Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone. I just got into mining recently and I have to say I find it quite enjoyable. Now I'm not looking to make loads and loads of money right away but I do want to take advantage of my situation. I have "free" electricity (I live in an apartment and all we pay for is rent), and some money to move around. Would it be better for me to invest in bitcoin or buy some mining gear to mine alt-coins (I was thinking about either a 5870 for $100 or an r9 280x for around $350)?

Since you have free electricity, mining alt seems to be a better choice, but I suggest you to start small until you know what you are really into.

Much more sensible to just buy

I'd say just buy at this point. Hope for a nice deep correction and then buy, hehe.

Mining is useless unless you have alot of starting capital

Setup an recurring buy at a site like coinbase.com. This will help to average out the price and you take less of a risk of a crash.

Take the $350 that you want to spend, right now that would buy you ~1.713 BTC. Setup a weekly recurring  buy for ~0.42825 and over the course of the next month you'll ease into the market.

Or if you don't mind the extra risk go all in and buy 1.713 BTC right now.

I have't seen any consumer / end user mining equipment that will give a positive ROI.

Invest in Mining gear... wait until the price for mining gear drop first tho...

Damn i wish where i lived was like that. Would be nice to get rid of that bill.

Well, how much starting capital is needed for mining then in order to have profit?

I have some free electricity also and I bought loads of used graphics cards really cheap and started mining alt.
When I had a motherboard and PSU I started making realy lowball bids on the used market and to my suprise I got some really good deals. But it took me about a month to fill up a rig.

Anyway I managed to get a few cheap rigs that are now hashing away :).

i'd just buy. i'm just concentrating on acquiring bitcoins any way i can. mining is super risky these days.....

Definitely buying at this point in time.

No matter how much you put in BTC to buy mining units, you wont mine your BTC back  ;)

can you define a lot of starting capital?

From what I'm reading on other threads ASIC seems the only option but with very few suppliers shipping and delays from other suppliers even that is making it difficult to ROI.

Any idea what % of the early miners are upgrading to ASIC vs investing in BTC?

I think I should of just bought em rather than mined, one thing for sure I would have 3 times as many coins as I have now if I bought them rather than my equipment!

Mining is way better then investing 1 year ago, right now its the other way round :)

Mining for primecoin and invest for bitcoin...

I think investing is the best option now. Look at the graphs of Bitcoin and Litecoin for example, they we're fluctuating a lot if you check it for the last month. I heard quite a lot guys who earned great money recently by using those fluctuations.

Daytrading is definitively option, but not much better than just holding.

And for every good trader, thre are two suckers in my opinion

It needs a bit of luck. The Litecoin for example fluctuacted for about $0,50 today.. I wish I had bought many of them for about $2 each earlier.

Ditto others who suggested buying vs. buying mining equipment. That's just me, though, because mining is so speculative. If you mine the right coins at the right time, I'm sure you'll end up ahead. But that's not a given!

Thanks for the advice everyone! Really appreciate you guys helping out a noob. The guy lowered the price to $75 but I think I'll just buy bitcoins as you guys said.