Bitcoin Forum

I recently (Oct 12th) bought a BTC mining plan at Byteminr, a "hosted hashing" company.

It works like this:
- You pay them with a credit card.
- They fire up a BTC miner for you.
- They connect that miner to the "KnCMiner" pool.
- You start receiving BTC.

Support: Courteous. Works. Responses received within about 12 to 24 hours so far.
Website: Interface provides pretty minimal feedback: you can't really see anything about the mining activity.

Payouts received so far for what is supposed to be a 50 GH/s mining contract that started on Oct 12th 2013 and ends on Oct 12th 2014 (the "XL Minr" immutable plan):

16 Oct 04:13 - 0.05842194 BTC
15 Oct 14:25 - 0.05399137 BTC
15 Oct 12:05 - 0.32 BTC (Compensation for Oct 12th and Oct 13th -- my account had problems for the first two days)
15 Oct 08:44 - 0.03700314 BTC
14 Oct 21:30 - 0.04785393 BTC
14 Oct 13:02 - 0.01916708 BTC

If you're interested, here's a link to the site that, if you buy stuff through this, I may eventually get free hashing power (i.e. referral link): https://www.byteminr.com/register/5258fd15469a8 . The referral option I have is 10 GH/s free for every 100 GH/s referrals buy. I think this is for the first 100 customers or something.

I like the simplicity of the service, the concept, but I'm not sure if it is profitable (perhaps not even break-even), though it seems like the most straight-forward way to buy a random stream of tiny BTC deposits with a credit card. The payment is through Google and it takes just seconds.

If anybody is interested I can paste more of my "mining outcome" here.

-- Obey

How  many GH per $ you got?

I bought their "XL Minr" plan, which is 12 months x 50 GH/s for $1,749 and you can't change anything about the plan. That gives a fixed cost of $34.98 per "Gigahash/second/year", whatever that means :-)

At this point I don't think I'll break even (i.e. compared to buying BTC). But I'm waiting for a month of data before I do another projection.

But even though the other miner services are cheaper (there's the "cexio" thing for 0.13 BTC x 12 mo x GH/s) I really like the simplicity of this service. There's also the Butterfly Labs $10.83 per GH/s, but that's for Jan/Feb 2014. I'd buy it too but I don't feel like waiting... just another thing to keep checking back, etc. too much stress then.

Perhaps I will get at least one referral bonus for Byteminr, that would cut my losses a bit...

Here's the next data point since the original post:

16 Oct 18:41 - 0.01924074 BTC

The deposits are random, i.e. they depend on blocks being found, but I have no idea why they vary so much from one day to the next.

-- Obey

So a TL'DR of this is buy a plan that won't ROI so I can hopefully recover from a bad investment.

Well, at least I'm out of newbie jail on bitcointalk without posting an useless "HI IM A NOOB".

Enjoy the free data on a service you didn't have to hire yourself to figure out its performance and whether it was a scam or not.

-- Obey

What pool they are mining on?

Today the difficulty increased by about +30%, so you should get lower rewards from today

The pool is called "KnCMiner" which they say has a 1.5% fee. You're supposed to be able to choose the pool even with the inflexible plans but I haven't seen the option.

30% in a DAY? Holy shit. Okay, really didn't see that one coming.

I guess that unless you're betting that BTC will go to $1,000 or something then there's absolutely no reason to pay for miners.

It isn't 30% a day.  The difficulty went up 41% today. It changes every 2016 blocks and the time between changes depends on what the total hash rate is over the 2016 blocks.

In a nutshell, 1 GH/s will mine about 0.13 BTC total, so 50 GH/s will mine about 6.5 BTC total. You paid about 12.5 BTC so unless there is a miracle and the difficulty stops rising, you have lost about 6 BTC in the deal.

In $ terms, you paid $1750 to mine $910 worth of bitcoins. It doesn't matter if BTC goes to $1000, because if you just bought the BTC instead of mining it, you still would have come out ahead.

Please note that my calculations assume that the difficulty will rise an average of 20% each period for several months. (it has been rising about 30% per period since February). They also assume that the operator does not charge any fees. For example,  Cloudhashing charges a 10% management fee.

Good point. Buying while betting it will rise is better than buying mining while betting it will rise, since the cost of BTC was cheaper than what I paid at the time I bought the contract. All the online profitability simulators I used pointed at the possibility of profit. I think the ones I used were just plain wrong.

