Bitcoin Forum

I was just looking at the KNC site for their various miners, the high end Jupiter model hashes 550 Ghash for $4,995.00 .

I'm telling you, DO NOT BUY ONE OF ANY MODEL!

Why?  Simple economics.  Run the numbers with me:

At current BTC difficulty of 267 million, you'll get 1.03 BTC per day.  In a couple days when the difficulty jumps to ~400 million, you will only get 0.69 BTC per day.  And it'll only get worse as the difficulty continues to rise!

BTC is at $215.00 right now, and assuming it stays there (which it won't), and assuming you are mining 0.69 BTC per day (which will fall more and more), you'd have to mine for at least 34 days to break even, and if the BTC price drops, it'll be much longer.

If BTC dropped to $100, and assuming again that you were still somehow getting 0.69 BTC at the 400 million difficulty, which will rise, your break even time is now 72 days or longer.

And this does not take into account shipping costs or electricity costs.

And WHEN the difficulty rises, it'll be much longer.

Do you really want to be on pins and needles for 3 months or more, praying that your foolish purchase at least breaks even, much less makes a profit?

Save yourself the headache.

If you're that desperate to throw money away, PM me for my PayPal address.  

And I really had to LOL at how they list the Saturn version as the "more affordable" model.  50% of the hash rate for 60% of the price -- you're already losing money relative to buying the Jupiter version!

And this is not a rip on KNC specifically, this goes for any ASIC built by anyone.

Why not ? If we have money to loose ? ;)

No more mining means no more Bitcoin.

People who say don't mine should have to do full disclosure as to what their current hashrate is. Lots of miners may see discouraging others as a way to try and sustain the value of their mining endeavor.

Okay, here's my full disclosure:

I don't mine BitCoin, I'm not an idiot throwing hashpower at a futile cause with no hope of profit.  I mine LiteCoin.  And I just sold off most of my GPUs and will probably stop mining altogether soon and sit on my 200 LTC and wait for the price to rise.

My GPUs were pimping 4500 Khash in LTC recently, now I have about 1200 Khash still online.

I used to mine BTC back when the difficulty was about 11 million to 20 million, then I finally got CGMiner working and switched over to LTC.

Ouch, you only made 200 LTC from your whole mining operation?

If and when the hashrate levels off AND there are in-stock ASICs for reasonable prices, then the mining may make sense.

I don't know if this will ever happen though. Most ASIC producers have either been late and taken away mining profits, or been savvy and priced their equipment above possible mining profits. There have been a few that beat the rise in hash and delivered within a timeframe, but not many.
The ASIC producers can figure out what their chips hash and what to sell them for, or for how long to mine. Gone are the days of AMD cards made by a company that didn't really care about hashing and sold them in their performance tiers. Why would an ASIC manufacturer sell their chips for less than they can mine?

at least you do something good  ;D

I can't wait for that day, because that means the Bitcoin will raise up again in worth. And more and more to come.

What a lovely world it is

If you find it profitable to mine, then mine.

If you don't find it profitable, then don't mine.

The "invisible hand of the market" will take care of everything else.

Well, maybe you should also take into consideration that, after you returned your investment, you have a machine worth a few thousand dollar which you can sell afterwards...

Just like an empty gold mine didn't raise the price of gold during the gold rush.

Then feel free to stay away then.

Let the rest of us hash in peace.

Looks like we have fortune teller here, I love that, can you also predict the bitcoin price for next week? PM plz... ;)
Just saying It is not all about the ROI when considering to buy a miner...

i paid 10 pink sheep for 550 Ghash and i will never see a ROI because my 550 Ghash mines BTC not pink sheep...

what do i say to that

baaaa!

How many of these threads do we need?   ???

That's where cex comes in handy at BTC0.082/Gh/s and deploys instantly as cloud miner, you have the option to sell the share so you both got the mining profit + the share which would then be a win+win situation when worst comes to worst.

You can check my sig for cex though.

Threads on what?  Stop mining, ROI or Pink Sheep?

