Bitcoin Forum

So i checked ebay for some - for "hobby" trying  and such and saw the costs of gettign one - 333mhs 60$ + 20$ for shipping.

80$ for 333mhs.

At current rate and increasing difficulty it could take up to one and a half years 24/7 to break even.

I could use cex and rent 1GHS for less then that.

it really is unsettling to read it takes so long for the block erupters to break even.  I think it's time for these mining companies to step up or step out of the way.  However I don't see that happening unless the community forces the issue.

I'm surprised they are that expensive unless folks are raising the prices as BTC value rises.  I bought three for ~$25 each in Sep or Oct.  Might want to keep searching.

Even at $25, breaking even seems hard at this point unless you park them on an alt coin that will rise relative to BTC someday, which is how I made back the cost and then some.  My erupters just solo mine now hoping for a lottery win....

Block erupters are toys , or novelty , they were never meant to return hundred of $.
Also , most of people who had them are now trying to find some clients suckers on ebay with all this media frenzy.

Agree.  After a couple months, I had them paid off and one dinner for the family.  No mortgage payments.

They are beginner's machines. To get you used to the software and process of mining.

I have bought 12 of these things over the past 5 months. I started with 6 @ ~$25/device back in July. Then buying another 2 every time I received a bitcoin. I don't really think they are worth the investment now. You would need to get them for around $5-$10 to be able to break even in a few months. Even @ $5, you'd need to invest $800 or more just to turn a good profit.

I got lucky. I hit a few coins then took those to btce and started trading. If it wasn't for the trades, I don't think that I would have turned a profit from the erupters.  

tldr; toys good for nothing but altcoins now.

I wonder how good they do with other sha 256 coins like ppcoin that worths around 6$ now

I wouldn't spend any more than $5 on a block erupter. You might be able to break even at that price, but once you factor in other expenses (usb hub, fan, power, etc.) it's going to be pretty difficult.

and there is basically no way to get them at that price - postage fee alone costs that much or more.


They are so obsolete that you can make more money selling them as keychains -_-

am I just lucky? bought one at 13.99 a month ago on ebay...still working well :) :)

Worthless for mining, but invaluable for the education in Bitcoin mining that you will get.

Anyone who does not fully understand the mining process will definitely lose
most or all the money they spend on miners. And fully understanding the
mining process does not mean that you will automatically make money.

-Mark

Common , let's not use such great words for a piece of crap composed of a chip and 10 grams of Chinese plastic.

For those who do not understand the process, of course,
means that most or all of the money spent,
function means you will win automatically.

Consider that there are multiple ways to make money (or lose it) on Bitcoins.

1) Buy & hold
2) BTC currency trading
3) Mine
4) Lease mining hardware/run a pool
5) Sell mining hardware
or
Scam newbies

Total waste of money don't buy it.

The difficulty is too high, so you'll mine practically nothing.

You'll get more money by buying btc now and selling it later.

Actually only the first one is a valid reason to make money. The rest are for losing.

Absolutely unbelieveable how much most people are willing to pay for them on ebay. Math doesn't seem to be a primary skill of those buyers.

And it's even worse for those Bitfury sticks. I was looking for one as kind of more realistic mining toy until the big iron comes...

Greed blows minds away! :D

Im brand new this week looking into bitcoins and other alt coins. I have noticed that 2 months ago block erupters were going for 10-20$ USD but now that the price of bitcoins has gone up atleast 5 times the price of the erupters has gone up the same, but at the same time the difficulty has gone up the same.

From what I take out of this is unless you are farming at 100 Ghash/s with equipment you bought at bottom dollar you are not going to gain much. I think this week ive made .0002 BTC with one erupter and my GPU will probably spending 5$ in electricity.

If you have to pay for electricity forget GPU mining at current difficulty levels, except you do it for fun and don't care that you can't mine with profit.

so in the future(2050), bitcoin mining will be a hobby for the rich? um...that will be a sad thing...

