Bitcoin Forum

I know I am kind of late to the party. I never mined any coins before. I was wondering if this is still a possibility for me. I don't have large amounts of capital. I hold less than 1BTC and make 28k a year mining fiat before taxes. How much would I need to get started in this day and age? Either mining established coins or brand new coins. I'm not too concerned about electricity usage not paying for the coin value because I am still bullish on crypto and will hold for a while, plus my roommate will pay half the electric without question. ;-) What setup would you recommend for a newbie to get started without a big investment?

People are going to be mining for as long as Bitcoin exists. It is never too late.

However, it might be difficult to make a profit right now because too many people are mining at a loss, and they bring down the profits for all miners.

If you want to start mining with little investment, you might try mining alt coins with your graphics card or CPU (depending on the coin).

I do have a graphics card, but it's old. I can just use whatever I have and mine at a loss? I'd like to do this for a little while to at least learn how. I have athlon II X2 2812 megahz and radeon HD 5670. Maybe I could mine some coinye west? Would you be willing to help me learn how to do this?

The Radeon should mine bitcoin and others okay. You won't mine much, but it will help you learn.

There are lots of guides to help get set up. As far as the coinye west, I haven't seen any details..

:-)

Its never late dude, but might be completely non-profitable..

I think you might have missed the boat for bitcoin mining(SHA256) but for alt coins it not too late yet.. even with 2 cards you could make 30-40$ a day  8)

http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to-get-started-using-your-gpu-to-mine-for-bitcoins-on-windows

I found this guide. Is there a way to substitute in a profitable alt coin? I already have exchange account at cryptsy. Help me out guys, just pick something for me, I learn quick. I installed OS before, linux command line a little. Then I will be ready for coinye. They are going to release the password for the files on the 11th I think. I'll just stick to buying the bitcoins with cash or the alt coins since the difficulty is so high.

^ That sounds pretty high. Not with the setup he has though right?

dont do it

you have sites like coinwarz or coinchoose.. There u look and see what is most profitable coin at the moment and u mine that. But as soon you start mining lot of others will start so that coin won't be most profitable in hour or two, so you'll need to switch to more profitable one. You change all of them on Cryptsy to BTC or to LTC or if you think price will rise in upcoming days you can hold a little and then sell. If u see some new coin which still is not on exchanges but you predict that will be profitable you can start mining that, because sooner you start difficulty will be lower and you'll mine lot of coins which can be very valuable in couple of weeks - thats gamble, you need to pick right one, but you can earn much more then with safe plays mining well known coins. I don't know if that's right guide, but that's how i am doing it

Good luck and see you on the pools :)

Is it really a big gamble, how much does it cost you to mine? I'm in SE USA. North Carolina. I'll have to find the electric bill to get the exact rate. Do you win more than you lose doing this? It seems like a really good plan to me.

I'd say you're better off using your GPU and CPU to mine LTC to trade for BTC, unless you have specialized mining hardware.  I just got a bottom of the line ASICMiner Block Erupter (Icarus) that does 333KH/sec.  It does 10x more hashing than my GTX660 for, maybe 1/5 the cost, and the i7 CPU combined.  Without an ASIC, I can pull in roughly 50x more by mining LTC than by mining BTC directly.

(I was mining DOGE for a while, while it was on the way up... got sick of all the brand new stratum servers going down constantly).

Well here goes nothing, I will try to mine some hobonickels. I really like the name. The program is now synchronizing with the network. The excitement is palpable. I think hobonickels could reach parity with bitcoin once more people hear about hobonickels.

Is the wallet separate from the mining program? Don't want to wait for it to sync and not even be able to mine...

You'll probably want to join a mining pool, do a google search for hobonickle mining pools, then get yourself a copy of cgminer and google cgminer altcoin tutorial and that should get you started.

yeah, you're right that's what I'm doing now. I've got a pool account, and now I am trying to get cgminer to connect. I'm installing AMD APP SDK which I am hoping will correct my missing opencl.dll error and my cgminer will start mining. crossing fingers.

Grab some Antminer hardware and start mining Tigercoins. They could skyrocket in price in the next few months.

Buy bitcoin instead, you can get ROI in a week time.

personally i prefer buying BTC as a potential investment and mining scrypt coins as a hobby

I will offer an alternative view.

Being broke (as you are), you don't have money available to buy bitcoin.  Buying bitcoin is not an option as credit card purchases aren't really possible currently.  However, if you can find an ASIC company willing to take CC (KNC used to but hasn't recently) then you could purchase an ASIC on a 0% credit card and pay it off with mining profits before the 0% expires.

I've done this multiple times and it has paid off so far.

For example... My Batch 1 KNC Jupiter(s) have netted an approximate 500% gain over their original CC purchase (USD) price.

