Bitcoin Forum

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THOSE NEW TO BITCOIN OR BITCOIN MINING

Bitcoin is going to blow up in 2014, we all know that. So what better way to get involved than start mining it! Right?

Wrong, dead-on-arrival, dead as a doornail, reaper with scythe cackling over your rotting corpse wrong. If you intent to profit, that is.

If you are OK to mine at a loss, because you enjoy the technology, or because you want to do your part to secure the network, good for you.

Every single day I see a new thread, "I have XYZ amount of BTC/USD and I want to get into mining!" The unsurprising part of this is that these posts are almost always from new BitcoinTalk members who have little to no technical understanding of mining, no experience mining, no understanding of how to properly calculate the profitability of mining hardware, but plenty of enthusiasm and money for what they perceive as a cash grab or get rich quick scheme. The surprising part of this is that many of these people are actually intelligent, well educated individuals. However, the desire to earn a quick and easy buck has a blinding effect on them; their most powerful tool - the logical part of their brain - stops functioning because another, reptillian part of their brain is screaming "MONEY. LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY."

The press certainly does their part to propagate this - every day there is a new story about people making tons of money from mining, or some new manufacturer or new hardware which is certain to bring untold riches to those who purchase it.

Stories like this:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/morning-agenda-the-bitcoin-mines-of-iceland/?_r=0
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/03/the-craziest-bitcoin-business-making-money-minting-machines/
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/05/butterfly_live/

My opinion, which is informed by a fair bit of research, is that for-profit-mining for the hobbyist, enthusiast, or semi-pro is effectively over as of 2014. There is still profit to be had in the mining game, but its going to go mostly to large professional mining conglomerates, pool operators, and hardware manufacturers. This is not news per se or anything like a revelation, and its no secret among people who have been around here for a while. And although there are other threads out there which warn new users about getting into the game, apparently they arent being read and in my opinion having one more cant hurt - all Im trying to do is save people money and heartache. My comments also apply to alt-coin mining, although there is a bit of life left to be squeezed out there, the writing is on the wall with people moving 100mh/s+ rigs into datacenters. Economies of scale, tiny margins, etc. Big money is now deeply into mining, it wont ever go away, and you wont be able to compete with it, unless you also go fulltime pro and invest a very large amount of capital.

But there is another, more important point I want to make, and thats why I created this thread rather than bump an existing one.

There is HUGE profit to be made in the Bitcoin space. There is an entirely new digital economy full of goods and services that is being created as we speak, and if you were to secure just a microscopic fraction of a percentage of that revenue, you would realize your financial dream. Furthermore, you as an intelligent, well educated person with a solid work ethic are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this new space. All of your expertise and experience in whatever field it is that you specialize in is highly valuable, and if you apply this to the Bitcoin space, you have an opportunity of a lifetime to get in on the ground floor of a revolution. Yes, starting a new business or expanding an existing one into the Bitcoin space is difficult and there is risk involved of course. But just recognize that the upside of a successful business in the Bitcoin space is potentially much, much higher than that of a traditional one.






FULL DISCLOSURE: I have been into Bitcoin mining for almost 1 year and have sometimes made a profit - in the past. I have a pre-order for an ASIC due to ship this year, but I wont be surprised at all if I dont turn a profit on it. Furthermore, the money I spent on a preorder was profits from previous ventures, not fresh capital. Also, had I invested 100% of my investment money into buying Bitcoin from Day1 and never got into mining at all, I would have more total Bitcoins than I currently do. Furthermore, the money I spent on a 2014 preorder is fairly trivial to me and losing 100% of the investment would not shock me or put me in a bad financial situation. Finally, Im one of those people who is OK with mining-at-a-loss, because Im interested in the technology and helping to do my part to secure the network so that less overall hashpower is concentrated in the hands of a few companies and pools.

How does bitcoin adoption by service retailers fit into that perspective?

"Social gaming giant Zynga has announced that it will be accepting bitcoin for in-app payments in selected games, as a “test” with payment processor BitPay. The move opens up $200m per quarter in potential markets for the digital currency.

The Zynga team account posted the following on reddit:

“The Bitcoin test is only available to Zynga.com players playing FarmVille 2, CastleVille, ChefVille, CoasterVille, Hidden Chronicles, Hidden Shadows and CityVille. The games can be accessed at http://zynga.com.

Zynga is always working to improve our customer experience by incorporating player feedback into our games. We look forward to hearing from our players about the Bitcoin test so we can continue in our efforts to provide the best possible gaming experience.”

Sources connected to BitPay and Zynga users quickly confirmed the announcement as true."

What about GPU mining other alt coins then trading for BTC?

The entry barrier for mining bitcoin is pretty high now, but Alt coins is still pretty low.

I've been saying for months now that a person would have to be a fool and / or have no financial sense at all to spend one penny buying BTC mining gear.  The few big money players have pushed the difficulty so high that it simply is not profitable anymore for small time players.  And don't forget the ASIC manufacturers who are mining with their own machines for months before they fill your pre-sold orders.  Don't deny it, it happens, they'd be idiots not to do it!

I agree with what was said about reptilian brains taking over, it was people with their reptilian brains that got me a $7200 net profit for my 205 LiteCoins I sold off in the first week of December.  I had mined the LTC in aug, sept, and oct, and held it while the price stayed at $2.

Now I mine Litecoin / Feathercoin / Dogecoin, and I am using the highs and lows of the BTC / LTC / FTC / DOGE markets on cryptsy to manipulate my coins into more coins.  It's the least expense and probably the best profit opportunity for me.

And me making money is all that matters!   ;D

Interesting thread.  I've been looking at a lot of the past & present Group Buys.  How do those factor into your analysis?  Total loss?

Personally, I see Group Buys as much less risk, and hassle, for what could be a decent profit.  No need to be greedy, IMO.  I'll buy a few shares in legit GB's, and roll the dice that way.  No one really know what these new batches of machines are going to do, when they'll arrive, etc.. we're all predicting. 

First of all, if you are mining for 1 year and you didn't make a huge profit then you shouldn't give any advice.
Second, if price speculation is taking into consideration, mining can still be very profitable.

This is my thinking also.  If you get in fast enough, with enough hash, you can certainly make a lot of money before the difficulty gets too inflated.  I don't think we've hit the ceiling yet, but do appreciate the perspective of those that do. 

This has always been the case since GPU mining. What changed?
But I agree with you, buying bitcoins is better than ASICs

This has nothing to do with difficulty or BTC price. It has to do with the fact that an single person with a $5000 budget cannot compete with companies that have $500,000-$5,000,000 budgets, which is what we are starting to see in the mining game now. Even with altcoin mining the game is coming to an end, there are huge 100mh/s+ GPU farms out there sitting in climate controlled datacenters with 100% uptime, mining on private pools, and now ASICs are almost here for scrypt also, so GPU mining is coming to a close in 2014. Even alts like Primecoin, which doesnt even use hashcash and is mined "CPU only" are seeing massive farms of cloud hashing on Amazon cloud and DigitalOcean. You're overclocked i7 doesnt mean squat when I have thousands of instances of miners running in a cloud, and Im paying a nice cheap bulk rate for the processing.

Mining has gone pro. The big money is now into crypto, which is what everybody wanted. Crypto cant go bigtime without it. But it means profitable mining, for the everyman, is effectively over unless you want to lower yourself to mining Dogecoins or some other such flavor-of-the-week scam/sham/shit-coin which will be long gone tomorrow and no sane person would touch with a 10ft pole.

