Bitcoin Forum

I don't want a 10 page answer please!!

Please make your answers as short as possible, a simple yes/no will do.

If you buy actual mining hardware then no. You will be eaten alive in cooling and electricity cost.

If you use cloud mining, IE Gaw Miners hashlets, then potentially. I just hit 85% ROI today after 35 days of mining and will reach 100% soon. Also if you're new to mining, never ever buy pre-orders they essentially never work out. If you going to buy hardware instead of cloud mining I'd suggest bitmaintech as they deliver SHA-256 items very quickly. If your going to buy scrypt hardware either wait for Bitmaintech's new device to actually be SHIPPED (do not pre-order) or buy from Gaw miners.

TLDR: I'd suggest cloud mining or buying bitcoin directly.

Not for individuals

Or unless you have free electricity, but even with free electricity newer miners like the S4 would take over a year to ROI at 15% difficulty increase.

Depends on assumptions:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=800842.0

Right now, you are probably better off just buying BTC.

I do not think at any time since the batch 1 avalons anyone can make a case that it was more profitable to buy miners than to have just bought the bit coin with the same amount of money.    The only possible exception to that is likely the people that used bit coin at $1000 to buy from KNC and then received US $ refunds (which is not mining).

Cloudmining is so stupid I cannot understand why anyone would do it.  You are basically buying coins delivered in the future and you are paying more than if you just bought the coin and received delivery of the coin that day.

What about hosted mining? I'm doing it right now and don't see a huge difference between buying a whole miner that is hosted and buying shares.

Depends on what you mean by that BUT, if you pay someone else to host your miner and you pay ANYTHING other than a percentage of the bitcoin mined, you could lose this gamble big time.
Example, if you are paying $200 US per month to host your miner with someone else there could (likely) will come a day, when you owe the host MORE than the coin that was mined.
What do you do then?   Does he get to keep the miner?   Do you ship the miner back to yourself (to do what with it?)?

You can simply make scenarios in your head with a combination of difficulty and price where this happens (and sooner rather than later).    Do yourself a favor and figure out how many coins per month your miner is production with the 245,000 TH/s that the network now is (1 TH/s / 245,000 TH/s X 3600 coins a day = 0.0147 coins a day).   The network is still growing but let's pretend it is not growing.   You are currently receiving 0.44 Bitcoin per month for that 1 TH/s miner.   It does not take bitcoin to drop much lower before you cannot even pay your hosting bill let alone ever get the money back from the miner purchase.

Yes, in ccertain situations, and with cheap hardware

Depends on your budget and proper setup.

it is profitable if you have big ASIC for mining and have some patient for return of your investment
if you are thinking amount mining with small hardware like GPU or small asic then you should avoid this

Unless you're an Asic Manufacturer and create your own chips and hash boards, the answer is a resounding NO.

Just buy BTC at this undervalued price, you won't regret it!

Or if you have the expertise that's necessary to run a large mining data center and live in a favourable location.

LTCgear still is amazingly profitable if you ask me, estimated ROI of 5-6 weeks if you pay in BTC and use the coupon code "anniversary1yr" even with the crash in Bitcoin value.

See my sig for their site  :) Could also sell you a smaller amount of shares for the same price per Mhash.

I can't find any hardware currently available that has a good chance to ROI. Any bitcoin miners that approach 1J/GH are already dead. Even the ones that are decent (e.g. Antminers) are way overpriced.

Scrypt mining is harder to predict given the less-than-predictable LTC difficulty increases...but I have to believe that with KNC shipping Titans now, that has to go up too, maybe even faster than BTC difficulty. And I can't find any Scrypt miners that are profitable either given 10% increases in difficulty. Some EBay auctions are absolutely ridiculous--thousands of dollars for 28 MHs miners. I wouldn't pay more than $10 per MH now, and there just isn't anything out there that is close to being able to ROI. Preorders (Volcano, etc.) are very risky.

TL;DR...no.

If you want to break even, you'll probably have to produce your own ASICs, or buy in large volumes so you can get a significant discount.

Why don't you try LTCgear which is $5.5/Mhash including a full year of free hosting? No hardware at home and still cheap hashrate with weekly payouts.

I like having the hardware in hand.  With renting out Scrypt i have been able to make more the regular payouts no secret there. With that free hosting o a year I don't think you own the hardware.  That is a huge con.  Selling hardware at end can add some extra profit.   With "cloud" you really do a long term lease, not buying hardware.

I have been able to successfully ROI each time i trade up.  This time will be harder if bitcoin does not go back up in price.   To do a ROI i really feel you need to buy a miner priced in BTC example is S3 compared to S4 priced in dollars with current exchange rate.

No

No, not even for manufacturer now...

Yes, it is.

How else do you explain 220+ Phash/s running?

Scrypt mining is still profitable if you find the right deal (LTCgear)  :D

I make $5 a day and its falling and falling everyday!