2050??? No need to step so far into future. Who knows how the race goes on in 2014/2015?

Best case would be that some kind of saturation accurs and difficulty turns into linear growth but that's very optimistical. I agree it's sad that one needs quite a lot of GH/s for reasonable mining.

Mining is a waste of money now,
dont do it

that's not 100% true. If you mine an Alt coin like say beta coins or something easy and it takes off it might be worth it.

Right now I am mining Beta coins (BET) not worth too much but with one 333 Mhs erupter ive gotten about 5 in 1 day.

Yeah, but it's a game of chance.

If the alt coin does not get popular, you wasted time and money.

bitcoin was a game of chance aswell.

You cant expec the coins to be easy to mine and cost 1000$ instantly.

I decided to buy cloud hashing power at Cex rather than buy obsolete hardware that will have no value whatsoever in 2014.

Not at all, if the miner is cheap and power effecient, you can mine profitably very long. I waiting for 2014 if the miners will be cheap finally, so far very expensive for small piece of hardware...

If mining is a waste of money , Why do people still mine?
Maybe because it's profitable?

And you Gh will be worthless with a difficulty increase that will happen very soon. Hf is supposed to start shipping also BA.

Why will the miners be cheap? Any reason for it?
Miners will have their price based on the cost of manufacturing and also on the return they can get.
I see no reasons right now for cheap miners with 25000usd reward every 10 minutes.

There's people renting a block erupter mining for just a week on ebay, and the average auction price is around $20
Crazy

Well , I can sell you 1 satoshi for 20$. I'm not the crazy one. The crazy one is the person that would pay such an amount.
And there are both stupid and crazy people on ebay.

Anyone tried to get a mining contract from Butterfly Labs? It was supposed to kick in at the end of November and still hasn't. Looks like sometime Q1, 2014 now.

I meant, the crazy ones are the one that are betting on ebay to raise the auction for such an high price

in case of cex.. the  ghs you buy may become  less  valuable when mining... but you can actually  sell it back to the system. Unlike  buyign  for exampel 3 block erupters for 3x the price  that basically noone wants to buy when they are not effective.

I am with Cex.io and having fun with it for now plus it's like an exchange and you can sell your shares back.

I don't think you could sell back what you buy with Butterfly Labs ;) ;)

like the usb block erupter?

What a surprise. Mining contracts are bad, bot this and Cex.io as well. You cant mine the BTC back...

And how exactly buying hashing power over at Cex is any better? Do you have any numbers to back this up?

I have 5 gh/s at Cex.io for around 350$.
I will leave the googling for Red Fury prices and mathematical equations to you my friend  ;)

LOOOOOOL
70usd/GH.
You must be joking.

And what is the funny thing here dude?
Which asic are you using?

I've gone with Knc.You can do the math at least once.
But it's 7 times cheaper.

And what will you do with that knc when its profitability drops down due to  difficulty?

Also  it expects you to spend way larger amount - 5-10k usd to get them. Not everyene has that fortune to spend for a miner.

In case of cex - you can just sell the ghs back later and get  the money back - altho perhaps 15-30% less depending of the market fluctuations.

You dont need to pay for maintenance or power nether - which can be quite alot o nsome areas (for example its ~0.14€ /kwh here).

CEX also does  merged mining  - more then just btc.

ne knc thats shipping soon: 12,995 3ths = 4$/ghs. BUT thats the next gen hardware - when they ship out the whole price at cex woudl chaneg aswell. KNC dont have old ones listed so dont recall how much it was  per ghs (10$?).

The cex price onl ywent up in the last few weeks.. it was cheaper before.

Seriously? you are happy with 350$ for 5gh/s? I 'm not talking in favor of red fury or any other physical miner whatsoever because they are all overpriced.
Just think how many bitcoins your 5gh/s will ever mine for you...

cex is affected just the same , income will be lower with difficultry rise
Also what stops me from seeling the machine?

The problems people don't see it with cex is simple.

