Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

no I'm not another newbie whos thinking to get rich by mining.
I know that mining is not profitable at all due to rising difficulty caused by "mining-noobs", losing a lot of their money.

In fact I think theres acutally blowing up some kind of mining bubble. When people realise they make no profit and sell all there mining hardware the bubble could explode and rise the btc prise down. But thats just a theory.

I'm writing a bachelor thesis about bitcoin and in one chapter I will analyze if its possible to make a profit by mining.
Also I want to calculate how much it costs to mine one singe BTC (power costs + proportional hardwarecostes). Therefore I will make the assumption that only the most efficient (hash per watt) mining hardware is used.

So what is the most efficient hardware available at the moment? It's important that it has been already delivered to some people. I don't want to calculate with one of those preorder hardware minng, which may never arrive. 

Thanks for helping me out.

Hi,

A direct answer to your question would be a stolen one using somebody else's power. $:MH/s ratio would be infinite and running costs would be nil. Any bitcoins mined would be profit. An answer you're probably looking for though is the KNC Neptune. (https://www.kncminer.com/products/neptune-second-batch?gclid=CK24zf-9gLwCFfMPtAodD0wA2g)

It's also worth bearing in mind that Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency you can mine. There are many others, and more importantly, many others that can use the same hardware to mine. These smaller crypto-currencies, along with the benefit of easy to use exchanges may pose opportunities to the small fish.

Good luck on your thesis. Rather you than me.

probably this one: http://www.xtrememiners.net/#!products/cngp the lion

Looks like xtrememiners is scam. Don't get near it.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345612.0

i've a small stack of garden blades (8gh-10gh per blade) they run around 80-90w per blade.
old tech but decent.

knc neptune in terms of $:GH/s is less advantageous than terraminer iv but both have shipping very late.

A bit off topic but in the vein of academic integrity, since this is for a thesis. You "know" mining is not profitable but you haven't analyzed profitability yet, and want people to give you lead ins to do so.
It's one thing to hypothesize it will not be profitable, but fore knowledge is dangerous.

the word is that the KNC Neptune is the nuts, but we're still preflop so everything can change once the board is revealed.

As others have mentioned in prior responses, you aren't restricted to only Bitcoin on ASIC SHA256 chips/rigs.... If you have the time, patience and a little smarts you can do as many are right now: find a sha256 coin that you've found to be profitable with your hardware, then trade up to bitcoin, and speculate, HODL, or keep flipping. There are a multitude of recipes that may be profitable... many many variables to account for. Lots of reading.

For anyone to be able to answer your question, he should have every ASIC so that he can compare which one is the most efficient. You probably should rephrase your question, asking to anyone who has an ASIC miner, what is the Hash/Watts they are getting at the wall.

I agree that the margin for profit is small, but not profitable is not true.
Most miners has experienced both loss and gains, but that is properly not much different that any other business.

The reward for mining is self-adjusting, as long as there is a block reward to compete on, then will there be miners to race for the reward.
If the block reward exceed the cost in electricity and roi is impossible then will some miners (with lower hashrate = lower probability to find the block) shut down, and then will the difficulty go down, and then will roi be possible for others. The system will self-adjust to a level where there is a profit for the miners.
 
Even when all 21 mil BTC has been mined will there still be competition to claim the tx-fee's in the block.

The system (bitcoin) is on a ramp-up right now, so it is very difficult to make any scientific conclusions based the current situation, I believe a more holistic approach is needed.  

  

You won't see this happen in the next few years. Because most miners dont think rational like that. They think like: Bitcoin is going to rise in value, so it makes sense to mine. But they don't see that their revenue would be significantly higher by a direct investment in btc.

I think you are underestimating the intelligence levels of miners... Sure you can find single cases that support your statement, but the majority of the network is commercial now.

The one used in most mining farms during 2013 was Bitfury/BioInfoBank 55nm chips they run at 25GH for 25W per blade (16 chips) but can run faster if you put more power to them and add cooling BitBurner Fury got them up to 52GH.
http://www.bitfury.org/ and http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/ and https://megabigpower.com/ and https://www.asic-hardware.com/

They just sold a $5million contract to some investors. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140123006299/en/CoinSeed-Invests-5-Million-BitFury-Bitcoin-Mining#.UuQrHPvLe00 in 2014

But that was not the first one also see the BioInfoBank 100TH Mining Farm Project https://picostocks.com/businessplan/19.pdf is from 2013.

