Bitcoin Forum

So has anyone done the math recently to determine if it's time to shutdown our 1st Gen Avalon, ASICMiner and Butterfly Labs ASICs?  I haven't, I'm too lazy, lol.

I have an 8 Blade ASICMiner, 3 BFL Singles and 70 USB's running in my garage and it will soon be to warm to run them without air conditioning.  That was some stylin' gear six months ago, lol!  My house is already stuffed full with 2nd Gen gear and the air conditioning situation prevents me from bringing the old stuff inside.  Those Singles are like blowdryers!

I had a quick peek at eBay and it's obvious that the good old days have passed where you could make some good money from reselling this junk. But it's better than dumping them in the trash, I guess.   But if the 1st Gen ASICs are still profitable to run, I may keep them for another month.  But then again, how much profit is the ~280GHs from this gear going to earn in a month?  Is it even worth it?

I just worked this out yesterday.  My gen 1 Avalon is making about $3 per day using $0.18 per kWatt electricity.

So I guess it is still profitable to use 1st Gen ASICs.  :)

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ says a bfl 50 makes money through july at .30/kwhr.  Same with a erupter usb. 

An erupter will make 8 dollars before it no longer pays for its electricity.  That suggests that if your main interest was money and you can sell the erupter for more than 8 dollars after expenses then that would be a better deal.

I should sell my erupters but it's too much like hard work.

The 130nm gear, I reckon will have maximum 2-3 months left before it's eating more electricity than it's mining in coin.
That's 3 months maximum at current difficulty rising rate, if a heapload of rigs are switched on at the end of this month (example - KnC ship out the Neptune), my own 130nm is getting powered off, or sent to a datacentre to mine for charity.

I think we are already seeing power-downs, with this phase of difficulty, it's been steadily rising at ~20% for the past few months, but not this month.

I powered down and sold my ASICMiner stuff last month.  I still have Gen2 Avalon hardware running, but it's getting very close to going too.  Sucking 350W for 100GH. 

Right now, I'm making more with 1.5MH of GPUs than I am with 180GH of ASICs.  ::)

Yeah you kinda missed the boat I sold all my 1st generation crap on eBay about a month ago and actually did vary good made 3,000 dollars back !!! If you mine bitcoin you have to keep a close eye on eBay auctions prices !! Thats the only way You can make ROI and be able to stay in the game and buy more hardware...

I'd say, you sold at exactly the right time.

Ironic isn't it?  I have the same.  Making more on scrypt than asic.

Yeah sale the avalon 2 ASAP !!

I've started on eBay to get my mining hardware so that is sooooo true!!
Recently AntMiners are going for less than 80 USD a pop and dropping ( U1 not modded ) and with my current set up i'm under 6GHash/sec Sha mining and it's either dump more USBs at it to try and get 10X mining speed to keep it viable for another year or sell it while the erupters/Ants are still worth close to what I paid for them ( or wait until they are useless and sell them for what I paid like some Icarus boards seem to be selling for on eBay ).

To conclude, it all depends on 3 factors per individual, BTC income VS power cost VS hash rate.

If the hash rate is too low, check to see how much of the new tech you can buy with selling off the old ( and potential power savings and increase of hash/same hash ).  I still have 2 old Nvidia cards I won't let go of that can mine but only since they can be ' backup ' video cards for my systems ( 8600GT and a 8400GT PCIe x 16 ' compatable ' ).  Not every miner out there can say they bypassed the power costs by going green tech ( solar/wind/battery + inverter ) to have the ' actual power ' cost the cable modem.  

Every miner out there will have to ask themselves " is it worth this power cost to get this much coin per month in this much space " at some point.

I would sale all that shit on eBay even the litecoin PC miner !! Get gridseed miners there like 200$ each right now 300-400 kh/s at like 25 watts !! I have only mined bitcoin but im about to get me a 10 pack of gridseed miners just to help pay the power bill on all my Antminer S1 hardware ..  Even though I have a pretty bad feeling litecoin difficulty about to start to go to the moon...  LoL

I'm buying the stuff here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=500967.0

As long as I have unlimited hosting space and free electricity, even 1st gen asics can still be profitable.

You can always have your miner mine other alt coins that are more profitable and trade them for bitcoin on the exchanges.  That will keep it making money much longer.
I recently updated the firmware on my Gen 1 Avalon and now I am getting 84 gh/s instead of 72 gh/s.
There is still lots you can do with them.

35c/kWh, mine are long gone...

My rates are 0.09c/kwh but I powered my 4x BFL 60 GH/s and sold on ebay before they became worthless.

Profite was high compare to electricity cost but my main investment is on LTC mining :)

Not yet by far; my 60gh units are still making more than their electricity input.

I've also been working on a concept: The units generate a lot of heat and pull a lot of power, but the usage is not linear. If you reduce the power to the chips and reduce the clock speeds, then the heat output will go *WAY* down, at the cost of 5-8gh of performance.

Thus there is a horizon coming up where "is the last 6-8gh worth the extra 50-100 watts of power?" That might be the spot to hit, then you get to run with less electricity, less cooling (going to be important in the summer) and so forth.

It was bound to happen, time to turn the red giant into a nice cool little red dwarf.

