Bitcoin Forum

I just don't understand ppl (especially this guy  Blazedout419) buying old  mining equipments in today environment. So what is the motive, when they know they can't make ROI? Is it collectible in the future?

He's buying it to heat his house. I was actually thinking I might do the same thing next winter. Make a few satoshi as I warm my house :)

Maybe in 100 years, but no time soon.  Unless it was a really rare piece of mining hardware (a limited run fPGA or an Avalon with a low serial number?).

An Altair can be picked up on ebay for about $2k and that is basically the first personal computer ever created.  I'm not sure how many were created/still exist.

Old miners will be become e-waste like everything else.  Only the rare items like the first 10 Avalons that might have a story to them like Jgarzik's would have any worth to them.

ok, but what about electricity cost? When I got my electricity bill, it took my breath away :o (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx51eegLTY8)

In some places where electricity is cheap, heaters utilize electricity instead of gas.  If you're going to be generating heat through electricity, might as have it do some useful work.  For the northern hemisphere, any miners that you could get for cheap will earn almost nothing anyways since the difficulty would be a magnitude higher.

I heard that Blazedout has free power. Not sure how he manages that but hey, if I had free power I'd be loading up on bitcoin mining gear as well.

He's a smart guy too, he has a huge amount of hardware and I'm sure he has an insane overall hashrate as well, so I'm sure he has a gameplan for all these parts he's buying, even the older inefficient BFL gear.

If you are using over a million watts (an industrial user), the  price varies (http://ets.aeso.ca/) throughout the day between $8/MWh and $850/MWh (with an average of about $50/MWh).

The traditional model is to run your miners 24/7 until they no longer pay for power. However, if you want to run the miner intermittently (either for heating or load-shedding applications), it may be possible to get obsolete hash-power at a cheaper rate.

From the [HAVELOCK] DataTank Mining: 1.2MW 3M Novec Immersion Cooled 2PH Mining Container (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=655464.0) thread, I learned that Bitcoin mining is pushing computing density limits. That said, for the high density they describe, you need to remove heatsinks and plug the boards into some kind of back-plane (that not all miners support). For such industrial mining, it is probably cheaper to buy current-gen chips in bulk, and make your own boards.

the first asic miners will sit beside the first ibm pc  and comodore 64, nintendo in a museum

one of my favorite possessions is and old Camillus Cuda CY1  pocket folder (it has a circuit board for a handle).
The thought to get older bitcoin asics together and put them on a decent frame (such as Kershaw) has crossed my mind.