If you have any sense you will write your dissertation about whether the BioInfoBank 100TH mining project reached it's investment goals as it's set out in a clearly defined business plan that you can critique it with hindsight.

Hashfast and KnC have delivered more efficient 28nm products, but KnC limits production runs, and Hastfast is too new to know reliability (arrived this week).

I am sure there are irrational miners out there, but I don't most miners are irrational.
However, I am quite sure it is not just a few single cases.

For example, if you take a look at cex.io, you will find people buying 1 GH/s mining contract for 0.043+ btc.
And, the GH/s price is pretty stable even after the difficulty readjustment.

most irrational.

 :-\

Ironically, cex.io has a built-in calculator showing that people will never get their investment back (not even close), but it seems no one cares about it. :D

Writing a theory on rising prices down sounds like an interesting task, I must say. ::) Maybe you should do some more reading.

you might want to catch up with this site too: http://btcinfo.co.nf

I'm interested in how this chapter will fit in - what is the real thesis topic?


In any case for the chapter you should consider doing a review of bitcoin mining profitability in the past since it greatly influenced the current state of the bitcoin economy - especially since it widely distributed coins to those that were willing to turn their cpu and then later gpu cycles to it.  You could discuss the current state where it requires dedicated ASIC (application-specific integrated circuits) to have profitability and the hardware that is profitable generally requires a pre-order gamble to acquire in a timely manner.  Then I suggest you turn an eye towards the future.  The total computational power of the network has grown exponentially - fueled in my opinion somewhat by increased bitcoin value and somewhat by technology that is more efficient - can this continue for the long term?  While moore's law has stunned some by holding true with exponential growth in computing power over more than 40 years - the limited pool of resources for bitcoin (the remaining coins to be minted + transaction fees) will likely mean mining power growth will likely become linear and logarithmic after a time.  But you certainly shouldn't try to predict that timeframe too accurately - the error bars are probably measured in tens of months.  Not to mention the exit of the home miner - soon typical household electric circuits will be sufficient to host the required juice to keep relevant miners powered.

You could look at the cost of such a large bitcoin computation network.  Both the social cost in current electric consumption which has some environmental implications and in terms of how much investment at current prices would be required to increase difficulty.  If everyone adding computation to the network is paying the pre-order retail price of $3 per GH/s how much capital was spent acquiring minng hardware last month?  Is that sustainable?

Lots of great avenues for topics, I hope you've carved out a good one.  I also encourage you to use analogies to relate the at times tediously technical details of bitcoin operation.  Things like What is difficulty?  What is one bitcoin?  Why is it secure?  Analogy is a technique often leaned upon by the great physicists to translate the technical into the everyday - think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

As for your question on what hardware cost to use - naturally hardware that can be purchased right now isn't such a great deal (or everyone would purchase it until it wasn't available).  The recent bitmain usb chips are priced at $50 for 2 GH/s (overclocked) and cooling would need to be applied and the bitmain S1 is $1700 for 180 GH/s

I don't think using those prices ($10/GH + electricty) are fair for your analysis.  You can find cheaper options with a high chance of delivery if you are willing to wait until April / May - but no one knows what difficulty will be then.  If you were going to buy mining equipment today I think you'd need to get in line on one of this and gamble on the difficulty or continually monitor for the next generation (more efficient) pre-order and again gamble.

Yes that's in. I explained the hardware evolution from cpu's to asic's and made 2 calculations with an actual asic-device. In the first calculation the device is delivered in time and the miner makes a huge profit, in the second one the device is delivered with 2 months delay and the miner will never reach break even. That's how I show how critical the delivery time is. (my underlying assumptions are: difficulty rises every 11 days about 28% - that's the average from the last half year) (unfortunately I'll have to calculate this new because I calculated with a device from xtrememiners, which is certainly scam.. :-( )


Yeah I'm thinking about something like that too, but actually I don't know how to do this. I'd have to make a lot of uncertain assumptions and therefore it could happen that it becomes not scientific enough for scientific paper.


