Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

I've been wondering for the last days, if mining is profitable? why would anyone want to sell a miner?

If you have the machine to make money, why would you like to sell it? My only answer is that those guys sell the miners when they are not anymore profitable.

What do you think?

If you can get Th/s miner then Bitcoin mining is still profitable.
About alt coins, I have mined $1000 worth of DOGE coins in last week with 70 Kh/s

All you can do is make an educated guess about whether a bitcoin a miner will be profitable. It depends on many factors but the hardest to predict is future difficulty.
If the seller thinks difficulty will be high he can sell to a buyer who thinks difficulty will be low without it being a scam. Also a buyer paying with fiat may see purchasing a miner as a way to convert fiat into bitcoin rather than going through an exchange.

mining takes time, say you need money now, you can get alot more money after selling off a mining rig right away than mining the rig 24/7, mining bitcoins is becoming non profitable pretty soon unless you have some very powerful asic's but there are still other sha-256 alt coins you can mine that will still be profitable for the time being.

Mining machines obsolete faster than pays for itself. Complexity grows very quickly. Profitable to sell for pre-order. And then - this is the problem for the buyer.

- some miners wise up to see buying coins is more profitable than mining in normal conditions. eg. slope of price increase of bitcoin vs  hashrate per dollar

-also the factor that preordering for a machine with full capital upfront could be risky, if the rig gets delivered late you loose the edge

-  some people selling rigs migh be new to the game with not much capital left after a purchase. New versions of chips serve better value of hashrate per dollar, thus they need capital to invest to stay ahead or else get left behind.