on btcmine i get about 0.5% stales and have had 0 downtime for the past few weeks.

i can't include difficulty increases because i don't know where the network is going - it can go anywhere: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/growth-10k.png

if i included variance, i'd have to draw a gaussian curve. i don't think the op wanted to know at which % we pay which amount of $ but instead the expectation value.

i have included the 0.5% stale rate.

somewhere around this forums there is a post which says 1 share per minute requires 71 Mhash/s. that's a fixed value as a share is a solved block with difficulty = 1. maybe this explains something (i don't quite understand some of your post). it's much easier to calculate with that, because the chance to find a block is always 1 share divided by difficulty.

$2.47/BTC

Not True take a look to Germany there is Solar and Wind Power Booming since 3-4 Years (long before Fukushima) You just simply Rent your South Side of yout Roof to a Firm who sells the Power so you dont even need to Worry if something gets broken.

We get through the the Rent for the Roof around that Money what our yearly electricy bill costs...

How much does the German government subsidize that program?

i'm not sure if that's exactly what you mean, but it started 2004 where you got 57.4 cents per kWh (at less than 30kW). it slowly declined until 2011 where it's 28.74 cents. gonna go down a lot in the future.

overview (english) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Act
in-depth with tables (german): http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz

I think what he means are what are the goverment monetary incentives for the program, as most governments have to do something to incentivize solar power. In the case of the german act it looks like there is not that much which is cool, if I read your page right there is no tax burden at all on the german people to promote solar energy, just slightly steeper charges for those who consume more (is it tiered? not sure), and alternative energy gets preferrential treatment, not too bad.

Germany benefits from ecnomies of scale I believe, since they have some of the worlds largest solar production facilities located there and they are one of the largest consumers as well. Private inititatives backed by public support can't hurt.

I'm surprised by how cheap solar is now though, while still expensive, it's gone down dramatically. A nice trend for once :)

My electricity is included in rent, my bitcoins cost my landlord :D

idk :< let's say your PV has 3kWp. at ~10% efficiency that's 0.3kW. you'll get ~750€ / year from government and you won't be able to use your PV for your own use at all. (if you had decided this back in 2004 you would get ~1500€ / year). if you decide to use the electricity generated by your PV yourself, you'd get ~16 cents per kWh, so ~410€ / year + ~2600kWh for free.

they will stop paying you after 20 years. so if you install your 3kWp PV now, you'll have earned 15,000€. 3kWp costs about 11,000€. that's less than 2% profit per year which is less than our inflation rate. if you use the electricity yourself, you'll get 8,200€ and 52,000kWh. that's a pretty good deal (0.22€/kWh).

after the 20 years you will still have your 0.3kW PV, although i highly doubt it'll last much longer by then.

downsides: you have to pay for maintenance, which is probably not too cheap.

well, it's like mining bitcoins. you should have started your photovoltaic yesterday.

$1.28 ;D

I'm confused, you get paid to use your own electricity?

yes - if you decide to buy/install PV in germany, but only for the first 20 years of operation. they encourage us to use renewable energy. of course they won't pay for electricity which you get from your local supplier, only the energy you produce with your PV.

edit: the thing is.. it's not too profitable, because your PV is expected to meet death not long after 20 years. if not, it's going to be at least a lot less efficient by then.

Yes, indeed. That's still pretty interesting, but seems a huge payout someone must be subsidizing. Here we do it in reverse, for example:

http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200441246_200441246?cm_ite=4570001&cm_pla=Alternative%20+%20Renewable%20Energy%3EBattery%20Backup%20Packages&cm_cat=Google&cm_ven=Aggregates

A 30% Tax Credit (meaning you can write off 30% of the cost from your income). So we incentivize people for the upfront costs, rather than continue to pay them down the road. Seems like it might be better your way though considering the difference in rates of adoption heh.

On another note, this system was what surprised me pricewise. 22Amps (at 120Volts) including batteries, panels, transformer, and all for $2k seems like a steal. 22Amps is enough for about 2 full mining rigs. So I envision 3GHash/sec for about $4,500USD and no electrical costs for the next 20 years. If I had a house, given my electrical costs here (.4USD / kWh) I'd be thinking long and hard about that!

isn't that 1.8kWp ? so effective 180W. it's weird, though, because all the sheets in the internet say it's 2,500-3,500€ per kWp. i guess this bundle is low-quality (or the US has some awesome prices).

1800w is the amount that the batteries can store.  It comes with 2 110w panels, for a total of 220w, under optimal conditions.  For me, it'd take about $50/year off my electric bill considering 8 hours of full electricity generation per day.  Only 40 years to pay back.  :P

So if I'd ask you what you earn at your job, you would tell me what you should earn measured by the time and effort you put into your work, not what you boss is actually paying you and not subtract taxes and stuff.  ???

no.