It's true that had I had the liquid assets to buy BTC with the money rather than a miner, I would have been better off due to the exchange rate increase, but this has been better than the alternative (doing nothing).

I did buy some BTC at inflated prices on ebay and virwox when it crashed from 1200 to 800. I bought some more on coinbase when it was $592. I knew about bitcoin the whole time but it never dawned on me that I should buy some at all costs, just to cover the infinite upside risk that it will be all they will accept in futureworld. I think I tried to make a mt. gox account way back in the day but since the utility bill isn't in my name and I get paperless bank statements I couldn't do it and I gave up. Worst financial decision of my life so far. Every other mistake I have made was lack of capital, but this was just laziness I guess. I could have figured out a way to get more involved sooner. All together I have maybe one BTC worth of crypto holdings. About what I spent. I did learn a lot about currency trading, and I knew a bit already so I think I will be able to profit slowly but surely.

That's a really good idea. How much credit do I need? Whats this stuff cost. I've got some available, and I could sell some stuff to make this happen

Yes it is probably too late. However it is exciting to see a coin being mined, even if it is just for fractions of a coin. I have started mining a couple of different coins (joined a pool for Quark and solo mining Earthcoin with limited success) just for the thrill of it. Its not profitable but I love firing up the start.cmd file and seeing the computer keep the room warm.

Generally ASIC equipment costs between 5k-13k.  Honestly, I would look at KNC, Bitmine or Cointerra... I am not sure if any of them will accept CC payment at this time.

I know for certain that KNC is not currently selling equipment for CC but if you watch closely, they will most likely open more Jupiters for sale (will probably sell out in 10 minutes) and may re-enable CC payment.

So if I sell one of my nuts for this ASIC thing I just plug it into the computer and it makes bitcoins until something better comes along. This would make me a rich man. Big investment though. Maybe easier to get it hosted since I still can't get cgminer to work. lol

Do they connect to the computer or just to the network? I think I would like to get one or two or ten if they do start paying for themselves. Why not right? I'll even pay the whole electric bill if it works out. Hopefully crypto is here to stay. NSA working on quantum though.

Lol, you have a lot of reading to do.

1) I value my nuts much more than my ASIC's.  Please don't sell your nuts in exchange for btc.
2) Some ASIC's have built in controllers that just need Power and Ethernet (KNC), others need a computer or device like a raspberry pi (Asicminer, Hashfast) to run the mining software.
3)  We are (in my opinion) on the ground floor of an amazing opportunity never before seen in the history of the world.  Do a Google search for "mike hearn autonomous agents" and prepare to be blown away.  The potential here is way beyond simply financial independence.

if your having trouble with cg miner make sure your not using the newest version as it doesn't support gpu mining only asic i'm using 3.1.0 then make your self a text file and enter something like this

cgminer --scrypt -o     stratum+tcp://eu.stratum.coinpool.de:1000 (<--your pool address) -u xxxxxx-p xxxxxx   (-I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-engine 1030 --gpu-memclock 1500   go to https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison and find your hardware and enter config information here)   save coinmining.bat and make sure the save file type is all files and save in the cgminer folder   once thats done double click the .bat and you should be mining.

I'm using the version of cgminer that my pool recommends but when I try to run it it says opencl.dll is missing. Do I just need to find it online and put it in the folder?

 I think it's not never too late, more miner is good for the alt coins comunity

you can mine some alt cryptocurrency, its more proffitable profitable.

Definitively worth GPU Scrypt mining and exchange to Bitcoin

+1 ;)

HOLY MOLY! I reinstalled catalyst control center and now I am mining! HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP? It's getting louder and louder. lol

I probably should have cleaned the video card before trying to mine. It got to 106c in a few minutes before I turned it off. Hey I got it working though. I'll clean it out and try again, hopefully it'll be good to go and I'll be mining crypto like a real pimpdaddy. Wish I had started earlier, but hope it's not too late to make some kind of profits. Thanks for the help guys!

Strategy for the broke...

i) forget directly mining bitcoin for the minute

ii) scrounge up some Radeon GPUs at low prices from local craigslists and other classifieds, everyone "knows" about 6950s, 5850s, 7950s etc, so maybe go for the less popular ones. Since 400kh GPUs are going at near $200 and 600kh near $300 and up, then finding ~200-300kh GPUs at $100 or less is a DEAL, so try finding 6850s, 6870s, maybe 5770s

