Bitcoin Forum

Ok as of right now you can't make a profit off of those USB miners. But what if the price shoots up to $250 per coin or even higher in the future? Will you then be able to make a profit off of those USB miners?

If you buy 1 bitcoin now and the value of bitcoin rises, you have made a profit. Not so if you pay with the usb miner and you never recoup the same amount. Doesn't make sense using that as an argument.

If you compare mining revenue to instead just holding the purchase price of the hardware in btc the value of btc compared to fiat is irrelevant.

In the defense of the OP, if bitcoins were worth $infinity, so that USD denominated electricity costs were zero, and assuming that there is a finite amount of silicon in the earth from which to manufacture ASIC miners... all miners will reach positive ROI, although you may have to wait several million years.

The short answer is: unlikely.

if you buy a USB miner at 30$ and in 3 years 1 BTC worth 1000$ => you have  a ROI ^^

You don't buy a USB miner for any amount of $. Rather you buy it for a certain amount of BTC. The question is then whether or not you get back more BTC than the miner cost you. And it's looking like, for all the miners sold in the last three months or so, and probably all the ones coming in the next six to nine months, the answer is no, you won't even get those BTC back, let alone get any more.

Made up example: say BTC1=$120 now, and you order a miner from FlarbleASIC for BTC1. It comes in a few days, you start mining straight away. But difficulty keeps rising exponentially for several months, then it levels off, but by then it costs more $ in electricity than it makes in BTC. So you switch it off. You look at the total amount of BTC you mined. It's BTC0.7.

That means you lost BTC0.3, and there's no two ways about it. You've got 0.7 but if you hadn't bought the miner you'd have 1.0.

Ah but, you say, what if I'd spent $120 to buy that one bitcoin, and by the time I've got BTC0.7, the exchange rate is $20000 per bitcoin? Then you could sell your BTC0.7 for $14000, and you've made a profit of $13880. Sweet! Yes, but the profit was made entirely from the appreciation in exchange rate, NOT the mining. If you'd just bought the bitcoin and NOT the miner you'd have made a profit of $19880. All the miner has really done for you is cost you $6000!

ETA: in fact it wouldn't even matter if your purchase IS conducted entirely in $ not BTC. The same principle would apply. If the exchange rate shot up massively you'd make $, but only BECAUSE OF THE EXCHANGE RATE, not because of the miner, and you WOULD have made more if you HADN'T bought the miner.

Just buy $30 worth of btc.

The convoluted math that goes on to try and justify a bad purchase is always funny.

And everyone seems to assume bitcoin will always go up. Which it does, as long as you ignore the times it drops. Much like the housing market!

As difficulty keeps increasing exponentially, it's unlikely that USB miners will be profitable. Even if BTC rises quite a bit, you have to factor in things like electricity cost and mining difficulty.

The price of BTC whether it rises or falls is irrelevant. All that matters is whether you generate more BTC mining then the amount in BTC you spent on hardware and electricity.

Actually you can purchase a USB miner for $ eBay etc are good examples also ssinc sells them for $~28 PayPal. So if in its lifetime you mine 0.05 and the value of btc goes up to $1000 you will have got a roi.

Please counter the following:

If I buy Bitcoin with $28 right now, I get around 0.24 btc.

If Bitcoin then goes up to $1000, I have $240.  Not $50.

If your argument for ROI involves bitcoin going up, YOU ARE BETTER OFF BUYING BITCOIN than buying a miner.

There is no logical argument to spend more for a device than it will ever return unless you have very specific requirements (such as being in a country that will not allow you to buy bitcoin easily).

Paying 0.3 btc for a device that may return 0.1 btc is stupidity, no matter how much the price of bitcoin goes up.  You'd have been better off buying bitcoin directly!

//EDIT: To be crystal clear and concise:  Any argument about mining ROI that includes "Bitcoin going up" is worse off than just buying bitcoin at the current price.

If you had just bought btc with your $'s instead of the miner you would be better off. Therefore no ROI.

I never said it was a good option. I am just saying a roi in $ is possible. Basing you chances of roi on the price of btc going up is never a good idea.