But my more important, salient point is that people new to crypto should not be looking at mining period. Nobody who isnt already neck deep into mining and knows the game inside out should be looking at getting into it. Its too late to climb that learning curve. But many of these people have vast expertise in other fields, like IT, network security, 3dprinting, manufacturing, marketing, product development, customer service, consulting, etc etc etc. These fields will see explosive growth in the next 2-5 years as Bitcoin takes off and spawns an entirely new digital economy, and being in on the ground floor of that is still very possible and most certainly will be profitable. So dont look at mining and try to learn a new game you cant possibly win at. Apply what you are already expert in to the Bitcoin space and you may be the next titan of your industry.

I find this point of view right on point.  Noone is going to get rich throwing money at high end hardware.  In my own opinion everyone who uses BitCoin and believes in the system should at least make a small investment into the infrastructure and become a part of the infrastructure.  Strengthen the system by helping the system.  No matter how small. 

If you have hardware you use on a daily basis, put it to work. 

Even small investments could in the future reap some type of reward. 

Think of the long term.

Not to say OP is wrong, but when I first bought my 2 USB block erupters everyone was preaching the same exact thing. "These will never provide a ROI, don't buy, waste of money, blah blah blah". I bought anyway not really caring if I got a ROI. Turns out I have more than doubled my original investment (at today's price). My point is, these threads offer a fair warning, but don't take them too seriously. He may be right, he may not be; no one really knows for sure. Remember, do your research!

What if I do the calculations by hand? How hard could it be?

You doubled USD value, but if you saved the BTC you would have much more USD value now

You all ought to come over to the LiteCoin forums and read the Mining section, there's a bunch of noobs over there with less than 10 posts talking about how they want to spend thousands of dollars getting started in mining.  LOL. ;D

I made a nice profit of $7200 after PayPal fees by selling off my 205 LTC in the first week of December to a bunch of noobs who were all wallet and no brains.  I'm still mining on a smaller scale, varying between LTC, FTC, and DOGE.  Whichever is the most profitable at the moment on coinwarz.com , and I exchange them into LTC or BTC on cryptsy.

My only regret is that I didn't just buy a couple thousand LiteCoins in mid October, but at the time, it had been at $2 for months, and although I was hoping its price would rise, I had no reason to think it would go up by 20x in 6 weeks from then.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r3wau/mining_bitcoin_by_hand/

Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor....


The fun lies in the fact you can actually play BF4 and not think damn, while I'm not mining I'm losing $0.03.  If you made $26k by buying the coins you probably won't care about missing out on 0.000196 coins lost to BF4  ;D

As somebody who had 50GH/s of GPUs mining BTC offsite and having to drive 3x in one day for downtime - there's a lot to be said for sleeping soundly in your own bed and not restarting a rig.

Well.... Let miners be miners  ;D

You forgot this basic equation:

(Viability of mining) = (Value of bitcoin)/(Network difficulty)

People always seem to forget this.

Let me fix that for you:
(Viability of mining) = [(Value of bitcoin)/(Network difficulty)]/(acquisition cost of mining equipment)

Right now all the SHA256 ASIC manufacturers are price gouging (whether they intend to or not).  When it came to GPUs the acquisition cost was more reasonable (except the recent LTC runup).

So is it all a question of not making ROI on the mining equipment?
I am guessing that it's only more profitable to buy the coins (rather then mine them) if the value of the coin goes up.
If the coin value stays constant over the next couple of months (to pay for initial investment in mining equipment), would it not be better to buy mining equipment?

But I guess the point of the OP was that coin (most coins) will increase by large amounts this year, which makes sense that buying the coin itself is a better option.

Though investing is cryptocurrency (mining or buying coins) is still a risk, my thought has always been that by buying mining equipment, I can always sell it the equipment (if it all goes bust). If I buy coins and it all goes south, I've lost everything.

First off, anyone who is mining is doing so because, to some degree, they believe in Bitcoin. I want to accumulate as many bitcoin as possible, but I'm not comfortable nor do I have the time to trade currencies. Yes, I agree that mathematically speculating directly on the Bitcoin may be more profitable. Maybe. But, then again in depends on the time frame you're looking at as well as if/when you sell your Bitcoin. Also, it should be noted that the USD continues to decrease in value and will eventually be worth less than toilet paper because its so abbrasive

There is a much more simple way to look at it. First, who decides the value of  Bitcoin? Well, we do, actually because we pay what it's worth to us. That being said, I view my speculative bet on mining hardware as a very simple bet. If I had bought my Neptune with bitcoin, it would have cost me about 14 bitcoin. But I purchased with USD, so I'm already ahead of the game because I haven't spent any bitcoin, but I've acquired a method to create bitcoin.

So, as long as I'm able to mine more than 14 bitcoin I have succeeded. Oh yeah, and I still have the machine and depending on its performance I can sell it or continue mining into the sunset.

In the mining equipment preorder game escrow is a must. The only people in Bitcoin making money are the hardware manufacturers, and the people carrying all the risk and cost are the miners. The current practice is for manufacturers to take Bitcoin on preorders and when they miss their timelines, refund in USD or EUR.

I will never preorder (nor even order for that matter) any Bitcoin hardware except through a reliable escrow service which allows me to release funds only once I've received a machine which lives up to the specs and timelines which were guaranteed.

What hardware manufacturer accept escrow ? Please announce me when you see one  :)
I will give you a free tip : if you buy it with fiat, you have more chances to get ROI  ;)

A lot of these doom and gloom 'mining is the devil' approaches fail to take into consideration what is happening right now.  In the last two hours BTC has shed %20 of it's value...TWENTY PERCENT people!
For a retail investor who has say 5-10k to work with this is a nightmare.  Imagine two people who began their BTC investment today.  One guy bought 8k worth of hardware and started and the other one bought
7BTC.  Now of course no investment is judged by what happens in such a small time frame but that having been said...

Which one of those two people do you think is having a worse day?
Yes, I know there are plenty of days where it runs the exact opposite.  But even on those days the guy mining can watch his existing and new BTC go up too!

I am still really new here and learning but from what I have seen there is a negative bias towards mining that seems to have it's own agenda.
JMO.

Let's take your example for a moment and see where it goes.

So Andy goes out and buys a 2 TH/s miner from scamfast labs for April delivery.  $8000
Brian buys $8000 worth of bitcoin.  10 BTC.

Tomorrow Andy is broke and Brian has 10 BTC.  And it's going to stay that way for a long time.

Fast forward to April:
Brian has 10 BTC.  He might be happy, he might be sad depending on the exchange rate, but he still has 10 BTC.  And he could do whatever he wanted with it at any time.  If bitcoin hit $100k one day and he thought that was too high, he could cash in for $1M and walk away.

Andy still has nothing.  He checks bitcoincharts and sees that the network has crossed 100 Ph/s and is still climbing.  It's going to take 140 days to get to 10 BTC if difficulty stops now, and more like a year if there has been no price appreciation and growth starts slowing.  He better get hashing soon!  Now where is Andy's scamfast machine?  Better check the forums.  Ah, Joe from Scamfast Labs is promising shipment in a couple weeks.  Well that's 1 less bitcoin Andy will ever see, but it's not so bad, I guess, just 2 weeks.  But wait, why is this guy complaining that his January order hasn't shipped yet?  What does that mean for Andy's delivery date?

Brian still has 10 BTC.  Used in hand sytems are selling for 4 BTC / 2 Th/s.  Andy realizes he's a sucker.

To begin with I would like to say that without us "miners"...none of this shit would be possible.  Don't ever forget that the spirit of Bitcoin was that everyone mined at least a little bit.

Secondly, all the mining hardware I have ever sold has been for more than what I paid for it so the hardware is basically free.  Don't forget that a lot of low hashing hardware isn't purchased by people that want to make money right away...they just want to learn the ropes.

Go ahead and cite all the cases where you bought hardware for a price in Bitcoin and then sold it for a higher price in Bitcoin.

The only times that has been feasible has been with pre-order flips, in which case you weren't actually a miner.  Just a speculator in mining hardware.

That's fair but not exactly what I meant. I was referring to a situation where someone either begins mining or buying same day.