iii) scrounge up some motherboards to run them in, here's what you need in your fancy mining rig, PCIe slots, period. Doesn't need to support haswell, doesn't need overclocking features, needs PCIe slots, there's some socket 939 and 775 boards that do just great. Scrounge up the slowest lowest watt CPU you can to stick in the board. Scrounge up  2GB of RAM. Scrounge up a PSU that on 12V gives you 100W for the motherboard and CPU and 150W for each GPU AT LEAST. So minimum of around 40A on 12V for a celeron 440 in a s775 board with 2 6850s. (I have that setup, I've got about $300 in it, makes about $500 a month @ 550kh for about $40 worth of electricity)

iv) set up per https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117221.0  set up on litecoin first and use a MAJOR pool such as wemineLTC familiarise yourself with how it all works, get your miners tuned up so they are getting in the same zone as the top hash rates shown on the litecoin mining hardware guide, then when you know what you are doing, start with the alternative coins. Last thing you want to be is a newbie mining a flaky coin on a flaky pool with flaky hardware and a flaky software config.

v) when your coin is high against bitcoin, sell it for bitcoins.

iv) be ready to abandon any coin that doesn't make the top 10 in market cap (Excluding ripple) if it's high market cap and "not real good at the moment" you can mine a bunch for a nice stash to sell when the price is better, don't count on doing this for low cap coins, they may never recover. This depends on whether you can afford to cover your electricity monthly and get big payouts a few times a year, if you need monthly payouts go with most profitable at the moment.

In the command line (or .bat file) you're using for cgminer add the following:

--auto-fan --temp-target 80 --temp-cutoff 90

This will allow cgminer to control the fan on the card, increasing its speed to try and keep the temp at or below 80, and if that's not possible, it will stop mining when the card reaches 90 so as not to set fire to your entire operation.

I started back in 2011 and I say it is never too late to start mining today. The more the merrier.

Thanks I will add the temp paramaters. Right now I am trying different pools I only get about 16kh/s and my HW number is 8. It's not ramping up fully for some reason. I'm not sure what the other numbers mean or how to tell if I am successfully mining anything. I did mine a few earthcoins on coinium pool but then I tried mining doge coins but nothing happened. I tried a middlecoin pool and it seemed to do something but I don't know what I'm looking at yet to see if it's working. Is it worth mining with these numbers? Maybe just get a new rig? If it pays for itself I can build something halfway decent. I like dealing with ebay rather than craigslist usually.

It isn't too late to mine Bitcoins now. You can use Pyramining to help you mine. Pyramining is a service that you can buy hashing power and it will mine you Bitcoins until you get your complete reward. Currently, you can buy 1GH/s for 0.02BTC which isn't expensive and you can get a bonus of 10% when you join with this referral link.

Referral link: http://pyramining.com/referral/287zdxqs9

never too late to start mining ... just too late to make some profit  ;)

It is not too late to start today. If you want to buy ASIC Miner, you might need to consider ROI.

And shipping times. ;)

You can mining a new altcoin, they appear almost every day. My single Asus 7870 working non-stop since december 2013 :)

Regarding whether it is too late to make profit:

It totally depends on your time frame and WHERE you think the value of bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) will end up.

If you take the view that spending say X amount on some mining hardware is the same as going to a casino and putting your money on a random number at the roulette wheel, and you can afford to lose X, then you should be fine no matter what happens. Winning your bet is just the upside for some short-term excitement/fun.

If you believe fervently that the currency has massive long-term potential and 1BTC might be worth $1m USD in the future, then the ROI in the short-term is irrelevant. The question then becomes how much you can afford to 'risk' on your bet and how long can you 'stomach' the ride until BTC reaches a value that you want to 'exit' at.

Short answer: what is your attitude to risk vs reward and your time horizon.

If you're talking about the major coins than yes, probably a little too late. You could however mine the new alt coins that pops up just about everyday.

Yes, but many new altcoins become worthless quickly. Only few will pay your time

Sure but you will have to choose the right ones as many of them are some flash in the pan.

Only way to earn some money is to mine most profitable alt coin at this moment because they lost value very fast.
I think i heard there is a way to set it up to mine most profitable coin .
I will try to find that post and . . .   

I foun it ;) It's on croatian but i will try to translate it right.

Original post:
odes na multipool.us, ukljucis multiport tj. auto switching to mine most profitable coin. I onda na criptsy stavis opciju autosell i nebrines se nista. Minas cijelo vrijeme najprofitabilniji coin i prodaje se sam na criptsy-u ako stavis da mulipool sam isplacuje coine.

Translation:
You go on multipools.com and you turn multiport on (auto switching to mine most profitable coin). Then you go to criptsy and put auto sell option on and you don't have to worry. All time you mine most profitable coin and auto selling it on crptsy if you set option for multipool to autosell that coins

I started mining in november 2013 and it was "late", but it is still profitable. I'm mining btc and alt-coins now and looks as good investment. If you have good hw for good price, never is late!