True but you are still achieving a roi in $

The simple answer is no.  Since the USB are priced as BTC, if BTC = $250 the .18BTC = $45.  If BTC = $1000 that .18BTC = $180.  AM's using BTC as the steady-state price = no chance of RoI (unless he sells them for .01BTC)

Your mentioned should be the current fiat price.

Currently, more the better. The small amount like 330Mhash/s unless you have a way to re-construct for Scrypt(N,1,1) or Scrypt (1024,1,1) array, You only protect the network instead of making profit in fiat.

Additionally, the methods of finding. Currently the finding method is currently not so optimal due to the additional stable cost like air conditioning. If you do something in nerd way like repack your "rig" as engines, you will be safe from the cooling cost as the cooling cost kills your efforts.


If you want to win the match, Only three ways. Obtaining more hashrate, Doing scryptmining or Finding a way to reconstruct the Scrypt (1024,1,1) array with your current usb miners.

There is a way to make money with USB miners.  You'd need to have a lot of them (like hundreds or thousands) pimping away for you.

The only problem is that you would normally pay for the miners, either in $ or BTC.  And that ruins the profit for a long time to come.

So the solution, although not entirely LEGAL in the strictest definition of the word, would be to steal or otherwise obtain USB miners in a way that costs you no $ or BTC.

Then you would have only profit from mining with them.

So you need to find the location of these ASIC companies and go visit them late at night..... ::)

It's better to mine Scrypt coins, where the resale value of the GPUs will stay.

To ROI with a USB ASIC is to buy them via a group buy here or somewhere cheap. Then onsell them on ebay for more. Instant ROI!

Excellent, well articulated example!

You can group buy USB miners? If so what section of the forums would I find this in?

So what price would a USB maybe be profitable? BTC.1, BTC.05, BTC.01?

You would not ROI in BTC terms, which is all that matters.  If you pay $100 for a miner when BTC=$100USD, then you paid 1BTC for it.

If the miner only gives you a maximum of 0.4BTC back, then you have lost 60% your investment.

If BTC goes $1000, you will have 0.4BTC which is $400. 

But if you didn't buy the miner and kept your 1BTC you'd have $1000. So where did the other $600 go? 

To the ASIC manufacturer who sold you -- the idiot -- the overpriced hardware.

The ASIC manufacturer is laughing at you -- the idiot -- all the way to the bank -- because you -- the idiot -- think that ROI in USD is what matters -- it doesn't.

ONLY ROI IN BTC matters.

Hopefully this post permanently clarifies things for idiots.

Preach on, brother integrity42!!!!!

I am continually dumbfounded by noobs who think that buying USB erupters in any amount will make them a profit, and they have to logically sort out how long they will have to mine to break even, and that is assuming that the price of BTC doesn't crash through the floor.

They make make "X" amount of BTC, but if a BTC is worth only 23 cents, then it is decidedly non-impressive.

I tend to focus on how many dollars I will end up with from my LiteCoin mining operation, but then again, LTC has lots of room to grow whereas BTC has maxed out already.

In the past I have explained how the ASIC manufacturers use their ASICS to mine FOR THEMSELVES for months before giving them to the people who prepaid for them.  The ASIC manufacturers would be fools to not do it!

At the moment... BTC.01 or less.

Seeing as a USB BE would generate more than that in the first week I think that is dubious.

At 0.1 BTC (or less) is is almost certainly profitable. 
At 0.15 BTC would likely take a long time (6+ months) and would require cheap power and difficulty growth slowing significantly in 2014.
At 0.2 BTC I don't see turning a profit under any conditions.

If I could get it in hand today, yes, I could make .1 BTC.  If it took 1 week to get it in hand, then it's looking shaky.  At 111M difficulty, it's estimated .05 after 1 month if difficulty doesn't go up.  I see .0015 per day for 10 days, .0012 for 10 days, .001 for 10 days, .0008 for 10 days, .0006 for 10 days, .0005 for 10 days.  .056 after 2 months, .066 after 3 months, .074 after 4 months .08 after 5 months and .085 after 6 months.  At 1Bil diff you're getting .000167 per day.  389 more days to .15 with no more increases, 90 more days to .1

Thanks for disproving your own claim.  :) Even assuming no slowing in difficulty growth, in the next six weeks and waiting a week for delivery, and subtracting 0.05 BTC for power cost the unit would produce 0.08 BTC net revenue.    Clearly 0.08 BTC is > "0.01 BTC or less".