I'm writing for an audience with economical background and it was really not easy to explain the technical stuff in an easy to understand manner. If someone with technical background and or knowledge about bitcoin read this he will for sure shake his head :-D


This sounds very interesting, I'll work through that, thanks!


Yeah, cex.io is one reason why I think many or most miners don't act rational. If they would the price would go down, but it don't. Another reason are those usb-mining-sticks (usb-miner) which were sold like crazy and the next reason is the insane prices people are paying on Ebay for mining hardware.

Interestingly it is really considerable to buy some GH on cex.io, because if the prices keep on not going down you can sell them after a period and had the mining for free.

Thanks guys for all you replies yet :-)

The currently most interesting mining project is DZ coop r17:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=335145.0

Shares was sold for $110 per 40GH/s in November, the hardware is due to be delivered in ultimo February.
Back in November it was extremely difficult to predict the difficult for late February.

Now it is possible to make a much more certain prediction, and ROI is definitely possible, even with weeks of delay from the fab.

In case you don't already know here are some great calculators (any miners most important tool):
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

lol.
Anyway, it is always fun to see guys spamming their cex.io referral links, and then lure newbies to the site.
You can find lots of them here. :D https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=387280.0

+1

Yeah, I noticed that too.
I didn't want to get started on cex.io, which in my opinion is the single largest treat to bitcoin that exist, Santoshi warned about companies like them. 

So you plan to forecast profitability on mining an output that fluctuates wildly? You might consider changing topics to analysis of blindfolded darts for picking options strategies. Sorry, I'm being a dick. But seriously I don't get it, as a research paper or a writing piece for an economics class maybe, maaaaybe if you are talking about supply an demand forces, and decentralized markets, secondary markets, etc... but a thesis, never. Good luck if you decide to do it, hopefully your professor isn't anything like me.

Edit: ugh, please, PLEASE tell me you aren't using "ROI" in a forecasting context... ROI is a measure of historical activity, not to be used for forecasting, this place is full of crap information btw and that term is molested here on an hourly basis. This is a good place to talk with tech folks, sadly not many Econ nerds participate here. Feel free to dig through my old posts, on a few occasions I went on a rip about ROI and other misrepresented bullshit, now I'm beat down from trying to spread knowledge that nobody gives a shit about, "ya can't save 'em all!" lol... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342859.msg3699883#msg3699883

Haha. No I'm doing payment rows and calculate the net present value. (including capital costs)

i've 150gh that's currently mining an average of €0.047 per minute (1/2 - ish)
happy.

How is this supposed to be possible?
Mining Calculator calculates per Day 0.03438524 BTC = $27.42  with 150gh and current difficulty

yup, you're not far off. good cooling is the key. open window behind the rig.

http://www.thescribe.eu/img/rigdaytime.jpg
there are 3blades from what you can see above - the first of the three is showing ^

Well that's a problem, because pre-order hardware is an order of magnitude more efficient than hardware available right now. It's certainly possible to profit from mining even with this huge increase in difficulty, but not if you don't take a risk with pre-orders.

I'm not sure how the cooling makes 150 GH/s mine faster than 150 GH/s.  At current difficulty (2,193,847,870.17) mining rate should be around 0.000229 BTC per day for each GH/s (based on Eligius pool) so with 150 GH/s you would be clearing €0.016 per minute before power TODAY.  Maybe you haven't re-calculated in a few months.

With overclocking, you could improve the hashrate a bit, but definitely not that significant. :)

sorry, yuup - there are 4 blades you can't see in the pic doh. can't count. but, those 4 are not spaced so I could have it running cooler (or will have when i do a bit of feng shui) at night - when I need to close the office room door, so the cat doesn't go investigating, the window is still open and the redundant hard drives take heat from the top shelf, so the psu is more efficient, during the day, office windows are wide and door open to let the lo-vely warmth fill the house (this saves on heating bills). so I'm getting around 148gh thru the night (11pm-6am) and the rest of the time it's around 152-155GH. I remain sure that I can push it to 160GH when I get those 4 blades on copper risers, anyone got any spare please?

  ;D

oh... and it's all sitting on a cold stone slab (an 1800's fireplace stone) - and that is super-chilly, check the PIPOTAC link in my sig to see where i live