Multipool (https://www.multipool.us/) and others do coin switching based on profitability for SHA and scrypt coins, and a Cryptsy (https://www.cryptsy.com/users/register?refid=102649) account can be set up to auto-sell most altcoin types as soon as it receives funds. If you have a decent lump of mining speed, you can alternate that way without having to do it all by hand.

Or for another entry level option use Cex.io (https://cex.io/r/1/Thomassoni/0/) to mine without hardware, and combine it with trading on the highs and lows, hopefully using an automated trading bot for profitability.

After I started out in november with a handful of ASICs from ebay and got dismayed at difficulty rising and rewards diminishing, I've done all of the above to the point where my daily coin earn is now steadily rising against diff.


Precisely.

Friends ask me: "is it too late to get into BTC?"
I'm all like: "is it too late to get on an escalator?"

If you can earn more than what you spend then yes, it's worth mining, any time.
ASICs can become useless in relatively short time so you need to speculate on the price to get an idea of the return. Also factor in *estimated* delivery date and difficulty.
I would stick to GPUs on alts, better availability and resell value

GPU Scrypt mining is profitable, but the situation may change relatively quickly, cheap electricity helps here

I started mining 2 months ago. Like yourself posted on the a forum (Litecoin) asking was it to late to get in the game. Let me tell you I went against all and said stuff it I'm getting into this, more of a hobby than quit my day job etc. Forked out $1500 to build a 2100kh/s gpu miner. Small time miner but none the less has been fun. I mine alt-coins and trade up to BTC or LTC. On the forums everyday checking for new launches of coins etc. Haha and I tell you there are plenty released each week - just got to decide which one you think will make it. Most are pump and dump  coins - but hey you want to make profit here? Others I mine for a couple of days and just hold them. I mined Dogecoin when it first got released, there was about 50 of us on one pool for 3/4 days until it went bat shit crazy. I kept mining then jumped off. Sold a % when they were at .00000180 and made 10BTC. Still holding about 10,000,000 DOGE until the block reward halves, prices should go up again and get rid of some of the major pools. Now if that's not return on investment I don't know what is?

It's never to late. I am in it for the long run, holding onto BTC/LTC. Mining for 2 months and if I was to mine LTC by itself I would have about say 36 LTC or 1 BTC. Once again mining the alts I have 105 LTC and 10BTC. Can't complain on a net worth of around close to $10k?

I would say spend what you can afford. Play around and just have fun and make some money whilst you're at it and help build the Bitcoin community. The more people using it the more it's going to be worth.

I just bought two r9 290's last week.
It's never too late  ;D

I just spent my whole paycheck getting in line for preorder hosting from butterfly labs. Hope it pays off well, but I have to wait until they come online. Now I still have some available credit on my credit cards to invest. I have around a thousand or two in available credit spread out on a few cards. What do you think would be the best, most profitable thing, GPU or ASIC or whatever, to buy right now to start mining alts and stuff so that I can pay off 10k on my credit cards in a year or two? At this point I need to use my credit to pay off my credit, and if worse comes to worse I have to sell some stuff.

Now your just trolling.

ASIC miners only mine SHA-256 and not scrypt coins. Most of the alt-coins coming out at the moment are scrypt based. GPU, cheaper and easier to setup - but power hungry. Mining is a 24/7 job. You will always be wanting to check on your miners status, making sure it is working. There is a lot of tweaking as well depending on the GPU cards that you buy. 7950 or 290 are best for buck at the moment. But with the massive media coverage at the moment the prices for the cards have skyrocketed. When I bought the cards just before every man and his dog jumped onto the scene you could get the cards for around $250/300. Now you are looking anywhere upwards of $500.

Mine alts and trade up! Be ready for the dumps. You have to be watching the exchanges and see when new coins are added and get in quick. Once it's been dumped it's all down hill from there for most coins.

This, it's not late to start mining but you need to put some effort on it, have a lot of time to join the pump and dump and trade a little bit.
Be conservative at the beginning until you understand the market better or you will lose! Good Luck :-)

Not trolling, just hoping the price continues to go up and I'll have some passive income from storing coins. Not affiliated with them, nor did I research it fully. Just gambling wildy really. I have 10k worth of stuff to sell so I'm not crazy. Now, I'm going to look for a deal on those graphics cards mentioned probably on ebay and buy the rest probably from newegg and mine the alts. Practice my coin-fu and dump before the noobs do. Then buy the coins back for half price.

I guess that mining itself *might* be a waste of ressources which were converted into energy. This energy is used to create a virtual currency, but it doesn't add anything to the "real world". If you chop a tree, you can make a table out of it or you can burn the wood for warmth. Burning away electricity via PC hardware is pretty ineffective.