Its a gamble, some people are thinking the difficulty would slow down :)

this is the best way to find out for yourself
http://www.btcinvest.net
mining calculator- better to just buy btc and hold then miners

this thread has a good side and a bad side...

good side... it tells people not to rush things and buy miners without thinking 999 times...

bad side... telling people not to mine can give a negative impact on BTC itself... if people stops mining... any big miners can take over.... corps/govs.... anybody...

attack of the 51%...

 It seems to me that the price of GH/s is always going to go lower. I'm not sure how mining profits will offset the price drop when you go to sell.

 Am I overlooking something ?

Agreed - you don't need to worry about selling your machine.  I just discovered CEX today.

You are constantly mining with the GH/s that you bought. So if you mine faster then it drop then you win :)

Don't buy any more ASIC please, all the company are scamming you by mining themselves first...

God I hate these threads

Every one of these threads:

lol

I'd find this unlikely as difficulty can also decrease. So if difficulty goes down, people will turn their miners back on and become profitable again.

Yeah - bitcoin is very self regulating.

The difference is, I have this Jupiter if I send my money to KnC, while sending money to you, will you send me some sort of hardware?

Reason please...

The KNC Jupiter WAS a wide purchase (so far) becuase most of us who have bought it have already been mining with it a few weeks. The earliest customers have already made their money back!

So yeah, if you are just getting around to buying your ASIC now, duh! of course you are too late and missed out.

This assumes that everyone who wishes to mine would have to buy a miner to do so. There are people for whom miners are a sunk cost -- for example, every one of KNC's customers.

STOP! Do not buy because I'm already buying and I dont want you to mine because that way I won't mine as much bitcoins as I want

Not when the visible hands of BFL and Avalon manipulate the market it doesn't.

Yes, Dabs.  If you send $250 to my PayPal, I will go to a local construction site and find you a really nice...... Rock.  A nice smooth round rock.  I'll bring it home and wash it and box it up to send to you.

That's about what your miners will be worth in 6 months with a few more of these 40%-50% difficulty increases every 10-12 days.

My hardware costs a lot less and produces almost as much BTC as your ASICs will!  You'll SAVE MONEY!  It's a really great deal! :o

I had put the value of 400 million difficulty into the online BitCoin mining calculators, and used 5 cents per KW for the electricity.  At 400 million, your 550 GH/s Jupiter will net you 0.69 BTC per day.

Now think about this.....

With the way the difficulty has been rising, how many more steps before it gets to 1 billion difficulty?  8-10 steps maybe?  Taking 3-4 months?

At 1 billion difficulty, a 550 GH/s Jupiter will get you 0.27 BTC per day.

Does it seem like a good place to invest $4995 now?  When you'll return ~ $50 a day IF the price stays where it is and doesn't collapse again?

I didn't think so either.

And at 2 billion difficulty, 550 GH/s gets you 0.138 BTC per day........ ::)

It doesn't help the bitcoin community any.  Is just negative and not in a positive way.  Honestly people will still buy just look at prices on ebay or anywhere and they ARE selling.  And the alternative motives of the poster are always in question.  Does he really want YOU to save money or is he trying to make it easier for him to make money etc.

These threads or comments like them are all over the place and I get tired of seeing them like the topic hasn't been said

BTC difficulty * 1000 = times a don't mine post like this is done now lol

Everyone has access to the charts. Let people do as they please... the information is available to them.

We are past the midpoint. As of now mining will become exponentially difficult.  Unless hardware becomes more efficient and cheaper, there is no positive ROI. Nothing available I see viable at this time.

you forgot to take into account that a lot of people like to bet on the difficulty rise slowing down a bit.  Difficulty can't rise like this forever, eventually it levels off a bit and those are the miners who will profit nicely

LOL this is like on Wall Street, everyone want ROI in 2 days, week at most which is - funny.
No pain no gain, you have to spend money to make money.
I am perfectly happy to have ROI back in 2-3 months, even 4. Still better than countless of people waiting over year for BFL asics and when they come out, in few months they slowly become relics.
Still safer to buy KnC machine than any one of tens of bfl jalapeno currently on ebay.