Unless you pay for your electricity in BTC, the mining factor is the thing that determines when you have to shut down your miners as they are making less than the cost of running them. If you have free electricity, then you could just run them until they die - the difficulty would be irrelevant to you. Hell if BTC shoot up in value, or the heat they produce is valuable to you, you can always bring mothballed miners back into duty while the returns are +ve..

You make ROI the second your miner produces one satoshi more than the miner and the electricity have cost you up until that point...

That is not the same as saying that buying that miner is a good idea in the first place - there is an opportunity cost whenever you put your money somewhere, but having made any profit at all is ROI - not having made the best investment way back when...

If your primary mining goal is profit then the fiat price of bitcoins is irrelevant. When purchasing an asic miner you are essentially buying an unknown inflow of bitcoins in the future. To fairly value your profit/loss from mining (not currency speculation), you must denominate all income and expenses in bitcoin when they occur.

If you lose bitcoins from mining, but gain fiat due to bitcoins appreciating, then mining activities have generated a loss.

I previously posted a more detailed explanation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283450.0) that may help with this concept.

True, but I still would not pay more than .01 for one of them.  AM has apportioned supply to regulate demand and milked every penny out of his victims err customers.  Obviously he is still making a fairly decent profit if he is able to sell them at the prices he is.  .1 BTC per chip still works out to $42 per GH as of today's prices.

Currently you can get around $.25 a day mining 24/7 with a usb asicminer (underestimate) depending on your luck.Therefore at the current difficulty it would take around 140 days to remake the initial investment and even if the difficulty increased a few times bitcoin price would increase (in theory) to respond to increased difficulty, so you would mine less coins for more money. The beauty of usb miners is that the investment is so low that it allows newer miners to join the game without a huge risk, which helps to legitimize the bitcoin as a globally accepted currency making it a safer investment for everyone. And once you pay back your $35 everything else is profit. You can even save all the bitcoins you mine now and sell them in a year or two for a huge profit if the market doesn't crash because you can live without $35 :)

WOW at the above post.  A dozen posts before you explaining it and it is still over your head.  I like that BTC is a zero sum game so the more people like that the better for the rest who understand it.  Your loses are my gains and there's nobody to print more or steal more to bail you out of your dumb decisions.  Also the deflationary aspect of bitcoin makes it all seem correct so you'll keep on pouring more value into the system incorrectly.  I'm all for it.

Ok so what is your plan all knowing bitcoin fortune teller? There is no need to be hostile just because you don't know how to correctly debate a subject *waits for another unnecessarily rude post*

Tobias, you really don't get it, hm? You are talking about "how to debate a subject", but the point is "how to do simple math". And you failed.

Scenario A: (your way)
You bought a Block Erupter for 35$
You mined 0.1 Bitcoins with it before the power consumption costs more than your mining reward.
Bitcoin price rises from 140$ to 1000$ per Bitcoin.
You sell your 0.1 Bitcoins for 100$ and say "Hey, I made 65$, I was right, I told everybody that those Block Erupters make Money!"


Scenario B: (the one you need braincells for)
You bought Bitcoins for 35$.
You got 0.25 Bitcoins at the Price of 140$ each Bitcoin.
Bitcoin price rises from 140$ to 1000$ per Bitcoin
You sell your 0.25 Bitcoins for 250$ and say "Hey, I made 215$, I was right, I told everybody that those Block Erupters suck!"


The difference is: B gives you 150$, but only if you have braincells.


But clearly your point was: Hey, 35$, who needs such peanuts, just throw it away in a most delightful way.

Also you are severely underpricing your time value.  Holding BTC for a year takes 0 time.  Running a miner takes what 5-10 min a week?  That's 4-8 hours a year?  What's your time worth to you?  In my opinion miners can be considered for purchase under the following conditions.  Difficulty is going to stop increasing because it is unprofitable to buy more miners and there is no new technology on the horizon.  Also miners sales price is very close to manufacturing costs and supply will be diminishing as manufacturers stop producing them because it is no longer profitable.  Currently we are nowhere near these conditions.  Numerous 28nm tech is coming and difficulty shows no sign of abating.  The chip production costs even for 28nm tech chips is likely a few dollars per chip.