On the other hand, simply doing some mining in the alternative coins (like Litecoins) might be ok to gain a few dollars. But don't expect too much of it, with decent PC graphics hardware (that you already own, maybe because you're a gamer), you can expect like 2-3 USD per DAY.

Only chance you have is that you "invest" into bitcoins/litecoins/etc. this way and hope that the bitcoins go higher "to the moon". [1]

Star3Bit

[1]: Yes, Dogecoin is another alt-coin...

How about on a mac would it be profitable to mine some altcoin as part of a pool? I'm trying to download one and see if I can figure it out.

I did spend my the paycheck before last buying bitcoins and altcoins. So far it has been a good investment! I'm hooked and panic buying in the only ways I can figure out. Hope I don't get burned. I figure if crypto crashes I can just spend future paychecks buying the coins. Seems logical? I think mining new alts like coinye west could be wildy profitable too so I'm going to try to build a modern rig on credit. How much would you pay for 2x Radeon 7950's on ebay? Up to $600?

Most all Mac's are built to be compact and I would be take caution to run the GPU at 100% mining as the unit would likely over heat. That being said you can turn the intensity down, and if you want to take the risk try Asteroid (http://www.asteroidapp.com/) but please do read about all the warnings.

doges are still very profitable to mine now despite the drop in price.

As he said. But your kh/s would be nothing and you wouldn't be able to use your mac at the same time. Because it is gpu dependant your screen will lag and make any sort of accessibility pointless. You would need to mine as soon as the coin is released to maximise potential, otherwise you will be getting pennies.

What is the Alt COINS

ALT Coins (Alternative coins) other than the main BTC LTC XPM etc. Because Bitcoin is open source, there have been a lot of copy cat coins created and pre-mined purely to make a quick buck in pump and dumps. But there are also a number of coins which are contributing to the community.

Good luck mining. I am posting several sentences here to fulfil the conditions imposed upon new forum accounts. I intend to lurk for now, but would like to have an account available to post if needed. Thanks!

I'm going to upgrade my graphics to 6850 in my computer and mine some coinye when it comes out. Then I'll look for a deal on some better gpus in the future to build a sweet rig and go from there. Thanks for the advice. I'm sure one of these investments will pay for the others in the end.

Altcoins are "Bitcoin alternatives" (ie, Litecoin, Peercoin, Feathercoin, etc are all Altcoins).

http://www.coindesk.com/top-altcoins-2013/

like what the others said, mining alt coin is still profitable. check out multipool, it offers peace of mind for lazy miners like me. ;)

You can easily buy BTC with a credit card... I've done it twice this week.  The easiest way is to use VirWox.com, buy SLL (Second Life Lindens) with PayPal (or credit card through PayPal), exchange them for Bitcoin, and withdraw the coins.  The first few transactions you do will require them to do a manual step that has taken 1 day each time, but that's still less than Mt.Gox's 20 days to approve your account that I'm still waiting on.

you can still mine several good and profitable alt coins. sha256 or scrypt minig , what ever you like. i bought used asic usb miner and i now mine ZetaCoins for fun. it's now great speed , it's around 333 MH/s . there will always be alt coins to mine, you just need to find one for yourself ;)

 I agree, use low hashrate hardware for alt and possible new coins and if you are going to mine btc then go for the highest hashrate you can get etc.

I'm thinking about getting into mining altcoins. If I were to throw $10k at it and build 4 computers with 2 vid cards each, would it be worth it?

Can you please elaborate what coin you're mining. I am using a multi-pool but I can't get more than $250 at 650 khash/sec

Yeah, that was a November/December average mainly on litecoin with rises in value, you're probably doing good for present prices/difficulty.

If we are talking about Sha256 coins, i would recommend to buy some usb sticks to try out the whole mining experience or buy some shares, if you can't afford to buy the whole ASIC equipment. As you gain experience, you will decide for yourself if its worth it to continue with mining.

It is not too late yet for Gridcoin, if you hop in now, you will make some good profits. The coin is slowly gaining in momentum and its price has been stable since the first transaction took place, a sign of long-term profit.

What about cloud mining?Is it possible to mine all curencies?Sorry a little off topic but it would be nice to hear actual opinion.

I would recommend to invest in a small setup to get some experience before blowing your hard earned fiat.

If you have an old desktop computer then you can slowly start building a small mining rig.

To get started you only need a powerful graphic card and a good power supply:

Here is an example:
MSI R9 280X  (~$360)
Corsair HX750 (~$140]

The power supply will support two graphics card, so later you can upgrade your rig with one more card.

You don't need to build a fancy rig to start with, just open the desktop chassis and leave the side open.

This setup will only cost you ~$500, and give you 720 kH/s

Right now you can mine altcoin worth ~$10 / day

So in approximate 50 days, you will have ROI.
You can use the income to upgrade your rig, or build a new one.

