Bitcoin Forum

I am new in this forum. What mining equipment would you suggest. I have about 3500$ to invest.

I recommend start slow, learn, and grab some cheap stuff while Bitcoin is cheap. Maybe a s1 to start?

Also take a look in the mining section of this forum, guess more likely to get answers.

Thanks for your answer. For how much can i get ~ now used S1, S2, S3 miners ? Thanks.

Welcome to bitcointalk.
I would suggest you to buy some cheap bitcoin now, as the price now is at $510.
It is not easy to get profit in bitcoin mining, so please make sure you have done some calculation before purchasing any products, and please don't invest more than you can lose.

A good miner to get right now would be the Avalon Bitcoin Miner "THUNDER II".
It has 1TH in performance and uses ASIC.

If I would start mining now, I won't choose bitcoins. Check some other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin might not be profitable right now.

Invest in some Altcoins, Litecoin for example.  ;)

Altcoin mining is even more risky though. Scrypt's difficulty is increasing faster than Bitcoin's, which means the ASIC one could buy now may very well become obsolete in two months or less.

Invest in bitcoin cloud mining on cex.io. You earn about 20¢ a month per GH/s, each of which cost around $4. With $3500, that's 875 GH/s. After using them for a while, you can also resell.

That's not a good idea. Cex is overpriced, buying gh/s on their site cost considerably more than if you bought your own machine.

But the worst is how it encourages centralization of mining. Cex is affiliated with ghash.io, which is the largest Bitcoin pool and is a constant threat for 51% attacks.

Take a look at gaw miners (signature) they are great and recently bought the domain btc.com (http://btc.com)!

Mining is only viable right now IF you expect the price of BTC to go up. For comparison, I sold a 10ghz miner back in Feb or march for 500 bucks or something like that, right now it is worth about 20 dollars or less. DO NOT BUY mining equipment. IT IS NEVER WORTH IT honestly. even buying mining shares makes you lose money, unless you only hold on to them for a short period then sell then wait for price to go down(which it does) then rebuy.

If you are investing anything small I would buy Bitcoin and hold from a financial standpoint. Small miners might make ROI if price goes up but you can still profit from a buy and hold model. Right now I think the small players are fighting a losing battle with difficulty, only the big players or early pre-orders that actually receive their equipment on time have mining power to make a significant impact.

If you are looking at it as a hobby to help the Bitcoin network and learn about how it works I would say go ahead and invest as it might be fun to be in the business.

It may be god to mine with s3 units, but consider to invest some part in btc directly.

That's right. Because big mining farms can do orders 100x bigger than those of small users, they can get their equipment at ridiculously lower price. Even more so if it's the ASIC manufacturer mining with their own equipment, like KNC and many other do.

This leaves virtually no margin of profit for small users.

It isn't worth if you're talking about bitcoin as the prices go down atm and difficulty goes up anyway.
On the other hand you may try mining altcoins but it's always an gamble.

The market price of mining equipment might go down though, because of the drop in price of Bitcoins and altcoins. So it might not be a bad time to start if buying with fiat.

Then again, simply buying the coins would make more sense.

Anybody that asks this question is wrong if they believe they will make money by mining. My suggestion is to keep your money or buy bitcoins directly. Just don't blow it on mining equipment.

Buy BTC for that and wait :D

If one plans to start mining, I think we are getting closer to the perfect point to do that. Since price is decreasing, so the miners price are, and they will keep mining when the price recovers.

On the other hand, if you believe price is going up anyway, might be a better idea just buy bitcoin and take profit in the future, then think again if you want to buy mining stuff.

The future bitcoin price shouldn't be considered in the decision at all.
If you can get more bitcoin by spending your money to buy bitcoin directly than by buying some miners, you should go buy some bitcoin regardless of how much you expect bitcoin to be worth.

My suggestion is to directly buy bitcoin, if you want to have the feeling of mining, buy a rig but it may not pay off well.

Bitcoin I think will slowly go up as it had a fall.  It seems to be going good.

It all depends on your situation.  It is very nice to buy bitcoin direct when low prices, but if you can take that money and make  more BTC overtime with miner go with mining.  It takes ROI math.  But it depends your situation.

My prediction is that 1TH/s will mine about 3.7 BTC over the next year if you start mining now. So, if you are paying more than 3.7 BTC for hardware and power, then you should just buy (or keep) the bitcoins instead.

You have enough money to invest. Solo mining will be best but if you are not so experienced than i will suggest you to start mining with a pool.

So for a newbie to look into buying a miner and start mining would not be a viable idea?

It's a good hobby.. you only invest what you can afford to loose in terms of money and it depends on your location( house/office/warehouse) where you gonna run the miners.

A good miner like the antminer s3 (0.58 btc or $278 direct from manufacturer/ $400-450 in ebay) that with any btc profit calculator makes you around $3.81 per day less $0.75-$1 electric bill/day@0.10 cents/kilowatt plus a decent 750 watt atx powersupply +$79.99 corsair cx 750. With the next jump in difficulty(every few weeks)...that $3.81 will be $3.34 or lower...until the next hike in difficulty.

So if you invested $278 antminer s3 direct buy+$80 powersupply= $358 or bought it from ebay $450+$80 powersupply=$530 .... it will take you 111 days or 164 days to get your money back untill you see any positive income. Yes thats $3 per day @ current $470-480 btc price.

Plus if you live in a 1-2 bedroom apt with only a  100 amp main breaker and you decide to plug 6 of those suckers with 2 1300 watt powersupply with a 15 amp outlet and burned the place up..it would be really bad.

My advice ...do your research, ask more questions and never do an impulse buy...people buy tons of asic stuff and don't even make 1/5 of their investment and it usually loses its value pretty fast. I still mine bec even with the risk I'm around 1/6 of my investment in 2 weeks and if btc goes past $700-800 range it would be even better.

