Bitcoin Forum

Hello all!

Introducing myself as I believe I will be spending significant time on this forum in the coming months and hopefully years.
I am an Army vet, just got out in April after about 6 1/2 years in. I spent nearly two years in Iraq, and my time in the States was at Ft. Riley, KS.
Currently I am attending college in MD pursuing a degree in information systems.

So, after reading an article from my cousin, doing a metric tonne of research, and watching the price go crazy over the last week, I decided to take the plunge and buy some equipment. My intent is to set up a small mining operation and attempt to grow it to maintain profitability. There a few reasons why I feel comfortable taking this risk. I am living with my folks while I am in school, so no utilities costs or mortgage/rent. I am going to school on the GI bill, so my tuition is paid and I have enough money left over to pay for my bills. My worst case scenario is that the difficulty jumps so tremendously that I will be unable to make my initial investment back (no loans, took extra money out of savings, so it will not kill me). Best case scenario is I will be able to reinvest funds fast enough that I can get ahead of the difficulty curve and the mining operation will be able to provide supplemental income.

The networking part of my order was delivered today, the mining hardware and power supply should be getting here Monday.
My rig will be 5x Gen2 Blade Erupters (10.7GH @ $266 ea.) installed on the backplane so the rig will be moderately extensible. I will be running the cards through a network switch, which I will either plug directly into my ancient laptop or network through a repeater into the primary network in the house so I can run them off my desktop (any suggestions would be much appreciated!) I am debating buying a Raspberry Pi to run the blades, but I am unsure of how much it can handle (the topics in the forum were not specific as to problems, just said they didn't work or not well.) Hopefully I can have most kinks worked out of the network by Sunday so it will only take a few hours to setup the blades when they arrive Monday.

Total cost for everything with shipping was $1530. coinwarz estimates have me breaking even between 40-60 days. According to mining.thegenesisblock, if the price stays stable I will break even by early February (based on 129% monthly difficulty increase). If, however, the exchange price grows at at least 100% monthly (been 120% monthly this year) my break-even will move nearly inline with coinwarz, and I will make enough by February to fill out my backplane, doubling my hash rate.  From there I would assess whether it would be more intelligent to put money down on one of these TH rigs that are getting geared up for production, purchase more currently available equipment (including used), or simply hold tight to what I've got and run my rig until it cant make coins anymore.  Information that may help me make a decision would be knowing what kind/how much equipment some of you guys have so I can get a snapshot of the community (if most people aren't able to get their hands on 100 GH/s equipment affordably, then I know the net difficulty will not grow at the projected rate in the coming months.)

Sorry for the tome, can't sleep. Any advice or input you mining vets have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for stopping by!

UPDATE:
Rig is set up, using a large box fan for cooling in the garage. They seem to be running well, all except for one card that is under efficiency and shares are not being reported to Slush's Pool. Changed the card ip and worker, and now it is reporting shares fine. Not sure what could have been the issue.