Bitcoin Forum

There's a ton of posts debating the pros and cons of mining vs. costs, but if you're mining on anything more than just your GPU sitting in your main machine, you owe it to yourself to determine your 'Break Even' price of BTC vs. your Local Currency.

It's actually pretty simple.  First, figure out how much you spend on electricity mining each month.  If you can determine out your machine's power draw with a KiloWatt meter or something of the sort, you can get an approximation by seeing how many watts your machine is pulling from the wall and doing the following:

(Watts Drawn from the Wall / 1000) * 24 [Or however many hours per day the machine runs] * 30 [Or however many days there are in that month/billing period] * Kilowatt Hour Cost [Most power companies will list that on your bill or you can call them and get it]

There's your approximate mining cost for that machine per month.

Then just hit up any of the many Mining calculator's (http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php) out there.  Plug in your hashing rate and tweak around with the BTC price until you find the price that you'd make back the same as your electricity costs are that month, there's your break-even price.

You'll need to recalculate that at every difficulty jump to find your new Break Even price and if you haven't already paid off your hardware costs, you need to factor that in as well.

Regardless, there's no reason to not be an informed miner and determine what price you will be 'profitable' and at what price you're spending more than you're making and then make intelligent decisions on your own about what works for you. 

My best rig is 4x5830, 1080 mhps, drawing 650 watts.

Monthly electricity costs (~$.40/kwh) = $187
Monthly bitcoin income = 17.5 BTC
Break even at $10.7 per BTC.

Yup, I'm already at break even. So roughly, if difficulty goes to 2,000,00 and price stays at $10, then either I move out of California or shut down my rigs.

Are you really paying .40 $/kWh? Ouch.

I'm glad I don't live in CA...

Between 2 rigs I'm getting ~ 2.54 Ghash --- monthly power bill is about $85.00
40-41 BC per month
Break even @ approx 9 BC per month at current prices.

Looks like it can drop some more before I start to regret my time spent. ;)

the lowest i can go before shutting down my rigs is $3.5/btc

still have a long way to go.

Thanks to pool hopping and improved efficiency because of this, I still can mine a bit - but it already gets close. Most likely I will only mine with 1 PC (which is running 24/7 anyways + has a more efficient GPU) though.

Electricity here is also quite expensive, but if I feel the need for BTC, I can anyways just buy them - they get cheaper by the minute it seems! :D

I'll use my 5830 rig:
generates 1320 mhash
thats .703 btc
requires 888 watts
Only costs me 6.7c per kwh
cost of electricty per day:1.43

A btc would have to drop to 2.03 for me to break even.

Mine is right about 3.70 with my 420Mh/s

That's awesome, except for the CA power costs. :)

My whole point of the post is that people just need to spend a few minutes and then they can make intelligent decisions about their mining.  There's way too much panic/hype being spread on the boards by people that either don't know any better or are trying to push their own agenda.

Spend five minutes every difficulty bump and figure out when it makes sense for you to mine and when it makes sense to get out. 

scratch my 3.5/btc

my boss just approved me to move my server to the office....somehow.

1.4 is the new bottom...and below that, i just need to turn off my desktop rig at home.
haha.

I'm not sure I would stop mining the instant price drops below my BE point. Rather, price would have to do something to convince me it isn't going back above my BE point anytime soon. For example if my BE point is $4, I wouldn't stop the instant price fell below this. Due to the volatility in price, it could easily rebound and be above $6 in a week or two. But if it fell below $4 and stayed there for a while (two or three weeks) in a really tight range or something like that, then yes, I would stop. But this assumes that I'm not losing much at the current price so it isn't a big deal to keep mining for several weeks and just eat the small loss. This is a hypothetical point for me though, since I don't pay for my electricity. Even with free electricity, though, I think I would have a point where I might stop just because it isn't worth the trouble anymore.

No you forgot about the people that get electricity for free.

this is about giving the big commercial miners a headache, we won't stop until they stop!!

How can the rig take only 650 W?    Just the 4 gpus themselves take at least that much.

My break even price is about $4/bitcoin.  However, the price where I'd stop mining is $0.00.  Even if it were costing me money to acquire bitcoins, I would continue to acquire bitcoins.  You can get your profits from trading or waiting until the price goes back up.  These people who say they'll stop mining if the price falls below a certain point are idiots.  It could always go back up, then do you think you'd give a damn what the price was when you mined the coins?  If you're willing to stop once the price hits a certain point, do everyone a favor and stop now.  Mining is for big boys and believers.  Scared children needing to see immediate returns need not apply.

If you prefer to mine even if you could get more bitcoins by just buying them I wonder who the idiot is...

There is one other factor that is being overlooked here when people say they will stop mining and start buying.

Even if you're below the point of breaking even, you're still getting discount coins. If coins are trading for $8, and it costs you $4 per coin to mine them, you're still getting coins at 50% off their cost.

That's great for you, but it doesn't mean that works for everyone.  There's no reason people shouldn't be calculating at what point they are spending more on power than they are making in BTC.  At that point people can make their own, informed decision.  My break even is about $2.50/BTC.  If BTC drops to .01 tomorrow, I'd likely keep all my machines running for a month or two, but I can't afford to spend close to $500 a month on power to make about $2 in BTC...

As long as BTC is around, I'll at least keep one machine up and running, but there's no reason to hammer people for saying they aren't willing to pay to make BTC.

this thread should really have a "price/difficulty" as the break even point no just price because difficulty has a large impact too.

Dang, and I thought my 14 cents per kwh was bad...

you can say that again

You can do more than one thing at a time can't you?  I'm simply saying that it isn't very bright to base your long term operation on short term prices.  That isn't sustainable.

If it costs $4 to produce them and they're trading for $8 you're hardly below break even.

Sure you can, but that would only make it slightly less idiotic. There is no way your long term bitcoin speculation can benefit from getting fewer bitcoins than possible in the short term.

I'm going to withdraw my statement, yesterday was a long day, and it no longer makes any sense to me either.