Does the mining game change at all if we're talking scrypt instead of SHA-256 coins?

Yes, you need to dump $10k for a machine that won't be available 3 months from now (if you're lucky) if you're after bitcoins (SHA-256).
I can walk into my local computer store and drop $10k in GPUs and MoBos and start mining scrypt coins today and convert to bitcoin.
Sure there's more work to get a tonne of GPUs working smoothly (never mind heat management), but all that aside, it seems a lot safer to go the scrypt way.

I'd like to propose an alternate theory on what happens to GPU prices / resale value if Litecoin prices do a lumpkin dive.

GPU miners will look on coinwarz.com, see what are the next most profitable Scrypt coins, and then they will look to see which exchanges are taking those coins and converting them into BTC or another coin they want.

Then the miners will point their GPU farms to some other Scrypt coin instead of LiteCoin.

So in conclusion, if Litecoin did crash out in value, I think some GPUs would go up for sale, but the majority of them would just mine some other Scrypt coin.

you can get 2 x 200 GH/s machines for 5K

they will mine 1BTC a week between them at current difficulty.

with increased difficulty you sould get ROI in 7 weeks.

Seems pretty good to me.

Can the speculators please stop trolling the Mining Boards? ;)

Where exactly do you see this trolling?

A lot of people PM'd me asking for advice on what miner to buy and if this contract or hosted mining is profitable blah blah blah.

People. Reread the original post. If you arent already neck deep into pro-level mining, dont even think of getting in now.

You will be outgunned and outplayed at every possible turn. Mining is at this point a Snipe Hunt or Fools Errand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipe_hunt

Nobody like bad news. Nobody likes hearing that their grand plans are actually a pipe dream.

Swallow your pride and save your money, unless you want to make a donation to mining manufacturers and Bitcoin network, which is surely appreciated.

"Bitcoin network, which is surely appreciated."  Thank you.

Some of us just like playing around with tech...helping out a cause while making a few satoshis on the side is just bonus.

If you are trying to mine for profit, then you should get out as soon as possible, since you are no different from the government idiots that think BitCoin is a "High Risk Investment Product with low ROI".
If you hope that bitcoin will eventually replace the current meaningless pieces of paper, then i take my hat off to you. Continue mining. Even if you have a very low hashrate, you are still contributing to the network.

That's all i'm saying.

How accurate are profitability calculators? According to all of the ones I've checked, profitability will go way down in about 5 months from now. It seems that the next three to four months are all that are left for mining in the black.

I want to jump in, but difficulty is not making an investment in hardware very attractive.

It's a risk you have to take. Do you believe that the 3 TH machines will be released on schedule, and are you slated to get one? Alternatively, do you have access to the latest 650 GH/s machines?
If you're not, I wouldn't bother mining BTC. - Look into alt-coins or arbitrage in the financial markets (ie, trade 1 crypto currency for another)

My personal estimate is that a 650 GH/s machine has about 14 BTC left in its life, so if you want to get one, bid appropriately.
disclaimer - I have a batch 1 KNC Neptune on order that I'm thinking about cancelling since the batch 2 comes out a month later, and if it follows KNC's historical info, it will probably be faster

It sounds like your local computer store has somehow managed to obtain more GPU stock than anywhere else on earth at the moment (unless you want to get gouged by Newegg, anyway).

weird...I just started mining 3 weeks ago and have nearly broke even.  I should see profits next week.  How is mining not profitable???

Thus far with the increase in value of the coins one can make money.

However this game is high risk and hopefully high reward.

Thanks for the info.

OP, I did some research on mining and I was pretty much ready to jump into it but reading your post has discouraged me (which kinda sucks because I thought I finally had a bright future). Of course I wouldn't get into BTC mining but I thought ALT coin mining still had some juice left in it.


I was thinking of building a $2,000 rig, with 3 - R9 290, Radeon graphics cards, which would hash at about 2,500 khash/s. It would mine about .6 LTC per day at current difficulty. If I mined Worldcoin, I would have around 3,600 coins after 3 months. Each coin is now worth about 40 cents.... But if Worldcoin increases in value to $3.00 per coin I would make a good profit


Another reason I wanted to mine is because I wouldn't have to worry about electricity (I have permission to leave the rig running in my office building).


So please tell me if my logic is flawed. I don't quite understand how fast difficulty rises and how that will change the amount of returns I can expect to get. As far as I was aware GPU mining for Scrypt coins can still be profitable for the average joe....... but am I underestimating how early ASIC for scrypt mining will be available, or how the rising difficulty is about to push GPU miners out of the game?

Dude, if you are feeling lucky go for it. Nobody can know what will happen, but people keep talking like they're able to tell you what the future holds. They don't. Do what you think it best, nothing else.

So no one knows if ASIC for scrypt mining is coming out soon? or if ASIC for scrypt will ruin mining for all other alts too? I'm only asking here because I don't know anything about mining

Agreed.  My case is probably not the norm.  And I am not making tons of cash, but a daily residual income that will surely add up to almost a mortgage payment each month.  I should also disclaim it will be about 4 full weeks of mining for my break even point, give or take a few days.

My initial investment was $1300 cash and yielded about 2.2Mhash, also disclaiming that I saved myself about $200 on hardware from existing parts I have collected over the years.

I initially was pool mining "the most profitable" coins and made a nice little chunk with doge, which definitely helped knock out some of my costs, but I also spent a day or two mining junk coins as well.  Since then I have switched to middlecoin as I find the btc payout handy, saves me from exchanging and messing with all of that.  This also makes my operation hands free, so I do absolutely nothing each day to earn money (your time is money imo, and if you spend hours upon hours "making money" you are really costing yourself the most important asset in life, time).

I have also found that sourcing hardware is a bit easier when you pay in btc over fiat these past few weeks as the mainstream market has dried up.  I have found ways to save 40% off (the old, non inflated prices) on hardware using btc and a little ingenuity.

I will also say that I am a computer guru, with decades of experience under my belt with hardware, software and the internet.  So configuring rock solid linux boxes to mine was easy for me.  I find things are much more stable on linux with cgminer rather than windows, and recommend anyone with a little computer knowledge to go the linux route.  There are plenty of guides out there to setting up a system from scratch to mine under linux and the stability you get over windows is priceless.  I run my miner in a screen and can attach to it from an ssh session at any time.  The machines run headless in my cold basement.  My breaker box is also near by for when/if I need to add more circuits down there, it will be a snap.

I will also say, the most important thing to my success so far with mining, is my research.  I spent many hours up front reading and understand all the different aspects of mining.  The difference between scrypt & sha-256.  The difference between mining software.  Why --scrypt not work on the latest version of cgminer.  And every other pitfall there is to getting up and running in the "Mining Game".  I still learn daily, and assume that trend will continue, so I try to keep an open mind.

SO what your saying is I should not mine SHA256 and just mine script coins sell em high then buy em low rinse repeat? Script mining is still very profitable.

I guess it depends on what hardware you can get access to and for how much.  Right now the big thing seems to be hardware availability and pricing to determine ones success in mining.

Look everyone...this is so much FUD.

At the end of the day there needs to be miners and they need to be distributed...centralized mining is not a solution.

With that being said, the reason why people mine is completely inconsequential since someone has to do it.

Nuff sed.

Buy hardware secondhand if possible because it will likely not be price gouged.  Everyone who gets this far who is still a newbie - please understand...ALL MINERS (SCRYPT/ASIC/SCRYPTJANE/BLAKE256) HAVE A COMMON INTEREST TO TELL YOU MINING IS NEVER PROFITABLE.  Miner's have an incentive to tell everyone that it wont work so that they can stave off difficulty increases for at least a little longer.  The idea is that as more people mine, the same amount of coins are released so as more people break into mining they all have to share from this same released cache of coins.