I won't insult you, but I will debate and argue the points in your post.


The difficulty definitely will not be the same for 140 days, it won't be the same for 15, it won't even be close at 140.
Considering 'mining at the currently difficulty' for any duration beyond the next difficulty change ruins any profitability calculations. You can't even know what the difficulty will be in a month, so you can't calculate how much btc your miner will make then so you can't calculate your profitability in advance. The only thing that seems certain is that diff will be higher than now.


I bought coins instead of a miner, what you're saying is that even if your miner makes less coins than it cost you'll profit due to price rise, but you'll never have as much as if you just held/bought coins instead of buying the miner.


It's true you can buy a cheap USB miner, have some fun, make a loss, but not be financially ruined because of it. However, it may turn people off the coin if they feel they've been scammed when their first 'money making machine' purchase fails to be profitable if they expected otherwise.  If you dont' care about profit and enjoy the hobby aspect or want to support the network then great!


But you never will.

The way I read it, most "know it alls" here in the thread are completely dismissing the possibility that USB miners will have future value, even when BTC mining is unprofitable.

I'd like to see some calculations when future value is included. Naturally, you can not prove that the future value is nil.

They aren't saying that they won't have any value at all. What the "know it alls" are saying is that, instead of buying 0.3 BTC of hardware hoping to make back 0.1 BTC is ridiculous. The 0.3 will always have more value than the USB ASIC miner in ANY and ALL situations proposed except for one in which Bitcoin becomes so invaluable that the pieces of hardware in the ASIC are worth more than what it can generate in a year. In such a situation, nobody would be willing to pay for such hardware, as it will have likely been used incessantly, as all ASIC devices are not given breaks. Why argue over something when you probably won't even buy it because of what we are saying is true.

And with the value of the ASIC miner argument. Say in 6 months the difficulty is 700million. At that moment, you will be making 0.01 BTC a month. Judging off the fact that nobody can predict future Bitcoin values, lets estimate a value of about double (e.g. $250). You will be making $1.64 worth of Bitcoin every month. Another factor people refuse to acknowledge is that the USB ASIC isn't the only thing pulling power while mining. Not only is the ASIC using power, but the device it is connected to is pulling power as well. Whether it be RPi, MK802, a USB hub hooked up to anything with miner software, or a computer, it's still pulling power. In most situations I've seen, people are using full desktop computers. Factor in the power draw of running a computer with all USB ports at maximum power draw and tell me that it won't draw more than $1.64 a month and I'll back down. Have fun celebrating with your stack of pennies.

You're right, i usually assume that. If you're assuming that the only thing that makes your miner profitable is selling it at an unprofitable price to another person then so be it. This is a ponzi scheme. It may actually work, but it sure sounds risky to assume there's one more idiot waiting to buy one. And even I'd feel like a dick doing it, but that's just me.

GPUs have a use outside bitcoin so have a good residual value.

FPGAs have a use outside bitcoin so have a good residual value.

Bitcoin mining asics have no use outside bitcoin. Why would you expect them to have a residual value higher than their mining returns?

Maybe if I had brain cells I would be able to do the math in my head but for now I used a calculator and discovered that "65$" and "215$" are both more than 35$  :o thus agreeing with the dictionary definition of the word profitable. I am not telling people to buy 1000 usb miners and mine with them I am just arguing that you will one day in the future probably make back your 35$ with a usb miner. However I would NEVER condone basing your entire operation off usb miners and yes you would get more money if you bought 35$ in btc and just held it for the same amount of time. The post was asking if they are profitable not if they are the MOST profitable. But hey, I am just a guy without brain cells...

For the sake of usbminers everywhere I will throw away my peanuts in order to bring some actual evidence to the table. I just ordered a usb asicminer for 34.95 from ebay, and I will begin mining asap. Speculation is great but everyone is forgetting to add in the luck factor. We will see how it goes.

Profit in terms of fiat sure if BTC rises high enough before difficulty is at a "certain" point.