Don't have to much focus on investing on the newest gear, keep your focus on reaching ROI for all your investments.
Slowly build up experience, when you have about 1/2 experience in mining then are you ready to pull the trigger for bigger investments.

That is my advice.

Cheers!

No I don't think that is profitable.
You will only get ROI if the bitcoin rate increase a lot, but in that case you might as well have bougth bitcoins and hold' em, then would profit have been larger.

Exactly.

Before buying any hardware or hashrate, please double check with a profit calculator (tons out there) and don't forget to take the uprising difficulty and your electricity cost (if not cloud mining) into consideration.

Also, be careful of scammers, especially if you see some "too good to be true" deals.

A lot of times it is easier and more efficient to just purchase some BTC, and from there, invest in whatever kinds of cryptos you are interested in.

But mining is fun!  It really is fun to be able to point your gear at different coins, especially as they are released, and it adds some variety to things.

If you can, I might suggest investing some money directly, but setting up a small mining rig as well. Even something as basic as one video card with 300 k/hashes or more is enough to start producing a trickle of scrypt coins.

There is something truly exciting about going off to work for the day, coming back later to see how many coins your system has produced.

And with a little bit of trading savvy, you can make that video card pay for itself in a month or two.

thanks bro

low investment mining:

Buy a 280X

Watch Coinwarz.

Mine Alt Scrypt coins

quickly flip them to BTC

Just like others have mentioned, Alt coins are your best option.

Most can barely keep up with the performance levels to mine btc directly, so at least hold them as long you can.

I`d buy some before prices hike.

I wouldnt bother!

Coinbase allows you to buy bitcoins with your bank account and credit card. You'll probably ROI quicker simply buying bitcoins at this point.

Agree.
If your mining profitability comes from the expected uprising btc price, you could get better profit by directly buying bitcoin.

Don't mine, it is really not good for your health. The addiction of getting more hashing power. Is as bad a crack, cocaine or heroin.  :P

Excellent point, math don't lie, as much as you want 1 + 1 to equal 3 it never does. I have been buying contracts from this really cool site that seems to be automated. I found it on eBay after winning one of their auctions. It is called mBigas.com although it redirects to mining.mBigas.com for some reason.

May not be profitable now but like you said its better then doing nothing. I have my hands on 4 coins and I am just ridding them out for a while to see how much they go up.

Its not too late, just purchase a powerful mining device  from here: https://products.butterflylabs.com/

Be careful with all BFL pre-orders, unless you want to have a terrible delivery delay.

Never to late to learn.  There's USB Antminers and Yellowjackets at a pretty descent price.  Sure, you won't make much with them but they are a start.   Good at getting your feet wet.

The best now is to mine new alt coins specifically cpu coins.

Hi everyone,
I'm new here. My name is Michael and I'm from New Zealand.
I've been reading this thread with great interest as I'm also keen on the idea of starting mining for coin.

I should point out that I have only a rudimentary knowledge of cryptocurrencies, so please excuse me if I make a dumb remark or ask a question others all know the answers too.

Am I right in thinking the following ...
There are two basic types of coin, SHA256 and scrypt ?
The hardware used to mine SHA256 coins cannot be used to mine scrypt coins ? Antminer etc
The hardware used to mine scrypt coins can also be used to mine SHA256 coins ? GPU's

Living down here in the South Pacific, it can be difficult to get hold of hardware at reasonable prices. For example I see prices quoted for GPU's in USD that I can only dream about. The newer more powerful cards are marketed as gamer cards and are sold at premium prices ... a Radeon R9 290X 5GB card sells here for USD$720 !

I've watched a number of how to videos and read a few too. It seems to me that a 4 x R9 280X rig with a 1200 watt PSU should be mining around 1 litecoin per day or 0.02 bitcoin ... does that sound correct ?
I could assemble a rig like that for around USD$2800 ... power is about USD$0.20 per kilowatt hour. If the prices I'm seeing for litecoin at USD$18.50 and bitcoin at USD$716.00 are correct, then mining can be profitable over the course of a year.

Am I correct or barking up the wrong tree ?
All thoughts and comments appreciated

MichaelNZ

IMHO, Folks should look at mining as a business investment.  Answer the fundamental questions about ROI (% and payback period both), risks, equipment utility, and variable costs.  The correct answer will always be one that reflects a profit and manages the risks.  All equipment decisions need to be filtered through that analysis.  There was some excellent advice earlier about using lower end cards/lower end motherboard & PC/ to mine alt coins; If you followed that conversation, that person didn't have a world class rig, but was able to pay for the initial investment in a month, and is now banking coin.  Risk has been reduced to zero---all profit now.   To me, that is a fabulous business model. 

