Bitcoin Forum

Everyone says that isnt worth the time to mine but why? I love this idea of mining and i want to get my hands on 3-4 USB Miners and start mining and selling contracs on ebay :)

mining is worth the time. depending on how you value your time. its whether its worth the Electric to mine. and with ASICS it is but most people and miners cant predict the future so who knows.
the thing people most complain about is the return on investment so lets day you spend 0.01 on a block erupter will you ever make that back? i for one think you will in time aslong as the block erupter is maintained and cooled it should make double whay you spend on it. but that said it could take a very very very long time maybe even 3 or 4 years

the way i see it with mining is the hardware cost is the price you pay for the fun of mining kind of like the cost of joining a club. but you get a chance to be in the game and have the chance to make it pretty big if you play everything just right
mining will only become unprofitable for me when there is a difference in what the hardware costs to run and how much it generates

Bitcoin mining isn't worth it because it's almost always better to buy btc instead of btc mining equipment.
Usb miners in particular is a very bad choice with one of the lowest ROI out there.

Just google for a bitcoin mining calculator and see what to expect from usb miners and other mining equipment.

yes but at the same time its the cheapest device out there and aslong as your willing to wait then you will make a ROI eventually

https://www.gldtalk.org/devteam/rope.png


If you want to have a chance at positive ROI you need to look here: http://www.coinchoose.com

If you mean USB Block errupters, these are more for fun than serious mining. Not power effecient + you need running comp or buy rPi.

The difficulty is going up constantly. Even if you mine 24/7 for the next thousand years you will barely make more than 0.01 BTC in total from each usb.

Its too complicated for newbie choosing, buying hardware and running mining, isn't it?

No. I think it's not too difficult even for newbies.

Good luck finding the buyers fools.

In even a few months you won't get anything with a BlockErupter. Just like you don't get anything when you CPU mine now.

These miners will not last more than few years. You should estimate max 3 years of mining to be safe

https://localbitcoins.com

What part of "mining contracts on ebay =/= selling bitcoins on localbticoins" aren't you getting?

You should know how to use "quote" correctly

Ok , I'm sorry for my mistake (?) , to make it up to you I'm gonna buy your mining contracts , do you have a price for your 3-4 x 300MH contract in mind?

Mining bitcoins has definitely been profitable for a company called KnCMiner.

They are a Swedish manufacturer of Bitcoin mining rigs, and recently made $3 million dollars worth of sales in just four days.

As has been mentioned many times before, in a gold rush the sellers of shovels will make the most money. Which includes ASICS. KnC were there at the right time. Just like ASICMINER was in the earlier months of 2013 (not now anymore).

You make a good point Tinus42

I wonder what is stopping the US government to buyout all the asics from the american manufacturers and mine the shit out of bitcoin. They could pull this off in a heartbeat if they would like to.  ;D

Have you seen elephants killing ants?
Currently they don't care about it. And until the network is strong enough , god help them not to change their mind.

If you are mining for fun and education, then go for it.

If you are mining for a profit, then you really need to do your research. Because of the expected rapid rise of the difficulty, the rate at which a device will mine bitcoins will drop very quickly. At some point, the amount of bitcoins that it mines each day will become negligible. My estimate is that each 1 GH/s will mine about 0.05 BTC over the next year. If you want to break even with a USB block erupter, you will have to pay less than 0.017 BTC for it.



vm1990, you haven't done the math. I suggest that you sit down and figure out how long it will take. Depending on how much you pay for the mining equipment, "eventually" could means decades or centuries, or longer.

With Bitcoin hashrate (and still growing), it would be hard to get 51%. They could test at altcoins though to get 51% there easily

Lots' of people have stated recently that it only cost around 10-40 mils to get that rate.
5PH means 5 mils GH , at a rate of lets say 6usd/gh (knc miner) do the math:D

Not being particularly technical I looked at mining BTC but it appears to be quite expensive to start seriously now, ok if you got in at the beginning.  I start a small amount of cloud mining, which is fun but don't pop the champagne cork.

I have tried solo cpu mining on an old pc (windows vista) for a couple of alt coins but didn't get a sniff so I joined an alt coin pool and am now getting something.  If you get some alt coin you can then exchange it for BTC and drip feed your btc wallet, with the added advantage if your chosen alt coin/s take off then you might be in the money 8) .  Spending thousands of dollars on mining equipment/ not to mention the electricity bill (although you could heat the house at the same time!!) when you now have some serious market competition doesn't make financial sense.

If you are investing in stocks/shares drip feeding your portfolio is quite a sound way to get long term returns.

(Disclaimer: do not class my comments as financial/professional advice etc etc).

I mine for the fun of it as I know I will never make a ROI. Setting up the miner, Maintaining it, adding cooling and overclocking. I have more knowledge of Linux than I did before I started which is a bonus too. But looking at the prices of the asic miners on ebay I could sell it all now and come out with a small profit. I am going to start buying BTC now when the current bubble bursts  ;). I will use the income from the miners to offset the fees. If you never sell a bitcoin and they do go up in value a lot you would make a ROI in the end but it's a gamble.