Those times are usually short lived.

And if you add in the "luck factor," Vegas is a can't lose idea!

Luck goes both ways.

a new coin coded to only allow 1 single stick run to mine it per ip address.  or any variation of the above .  why should someone make the coin  because there or 10's of thousands of sticks. any smart coder can see that his and her coin has a built in following.

In England They Would say :penny wise and pound foolish,

Nope, you are still wrong, because you misunderstood "profitable".
Mining-profitability does not! include a rise in Bitcoin prices. Don't mix profits you made by speculations with mining profits.
You bought an USB Erupter at 35$ and mine Bitcoins that are worth 14$. 14$ in Bitcoins made by mining. If the Bitcoin price rises, these 14$ in Bitcoin may be worth 100$ in the future.

Where Mining is red and speculation is blue.
So by spending 35$ on a Erupter you make a mining loss of 21$. Full Stop. No profit at all. Nada. Nüx.
The 35$ - 21$ loss then goes towards the calculation for your potential! speculation profits. 14$ to speculate with and hope and pray for rising Bitcoin prices, so that your speculation profits will compensate your loss in the "mining-stage" and maybe even overcompensate it so you make a netto-plus in the end.


The idea behind this is quite simple. Here a quick example of that logic:

You want to do the gold-stuff.
You go out and start digging, spending 1000$ on equipment and a claim for digging gold. You get gold, at the current rate it's worth 300$, your gold mine is as good as depleted.
You sit on your gold and hope that it's going to rise in price so you can sell your 300$ worth in gold for 3000$. And if you success, you say "Hey, great, I made profit."

But your profit of mining was -700$, just your speculation profit was 2700$. Why did you bother mining, when all you wanted to do from the start was speculating on rising prices? You could have just bought the gold.

This thread makes my head hurt. There is so much cognitive bias in the arguments for the devices that I'm dumbfounded.

Ok I am sorry but there is no point in arguing with a person who pulls numbers out of no where. Here is a link to the definition of profitable http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/profitable please study it hard and stop trying to prove your point just because you aren't willing to hear anyone else out. You are misunderstanding what I am trying to say. It is profitable and if you say it isn't you are absolutely wrong. However usbmining definitely isn't as profitable as just buying the bitcoins and waiting for the price to go up. And it definitely isn't as profitable as buying a better rig. I agree with that. However I disagree with your complete mutilation of the word "profitable".


Yes it does. Let's use your brilliant gold example. If what you are saying is true then no gold mining company is "profitable" because they should just buy the gold from someone else and hold it until prices increase. Then no one would mine gold... That just doesn't make sense, someone has to do it. And as less gold becomes available I am allowed to speculate all I want. So if I save the gold I mined now and sell it later for double its worth I make money. Thus a profit is earned.

Of course you can calculate profit from speculation into the equation, any logical businessman would. Profit is profit, even if I get it in the future. You think I am arguing for something that I am not.

heres a new argument - what if I bought one off amazon because I only had Credit to begin with...just one.  Lets take out the additional expense of extra stuff like fans and external hubs and presume that Im only doing one. I got one shipped for 23 dollars at the same time the price is 139 which converts my breakeven at that point in time to .164

Now, I didn't have cash or dollars to throw down on btc and only had the option to use credit which already explains why I couldnt just buy and hold btc.  I think I could make .08 BTC according to genesis block...by then I could also make another .08 in BTC by mining an alt I know this is now before difficulty goes up but coinwarz suggests that one block erupter could also mine terracoin which would yield approximately .0038 btc a day for just one erupter.  .08/.0038 = 21.05 Days added till break even so anyone who says you can't do it hasn't considered this. 

I will play devils advocate and mention also that this is not realistic to expect it to be this soon..there are also bound to be other sha246 difficulty jumps on those coins too which may triple or quadruple the remaining time required to break even on the block erupter.  If you ask me the goal isnt to continue to live off the erupters forever, unless you keep switching alts and have enough hashpower like in the several terrahashs to throw into an altcoin network.   


Let difficulty hit a few billion and I promise that more alts will jump in interest.  By virtue of the calculations brought above, I could even go so far as to speculate that those prices of the alt I mentioned could also themselves be higher in price from the interest and difficulty  spikes of having them available.  A

The alternative is that some people will have to admit they were wrong about buying the gizmos.

