Bitcoin Forum

Is bitcoin mining now forever extinct to new miners? With the more and more increasing difficulty level is it now unprofitable to start as a miner? Done a few calculations with one of the more powerful devices available (well almost), the Knc 550 ghps model. And looks like you'd be lucky to make a return on it, even with an optimistic rise in difficulty at 30%.

At about £3000 for the 550ghps model, looks like you'd only get a return of £775 profit after 6 months, at which point it would then no longer be worth turning on as it wouldn't cover the electricity costs.

Thoughts? Hoping I'm wrong, but isn't looking so with the rapidly increasing pool size.




Excel sheet: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1q7gleyq78uilj5/deeppockets.xlsx
(For non-british, excuse the £!)

Nope, you are right.
Atm buying into Bitcoin mining is very risky and most likely will make you lose money or at least gain you less money than buying&holding Bitcoins.

Well, let's just hope the value of BTC is gonna keep going up then!!

Mining is not forever extinct, just the miner units need to have much smaller prices, or the Bitcoin price higher. Until then, I dont buy miner units. And if others buy now, its ok, they make Bitcoin security stronger  ;)

Recon the next step is going home made? Perhaps buying chips (maybe group buys) and just creating your own miner from scratch to keep costs to an affordable level?

This is one of the reasons people love scrypt alt coins. They can be mined for a reasonable profit still and better yet if you rent out the time on your equipment you can make even more. With the added bonus of being able to recoup quite a bit of the cost of the hardware by selling it once you want to upgrade or stop mining.

Yes but not for long. People are starting to sell scrytp fpga.

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scrypt fpga but an fpga for something like xpm just wont work.

It has to be a good thing.  This indicates that people want it.  the difficulty lies in spreading the coin around so that it becomes accessible to the normal man in the street.  Then the currency will be worth so much more, but when only a few have so many bitcoins then this will stall the price rise.

Why not? FPGA can work on scrypt but they can also make it to work on prime number too right?

Making a XPM FPGA is theoretically possible but that would be a lot of research and work but XPM prices aren't too high at this moment, so that wouldn't be very profitable.

I think few months down the road it would be very profitable to make XPM FPGA then cause too many competitor on scrypt FPGA now..

Well this is the idea. One may only be making 0.001 a day but if that was worth (lets say) a dollar. It would be worth it. I can imagine mining  slowly converting over to exclusive"big guns" with deep pockets. In the past you could invest $300USD & profit. Now I can imagine the future need to invest $30K-50K minimum with an (early shipping date) to even get into the game. As much joy as it brings me to own my own, manage, experiment & host my own hardware. After discovering CEX, I've finally come to grips thats its more profitable to buy (buy,sell or hold) leased out hashes from massive mining farms in the cloud. No intentions to spam because I am truly pumped about this but Ill leave my referral link here --> https://cex.io/r/0/mobile314/0/ (https://cex.io/r/0/mobile314/0/).

Hek of a concept, Bitcoin Mining in the cloud is here. Let me know if you had any questions about it. There is a lot of volume there already but the more volume the more profit for everyone.

Mine alt coins instead.  Still plenty of room for growth there.

It is still possible to enter into mining. There is the occasional gem of a piece of equipment on ebay, I was lucky enough to get a few 60gh/s, which i have traded and am now running free. I was lucky, right place at the right time.

The biggest hurdle, I think, in the UK is the liquidity of BTC.

Scrypt needs a lot of memory. You can make FPGA with a lot of memory, but its not much better than GPUs

make asics be able to mine scrypt coins.. someone could figure it out I'm sure

The trading makes the money not the mining. I made a few £ as well, but only from buying and selling equipment at the right time and taking mining income inbetween.

The bottom line is if some hardware could be just plugged in and make money no one would sell it., they would keep it and mine.

They could, but it would cost far more to develop and manufacture than it would ever make.

Good point, do the hardware manufacturers do as you have? Build, mine, then sell? It makes economic sense. And is what I am doing at present as well!