The OP has refused to tell you A) only buy in Fiat, B) once you've made how much you could have earned by just buying it, you now have essentially earned both your investment AND hardware that can continue to mine sha or scrypt. 

As BTC price increases, it also pushes out the mining profitability threshold.

If you followed people's advice last august about how mining isn't worth it because XYZ are coming online with a ton of additional hashpower - you were suckered into NOT buying hardware because 3/4th of XYZ still never got delivered - hashfast, cointerra, and bitmine coincraft.

OP - Just curious, what is your exact definition of "all pro, neck deep"???  100 GH?  1TH??? 

Also, you didn't mention the idea of "equilibrium" - By that I mean, eventually other profitable coins come around that are sha variants and the hashrate will chase profitability - if I thought I was ever mining at a loss, I'll be damn sure to switch to something that isnt.

Case and point - last month I spent a day on betacoin and gained .7 BTC that day instead of the expected .3 with my hardware - so yeap...the OP is absolutely correct, if an only if this was a perfect square world with consistent certainty.

OP should instead state - DONT BUY BTC GEAR with BTC UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN IT BREAKS EVEN IN 60 days or so - its too wildly variable to guess difficulty due to the late nature of the expected hash-rate that is being promised above - we've seen pics of HF so no doubt that's real, we've seen KNC deliver so no doubt they are going to deliver. 

It's profitable now, at least for the next 4+ months...after that, difficulty gets so high that your profit is in the negative.

As an example, check out this Mining Payout Schedule (lower right) for a 50 GH/s Butterfly Labs miner: http://thegenesisblock.com/mining/a/899aa50cdb

In May, profits are in the negative.

For kicks, on the left side, select any hardware you'd like...or punch in your own numbers, and see what the results will be in the profits column.

Regardless of how accurate this is, it shows the detrimental affect difficulty has on mining.

Not Detrimental - Necessary.  I like the fact that difficulty allows cryptocoins to stretch out to be mined for longer periods of time.  If all btcs were mined they would be likely  worthless - no one would bother mining and transactions wouldn't happen because the fees structure is designed to be an incentive when btc becomes mainstream and is much much more universally accepted like visa/mc/amex

The thing I find a problem with this is it's simply false. It's all about what you decide to do with the coinage that you mine. If you think profit isn't profit no matter the size of profit than you are dead wrong. For example if I said I would give you a free penny would you take it or think it's freaking one cent what good will it do me? Now take that penny of profit and 8 million people all giving you a free penny now those pennies add up. It's all about what you decide to do with the currency you gain from mining. If you want to invest into buying crypto currency because you think the price of it is going to go high at a certain point you have a much better shot at mining and saving the coins from mining it as long as you are mining above the cost of electricity because you are going to be getting more than your investment back and can continue to get a few. If you want to start a few business ventures it would be safe to mine a bit or have continual mining operation of profit to covers potential losses in the early goings of a business venture of crypto. So calling mining dead is really the same thing as saying that crypto currency is dying out. How is it worth anything to begin with? You need mining to keep it active as they have to complete the answer of the code for every transaction of that particular crypto coin. So the more any currency is used the more chances if you are mining that currency to complete that transaction and score a few coins. So if you don't think mining is a sound investment than it would be the same as saying the entire system is a bad idea. You have to know that it isn't dead and I'll prove it. You said you don't care if you are losing money because you care about the technology and you would rather lose money than let certain companies or pool get it. If that's true than you are either A) stupid or B) lying. If you have a family owned pizza parlor in small town but some big conglomerate pizza company comes in and making a pizza at $3.12 when it takes $3.11 to make a pizza at the cost of toppings, oven, and employee so you drop your price to $3.10 and lose money everytime someone orders something because you are going to show them by going broke? You have a dog but there is a new landlord and in order to keep your dog you have to pay an extra $500 a month and let's say only have an additional $300 a month with your current expenses which is $200 less and you checked and there are no additional places. Are you going to go in debt $200 every month until your kicked out or going to find a good home for your dog? You're going to find a good home right? Pizza scenario you're going to hope the community loves you and spends a bit more or close up shop before forced to file bankruptcy right? So which is it do you know there is value there and lying about the there not being value there or are you stupid and going to lose money knowing you are losing it?

Killua - you talk too much.  Learn to paragraph!

If there were no coins to mine and no profit to gain, no one would let their computers run to "secure the network" with no profit to be made.  Coins would then die out.  Then onto new coins with more profits to be made!

I wish I'd read this before I bought two miners yesterday.

But alas, I'm $2100 poorer and 76Gh/s quicker. The mining calculator I was using suggests I should break even within 3 months. After that I will still own two miners which can be used for other SHA-256 currencies or simply be sold on.

This is a good idea, and it's pretty much the same recipe I plan to follow.

These dumb calculators do no predict the future. Say goodbye to your money.

But remember, mining is good for the network even if you don't make any profit yourself so keep on mining.

From what I can tell, this calc is not much different than any other (but, I agree that it is a good one). I think people overemphasize the importance of these calculations. I understand that mining is highly competitive, and it seems to me like a lot of people try to discourage people from entering the mining game. I think that's healthy and good for people to show concern for others well being, but it does seem like people are pushing people away for a multitude of reasons. I believe greed is one of the driving factors for some, so it's good to be aware of this.

Also, in regard to those calculations: Why should it be that they are treated with so much importance? They're only a glimpse at what might transpire. There are many, many factors which can, and certainly will, change as things develop. The most important of these factors, in my opinion, is how the individual conducts their mining.

Let me give you an example:

Case A is a person who has invested borrowed money, and wishes to recover that "investment" (speculation, gamble) ASAP.
this person will more likely make emotional decisions which do not create an advantage. They'll likely sell their Bitcoin immediately, ensuring they won't take advantage of increasing value. In these cases, I believe it will be difficult for those people to get positive ROI.

Case B is a person who has speculated with their own money for which they have either no, or a very long, time frame for recovery. These people are able to balance risk better as well as HODL, or speculate, as value changes ensuring a better return.

Case C is a person who has no time frame for ROI. This is, I believe, the best situation to be in. They can sit on their bitcoin for 5 years if they want for when they're worth 50k USD, or more! Or less... but these individuals are in the mining game as a hobby, not an investment, but will actually have the best possibility to make some money.

Also, don't forget that, as long as SHA256 mining is alive, these ASIC rigs will retain or increase in value. Once profitability is too low, there is a healthy aftermarket for them.

Blah blah blah, over and over with these speculations and crystal ball forecasts.  You may end up being right, but nobody knows.

Who are you arguing with, anyway? I love how you say things like , "in fact" or "The actual blah will probably , blah blah" Do you read what you're writing? State your thesis and be done with, jesus. We get it, you believe something will be a certain way. Great. We've all taken note of your position, the forums have archived your contributions.

We've already established that everything is speculation, and I can't see anything new being added to the discussion.

You see a sad situation, I see enormous potential for the grand scale of of participation that is happening now.

Who are you shilling for anyway?  The big centralized mining shops?  Just so you know they are not the answer.

So why else are you badmouthing miners then?  Because your just looking for someone to &%^$ on?  Well move on we have had enough of this FUD already.

If your going to hate on miners at least go do it in the speculation subforum or something...I be there are a ton of people over there who would love to hear what you have to say.

So if there are no more miners then who will support the network? What will happen to bitcoin. I got 10.7GH/s that will always be mining till the end.

So if I mine 1 Worldcoin every 20 minutes now and 2 years from now WCD is sitting at $50 man what a bunch of wasted time and money.

Its wrong to try and convince people to stop mining in the mining forum...how about that.

Hi guys ^____^


Soo... is it still worth getting mining gear to mine WDC? Or is GPU scrypt mining about to be dead? Pleas respond

Not sure...all depends if you like mining or not.