That's hard, apparently.

Well, in an example you use numbers. You can substitute Dollar with Sheep or whatever you like, but numbers usually helps to understand complex problems. You can alter them, since they won't change the outcome of the given argument.


By having proven you wrong by all scientific means your argument is rendered invalid. By USB Mining you loose 70% of your money. Gone. Even if you turn your calculations upside down and squint at them.


Thats two different things. Buying an USB-Miner and using it for mining generates Mining-Profit. It's a negative value. You loose money.
Holding Bitcoins and speculate with 'em is independent of your source of Bitcoin-Income. It doesn't matter if you have mined them or if you have bought them.

Nope, still does not.

Exactly this happens in roughly 90% of the known gold deposits. The costs of mining the gold there is higher than the value of the gold, so noone is mining there. On some places it is still profitable, because the gold is easily accessible and the worker costs are low (e.g. african continent).

Only a speculation profit. Again, you mix mining and speculation. And that is a plainly wrong. If the gold price isn't rising at all, your speculation profit will be zero. No loss. But the money you spent on your unprofitable mining is gone. If you bought the gold, you wouldn't have lost any money at all. Therefore, mining is a way to loose money, you won't have any gain from it.

Profit is profit, exactly. The mining profit is negative, roughly -70% in case of Block Erupters. The speculation profit may be positive, the future will tell. The thing is: These "profits" are two completely different things, you cant mix them and calculate an "overall profit" and then use this to draw the conclusion that "mining profit" was positive.


PS:
I am not arguing with you, I just try to explain the basics behind the ongoing mining-fraud to you. You make some very common mistakes and I can only hope that you won't loose a lot of money by investing based on wrong assumptions.

Profit/loss from mining =/= profit/loss from currency speculation. Just because you may make more in fiat then you started with does not mean the mining generated those returns.

Hoping that bitcoins rise in value to make your mining operation profitable is not rational if your primary goal is profit.

You haven't once proven me wrong, you just refuse to calculate speculation into the profit equation which doesn't make sense to me. You have admitted countless times that you make money, then you turn around and say you don't make profit. That is the only discussion here but you keep going off topic for some reason. It doesn't matter if the profit is from mining or speculation, because you speculate with your mined coins. I really don't think you know what "all scientific means" are. Science works with evidence.

EVIDENCE:


then

You can't say one thing, argue the completely different side, and then refuse to understand what I am trying to say one bit. I am not sure who made the rule that you are not allowed to calculate speculation into mining but it is wrong. Any bitcoin miner immediately becomes a speculator the second they help solve a block. You can be safe and immediately sell it, or you can take a risk and speculate. If you speculate on coins that you mined yourself you are making a profit off of mining because you mined the coins that you are speculating with. If I just bought the coins I would be speculating, but because I mined them I am allowed to combine the profit. There is no logical argument against that as far as I am aware.


Have you ever even owned a usbminer? I feel like most of the people on this thread are talking but they have absolutely no evidence to back up their claims. Let me make this very clear: I am not endorsing usbmining I am just saying that they will one day in the very distant future make a profit. I do not and will not ever buy more than one of these purely for the sake of experimentation because they are interesting devices and if the technology was perfected they could one day become a viable source of income.

OKAY I will meet up halfway with you because I am a good guy, let's use your side of the argument that mining generates a negative profit. Even if it takes years to do, if the usbminer somehow magically mines .00000000000000001 more btc than it took to buy the thing(not counting speculation, we will assume price never increases but difficulty does) a profit has been achieved, do you agree? And you can't just say "No that will never happen" because you don't know for sure so please don't go there. You will not make as much as just flat out buying the btc, and definitely not as much as a legit rig, but if it one day makes more than it cost to buy you get a profit purely from mining. My arguement is that this is possible. Slow, but possible.

You are saying that a usbminer will never reach the initial investment that it cost to buy purely from mining btc and selling them immediately? Correct? Just try to see my point because we aren't being productive anymore we are just going in circles.

Please elaborate why you should include any profit/loss from currency speculation into your mining operation's profit/loss.