Err, most miners can't ROI for the lifetime of the machines. Based on the calculator.

Not gonna happen.

KnC smaller unit will break even in less than 2 months, if difficulty increase it might be 3-4 months. I dont know what you talk about.

hmmm... a thought. if people stopped mining and just bought Bitcoins instead, the demand for Bitcoins would go up causing the exchange rate to go up. So people who no longer mine may still be trying to get people to stop mining for their own profit. 8)

Sure not. Your wisdom is duly noted. You must be one of BFL pre-order customers or simply do not have money for investment.

So you are the few lucky one eh? Well most people didn't ROI...

Actually I want to use the bitcoins I bought a while ago to purchase a miner, or at least shares in a miner. Is that the same thing?

Kinda same, but share is higher in risk as in you have to pay for their management fee too...

Not really, his point here is that people who are mining already want other people to stop mining and invest in bitcoin to drive price higher. Guess from who they are supposed to buy those bitcoins? Its easy, from the same guys who advise others to stop mining LMAO.
Every price increase in bitcoin will only attract few thousand people to try mining. If they want to make some profit they do have to have the newest toy in the town otherwise they cant even see ROI on whatever is selling for some time.
Like those usb miners or bfl or avalon miners, while they were good for first few hundred owners after just 3-4 months they are obsolete pieces of machinery. In mining it is no longer about peaceful mining, it is a race for newest toys and fastest utilization of those.
Bitcoin mining moved to predatory stage when one eat another alive and only fittest will survive. Like people with capital to spend.
This is going to benefit people who are in mining from start or significantly longer than those who come only recently. While newcomers need to spend hard cash, ole day miners just invest part of their revenue they generated long time ago.

So then where do you go from here?  As a new comer myself, I do realize the majority of the profits are gone to the early adopters, but I want to mine.  Blah...take it as a hobby and mine at a loss I guess?  Or wait for the next round of shinny toys and buy!

It depend if you can take risk.
People who took risk ordering from bfl about a year of empty promises and obsolete machines delivered - that is what you call bad investment, on the other hand some other investments were better.
I would definitely go for new toy in the town if I like it. And with all that shared mining? I like when I control my money and when they work for me. I would go for shared mining only if I will be setting one up, that mean I do not want my money work for me, at maximum available profit.
Bitcoin mining is not (and never was) fun for poor people. Even with cpu mining you had to have pc, electricity and internet connection.

You get less GH/$ for the smaller units, and even the Jupiter will almost certainly not break even.  Could you show your work on how a KNC smaller unit is supposed to break even in less than 2 months?

Dude, I am talking about people who already have them. And even if you get one today it will break even, do the math it is really simple.

The Jupiter miner can break even within a few weeks. I got 4 of these monsters.  ;D

When these monsters milk out all the btc, I will be upgrading to a few CoinTerra 2TH/s, and then sell my Jupiter, once they arrive.  ;D

This is what I am talking about.
Btc mining is not for undecided weak people.
One step ahead and be able to lick wounds and go ahead.
You cant do it from borrowed or last money you have.

Sorry the slow part is over. Pre-orders are out until march netx year and it would mean that the por guys in production get obsolete. instead together with the pool Operators they will recruit more money as they did in the last two or three years.

Cex.io is getting expensive...it's about 20/GHS right now.  I ended selling my GHS and cashing out - good thing I bought cheap and made some money =)

Nice, I am also waiting for the price to drop until a profitable level.

 ;D This thread made me purchase 10 more v3 block erupters on Bitmit!
                         Thank you OP.

https://i.imgur.com/gaBGqTH.png

What you trying to prove? People still buying USB erupters?

Just Trolling the Trolls.........

...

Dude, you are late to the party.
He said he got 3 of them. They are already mining and he may very well got ROI back already.

Now is time to buy - preorder new machines which will pull 1-2 TH/s, not Jupiter's, it is too late for them.

You do know about the block erupter vibrate feature no ?

It does require a small bios update , but armed with this , I think you should get an ROI.