I mean... I haven't done it before, but I like the idea of "generating" money

If you don't like the idea of mining then your probably not going to like it however the more miners there are the better it is for network.

If you want to give ASIC mining a try Antminer SI's are a good bet right now...they have a decent price, are well built, have a scalable setup and only sold on an "in hand" basis.

If you want to give GPU mining a try most motherboards have 3 x PSI-e slots of some kind...the Radeon R7 280X cards seem to be the most popular right now.  Be prepared to grapple with GPU cooling issues GPU mining however.  Actually, GPU's can be just as hard to get now as ASICs.

Well, I do like the idea of mining and I think I can learn a lot form it (about computers and the mining process). I don't want to get into ASIC mining because then I would just be mining bitcoin while competing with the big dogs, and not be able to mine LTC and the other scrypt-based alt coins (right?).

I'm afraid of investing in the mining gear for GPU mining because of ASIC developments for scrypt mining and the increasing difficulty.... I feel like I'm too late and if I start GPU mining now I'll be out of the game in 2 months.

I also saw this link on Reddit and if this is true it looks like ASIC USB miners for LTC that does 3.6 MH/s is in the horizon:
http://www.cybtc.com/thread-4792-1-1.html



Thoughts?

I think people that like the idea of mining don't really care much about whats on the horizon they just jump in and start doing it.

I personally like all forms of mining and am thinking of getting back into CPU mining with one of the lesser known cryptos.

I know what you mean, but I don't have the financial luxury to buy a mining rig as a hobby... that is why I'm concerned about at least breaking even, even if I don't profit.

Back when Bitfury and KNCMiner ship the first batch of units, many had reservations concerning possible return on investment.

The reality that btc would rise over its previous ATH had been discussed. However no one not even I predicted that BTC would be trading at over $1000 USD a few month's later.

Other ways to secure btc are available.

Mining is a high risk venture. It can be rewarding in many ways.

I have been providing a mining comparison spreadsheet to help new adopters become familiarized with the aspects of what network difficulty can do on projected returns.

Awareness of past hardware performance help people understand how speculative predicting future network speeds can be.

Here is a link. Create a copy and key in your own values if you wish.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmeuPljmUNHCdEpqX2RmMDFwemJyLURVUWFtZ3J3aGc&usp=docslist_api

Worldcoin is scrypt. You won't be able to use your 10gh/s miner on that.

2014 and im still making money :)

Cheers!

I don't. My strategy is much different. I basically go to friends houses and download miners on their computers, set up CG file on desktop and say "can you double click this every once in a while and let it run for me?"

So far I have an asus 7790, asus 7970, and 4 r9 280xs, and a couple nickel dime cards all mining WDC. It also helps that im the one that built most of these rigs. Can get about 1 coin ever 20 mins with everything running. Its a much better strategy than spending 1000s of dollars on rigs for myself, and if I get rich so do they, winwin.

Mining Bitcoin would most likely not be profitable with these machines but other alts will be. The big dudes with mass TH/s will stick to Bitcoin and the little dudes 100Gh/s - 4Th/s will move to other alts.

I have been mining with ASICs since beginning of November, and I cant complain. It is true that every second week, profitability takes a hit, however it still needs to take a lot of hits for profitability to become 0.

Right now a KNC Jupiter (https://www.kncminer.com/) makes only 0.15 BTC per day. I am sure in a month, it will be half of that. Still, 0.15 BTC per day means that I will pocket in the coming 2 weeks US$ 1600. (electricity for 2 weeks is less than $50).

If the difficulty rise continues at these crazy rates of 20% every 2 weeks (difficulty increases every 2 weeks, then that is the only valid period for BTC calculations), that means that I will make the next 2 week periods: $ 1250, $1000, 800, 600, 480, 380, 290, 220, 170, 130, 90, 60, 40, 30, 16, 5, -4, -12, -17, ...

So I would still be able to get about $5000 assuming the difficulty increases exponentially forever.


Luckily, that will not be the case. Because for every time profitability goes to half, it means that hashing power needs to double. If right now there would be 50 000 ASIC computers, next month it will need to be 100 000. Next month 200 000, then 400 000, 800 000, 1 600 000, etc.

Any business putting lots of money, they can not do that unless they can recover the investment within a year, and get an acceptable income for the coming years. Very soon that business logic will break (profits low enough to scare the big money), then network hashing power will stabilize.

Notice that if I stop mining because it is not profitable, then 90% of the network hashing power will also be in the exactly same situation, and they will also stop mining. Then the theory that hashing power will keep increasing is flawed. Hashing power is increasing right now, but it is very short sighted to think that it will keep doing that forever.

Besides mining with Jupiters, I am also waiting for few Neptunes. And I do think that I will end this 2014 with more money than what I paid for the Neptunes. (https://sites.google.com/site/kncrebates/)

So, just a different approach to analyze the bitcoin mining profitability for 2014-2017.

You can profit from mining, but the key is to invest into enough Gh/s and carefully watch your return on investment.  However, you need to reinvest into more mining equipment as difficulty rises while keeping an eye on the price of bitcoin. At the same time, you need to carefully invest into the next generation of mining equipment.  The large mining farms can't afford to reinvest into 3rd generation mining equipment because they're still trying to pay for the return on the 1st or 2nd gen equipment.  I was talking with a corporate farm owner that had invested 500k into 1st gen mining equipment which only did double digit Gh/s, now they're stuck and can't afford to get the single digit Th/s due in 2014.

To sum up, a miner can profit but I would say the entry point now is $6k - $12k in early 2014, whereas before $1k could get you mining at a profit in early 2013.  That being said, mining is very high risk and requires a lot of thought and constant calculation to maintain a positive ROI. 

I started mining a few months ago with a few block erupters. Quickly realised I was better off mining litecoin so sold the erupters for 4 times what I paid and bought a couple GPUs. By this point I was in profit and continue to increase that profit by mining altcoins and exchanging them for bitcoin. Whether these altcoins will last is irrelevant because they are worth money now, so who cares if they will be here in a few months, I sure don't. I wanted to mine because I didn't like uploading my passport and shit to Russian websites. I'm new to cryptos but I learnt early on that bitcoin mining was pointless, so switched to scrypt. Perhaps scrypt won't be worth a damn soon too but at least I had fun and made a small amount of money along the way.

This makes absolutely no sense, unless the "500k in 1st gen mining equipment" happens to have been block erupters purchased in the past 2 months @ $100/ea.

There's always eBay... ;)

That KNC Neptune ad has SCAM written all over it.  Some lines in the ad :

"We reserve the right to increase the hashing speed".  Like anyone will pitch a bitch about getting more speed.  That sentence is there purely to excite the naive Bitcoin mining noob into thinking he needs to buy NOW and get the best deal.

"Limited batch of 1200".  Wow, they really think we are morons.  Well, anyone buying their first ASIC at this point is, as far as I'm concerned.  What is KNC going to do if that batch of 1200 Neptunes sells out?  Say "No, we don't want to make any more money off the naive noobs just getting started in Bitcoin", and refuse to sell more of them?

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- DO NOT BUY ANY ASICS!!!! GPU mine Scrypt coins if you want to make money! :o

Asic hardware for scrypt is expected to become available some time this year.

Because of this investing in new gpu based hardware has become as risky.

The "ASICS" are mostly scams/lies and even the ones that might be true are barely better than GPUs so I wouldn't worry about that in the slightest. I predict that if anyone will make a scrypt ASIC it will be AMD and even then graphics cards can still be used for gaming so there is no real way to lose out.

How about an asic with a port for use as a gpu?

May I ask what pool(s) are you using?

Also what equipment?

About the increasing hashing speed, it might be misleading, however they did increase the hashing speed when delivering the ASIC Jupiter (they offered 450GHps and delivered 550 GHps). Then I do hope they will deliver some 20% more with the Neptune also.