Util all of the world takes BTC, at the end of the day you will be converting to fiat (i.e. USD) and so you generally can't mine without some speculation being involved. 

That is unless you spend in BTC strictly which of course you can't do because you had to either buy BTC (which was started by fiat) or buy mining equipment to mine with (which would again require fiat or BTC purchased with fiat).

The exception here is if someone gives you a miner - then you have virtually no capital expenditure just operating costs.

So who wants to send me a USB unit?  ;D

Indeed. The specific bias in question has a well defined name too: Post purchase rationalisation.

It really is a simple argument to say that you shouldn't buy AsicMiner USBs

It doesn't matter that some very small % of buyers are able to predict the future and use speculation to return a greater number of $ than they put into buying them, since, firstly, that is indeed some very small % of buyers and, secondly, if you rephrase it into 'gold' it is quite clear that it's a bad idea.

Now lets try a 'gold' example:
I have a device that can create 9oz of gold, and take many months, using only electricity.
I'll sell it to you for 10oz of gold.
Once it has made 9oz of gold, the value of the device is effectively zero but may be more if you can fool someone into buying it - or find a fool who doesn't realise that it has no value

This sound like a good deal to anyone?

Now just to avoid the speculation argument that may come up as a reply.

With the same input fiat, would I be better to speculate on the price of 10oz of gold or 9oz of gold?

Yup. Its fun watching new ways an examples they post to try and justify it.

Your use of his gold example makes no sense. There are companies that have the money to start mining gold, because chances are, they WILL BE PROFITABLE at MINING it. And if Gold value happens to rise, that will further increase profit margins.

People keep buying the USB miners that are already in "not profitable stages" and never will be, and they make retarded examples to justify the purchase when it is just as easy to buy BTC over the course of a 30 second span of signing up at coinbase and actually have the chance of making a profit.

Not to mention I currently buy BTC, have already made profit by trading and "betting" btc to increase my holdings.

Way better than buying a miner, losing the BTC I had/could have had, and sit waiting months on a miner that will never make it back for me.

Once BFL ships /irony they are just expensive souvenirs anyway.

Then to follow your approach by combining the apples and pears:
The amount of profit you accumulate overall by speculation and mining will be - in case of rising Bitcoin prices - always lower then the possible profit made by pure speculation without any mining. So your maximal profit that you can achieve with a given amount of money will be diminished by mining, leading to the conclusion that mining generates a loss.

Yes, I traded a MMOG-Account with a friend for his USB-Miners. He was eager to get rid of them, I didn't play anymore, so it was a quite reasonable trade.
(Ah, but to follow my argumentations: Of course I made a huge loss in this trade. Because I have to calculate the money that I could have gained by selling this account for money, then buy Bitcoins with this money. That would be the 100% that I could have made by selling this account. By trading it for USB-Miners I lost roughly 70%-80% of this value. This already includes an assumed scam-rate of 20% during the selling process of online-gaming-accounts.)

If the miner generates more bitcoins than it took to buy, it generated a positive profit. But it won't.
By using the numbers of the mining-speed-delivery-thread in this forum, my calculations show that the current Hardware won't make even half the amount of Bitcoins that it takes to buy those things. Even if i assume a complete stagnation after the delivery of the current preordered Hashrate, it wont return the investment in a 20 year timeframe. After that I stopped calculations.
It takes several - and at this point in time very unlikely - assumptions to get to a positive ROI. And those have to factored into your profitability-calculations as a risk-factor.

The other problem in your logic is still, that you assume the hardware investment as only parameter in calculating the overall profit. To say your miner generated more money including speculation than it's initial cost in Dollar is profit - is flawed. It only works if the Bitcoin prices are rising. And when the Bitcoin prices are rising, the maximum amount of profit you can make is by buying Bitcoins without mining. Again, this value is 100%. Everything less is a loss, because you did not get as much money as you could have gained.

I will answer both quotes at the same time.

