Bitcoin Forum

Just wondering

You might break even, but you won't make any big profits. It's better to just buy a few coins.
Unless you want to help the network but make less profit!

I hear there is this one guy in China who has basically a house full of mining equipment, 60 differnt machines, and he makes like 60 BTC, perhaps less than that now, but that's how much bitcoins he makes a day.

But really, most people won't get back their ROI from a couple bucks investment.

Mining is just speculating on bitcoin in a different way.  Right now you will at best break even mining, so 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.

Basically rising difficulty has made mining unprofitable at the time the coins were mined.  If you look back on this tread to mid 2012 there will be people saying mining is not profitable.  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.

Good Luck!

The only problem is the preorder model, you dont know when you receive your miner or how much the difficulty increases. And buying expensive unit on ebay today is even worse

All possibilities to make any significant income with mining are in the past already unless you designed your own mining chip and you produce the miners yourself.

In my opinion:
Before it was worth mining, because equipment was cheap and gave high ROI, and lots of btc.


Now, it is really risky, time consuming and expensive. And btc price can crash anytime, so I would not recommend it.

Mining is very expensive now, I waiting for cheap mining equipment able to pay itself in about one year. Hopefully next year

 "mining is not profitable" or "you better buy BTC directly instead of mining" aren't correct either. It's somewhere around "it depends" and "it's a gamble"

Like any investment it depends on fixed (upfront) and variable costs:
- Mh/$ you get out of the equipment, device + shipping + customs tax. The major problem is that the shovel sellers are charging astronomic prices, not that there isn't gold out there
- Power usage and power costs or fees from hosting
- The time you spend babysitting your equipment and pool web interface, instead of other productive work and family time

Before buying, use mining profitability calculator. What matters most if you can mine back your investmrent is initial price of mining equipment.

Personally I wouldn't want to mine to get coins. Instead I'll do business with it, accepting it as payment, providing goods and services to people and make some profit.

now mining is not profitable
mining was profitable a few years ago

The economics of it have certainly changed since the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed in the last month. Just make sure that when you're trying to price it, you compare your ROI to using that same money that you would spend on hardware to buy bitcoins rather than buy mining power. If you can mine more bitcoins for the price than you will mine, you should stay away.

For a long time mining was obviously quite unprofitable compared to buy and hold, but now that the price of bitcoin is up 8x and Cointerra and Hashfast are delayed, the economics have changed.