C

Which first gen machine are you running?  I was thinking the same thing, underclock it and see how much the power usage drops.  Although it's probably more profitable to just sell it off on eBay or Craigslist.

Just some food for thought ... if the price goes up the unit remains profitable. Sometimes it is worth it to mine at a loss and hold, if lady luck is on your side you will end up ahead. Mining is a nice anonymous way to obtain BTC. My electricity cost is how I pay for my investment rather than cash to an exchange to buy BTC from my bank.

BFL Singles and nitro jalapenos. They might be second generation, I don't know. But nice little boxes no doubt.

The real fun would be to replace the chips with a Monarch chip. Yes I am thinking about this... :-)

C

NO.

Gen 1 Avalons draw ~750W.  At 0.18 / KWh, that is $3.24 per day.  Plus there is taxes on your electric bill, and good luck getting the expense deducted from your income tax.

It was a pretty easy choice for me after I did the math. My choice was either mine with my first generation stuff for another 30 days and make maybe  another 1000$ or sale everything on eBay and hopefully make 3000$ back. But there was no garentee that my auctions would sale fast. Plus i had allready mined allmost 4 btc wih the miners befor I sold. I had 18 -  10 gh/s blades and couple asic cubes ..  In about 2 weeks i ended up making about 3500$ after fees in my paypal acount.  I was lucky and at the time bitcoin was down to around 500 $ I used the money to buy two 180 ghs antminer S1s. Im now waiting for 5 more antminers I should get on Monday. That was the last of all my bitcoin I had. I've allready allmost mined 1 bitcoin with the 360 ghs of antminers I've allready had online. I hopefully will make another 4 bitcoin once i get the other Antminers in. Then in a good 30-45 days from now I will sale all the antminer S1 miners on eBay and hopefully they will still be worth 500$ each or so. Then ill repeat the process with 1 th/s - 1000 watt miners ..  This is for sure the key to being succesfull in bitcoin mining .. Well unless you want to make huge investment in risky Pre orders .....


  I do wonder if difficulty slows down a little during this next month I could end up maybe under clocking my Antminers like you guys said and try to get out more bang for my buck on the power side. This could maybe get me more time mining but at the cost of the miner being worth 50% less at resale on eBay ......

In short the answer is no as there will always be other Alt-coins that you can mine with ASIC technology, and the alt-coins will always have a much lower difficulty level than bitcoin so you can mine tons of them and covert them to BTC if you want.

More importantly...
when did the word "sell" get replaced by the word "sale"?  I see it all of the time on bitcointalk and other places. Sale is a noun and sell is a verb.  "I'm going sale my old ASICs" should read "I'm going to sell my old ASICs".  Right?  Or did this suddenly change?

You're... noticing the bad English on this forum now? I don't think I've ever been on a forum with worse spelling and grammar, so I just ignore it since I have no choice (even though that's usually the sort of thing that makes me cringe).

There their they're your you're yaw yore "alot"... all the abuse you can imagine and more..

But at least it gives me an excuse to post this again:
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

Older ASICs may not be so great for Bitcoin mining itself, but absolutely zero reason not to mine on another network with them.

If you have an old miner throw it on Mazacoin or another SHA. I have actually found mining on the other networks to be decently profitable without the hard diff curve to fight continuously.

I know I shouldn't comment on poor grammar on a forum.  But this sale/sell thing has me confused.  I've never actually heard anyone use the word "sale" in place of "sell" in person.  It seems to be only in writing (righting, lol) and usually in comment sections on blogs and message boards.

not to be confused with riting, which has something to do with goats, i'm led to believe  ::)

That's likely because while we where given an education these folk, likely the younger generation, weren't. They have been taught to only sign their name. :)

When 2015?

Best thing to do is consider a sweet spot of resale value. Recently when the price rose people were paying stupid money for ASICMINER USB's and i was able to sell some for more then i paid for originally regardless of BTC mined. Sold a BFL Jally for almost what it cost me and that had been mining for 9 months, otherwise the switch off point is when it costs more to run unless you are prepared to pay out of pocket for convenience of mined coins versus using an exchange.

Ouch lol sorry about my English !! Grammar was allways one of my weak points in school.. Guess I need to run that spelling and grammar check befor I post  !! I will try to be gooder at it for u !! They should of never gave me that diploma I need to go back !!!

Im Buying your old Miners for a good price here :https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=493811.0
Send me a PM with what you have and i will give you a price :)
Thanks,
JT

If all else fails with the ' older ' mining equipment, I've started a thread regarding e-waste

bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=505754

So far, a few looks and no comments except my own.  If you can afford the shipping to BC, Canada I'm willing to accept your old miners ( 386 or newer, no monitors with tubes unless it's either a PET or a MAC Classic )

 ::)

My Generation 1 Avalon does 84 GHash/sec for only 700 Watts and brings in 0.011 bitcoins a day which is worth $7, more than twice what it cost in electricity.

It is still worth running.

Back in April this same Avalon was generating 7 bitcoins a day, which was over $700 a day at the time.  This is the same Avalon that was almost stolen (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=163795.msg1714288#msg1714288).

After the difficulty doubles I will shut it off.  I will sell the power supply on eBay and feed the rest of it to my livestock.