I've mined BTC a couple years ago, paused and picked up again last fall.  From what I've experienced with current BTC mining, I'd say you best be prepared to invest substantially to recover your investment and reduce your risk.  Entering the BTC mining business now requires some jingle in your pocket---and to enter it with serious capability will require some serious jingle.   

I love the opportunities in alt coins right now---in both SHA-256 and Scrypt.  I just picked up a couple used BFL Jalapeno's off of ebay for ~$150 and will have some fun using them to mine some SHA-256 Alt Coins (my larger miners remain pointed at BTC).   Although, I am seeing dynamics (as mentioned earlier) where alt coins make an interesting hedge against BTC.   

One of the best places I've seen for analyzing coins is coinwarz.com---great data, and great tools (tip of the hat to them).   Know your hash-rates, keep it simple and profitable, and just get started.   

My option is straight: lost very first wave of cryptocurrencies (BTC), also lost second one (LTC, PPC, NMC), now is third wave going to it's end (more than 50 approved by coinmarketcap cryptocurrencies), so the only chance to make profit by mining is to mine new coins only.

I only just started mining a little over two weeks ago, I made 6 BTC off of the MaxCoin release. So I wouldn't be discouraged as a new miner, it may seem confusing at first, but you will begin to understand what is going on eventually.

mining is not possible without mining rigs

Welcome Michael.

Apart from SHA256 and scrypt based coins, they are many others like SHA3, PoS (Proof-of-stake), PoW (Proof of burn), etc.

You can use CPU/GPU to mine SHA256 and scrypt based coins.
ASIC is used to describe those specially designed hardware for mining.
The Antminer or other existing ASICs are specially designed to do SHA256 computations.
We will have some scrypt ASICs as well soon.
For example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421921.0

Don't forget to take the difficulty adjustment into your profit calculation.
Bitcoin Profit calculator: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator
Litecoin Profit calculator: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator

Apart from checking the profitability on conwarz, you could join middlecoin or multipool, and you will be able to mine the most profitable coin automatically. :)

Don't forget to take the difficulty adjustment into your profit calculation.
Bitcoin Profit calculator: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator
Litecoin Profit calculator: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator

Hi Sonny
Thanks for your reply.
I have been and had a look at the profit calculators and I don't understand what they are telling me. I inputed what I thought were the correct figures based on what my limited understanding allows and all I saw were profit figures in red with a - sign in front. To me that says this will never make a profit and you've done your dough ... is that correct ?

It's never too late. Invest some smaller amount for start if you don't have much then go from there. Mine some alt coins, exchange and go from there. You have to start somehow.

You need a lot of money to invest or have access to free electricity to get any good profit.

Time to start understanding about bitcoin difficulty before you start mining. You soon realized that only ASICs manufacturer is making money.

I'm not going to pretend to understand the way difficulty works, but from what I've read from others it seems that the more people there are processing, the faster the blocks are discovered and the faster the difficulty increases.
If that is correct it would from an untrained eye that very soon it is going to be impossible to make a profit from mining for any form of coin as the return on money invested plus the cost of energy to run it will far outweigh the returns.
So effectively it becomes a self destroying market, which is madness.
And to think I was contemplating buying a Terraminer IV !

You are welcome.
Yup, you are right. It is very unlikely for you to get your investment back....

I've been to coinchoose and looked at what appears to be the most profitable coins to mine and they all seem to be scrypt coins. At time of writing bitbar seems to be the most profitable as it shows 4000+% profitability.
To my naive eye it would seem that mining them and as has been suggested earlier in this thread, trading them into an alternative, such at bitcoin or litecoin immediately might be viable.
If that is the case I would think to abandon the idea of buying a Terraminer IV and instead look at constructing a 4 x GPU system.

There are any number of sellers out of China offering USB ASIC's ... BTC, Antminer etc the cost of buying a few of those and a decent multiport USB hub is minimal, as it the cost to run it ... quoted power consumption seems to be around 1.2 watts per device ... not much at all. The question then becomes will a minimal rig like that ever make a profit ? What I don't know is at what level the payout from a pool would be with a rig like that. Is there anyone who could give me a guiding heads up on what they achieve ?

Some example which coins to mine please?

Mine duckduckcoin

I think you can earn more by mining this new coins.

I'm sure I'm covering old ground, but I've found this two sites very useful ...

http://www.coinchoose.com/
http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

Working on the information from those sites, it seems that it is still possible to make profit from mining.

I haven't jumped on the band wagon yet, I'm still debating what hardware to use, but a 4 x GPU rig using fast but not bleeding edge, cutting edge, but leading edge cards that are at better pricing ...