They are mining  coins and willing to sell you GH that will make you a profit.
Why even bother selling those GH when they could keep the coins for themselves?
Because they sell it at prices that will get higher revenue than just mining. Guess who got the short end of the stick ?

Also , you do pay fees on cex .;)

the fees are astronomically small tho. compared to anything you would play for your own mining.


yeah you can sel lyour knc -  but how much of the original value do you get for it in a year? With new asics  that are 2-3x  more powerful for the same cost - you lose 2-3x of your old asics price.

Also.. there isnt any middle speed alternatives on the market - ether get stupidly expensive 333mhs blockerupters or 150+ghs  rigs.

Anythign in the middle at normal price was ether sold out ages ago or is scamworthy expensive.

Im at leats minign for pure profit at cex.. 0.04 btc paid in.. a month ago then a bit mroe bought for what i mined for it. and  the rest from referrals - so 0.6ghs - with 0.14  that i paid for. So pure profit this far.

I won't brag about the revenues of my miner.
But .. I bought it at 10usd/GH , the guy bought cex it at 70usd/gh.
Where does he have to sell not to loose to much and where do I have to?
Currently even after all this mining , I can still sell my miner on ebay with more than I bought it for.

you can literally sell your ghs back at the cex itself -  and keep the mined btc ,dvc, nmc, ixc coins.

More of for-fun now,you can get some for 0.035 but it won't be profitable or even ROI with the current difficulty and it's hash power. maybe using it to mine other alt-currencies might produce some profit?

Yeah, they are worthless, you can just send them all to me and I'll bury them for you. ;)

I actually got 6 of them for $40 a couple months ago (2 given to me and 4 I bought for $10 each).  The BTC they mined allowed me to get 5 more and a 10 port hub.  I now have 11, a hub, a USB Fan and about 0.11 BTC.

I would like to get about 4 more to make a 5GH/s rig, but no way am I paying more than $15 each.  With the outrageous prices on Amazon and Ebay, I'm seriously thinking about selling the entire rig.  Buying for $10 and selling for $149 sounds like a no brainer,  but sadly I have a conscience and have never been a very good salesman.  I just wonder how many they are actually selling at those prices, seems insane to me.

yes

It's true that cloud mining brings something new to that. It provides flexibility in the ways you can lose your money. Kudos  :-X

Can i use them to mine alternative cryptocurrencies?

cloud services no.. there are few alt coins that use sha256

thats why you may want to sell before that and buy again after they have become common and price drops.

not if you point it to PPC

Moore's law isn't a nature's law or something. It's just an observation that happens to work for now. Just saying ...

Let me fix that for you:
New Cloud Mining, referral link, no hardvare,no setup,only web browser

They sort of are toys, but they can be good teaching tools too. I bought 10 for my nephews a few months ago (one 8 and the other 7). They were curious about my rigs and so I thought it would be a good way for them to learn more about btc and alts. They are now fascinated by cryptos. The first thing they do when they get home from school is check to see how much they made, its never much, but it holds their fascination anyway. They will sit there and watch as shares are sent and repeatedly refresh the pool page to see if a block has been found – it is both scary and adorable all at the same time.
At Thanksgiving, I asked them what they wanted for Christmas, from the youngest (the 7 year old), I thought I would get a request for Pokemon or some new gaming system; instead, he asked me for a mining rig so that he could mine litecoin.
They may not be good for ROI, but they can serve a purpose of introducing people to the world. (I also have given about a half-dozen to friends that didn't understand how I could make money with a computer, the results have been hilarious.)

Too many people thinking of getting rich schemes and buy these at 50% markup. I bought a couple myself but it's for educational purpose only.

Yeah , great way to learn the bad thing about bitcoins.
Your kids are just expecting money in return! Like most people out there!
Bitcoin isn't about gains.
You'd do more for bitcoins and your kids if you showed them how to buy a game with bitcoins .

yes, they are. Mine LTC or buy a more powerful ASIC