Thats true but Scrypt ASIC will be able to mine scrypt coins :)

But as pointed out already, development+manufacture costs are huge and there is not big enought price of Scrypt coins to make this venture profitable

I don't know, but I would if I was them  ;)

Especially if they have money upfront and so bad reputation they cant loose even reputation  :)

I've done the math repeatedly... It's not about up front costs, it's about price per Gh/S and how profitable said Gh/S are.
Mobile got it right with the idea of renting Gh/S or trading for them over at cex.io.

Even with an investment of .35 BTC, you can make 0.01 BTC/day. That was my first "trial" there and it was worth it. I'd invite you to check it out as well, because while I am "plugging it"... It's free to sign up and absolutely worth having Gh/S in your portfolio (they pay you!)

https://cex.io/r/0/neuros/0/

At time of writing, CEX.io (the service mentioned above) is 0.1045 BTC/Gh/S. This equates to about ~20 USD at current market rates. This option would not break even in under 30 days (I like tight schedules!), except you have the option to trade Gh/S back for BTC, so your initial investment is "refundable," depending on Gh/S to BTC market rates. You can also continually buy in to further Gh/S with your earnings, compounding your income.

That said, when we're looking at bigger hardware, anything that costs less than ~$6.50/$7.00 USD will break even in 30 days or less at current BTC/USD market rates. However, looking at being "paid back" in USD or other fiat shouldn't be important - the BTC should be.

I myself have ordered a large machine with a friend (less than 1Th/S but not small) and estimates show it should "pay itself back" within 30 days. The machine is $6.50 USD per Gh/S. Even if BTC falls to $100 and we assume a ridiculously high profitability decline of 0.1 or even 0.04 (unrealistic by the worst math), the machine pays itself back and turns a profit in a 90-day period. However, we are not looking to recoup USD, as we are looking for a set amount of BTC to break "even." Much of this BTC will go into EMA trading and Gh/S rental for continuing compounded income, hashing speed, and holdings.

Oh, I didn't even say hello, how rude.... Hello BitcoinTalk  ;)

Even if mining is extinct, you can still break into the Bitcoin market for free by using Devtome.

Pretty sure you've found yourself the holy grail there. Remember a guy who didn't something similar...

What machine was that to guarantee that sort of return with a rising difficulty?

You know, I'm hoping so. Every estimate says we will make some sort of profit in a 5-month window, but I might be eating my words in 5 months when we have a set investment evaluation.

I don't mine much any more.  The electricity is too expensive.

Mining is extinct to some degree; however, we need miners to confirm blocks and pass it on to nodes.

It depends on your location, some people get as cheap as 0.02 cents a KWHs which makes me jealous..

Mining will never be extinct as long as irrational participants are willing to mine with no hope for a positive return.  Just look at the airline industry if you want an example of a market where players continue to enter despite the fact that historically incumbents have only destroyed value.

So, if you do the math correctly, you will see that 1 GH/s will never earn 0.1 BTC, so paying 0.1 BTC for 1 GH/s is a money loser. On the other hand, like you said, 0.03 - 0.04 BTC ($6.50/$7.00) per GH/s will probably earn a decent profit, and I agree that calculating the return in BTC is necessary, and the return in dollars is irrelevant.

.....This indicates that people want it.....
Most people are speculators, when btc rising fast they will buy it and this is the way to fall down in any time.

Do you count conservative difficulty change +30% every 11 days ? This mean -30% mined coins every 11 days. And delivery time is important as well as you see from difficulty change

When I say "price" for Gh/S, I mean, market price. I can buy them and sell them, and make a profit on THAT as well. Unlike a mining machine, which I can't exactly call the company and return minus a 20% fee (though I COULD pawn it off on some sucker when it's not profitable, but I'm not that kind of person.)

The market price follows the inverse of the difficulty, and the trend is down. Except for random fluctuations and ignorant buyers, you should never make a profit buying and selling (unless you can sell short). Assuming that you don't have the ability to predict random fluctuations, your average gain from buying and selling will be negative. On the other hand, you could just get lucky, but remember that for every lucky person, there is the unlucky person on the other side of the trade -- not everyone can be lucky.