If you do I dont mind buying them after you ROI , at a much reduced price, just give them a wash first if its not too much hassle.

not bad price :))

Yeah,  if in 2 weeks they turn into 10 tabs of pure LSD.

Based on this possibility they are the best buy around, and I'll furthermore assume your comment proves the possibility.

I agree ，and I will not buy ASIC!

I pulled the trigger on the cointerra 2TBs...hopefully it's worth it.

Cex.io is a lot of fun...but it's way too high right now...or at about ebay market value for a miner...

Nice, how much did you paid for the 2TBs asics?

Maybe if you have close to free electricity and you pay really cheap for the ASIC then its worthwhile..

Until reasonable prices and predictable timelines are a standard in ASIC production, no one should buy ASICs. That's why we are all "renting" from cex.io (https://cex.io/r/0/bigb159/0/).

Just buy shares and sell if you need liquidity. Deposit a bucket withdraw trinkets.

not everybody buys ASIC for Profit...

WRONG! i bought ASICs for mining to validate the transaction and protect the network not to make a profit!

I will try my best to convince everyone not to buy ASIC and I order one myself, Ya ASIC sux please don't buy....

TRADING BITCOINS ARE MORE FUN, JUST LIKE STOCKS

+1

Mining is once again profitable =)

Does the constant need to gain any gain :)

Only in the same sense that "buy Bitcoins with USD, send half of them to the Bitcoin eater, hold the rest and wait for them to go up" is profitable.

the only way to get ur money back is by paying with fiat and not with bitcoin. However, it would be more profitable to buy bitcoin directly.

well a terra miner is 2 Th and 6000 dollars why I should get one of those?

heh this was a fun read in that my oct knc Jupiter has made 40 coins so far on slush (2/9/2014) and I expect to get 45 coins out of it lifetime more or less

there was a guy on knc forums it think it was got 10 knc jupiters (1 for free if you get ten) so a total of 11 Jupiters...he mortgaged the house I mean really really
drank the koolaide...he got his delivered about the same time as me...he has something like 500 plus btc by this point I'd imagine....probably will have 550 lifetime

take away elec costs etc...he is still probably sitting  on 450 coins btc

ah crap ..I shoulda /coulda gone 'all in'

hindsight maybe 20/20 but I'd feel really 'sad' if I took the advice above back in the day....

as to the future of asic mining as of feb 2014...well maybe he was just ahead of his time on this post

Searing

Just curious, if you buy bitcoin directly on the same day you pay for your ASIC, how many bitcoin can you get with the same amount of fiat?

Rate of return is fairly easy to quantify in a spreadsheet; know your hashrates, return on hashrate, and determine on investment (fixed costs + variable costs)....  its all there...  The only damnable wildcards are the freakin' hardware providers (e.g. BFL, Avalon, VMC, etc...) that don't deliver in a timely manner.  I truly wish a real hardware company would step in and give us miners some reliable, predictable, and scalable hardware!!!   That is the true weakness in mining; unpredictable hardware!

mining is still profitable, and we will have the same exact discussion next year.

....only if machines are replacing computing power ratings of 100's of GH/s with 100's of TH/s

I don't disagree...but i've yet to know a NOOB that has plunked 5k down on buying pure bitcoin..i do know NOOB's that have done the same for miners...its a noobie hedge

but yeah past has shown you are better off with just buying bitcoin

although  a truely smart noob woulda hedged bets with both (i was not such a noob but got lucky with a knc product)

as to the future ..that is a logt more cloudy on mining anymore

Searing

You're not really hedging your bets. If Bitcoin goes down in price, you lose on both.

well I'm optimistic even if mining it would eventually go back up..or if not bitcoin is eventually doomed....but the point is
it would take quite the far sided noob to dump say 7K into just plain bitcoin speculation...(hey if it was easy people would do this
with gold/silver as noobs)

but people being people seems they have no problem dumping 7K into a bitcoin mining machine (or me anyway)

go figure

either camp mining or buying only or both....bitcoin has to rise at some kind of legit pace in regards to worth with other fiat dollars
or the whole thing kinda becomes moot to invest in either bitcoin or mining...as a transaction mechanism it has to be used and grow
it is not there yet in growth imho...