Why is it that so many newbies show up here, assuming that the obvious way to go is mining? Bitcoins have a price -- does it not occur to anyone that simply buying may be a better investment strategy than mining?

Mining is very speculative and capital-intensive.

Because the media has done such a horrible job of explaining Bitcoin.

30 second clips where they name Mark Karpeles as the CEO of BTC
30 second clip showing somebody using 25 PCs to mine BTC (from 2010)
30 second clip stating BTC funds terrorism (as opposed to cash and the banking system which is in bed with terrorists)

People see a short clip of somebody using computers and then everybody with 2 "PCs" in their house wants to come here and ask where to get the free digital money.

With 3500$ you should buy bitcoins directly and then hold them long term instead of mining.

Wouldn't bother mining dude, much easier and a lot less hassle to just buy bitcoin with your $$$ right now.

It's just not feasible unless you've got a shitload of money to spend on mining equipment (and electricity).

I am newbie too, reading. This is Big thread..

Just buy and hold BTC especially at this point in time. Price is low ish mining not that profitable right now and if we hit another bubble phase you are stuck with mining equip not bitcoin. 

Why mining, it's not profitable anymore for most people, invest the money in some altcoin instead.

I'd view it as more of like a hobby, if thats something you're interesting in doing and would have fun doing so, why not? get some equipment if it makes you ROI down the road, awesome, if not, well you atleast got into it and did something, and at the end of the day you'll have a stream of coins coming your way anyways.

Buying in now seems like a pretty good idea as well though, the price did just drop.  Thats just my opinion.

i would suggest to invest in some alt(but be careful) or directly into bitcoin, mining isn't worth it, roi is impossible

If you just heard from somewhere else that you can get rich from mining, it is definitely a bad idea.

If you have done enough research and understand how difficulty changes, how much you can get from the miner and how much you need to pay for electricity, you should be able to answer the question yourself. :)

Perhaps you could buy bitcoins and get some Ghs from Cloudmining (PB mining or cloudhashers), it's much easier and faster than running own mining rig. could be

While doing more doesn't necessarily mean more profit, taking shortcuts DOES mean more loss.  Cloud mining is inherently risky unless you can be assured that the company is legitimate.   https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=739510.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=739510.0)


Beyond that the contracts are not competitive compared to buying hardware.

If you wanted to own some gold, would you mine it or buy it?

As a newbie, mining it would take a lot of time, effort, and money and you would only find a tiny bit. Bitcoin is the same.

On the other hand, an experienced gold miner could probably do ok. Bitcoin is the same.

Experience gold miner could go broke also if market condition is bad.

They have long term capital cost tied up to the operation that is not easy to sell and liquidate.

It is true never bet the house so to speak.  I love mining, and am lucky to have decent electricity price and lots of space.  So I will keep mining.

I hate how people try to scare people away from mining.  But i do agree there is a need for quick BTC when buying comes in nicely, or if BTC takes a drop and you can buy in.  But at least do ROI calculations before saying no mining to your situation. 

whats with everyone wanting to mine? just buy it and hold onto it, and you`ll be in more profit then the miners.

A lot of people who are new to Bitcoin are attracted by the fact that you can create wealth by letting your computer perform arithmetic calculations. It's interesting, effectively money for nothing. They also don't get that the difficulty increases exponentially and therefore assume they'll get thousands of USD every month and will be millionaires in a few years time.

Don't spend $3500 on a miner, you'll never recoup that money back in BTC or fiat barring an amazing price spike in the next few months.

Mine for fun instead.  Mine to learn new tech, to play around with hardware/software, and to say to all your friends "I'm Bitcoin mining!"

Here's what you do.  You buy $3000 worth of BTC and sit on it until the eventual price spike to the moon.  The other $500, buy an Antminer S3+ and power supply and go to town tweaking, overclocking, cooling, and find ways to wire and host it without tripping over it in your house.  After about 3-4 months, sell the S3+ and psu for BTC to recoup some of your fun losses.

That's all you need to do, and you'll be happier and healthier of mind.

And then check back on the BTC price by 2016 or so, it'll be worth it!   8)

What makes the problem worse is that, they can find some out of date mining tutorials and analyses, in which they can get a lot of bitcoin using just ordinary computers and USB miners.

Agree, too many outdated tutorial make it feels like bitcoin is so easily mined. Even my friends told me its easy to get ton of BTC while they didn't even know what is ASIC.

each investment must have a risk, whether high risk or low risk, depending now we want to choose between these investments, at this time if we do not have substantial funds, perhaps we should invest our funds are low-risk investment ...  ::)

I am not so experienced, but as far i know BTC mining is almost dead. So think about BTC trading instead of mining.

If you are into miners, look into antminers, but understand mining in general is pretty brutal now.

It seems absurd to claim that mining is dead when the network hash rate is around 240 PH/s.

Fixed that for you.   ;D

And there endeth the lesson.

Thanks, great informational thread for a newbie like myself  :)

Mining isn't dead, but mining for home user is..

There are also still tutorials or summaries of Bitcoin that suggest Mt. Gox as a Bitcoin exchange, which obviously isn't a very good idea nowadays! The basics stayed the same, but the whole ecosystem is moving so fast that things become obsolete practically over night.

Of course mining isn't dead. It's indeed absurd that people claim this. For the network itself it doesn't matter at all what the hash rate is. When people say that mining is dead, most intend to say that mining for profit is futile for the regular person doing it in his basement. Which is mostly true. The margins are getting smaller and smaller and only the very big operations survive.
Still, if this makes a lot of mining unprofitable and the hash rate indeed goes down, it effectively becomes profitable gain. It's self-regulating - beautiful!