Most mining calculators do not account for future difficulty changes. The best one I have found is http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

Quick question... Wouldn't this be a worthy investment if bitcoin goes up to 200 or more? I guess while investing it is best to look way far ahead. Maybe he might end up with 9000 dollars instead of 900!

Sure, he might end up with more dollars, but he can do better with less risk. Let me show you.

There are two ways you can obtain bitcoins. You can buy them or you can mine them. Let's compare the two, assuming that you mine for a year and the value of BTC goes up to $1000.

Method	| $ Value Now	| BTC Value Now	| BTC Value Next Year	| $ Value Next Year
Buy	| 1750	| 12.5	| 12.5	| 12500
Mine	| 1750	| nothing yet	| 6.5	| 6500

As you can see, if he mines he can make a big profit if BTC rises to $1000. But, if he spends the money on bitcoins instead of on mining bitcoins, he comes out way ahead. Also, there is no risk of Byteminr shutting down.

Right... Thanks for explaining this... Good thing I have not bought any mining shares... But what if I can find a ghash for cheap? Do you think it would be worth it?

what i think is why not make your self a mining rig you confirm profit on that if you own it , no matter the diff go how hard you are still mining

You have to determine what you think is the value of 1 GH/s. That value depends on the difficulty and on how fast you believe it will rise over the next several months. Then, you have to decide how much of a discount you want. There is no sense in paying 0.13 BTC for 1 GH/s if you think you will get 0.13 BTC back over a year, but maybe you think paying 0.10 is a good deal. Finally, you must also consider risk. What if your prediction is wrong? What if the host shuts down?

you are right and especialy the last sentence

The table is very helpfull, but $ Value Next Year column is not necessary, it just confuse things...

Great idea if you have the time and finds it fun to build your own mining cluster.

But you also have to NOT be in a shitty country that imposes 100% ~200% tax + shipping costs on technology imports (e.g. Brazil).

The purpose of the the $ Value Next Year column is to show the fallacy of "if the value of BTC goes up enough, it doesn't matter what I paid for mining."

obeygiant, Would you mind posting what payouts you managed to get this month?

Thanks,

They increased my hashing speed from 50 GH/s to 60 GH/s sometime earlier this month.

Below is the data from the new status page.

-------------------------------------

Total mining power: 60GH/s

Total BTC mined: 2.64914

19/11/2013 07:09    0.08700000
17/11/2013 07:01    0.07320000
16/11/2013 04:24    0.10560000
14/11/2013 02:49    0.08820000
12/11/2013 11:26    0.11700000
11/11/2013 09:30    0.04500000
10/11/2013 09:36    0.03900000
09/11/2013 05:20    0.15480000
07/11/2013 08:37    0.12720000
05/11/2013 12:32    0.12300000
03/11/2013 11:27    0.00332312
03/11/2013 08:52    0.08650000
02/11/2013 02:29    0.01550687
01/11/2013 08:41    0.01499254
01/11/2013 05:46    0.01460801
01/11/2013 06:20    0.01439778
31/10/2013 04:36    0.01574300
31/10/2013 04:20    0.01709279
31/10/2013 03:30    0.01715555
31/10/2013 03:03    0.01709833
31/10/2013 01:36    0.01671509
31/10/2013 07:02    0.01619152
31/10/2013 05:05    0.01594391
30/10/2013 06:17    0.01507693
30/10/2013 06:12    0.01516366
30/10/2013 01:31    0.01501710
30/10/2013 01:15    0.01458289
29/10/2013 11:51    0.17000000
27/10/2013 12:00    0.14910000
25/10/2013 12:00    0.11710000
24/10/2013 12:00    0.11710000
23/10/2013 12:00    0.13860000
21/10/2013 10:05    0.11710000
20/10/2013 08:29    0.15967000
18/10/2013 09:57    0.00001341
18/10/2013 01:15    0.15967000
16/10/2013 09:41    0.01924074
16/10/2013 07:13    0.05842194
15/10/2013 05:25    0.05399137
15/10/2013 11:44    0.03700314
15/10/2013 12:30    0.04785393
14/10/2013 04:02    0.01916708

-------------------------------------

-- Obey

Looks great. Looking to buy a contract.

Thanks for the info... it's funny how the second the BTC value increased all of a sudden there was no capacity left without warning.... There was plenty of capacity one day and then the next when I went to order it was all gone :(

Oh well... I'll continue to watch from the sidelines.