About the Limited batch, it is just how many units they can put in the market in 1 month. Right now they are selling the 3rd group of 1200 units. Once they sell out, they will start with another 1200 units batch for the next month. If they were able to put in the market 5000 units per month, they will very likely be selling monthly batches of 5000 units.

I don't think KNC is scam (I am already using few Jupiters), what I am not 100% sure is how profitable those Neptunes will be. But in bitcoin everything is a risk.
I don't have an opinion yet about Scrypt coins profitability, but I am interested so I will be checking that out.

I just mine solo with my 8GH/S. I use it as lottery ticket=)
Ans yes, i checked maths, i have  much better odds on winning the whole block  then winning in lottery.

Here in germany, if I will play 6of49 Lottery twice a  week for  about 20 Euros, i will spend 960 Euro total for tickets.  My average win will be around 530 Euro, so i will  even lose money on the long run (what a surprise ::)).

With my 8GH/S   for 300 Euros I have  3% chance to find a block in one year.
OK, lets take in account the difficulty will increase(even if i think that it will not grow exponentially  forever, but rather will stabilize  very soon), but  even so i have better odds while mining solo;)

While that may be true, theoretically, in this case Im truly trying to do the community a service because of the number of newcomers who I see about to get burned, who maybe cant afford it, and I dont think thats good for Bitcoin. People need to have realistic expectations. This isnt some Don Lapre late night infomercial. Go look at a BFL ad if you want that, and marvel at the uncanny resemblance between Don and Josh Zerlan.

This is a public service announcement.

My interest personally in the mining game is not primarily financial. The amount I can or will mine in a month now is maybe .1% of my coins. Point one. I mine now for the love of the game.

I wanted this discussion to move in another direction - directing people towards avenues where there are healthy profits to be made. I understand its the mining forum, so the discussion has stayed focused on mining, and if thats what you all would like to discuss, Im happy to. I see a lot of people talking about Alt-coin mining, so lets talk about that.

The alt-coin mining forecast has moved from dark and stormy (Aug-Sept) to very sunny (Nov-Dec) back to overcast again. The winds change quickly in the mining game. When Litecoin almost hit $50, I knew there was going to be a tidal wave of GPU orders, as well as a correction in the market. Anyone who has followed mining for some time (and Im a newbie compared to many on here) will attest to this. There were periods, 2-3 years ago when BTC mining was no longer profitable and many bigtime GPU-farm miners dropped out entirely because they could not make ROI (many pro miners only hold onto a tiny % of the total coins they mine, preferring to convert most into fiat immediately). Yes, there was a time when BTC difficulty went down, as far away as that seems now, yes it did really happen (and may again in the future). But I digress...

I had actually dropped out of LTC mining for a while in Sept because I just moved to a nice new place and didnt want to spoil it with PCs all over the place (at this time, I had around 18 cards across 6 rigs). I was content to just watch the BTC-e ticker and do a little day trading. I hadnt sold off my rigs, mostly just due to laziness, they were just still all boxed up from the move. Then as autumn progressed LTC went on a bit of a heater, and when it hit its all time high ($5) I couldnt resist and started firing up rigs. The weather was cooling off and if I just set up a few of them, it would be fairly discreet. AMD had released its r9 series, and being an avid gamer, I always like to try the latest cards and I quickly realized that the 280x was a very nice mining card that while a bit finnicky to tweak, could be undervolted for awesome efficiency. I ordered 4 more and picked up an old mobo, CPU, RAM and PS from a friend who was liquidating his rigs. I set up just a few rigs initially, and then, all of them. Thats the mining bug. Its like a sickness. Oh well. I was - and still am - back in the game.

But my return to GPU-mining is probably going to be short lived. Many of my cards are older 6950s, and they are starting to have the usual issue - dying fan. I think I even finally killed one of my cards which would be the first time ever for me (Im going to try baking it, which can heal the micro-cracks). The tidal wave of GPUs has hit, and boy did it hit hard. I started LTC mining heavily when the difficulty was 17. Seventeen. The difficulty now is 4000, and the price is stuck in the $23-24 range (oh the humanity! actually, Im thrilled with anything over $10). I have very little to gain in terms of adding to my stash. I recently had the chance to buy a whole bunch of new-in-box 280x and 7970s for $300 each, which judging from Newegg is a now great deal (lol cause used 7970s were ~$200 on ebay in August) but decided to pass. Why? Two reasons:

1) I looked at the numbers and its marginal. 280x will generate around $100/month in LTC, or roughly 5 LTC. This number will diminish rapidly given how many GPUs are coming online every day. When mining hardware has a ROI of 4 months or so, Im basically indifferent to mining or buying the coins, financially speaking, and anyone who has been in the game for a while will tell you that buying is a hell of lot less work and stress than mining - not to mention the heat and noise if you mine at home. 2) That heat right now is probably saving me $500/month on gas to heat my place, so its much easier to justify. But come April, Im going to shut the whole thing down and sell off all my rigs. The writing is on the wall and I simply cant and dont want to compete with these 100mh datacenter rigs. In 2014, its either go pro or go home. While I sincerely respect the people who have chosen to go fulltime pro, thats not something that interests me at this time. I have other commitments and plans for 2014.

Im optimistic that I will eventually receive my Black Arrow and Alpha Tech ASICs, but if I dont I might actually breathe a sigh of relief. If you have ever had to dip out of a night on the town with your friends because one of your rigs went down and the OCD part of you cant enjoy the evening because of it, you will probably understand. Mining is probably not the most psychologically healthy or mentally stimulating enterprise. Its a grind.

To the guy who is solo mining BTC with 8mh, thats the fucking spirit dude. People can shove their ROI up their ass (sorry, but Ive had a few drinks). I salute you and other independent miners who support the Bitcoin network through thick and through thin and help support decentralization. You just reminded me to setup a full qt node on an extra machine I have. You embody the spirit of Bitcoin, and Im quite sure that somewhere, somehow, Satoshi is thinking of you and smiling.

http://v030o.popscreen.com/V2pQcWNjVnNQMjgx_o_josh-zerlan-butterfly-labs-interview-part-2-raw-video-.jpg

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Uploads/Graphics/090/10/090-1004024954-Don-lapre.jpg

Started mining 2 weeks before 2014...still making money, still recouped my costs.

While I think this thread is complete garbage for the most part, I will agree that investing in anything without prior knowledge of its workings is silly and generally leads to failure.  That being said, it is completely possible and still very easy as of this moment to make money..

2 months from now??  well, we will have to see then

Damn it you guise I would have started mining last week but this thread convinced me not to.... I could have mined LTC and Dog coin and now Dog coin just exploded in price!

Really? You're that easily influenced? Dude, don't blame us. Its your job to make good decisions, not ours.

I was just kidding, I'm still gonna do it

Oh yeah, the #1 problem of text communications: the lack of inflection. Nice one, very nice one. ;)

I don't get it...so since OP decided he doesn't want to mine anymore because of the stress, heat, noise, "the grind", adding hash power to keep up with the difficulty and his self-admitted OCD that won't let him enjoy a night out if one of his rigs goes down, he's doing a public service by discouraging anyone else from mining? I respect that OP has decided mining is not for him. I also agree that there is a huge potential market for retailers and service providers that accept Bitcoin. On the other hand, not everyone finds mining to be a high stress "chore" that keeps you from enjoying life. Some do this as a hobby in their spare time for personal enjoyment. Others make it into a business.

Standard disclaimer: Don't invest anything you can't afford to lose and always be well informed about any investments you decide to make.

This is what people are referring to when they say, "don't invest anything you can't afford to lose". Mining is a very high risk investment. If you can't imagine the money you spent on a mining rig gone forever, please do not invest that money.