Yes! That is all I was trying to say, you completely misunderstood me. Of course there will be a loss because you will never fully get back what you paid for the miner, and it would make more sense to just buy bitcoins. Then you will have an extra 35$ to speculate with. The only point I was trying to make was that there is some "profitability" if you account for successful speculation with mined coins, but definitely not as much as just flat out speculation profit. And of course my argument is flawed because I can't predict the future, I am not sure if btc prices will ever rise, but your argument and every other argument is flawed as well because everyone is making their own assumptions. That is why I am ignoring the irrelevant people in this thread and I am just debating with you. We have the same train of thought, you just think it's more profitable to speculate, which I agree with. For the last time I was trying to point out that a profit is possible, no matter how minute. Please admit that so we can spend our time more wisely :)

... you could solo mine with a BE and find a block ...

I'm not sure which is more likely ...

(yeah that's what I do with 2 of my 3 coz there no f'ing way they are useful doing anything else ... when I have 144GH/s of mining hardware)

Of course there will be speculation involved in you are mining or holding bitcoins. Mining and speculation are two different activities. To find out if your mining operation is profitable, you should really try to separate it from the speculation.

The metric that matters is Mh/$, regardless of the device. Block erupters at 0.17BTC or ~$23 are as good or as bad as a Japaleno.

If I were to buy today, I wouldn't go below ~30 Mh/$ and even then it had to be "in hand", not scammy pre-orders.

Then you will lose out.
Funny how so many people don't even understand that.
At the moment there are few if any ASIC devices you can buy that will not lose you BTC.

Profitability depends on what you do first, then the process.

There are many options which can be tricky to follow up. If There are many Big arrays (For example, 256Gh/s by 4 with Cooking Oil cooling at least, which represents 1,300W) poured into, then The Smallest USB miners will be broken unless you have thousands of to follow up.

P.S The case is from PRC, 300Mh/s by 1000 can be impressive number but the wattage can be problem as each 30Gh/s (100 x 300Mh/s) represents as 250W, You can count on it.

Before January 2014. if you have these trustful miners, then you have little chance to get profit due to low power cost. I have purchased six with the necessary via ebay for pressure test, I have bidded it for USD 210 instead of spending USD 330 for six.

Your reply is a non-reply. If the metric to decide profitability isn't Mh/$, then what is? There is none?

Perhaps what you have in mind is that most or all vendors sell ASIC devices at inflated prices for the current and future difficulty. They are too expensive. That means too many $ for a particular hashing power, ergo too low Mh/$

Of course there is the operating environment to take into account, power usage, cooling, but that tends to scale proportionally with the operation. Nobody is talking about purchasing 2kW units with low hash rate or leaving an high-end PC on 24/7 just to control a block erupter.   let's be serious and have common sense.

If there are such devices, they are exactly the ones that provide the highest Mh/$

Consider the case where buying bitcoins directly is problematic. Let's say you don't want to link in a bank account, prove your identity to an exchange, meet with a stranger from localbitcoins, etc.

You can go buy a block erupter via credit card for $19 + shipping from Amazon, get it in 3-4 days, and start hashing. If the bitcoins you mine are eventually worth more than $19 + shipping, your purchase was profitable. And you've still got the miner. Personally I think that even the lowly block erupter, if bought with fiat currency, will eventually be profitable.

Buying bitcoin directly will most likely be more profitable, but that option may not be available to everyone.

I suppose if you refuse to use the more normal channels, then you could overpay for coins through unprofitable mining.While people in some areas of the world may have trouble buying coins, generally it is better to buy x coins now then receive < x coins in the future.

Yeah I could see that being a problem if you were doing something illegal ... gotta keep that paper trail clean.

Lucky credit cards hide your identity ...

If you can't buy bitcoins via the standad exchanges the profit calculations would be:

<amount of bitcoins generated by miner> - <amount of bitcoins the miner costs> +<amount of bitcoins it would cost me to get bitcoins in some non standard way>

Lets say you need 0.1 bitcoin, pay the equivalent of 0.15BTC in fiat for the miners and get your 0.1 BTC of them, but otherwise would have had to bank wire the money to some scetchy exchange with prices 10% over market, for 15% fee and a risk of 30% of getting scammed buying the miner gives a profit 0f ~0.03 btc

The point is that you won't see a profit in BTC at all.
The price you pay for them in BTC is less than the BTC they will earn PPS mining.

Why still bother with Bitcoin when Betacoin exists?