Here's the chart for Avalon ASIC #2 profitability:
http://divananalit.org/graphs/bitcoin-profitability-from-20130201-to-now.png

And the right bottom corner of this chart:
http://divananalit.org/graphs/bitcoin-profitability-from-20130801-to-now.png

Profitability will getting lower and lower because of difficulty rising.

I could draw a chart for your miner if you want.

in a 49-port hub the USB block erupters are quite profitable, i paid 150€ for 25 miners :)

How many bitcoins you could have bought with those 150 euros? How many bitcoins your 25 miners will ever made?
Do the math and you 'll see that it would have been better for you to buy bitcoins.

Hello here is my first post since it a requirement here:

I think mining bitcoin at this point is useless. That is why my friends and I are starting to mine litecoins.  The ROI is great, especially with free power like we all have.  I am using CUDA Miner on my GTX 295 quad sli rig to get 100-125kh/s.  Cpminer on my laptop with amd 8750m for 60-90kh/s, and minerd on the 295 desktop for an extra 15kh/s.

I'm not here for bitcoins but I want to post in the cudaminer thread so here I am  :)

Well you shouldn't put so much stress to your nvidia card and your laptop for so little returns. Still if you want to mine you may want to consider sites like http://www.coinchoose.com/.
You can mine some of the other crap coins out there and then trade them for btc or ltc to squeeze some profit.

In 6-8 months a new technology will be invented to mine at huge speed, and probably will cost the same as today flag ship of (insert company here). Minimum speed should be alt least 10 ph/s to compensate difficulty

Probably not.  28nm is very likely as good as it gets for 2014.   Even if a new 28nm chip was 2x more efficient than any other spec on paper it would still mean about 400W per TH, or 4 MW (as in a small power plant) for 10 PH/s.  In 2015 we may see 20nm chips but the days of 1000x the peformance are over.  20nm chips is going to offer maybe 30% higher efficiency for the same cost, or 20% higher speed for the same cost. 

Miners will get cheaper (maybe) and rigs will get larger but you really are limited to 2 TH/s on a "normal" US 120V outlet with current chips.  Even a break through chip would be lucky to triple that.  Prices may fall but they can only fall so far.   At $0.30 per GH/s (90% cheaper than anything offered) a 10 PH/s rig would be ~$3M USD.

So you think I should mine a crappy coin, hope I can trade it for LTC on an exchange and go from there?  What crappy coin do you recommend for this? 

I'm definitely OK with using my desktop GPUs, I have adequate cooling and they have barely done anything in the past 3 years.  I need to put them to work.

Well i can't name one because i 'm not up to date with the subject.
Start by checking out coinchoose.com.
Take in mind the avg. profitability over LTC, see in what exchange you can trade that coin and if the exchange is trusted. Consider exchange fees etc.
There isn't an easy answer and even if it was it might not be the right answer tomorrow.

As i said this is way to squeeze profit. If you don't want to bother just go with LTC  :P

I think of Bitcoin mining as a hobby, and thus if I do end up turning a profit someday, so much the better. Over the past few months, I've purchased 6 BlockErupters, and have had a fun time getting them up and running with a Raspberry Pi. I have made back a little over .1BTC so far, but the goal for me is to have fun. I enjoy checking on the miner stats, tweaking settings, cooling, and the like, and watching a small trickle of BTC come in over time. Not to mention, being a part of the network itself.

Will I ever make a profit? It is possible with the recent increase in BTC exchange rates. But if I don't, I still consider it a fun and worthy investment.

Thanks again for your advice.  I will look into this if I get more serious about squeezing profit lol.  For now I'm just a n00b figuring it out.  Once I get a real handle on litecoins then I might venture into crappy coins  :)

That website doesn't seem to list order correctly when you change sorting to best price though for some reason.

Unless you have A VERY powerful ASIC you will never get a ROI

Please do the math. ROI depends on both cost and return. You can get a positive ROI with a measly block erupter if you can find one cheap enough.

Also is positive if you do not pay for electricity and use existing hardware.

And you can possibly never show a positive return with the largest possible rig if you pay too much.

The factors for profitability are
price $/GH
efficiency J/GH
electricity cost: $ per kWh
exchange rate: USD per BTC
dificulty: both current and rate of growth

As odolvlobo, said the size of the rig doesn't make any difference.  It would be like saying "you will never show a profit unless you buy a LOT of facebook stock".  No you can profit with a single share, and you could also lose 100% with a million shares.  What matters is the price you buy at the price you sell at.

Thank you all for insightful replies!

Regarding ROI - mining is just speculating on bitcoin in a different way.  Right now you will at best break even mining, so by mining you are essentially saying that you think the price of BTC will rise.  That is the same thing as simply taking the same amount of money and buying some BTC.  However, with mining there is less of a trail to you of how you got your BTC versus an exchange.

If you look back on this tread there have always been people saying mining is not profitable - and they were right - it wasn't profitable at BTC prices of those times, but it damn sure was in hindsight.  Hence my point that mining is speculating just in a different way.

For a non-technical newbie, probably the best way to see if mining will work for you is something like Bitminter.  It is both a pool and a miner application and can give you a good estimate of how many BTC you will get with your configuration.

Good Luck!