I'm a techie and a gamer so I have spent all kinds of money on all kinds of stuff just to tinker with it and never got a penny back from it.

With mining I get the best of both worlds...tinker around with cool gadgets and play this mining game and get a few satoshis on the side.

I know its hard to believe for some people but I look at all this stuff as fun and in all honesty even if BTC crashed to zero tomorrow I would continue mining until long after the body was declared dead...just to make sure.

My 3 GPU mining rig has earned 8 LTC since this thread started.

No, S4VV4S, you may not ask about my mining pools.  You're a 10 post noob.  Come back to me and ask when you have 100+ posts, a few Mhash or more worth of Scrypt mining gear or a few Ghash of SHA-256 gear, and can run your gear on your own.

Maybe people dont agree with your original post.  To be honest, you seem to have an agenda of some sort.  Its 3am so i am too tired to speculate on what it is.  But its probably something annoying.  You are utterly ignoring the glaring flaw in your logic.   You could've preordered a KNCMiner 3,000 Gh/s for $9999 in December, probably receive it Feb 15, and believe me, not only will you pay the thing back in a matter of a few days, but you'll be sitting on some very nice profits. Sure, its not 100 BTC a week.  But 5-7 BTC a week is going to be a very happy day when BTC hits $10,000.  So i honestly have no idea what you are going on about.   The $10,000 units are getting more and more powerful.  They have to, or they couldn't sell them.

The ONLY point at which consumer mining is over, is when the hardware *legitimately* starts costing $25,000+ to get the most basic coin return.   BFL had a 500 listed for $24,000 I think several months ago.  Obviously way overpriced if KNC offers a 3,000 for $10,000.  I am waiting to see what the next KNCMiner preorder is going to be.  In order for it to be worth selling, its going to be significantly more than 3,000... and as a result you'll get a profitable mining machine for the same price.

--------------
You also rejected someones comment that alt coin mining can work.  That is utter hogwash as well.  I have a pithy 8 GPU system pushing 5600 MH/s and with DOGECOIN currently at 230 satoshi, I am generating roughly $95.00 per day, which means I will generate a bitcoin from it in 8.7 days.   And do you know how much I spent to get set up?  About $4,000.  

So with $4,000 you can mine alt coins and generate 4 Bitcoins a month.  Get another 4 GPU's, (total of 12) for another $2,000 and make that 6 BTC per month.  Assuming DOGE stays high.  Even when it was low I was doing 1-2 BTC per month.   Mining LTC was giving me 1.4 LTC per day.  With LTC @ $24, thats 1.3 BTC per month.   With a crappy 8 GPU system.  Worst case scenario.  So you're wrong.   Its still possible to mine Bitcoin.  And if 1 BTC is worth $10,000 soon (and it will be), then even 1.3 BTC per month is a beautiful thing.

-B-

Whatever man.

God bless you!

You have been most helpful....

EDIT: BTW I already have a few hundreds GHs worth of gear, but I am not coming back to ask you about anything. I don't need to. I was just curious.

You are completely talking out of your ass.  A KNC Neptune order from November will be lucky to take delivery in July.  They haven't even completed the design phase yet.  The fools who funded KNC's R&D for that project will be lucky to get to break-even in 2 years.

And Dogecoin?  Making profits from scam coins is picking up nickels ahead of a steam roller.  Somebody holds the bag and loses everything.

SEE THE WEBSITE: http://btcinfo.co.nf

Hey,

I've set up some numbers about Bitcoin, as you can see below. These numbers rely on the fact that there is 25 TH/sec equipment for mining (!!) and there's a growth in difficulty of 20% every 12 days (estimated on the historical facts - The previous/historical facts of bitcoin (source: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty) are shown below my own generated numbers). Please keep in mind that the growth may vary because many ASICS are shipping. Time has been calculated with the bitcoin-calculator of wolframalpha.com

So, if you're into mining right now and have some decent equipment, you can make some nice "money" for a few upcoming months.
It will probably end in july, then the difficulty will go up too much to make it pretty profitable.

The point is, if some guys have made some pre-orders of some ASIC of 500 GH/sec or like 2 TH/sec, they probably get it delivered in june/july and won't make any profit anymore because their hardware is kinda obsolete. ASIC manufacturers should come up (read: Really FAST) with new hardware to make mining profitable in the future, as it will take more than three months to mine a single block in the end of august with 25 TH/sec.

Note: If you're a miner with 100 GH/sec or sth like that, then please keep in mind that I'm talking about numbers of 25 TH/sec. Please relate that to the hours / days given below (july will take about 55 days with 25 TH/sec, that's 1375 days with 1000 GH/sec, which is almost 4 years .. just for one block).

For those guys who want to see some graphics, go to: http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

** I'm not saying that BTC is crap, it's just that the industry needs to improve mining hardware in the future to make it profitable for miners **

SEE THE WEBSITE: http://btcinfo.co.nf

1. Date
2. TH/sec
3. Difficulty
4. Growth in %
5. Growth in numbers
6. Hours for a block
7. Days for a block

1              2       3                      4       5                      6         7

23-1-2014    25    1.789.546.951   0%   0                   85,4      3,6
4-2-2014   25   2.150.113.338   20%   357.909.390   102,6      4,3
16-2-2014   25   2.580.136.006   20%   430.022.668   123,1      5,1
28-2-2014    25   3.096.163.207   20%   516.027.201   147,8      6,2
12-3-2014   25   3.715.395.848   20%   619.232.641   177,3      7,4
24-3-2014   25   4.458.475.018   20%   743.079.170   212,8      8,9
5-4-2014   25   5.350.170.021   20%   891.695.004   255,3      10,6
17-4-2014    25   6.420.204.025   20%   1.070.034.004   306,4      12,8
29-4-2014   25   7.704.244.831   20%   1.284.040.805   367,7      15,3
11-5-2014   25   9.245.093.797   20%   1.540.848.966   441,2      18,4
23-5-2014    25   11.094.112.556   20%   1.849.018.759   529,4      22,1
4-6-2014   25   13.312.935.067   20%   2.218.822.511   635,3      26,5
16-6-2014  25   15.975.522.081   20%   2.662.587.013   762,4      31,8
28-6-2014   25   19.170.626.497   20%   3.195.104.416   914,9      38,1
10-7-2014   25   23.004.751.796   20%   3.834.125.299   1098      45,8
22-7-2014   25   27.605.702.155   20%   4.600.950.359   1317      54,9
3-8-2014    25   33.126.842.586   20%   5.521.140.431   1581      65,9
15-8-2014   25   39.752.211.104   20%   6.625.368.517   1897      79,0
27-8-2014    25   47.702.653.324   20%   7.950.442.221   2276      94,8
8-9-2014   25   57.243.183.989   20%   9.540.530.665   2732      113,8
20-9-2014   25   68.691.820.787   20%   11.448.636.798   3728      155,3
2-10-2014    25   82.430.184.945   20%   13.738.364.157   3934      163,9
14-10-2014   25   98.916.221.933   20%   16.486.036.989   4720      196,7
26-10-2014    25   118.699.466.320   20%   19.783.244.387   5665      236,0
7-11-2014   25   142.439.359.584   20%   23.739.893.264   6797      283,2
19-11-2014 25   170.927.231.501   20%   28.487.871.917   8157      339,9
1-12-2014   25   205.112.677.801   20%   34.185.446.300   9788      407,8
13-12-2014    25   246.135.213.361   20%   41.022.535.560   11746   489,4
25-12-2014    25   295.362.256.034   20%   49.227.042.672   14095   587,3
6-1-2014   25    354.434.707.240   20%   59.072.451.207   16914   704,8
18-1-2015   25   425.321.648.688   20%   70.886.941.448   20297   845,7
30-1-2015    25   510.385.978.426   20%   85.064.329.738   24357   1014,9

Historical overview of bitcoin:
(source: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)