but then again what do I know I'm still waiting for my noob equipment I got (ordered april 2014) from Butterflylabs and due to no refund was forced to
upgrade the 65mm bricks I was supposed to get in May and would have got at thanksgiving  to future bricks as a hail mary pass
 ie  the monarch 600gh card bricks sometime in the future (they said dec then jan then feb now they say march....great racket....sell something
no one ever gets and don't refund)


don't listen to me imho

my 2c worth

Searing

Mining will result in more bitcoins then what you can buy with the same amount of fiat at the time you place a order; this is true only for higher end machines.

The only ASIC miners to ever pay back their BTC opportunity costs were Avalon Batch 1 & 2 and a few of the original Jupiter orders.  All the other ASICs were a complete BTC dump including my day 1 BFL SC Single which cost 208.5 BTC and only mined 40 BTC to date.

Even some GPUs technically are a loss considering I bought 6870s in early 2012 that cost $150 (could have bought 75 BTC with each and there's no way a 6870 could have mined 75BTC) - although nobody expected BTC to go from 13 to 1200 in one year.

lol man if bitcoin crash to 100$ anyone here will lose all moneys anyway!!!

My niece wants too know where she can get some of those pink sheep!

They are available at the Magic Mart, right next to the Holy Cows  ;D

She didn't get it but maybe one day soon. She's growing fast! :D

uh yes it can.

unfortunately, it's a money grab, and u gotta take what u can get.  eventually when block sizes get below 6.25 BTC it might get a little easier once people give up.  unless bitcoin is a million by then.  then by all means keep going with the difficulty!

Difficulty can't rise like this forever?  That's what people were telling me when BTC difficulty was coming up on 400 million.

It simply can't, which should be obvious.  That said, you're right inasmuch that everyone here is extremely premature with that wishful thinking.  We're still firmly stuck in the parabolic curve for the time being, with the the previous generation of gear being replaced and/or augmented by this new generation with magnitudes more computing capability.

In short, difficulty will eventually flatten out, but not until one of two things happen:  either we reach the point of diminishing returns in subsequent generations of hardware, or the market valuation of BTC gets hammered down to the point that the energy expenditure outweighs the return.

Methinks I spoke too soon, Mt Gox is doing their damnedest to accomplish the latter... ;-)

People have been saying that mining will never be profitable. Just check the first post in this thread. In the meantime, I have preordered KNC mining gear since july last year, from every batch they sell.
So far, October delivered Jupiters, have given me about 5x what I paid for them, and I can still resell it half the money I paid for it.
November delivered Jupiters (mine was delivered middle December), has only given me about 1.5x - 2x. I am also still able to sell those for the same price I paid for it.

I wrote quite a long post about this same issue (mining in 2014, the increasing difficulty, expected profits, etc.) that I dont want to repeat it here. If you want to take a look, you find it at: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=477616.0

Well, one can't do a thing, double will do. Regardless the model.

In my suggestion, Obtain contract first.

Unless you have free power (and nobody actually has free power), and free hardware (nobody has that either), there is a break-even point where the current value of BTC mined today matches the money expended to get that BTC.

When the majority of miners hit that point, you will see difficulty stop rising. Just look at the time between when GPU mining became mainstream, and when ASICs hit... difficulty actually dropped a bit.

Sure, tech improvements can make ASICs more efficient, but thats a 10% to 20% improvement, not the 1000% improvement that ASICs are over GPUs.

At 1w/GH/s and $0.10 per kwh and $593 per BTC, that break-even point is 124 billion difficulty. Even at 0.5 w/GH/s and $0.5/kwh and $1200 per BTC, that point is still only at 600 billion difficulty.

