Bitcoin Forum

Mining is fun and a neat hobby, however for us little guys mining just isn't really making too much cents/sense.  Difficulty is rising too rapidly, that along with the insane price for power to mine (at least in California) is making it harder and harder to continue mining.  The s3 which is pretty new is almost outdated in terms of profitability.  Nowadays 450 gh/s is the new BFL jalapeno.

Cloud hashing services/Ponzi schemers are anxiously waiting for all us little guys to crossover, and are licking their chops. 

Mining always has been, and always will be a race to the bottom.  Alas you're right, you cannot compete with the large farms that have their own IP and a direct line to the fab house.   All you can hope for, if you really want to call it that, is for a sky-high difficulty and a massive sustained drop in price to the point where all of those large farms go bankrupt without recouping their initial investment.

Well, most of them are taking it as an hobby but unless you have terahashes of power it's useless to even begin with.

I do it because I enjoy it.

If your have space and decent electricity you can still ROI.  But it is harder then the day's you could just buy GPU's and almost guaranteed ROI it seemed for a long time.

Even when there are some farm with ridiculous electricity costs and several TH/s miners ?

I still have decent electricity and good amount of space, and mining ROI ...... so yes even if big farms.

Many miners like to fool themselves with faulty ROI calculations because the belief system must be upheld at all costs.

Even with a 7c/kwh rate I can say with 98% certainty you will not make a profit in fiat (which you pay your bills with) if the exchange rate stays under $550 and the diff. keeps increasing at recent rate.

The only ones making the money are the mining equipment manufacturers which run their new ASICS for 1-2 months before releasing them to the consumer or wholesaler (who may or may not also run them for a couple weeks first).

In general after mining for 2-3 months you have to sell your equipment because you usually will get more on Ebay (even after fees) than the miner can produce if kept running.

There is a good chances that the difficulty would stop/slow down at one point. Its just too hard to keep increasing 20% forever..

The difficulty will only increase if the technology or the means (investments) don't change. Sometimes difficulty lowers, but many people think it's only market readapting (miners selling their old hardware to buy new ones).

Technically there were only a few periods of time where even GPUs made ROI (we're going to consider BTC ROI since fiat ROI was all based on luck of BTC shooting up in price).  Back when BTC was $2 you would have to mine 75BTC to pay off a 6870.  While a 6870 was able to make almost 0.5BTC in a day at the lowest difficulty of 1 million the difficulty didn't stay there for long.

So almost the entire history it has been financially better to buy.  Had any of us GPU miners know that BTC would be $500(or $1200) we would have probably bought thousands of BTC and just kept much smaller farms rather tha have our wife ask why the electric bill is in the thousands  :D

The only way to see it as "fan" or "hobby" is to solo mine (no pool).
That way it's like lottery  .    25 BTC is a good prize ;)
Oh.....I forget , you can also use it as a heating element in winter   8)

Generally at this time........mining is not such a good idea .

mining for small miners is bad !
only big miners are getting profits, like manufatureres and stuff.

During the Gold rush it was the same thing. Most prospectors win very little and had to buy very expensive fournitures and equipment, while shop owners and equipment sellers could make amazing margins because of the increase of demand.

This is the reason why everyone should buy BTC and not mining gear. Its killing the market...

At least the hash power is getting the bitcoin ecosystem more secure.

I think it is for the fun now. Even online, it's something I can keep an eye on, a little hobby I can check every now and again.

I like the hardware and I like to have a small army working for me  8)

it's a hobby , addiction ... its a race u might win or not ... its like a RTS ;)

Not true. I've seen a lot of people who profited from "small" mining, even recently.

Commercialization has pretty much killed mining.  Manufacturers mine with their equipment for 1 - 2 months before selling it to the public.  The public buys the hardware with the illusion of ROI, but I believe that the majority of people that have been burned realize this and they will stop buying new miners.  Even with free electricity some of these "new" miners for sale will take years to ROI with the difficulty change.  Unless the price of bitcoins skyrockets things look grim.  Plus I doubt that the price of BTC will skyrocket considering these huge monster mining farms are mining and dumping their BTC daily.

Care to point to a single post?

You can mine if you dont pay the elettricity.

If you pay you must find a profitable cloudmine service.

Or maybe just bought some crypto and wait (and hope)  :P

If you "dont pay for elettricity" you will still lose money buying any miner right now.  The best pricing figuring in ship times right now is still the S3 and it won't be able mine back the initial cost even with modest 12% increases.

There have been arguments about ROI since I got into Bitcoin.  I'm glad I didn't listen when I bought my first GPU miner back in 2011, and I'll be damned if I'm going to start listening now.  That being said, buying and holding BTC has always been a better strategy.  I suspect that profitability will continue squeezing the Chinese manufacturers who have been mining with their newly created equipment and selling coins instantly to profit.  That is why hashnest is now teaming up with Bitmain to stick those buying cloudhashing (bagholders) with the eventual scenario shutting down rigs and tossing them in the trash.  Once that happens and all the cloud hashers get burned, the BTC price will probably see a massive increase and those who were able to mine and hold through the dust settling will be rewarded handsomely as difficulty stalls and their mining revenue grows considerably in fiat terms.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=64507
I remember this guy saying it, don't have the time to go through his posts now, but you can just ask him. He had multiple ROI tracking threads.
As I recall, he used gridseed blades, s3 and GAW hashlets.

Yes I know scrypt was profitable if you got an ASIC early on.  I was considering it but didn't feel like playing the BFL roulette game and hoping my company was the "Avalon".

I'm talking about Bitcoin SHA-256 based ASICs.  S1s apparently did make BTC ROI for many people as Bitmain priced them too low (that's what they're thinking).  The S3 was not priced like the S1 and yet people still bought them.   I bought a few S3s out of curiosity - they're much nicer than my BFL Singles from last year.

not sure if s1 was priced low.  it was going for $2-3k initially.  hell it was over 3btc when value was 1K.  i agree, s3 has a sleek design, more thought into this miner.  it looks finished, unlike the s1 which looked like a prototype.  BFL did have an awesome design too, i think all their engineering went into aesthetics, the internals were blowing up all over the place, poor soldering, poor components placements (components and metal touch each other). 

cloud mining looks to be the natural transition for the small-time miners (such as myself).

I never bought any Bitmain products prior to my S3 and I was so enraged over BFL's handling of the Singles that I decided to sit out of the race.  Several people have reported that their S1s were able to BTC ROI.  Even if they cost $3k back then which would be 3BTC, if they mined 4BTC you still came out ahead.  Very few ASICs actually has positive BTC ROI.

i had a few of the S1's, i can say that i made a ROI and then a little more.  with all HW, the whole thing is timing, get in and sell before it loses too much value.   yeah, BFL did everyone dirty.  I don't know 1 person that has been happy how he was treated by BFL--when ordering a product directly from them.  all the poor folks that ordered monarchs got shafted with no lube.  they paid 3-4k and are getting a miner a year after it was promised.  who the F is going to pay $2k for 600 or 700 gh/s now ? 

Did you factor in the electricity charges? I also had S1 but it seems like it will never ROI for me...

yeah, i factored in the electrical.  i bought mine back in November i think ?  i mined till March, then sold them for .80 btc.  so all in all i was ahead.  especially with the prices i paid.  one i bought for 2.5 btc, another for 2 btc, and the last for 1.5 btc. at one point in time i was making 1 BTC per week with them.