1. Date
2. Difficulty
3. Change
4. Hash Rate

1                       2                      3               4
Jan 13 2014   1,789,546,951   26.16%   12,810,076 GH/s
Jan 02 2014   1,418,481,395   20.12%   10,153,885 GH/s
Dec 21 2013    1,180,923,195   30.01%   8,453,378 GH/s
Dec 10 2013   908,350,862   28.41%   6,502,229 GH/s
Nov 29 2013    707,408,283   16.07%   5,063,826 GH/s
Nov 17 2013   609,482,680   19.29%   4,362,847 GH/s
Nov 05 2013    510,929,738   30.70%   3,657,378 GH/s
Oct 26 2013   390,928,788   46.02%   2,798,377 GH/s
Oct 16 2013   267,731,249   41.45%   1,916,495 GH/s
Oct 06 2013   189,281,249   27.19%   1,354,928 GH/s
Sep 25 2013    148,819,200   32.13%   1,065,289 GH/s
Sep 14 2013   112,628,549   29.56%   806,227 GH/s
Sep 04 2013    86,933,018           32.22%   622,291 GH/s
Aug 24 2013    65,750,060           29.40%   470,657 GH/s
Aug 13 2013    50,810,339           35.88%   363,715 GH/s
Aug 03 2013   37,392,766           19.63%   267,668 GH/s
Jul 22 2013           31,256,961           19.47%   223,746 GH/s
Jul 11 2013           26,162,876           22.63%   187,281 GH/s
Jun 29 2013   21,335,329           10.32%   152,724 GH/s
Jun 16 2013    19,339,258           23.92%   138,436 GH/s
Jun 05 2013   15,605,633           28.41%   111,709 GH/s
May 25 2013    12,153,412           8.64%   86,998 GH/s
May 12 2013   11,187,257           11.03%   80,082 GH/s
Apr 30 2013    10,076,293           12.28%   72,129 GH/s
Apr 17 2013   8,974,296           16.96%   64,241 GH/s
Apr 05 2013    7,673,000           14.59%   54,925 GH/s
Mar 24 2013   6,695,826           38.13%   47,931 GH/s
Mar 14 2013    4,847,647           10.98%   34,701 GH/s
Mar 01 2013   4,367,876           19.63%   31,266 GH/s
Feb 18 2013   3,651,012           11.47%   26,135 GH/s
Feb 05 2013    3,275,465           10.33%   23,447 GH/s
Jan 23 2013   2,968,775           -8.64%   21,251 GH/s
Jan 08 2013   3,249,550           9.06%   23,261 GH/s
Dec 26 2012   2,979,637           -11.59%   21,329 GH/s
Dec 10 2012   3,370,182           -2.00%   24,125 GH/s
Nov 26 2012   3,438,909            2.08%   24,617 GH/s
Nov 12 2012   3,368,767           1.95%   24,115 GH/s
Oct 30 2012   3,304,356           7.55%   23,654 GH/s
Oct 16 2012   3,072,322           0.58%   21,993 GH/s
Oct 03 2012   3,054,628           6.65%   21,866 GH/s
Sep 19 2012   2,864,141           6.31%   20,502 GH/s
Sep 06 2012   2,694,048          10.38%   19,285 GH/s
Aug 25 2012   2,440,643          11.40%   17,471 GH/s
Aug 12 2012   2,190,866           7.57%   15,683 GH/s
Jul 30 2012           2,036,671           9.12%   14,579 GH/s
Jul 17 2012           1,866,391           6.56%   13,360 GH/s
Jul 04 2012           1,751,455           1.44%   12,537 GH/s
Jun 20 2012   1,726,567           9.06%   12,359 GH/s
Jun 07 2012   1,583,178          -0.50%   11,333 GH/s

Difficulty will be leveling out very soon.

I'm glad I ignored the naysayers in this forum that said you'd never ROI in the mining game.  The difficulty will be too high.  All the high end miners will flood the network.  Just Buy and HODL.

Blah Blah Blah.  They won't flood the network, more like trickle slowly in batches.  The difficulty jumps aren't 30%, more like 18-20% increases.

By every calculator (Genesis Block, Bitcoinwisdom, BTCInvest, etc) I will ROI by May or so.

It's all about doing your own research, finding the best bang for your buck, and only ordering equipment "In Hand".

Thank you Bitmaintech, for proving there is hope in being a home miner.   :)

nice post, thank you.

I would like to know what folks think about mining via pools like CEX.IO for BTC or Pool-X.eu for LTC. I believe its profitable trading in a pool.  Please let me know your thoughts.  Thanks

I had been considering for some time to buy mining hardware and mine myself. But looking at the numbers it just didn't make sense to buy my own hardware as the returns weren't viable and the new generation machines were all on a delivery promise in the future which based on difficulty increases made pre ordering a suspect way to go. The only viable option I saw was getting Cointerra early batches of the 28nm machines (byearly I mean Feb not May).

So just recently I bought 2 BTC worth of GH at CEX.IO. It got me 84GH of immediate mining and based on past few days yielding around 0.0174 per day = $11.50 per day or $300+ per month (based on $1BTC = $660 USD).

Benefits for me are I can sell my GH at any moment (so won't be stuck with old mining kit or try to sell it on EBAY). I can add to the GH at any moment (if I want to reinvest profit or add more as difficulty increases). There is also profit potential if the GH to BTC exchange rate goes up (which it has since I bought).

I have never been "stuck" with mining kit.  Have always sold it on e-bay for at least what I paid for it.

I agree that nowadays buying bitcoinc is much better than mining for the beginners as there are many big companies who have huge budgets and this is advantage over individual miner.

There is so few miners around (the good ones, 28nm asics) that if you get your hands in one, you can mine for some time and resell it for the same you paid for it.

I have been mining with asics since october (KNC (https://www.kncminer.com/?)) and every time I bought a miner, I have got ROI within 1 month.
It is true that difficulty is going up fast (same argument since the last 6 months), and that this 2014 will be less profitable than 2013 for miners.
Still, mining equipment is profitable. Difficulty can not just double every 2 months. Every time difficulty doubles, it means that there is twice as much equipment mining. If there is now 100 000 bitcoin miners, for difficulty to double, there needs to be 200 000 miners in few months. And for it to double again, there needs to be 400 000 miners. Then 800 000 and then 1 600 000, and so on.

So we will reach the plateau where people can not buy mining equipment because ROI is too low to make it a good business idea to get into bitcoin mining. Then network difficulty will be flat for the next few years. If at that point you have miners which have already paid for themselves, you will have extra monthly income for long time, without seing the reduction you see now due to more people getting into mining.

I have bought 6  20nm Neptunes (to be delivered within 1st half 2014 (https://www.kncminer.com/products/neptune-second-batch?), which I plan to mine for at least 2-3 years. Reach ROI within 5 months, and have those as a constant income until 2016-2017 when the 4 th generation asics (14nm) make the 3rd generation asics (20nm) obsolete.

If only we could go back and look at historic data for when something similar has happened once or twice and base our math on that, but no no ASIC is different and this time next year there will be a global energy crisis due to BTC mining  ::) Within this decade the continents will start sinking due to the mile thick layers of e-waste generated from this exponential growth in mining power.

As long as the value of Bitcoin stays around where it is difficulty will level out.

Even if Bitcoin does keep going up in value and people go ape-shit buying miners, technological limitations will force difficulty to level out.

Difficulty WILL level out one day...there is no way around it.

… says the guy who runs a gambling website. :)

In other words, listen up n00bs, the man knows what he's talking about.

Mining will remain an interesting market for some time if your lazy you can move the hash elsewhere as well

most of my antminers have actually broken even at this point, basically any hardware purchsed >3 months ago in fact has

Totally agree with you. Mining is a hobby that also give you an opportunity to earn money - that' cool