At 20% increase every 11 days, difficulty will hit 124 billion in 220 days, and 600 billion in 320 days. In reality, most ASICs don't get 1GH/s per watt, so some will be shut down long before 100 billion, leading to a gradual leveling off. In one year, we will probably be sitting at around 100 billion and only 28 and 20 nm ASICs will still be running.

yeah i have 1 neptune left (1st batch order...10.2k version....i'm at the top 10 of the list too...anyway....still hainging on but essentially ..from what i can tell i may be able to "barely" get the same amount of coins as i could buy with the 10.2k now (at 3TH) ...so it is getting to the point of punting this last one too

one  i can get a refund on this "hedge" on bitcoin going nuts (gee look what happened) and get my USD back (whew!)

two i suspect with the amount of orders knc is getting refunded on neptunes as we speak they will either a) give us more TH say make it a 4TH machine to stick with them or b) don't care if we refund just more machinery for their hashing farm

three i like to mine .....but it is getting to the point of "this is dumb to keep stage"

anyway seems the worst fear i had has come to pass ..in that difficulty is going up faster then equip can get out to folks ....at an even more accelerated pace and the second is the miners (the cheerleaders of bitcoin) are gettnig pushed out by the price...lack of equip to roi and the large farms coming into play..ie we look pretty well boxed in here on what options we have for best use of coin and mining don't look like the way here at least this 1st 1/2 of the year imho

anyway they have till maybe march 15th the very latest april 1st or i punt and get my refund back....we will see...but knc does refunds...the other guys don't....so this may be the last hurrah for independent miners this year unless some other dark horse comes out of the woodwork and offers more bang for the buck and delivers like knc did last summer...i think they are just gonna build equip for their own use from now on and be the  'worlds largest virtual miner place" as they state

anyway we will see how it goes ..but looks likely this last neptune asic will also get punted unless knc has somehting up their sleeve

or is there some other mnfg coming on the market i should be aware of ?

anyway my clouded view so far on this

Searing

I think as miners when spending money and electricity want except from the fun of it
to make some money too, so these can be reinvested in faster hashing equipment...
If this aint going to happen no more investment in these BFL KNC etc machines..
See the advert from BFL when their card look like miners will launced what is their lifetime...
I guess the BTC will increase
For this reason on my ebay user ID i advertise since today BITCOINS ACCEPTED

Well said, the old ASIC miners are great to use as boat anchors. I know. One's a boat anchor while the other one is used as a door stop in my garage.

I agree with your idea but not your estimations.

Asicminer 40nm chips will be able to achieve 0.2w/gh so maybe 0.4w/gh at the wall. And if AM can achieve that efficiency with 40nm, I think there is much room for improvement with 28/20nm chips.

I would guess that we eventually see 20/14nm miners with 0.1w/gh

Also there will be large scale mining operations taking advantage of cheap electricity and energy arbitrage and get electricity for something like $0.05/kwh.

The whole bitcoin Jargon is powered by the greedy and the morons who think they'll get rich mining bitcoins.
Fact 1: Difficulty level in 2014 means it's not profitable anymore.
Fact 2: Miners are in it to make money. When Miners shut their rigs off and count their losses, It's the end of Bitcoin.
Fact 3: Its all dying right now, just visit Ebay and search for Bitcoin miner. You will PU 1.4TH's Miners for around $1800, Hmmm! I wonder why?  Bitcoin is a dead man walking peeps :) lmfao

You are bashing on a thread that's gone 90 days without activity. Take your negativity and focus on yourself!

Well, he's right.  I have been telling people not to buy ASICs for a full year now, yet dumbasses keep doing it, and look at what it has done to Bitcoin mining.  I was right all along, and most people refuse to admit it.

Remember how much the USB block erupters used to cost and how cheap they are now, along with most of the early ASICs?  That money is PISSED AWAY because within 6-9 months of purchase, even the best ASIC is obsolete and useless for anything else!

Hey Nostradamus, still bitter that you missed profitable mining during the past year? There are hundreds of people here that can prove that your prediction was wrong.

you should of given this advice months ago.
can't believe people still buy ASIC's.. well I am sure some are still profitable.. but with the delays and everything..its a gamble.. not in our favour..
I hope all that do have asics end up ROI and profit.. I was never into hardware... kinda wish I hadbeen.. but oh well :/