Radeon R9 280 or 270 for example ... 50% or less than Radeon R9 290X

You will get better hashrate with R9 290x, but definitely not 50% better lol.  :)
FYR: https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

I've found that website extremely useful in helping me make a cost/benefit analysis of available GPU's

Still lots more work to do before I make a final decision, but based on what I've seen a Terraminer IV do, it's looking highly likely that is where my money will be going ... But, anything from Cointerra is unlikely to be available until June, at the earliest, maybe, delivery dependent on availability, not a strong point with Cointerra it appears currently !

I can get my hands on graphics cards no problem, so I could be up and running on scrypt mining straight away. I haven't got enough funds available to do both types of miners immediately, so I need to look at the return from scrypt and see if I can recover enough to be into a Terraminer for June ... decisions decisions LOL

Call this a heads up, KNC just announced a motherfuckin' SERIOUS scrypt ASIC, see link in sig.

Y'all got about 6 months of GPU mining left. Make the most of it!

Don't forget when the ASICs kicked in on bitcoin the price ended up going up by 10x, so SAVE every coin you can.

Wow, it looks really good, minimum 100 MH/s and shipment begins in Q2/Q3 of 2014  :o
If these asics are shipped in Q2/Q3, those buying GPUs today will probably not be able to get ROI...

I saw the announcement today.
That machine is a beast!
If KnC can deliver, the game will change again.

I can't find the power consumption of it.  :(

Based on that it runs on a standard ATX supply, then is power most likely less than 1200W.

a single ant would be good, but if you dont have the money go for old asicminer blade setup

Well ... i generate 0,01 BTC per week (yes, 7 days) .. with a 12GH/s BFL miner (50w PSU).
do your calculation ...

I think it's too late to start mining , it's not profitable now, you can make much more by buying and selling coins

KNC just upped the specs from 100 MH/s to 250 MH/s !!
I wonder if small scrypt ASIC miners (Read: Gridseed) will have same fate as GPU miners. Probably worse, because GPU miners can always switch to GPU-only coins, which Gridseed miners won't be able to do.

my friend suggest me to mining scrypt coin instead direct mining BTC
and then sell my coin to BTC
whiich scrypt coin is most profitable right now?

The profitability keeps changing every hour. Join a multipool that mines most profitable coin and converts them to BTC for you. There are lots of them, wafflepool, clevermining and middlecoin to name a few. (Google them)

IMO anyone who buys those right now, should have a couple of months to make back their cost. When the Alpha-T and the KNCs arrive on the network, it won't be worth buying those any more, BUT, since they are power efficient compared to GPU, anybody who already has one, should be able to run it at a small profit for a quite a while after.

There were still people finding it "worth it" to run FPGA bitcoin miners as late as August/Sept/October last year for similar reasons.

ohh i see, just read about how multipool work and you give me suggestion ;D
thanks, i'll try that

No one in their right minds will mine Bitcoins now. If you are going to mine some altcoins, then it is OK.

Noone is buying the high-powered ASICS any more? Hmm interesting  ;D

It is not profitable to buy a miner to mine bitcoin now.
It is definitely profitable to run your sha256 ASIC now, unless you are using some very obsolete models.

At current BTC price on current difficulty slope, for typical North American power prices, 3W/Gh hardware looks like "lasting" until mid May, 2W/Gh until mid June, and 1W/Gh somewhere in August.

1st gen Avalon machines are probably "not worth" running in the majority of the world now, at least anywhere with power over 10c/kWh.

I get cheap overnight and weekend time of use pricing, so I could run one part time until the end of April-ish.

However, you can justify running them depending on what you personally think "fair value" of a BTC is in the near future, if you think it's truly "worth" $1000 and going up from there at some point this year, you may go a couple of months longer.... and either the price will rise and prove you right, or you'll figure your "savings plan" is costing you too much.

I think that it has ben late for months but some people are still investing in mining eq so I don't know :(

U can always mine something else . Like pts.

It is still generally profitable to mine with a 66 GH/s Avalon. It currently mines about 0.00663 BTC per day, which is currently worth about $3.00. The Avalon uses about 600 W, which at $0.10/kWh is about $1.50/day. The profit is about $1.50/day.

The Avalon becomes unprofitable if the cost of electricity exceeds $0.20/kWh, or the value of a bitcoin drops by half or the difficulty doubles, or some combination of the three.

yeah the btc boat left. i invite you to take ripple a look.

it's more than just a 'coin', it's a complete payment system with an exchange built in. anyway, to learn more about it, read here:  http://coinjoint.info/ripple-might-want-pay-attention/ (http://coinjoint.info/ripple-might-want-pay-attention/) and there are intros and guides here:  https://xrptalk.org/forum/61-faq-and-guides/ (https://xrptalk.org/forum/61-faq-and-guides/)

see you. :)