It is up for you op to decide. People will be telling you different things. If you are interested, you may always try some cloud mining. It is not expensive at all. Just test the water. But remember to buy from some reputable company. Don't trust some random small companies which will probably scam you.

I have ~10THs mining at home which is about $1700 per month in BTC income at the current difficulty. Everything I have running is at 1w/GHs or less.

My last 3 electric bills have been an average of about $1700 per month. Of course my electric bill isn't from mining alone but I would estimate that 70-80% is from my mining gear. It's still summer in the desert where I live so my A/C still runs most of the day.

So I have another month or two (max) before I'm mining at a loss. Although I might run some of the most efficient miners (S3's and Monarchs) for auxiliary heat in the winter even though I have a gas furnace.

yes it is, depends on electricity costs and how much you pay for machines

buy used machines as cheap as possible

I have 5.4TH in undervolted s1s and one s2 and pay 0.064 and my entire house including mining elec cost is about $350-$400

0.1 - 0.14 BTC a day

It all depends on the cost that you purchase at and your cost for electricity. So there is no easy answer. For the most part, the answer is no. If you had a couple million and cheap electricity, you might have a chance at roi, but since coins are so cheap right now, Its better to buy the coins with your investment. I wish I would have done that...

yes yes, ROI is impossible. sell me your antminer s1s for $20 a piece i'll use them as decorations

This should be your answer.. Granted, bitcoins could shoot up at any time but could go down too.. Id steer clear of mining.. not profitable.

If you weren't mining anything ever before. The only reason to start mining now is to feel how it is. You would later can tell some of your children or grandchildren that at some point you were bitcoin miner in the past. Other that that standard mining is not that good for individuals.

Absolutely! An individual trying to start mining BTC now is a guaranteed losing venture.

In my case, I was lucky and timed my first miner purchases well... paid fiat for early mining gear when BTC was very cheap. And I reinvested my BTC earnings in more mining gear when BTC was very high. I've had a positive ROI (bitcoin and fiat) for many months now. I had zero bitcoin when I started and now hold some in my wallet. And I earned back my fiat investment by selling some used gear on eBay early on.

I was extremely lucky, there was absolutely no skill involved, lol. But those days have long passed and anyone hoping to duplicate a similar situation is going to be very, very disappointed.

The ONLY way that you can mine starting now and recoup the amount you have to pay for the miner is IF bitcoin rises.   And if bitcoin rises, you would have been better off just holding your bitcoin or using the FIAT that you have to purchase the miner to buy the bitcoin.

Mining is basically buying bitcoins for future delivery (with a lot of volatility on the quantity of each future delivery).   At prices below $500-600 and this current difficulty, you receive far more coins TODAY by just buying the bitcoin vs. buying a miner (and the coins from the miner will not be delivered at once).

Bingo!!!!

Like many other people posted mining is not profitable the way bitcoin price is and the way difficulty is. your best bet is to buy bitcoin if you have that desire. Otherwise i would use mining for investment purposes. What i mean is use a cloud mining site that offers you to sell the hashpower back. Do not get involved in any contracts where they do not offer a place to sell that hashpower back since those will not ROI and you would be better off just buying btc at the price it is now. If you cloud mine then resell it back you can make a decent profit if you time it right. If not you will still get dividends no matter how small they are.

Also, if the price of BTC went up 10x I would suspect that many cloud mining companies would mysteriously disappear or go our of business, and people's paid-for virtual miners would stop hashing.

Unfortunately it is approaching $250 this month.

With Bitcoin at $300, my Cyclone (22 MHs scrypt) is netting about $0.56 per day at nicehash rates, after electricity. If you add in cooling costs, I'm probably negative at this point...

Since you want a short answer.

Answer: NO

NO

if you are a casual home miner the answer is no.  if you are constantly tinkering and upgrading it still could be. 

Yup..I got Positive ROI After 5 Weeks with LTCGear

Wow that is awesome, do I still get to ROI after 5 weeks if I buy now?

No, no...

The current ROI at LTCgear is about 6 weeks, still extremely good but no longer the 5 weeks it was a while ago  :)

No its not if you are doing it at your own expense(e.g. Electricity cost, hardware cost) but if you are doing cloud mining it maybe profitable for you.

The difficulty in mining is also increasing that it is hard to generate BTC and earn you more at expenses than income

I wonder how low the price of btc must get for even the large mining operations to stop before they're mining at a loss

I believe its 0.05 kwh

I ran a few numbers through a spreadsheet I've been using for profitability calculations.  Correct me if I'm way off here!

Assuming electricity/facilities/manpower can be equal to approx. $0.05 USD (which you would generally only see in very large industrial operations, or very small private mining operations)
Assuming hardware efficiency of 0.7W/GHS (I'm using Bitmain as my standard here)
Assuming current difficulty of 35 Billion

Mining becomes unprofitable at a BTC price of around $58.50 USD

Alternatively:

Again assuming electricity/maintenance/etc equals $0.05 USD
Assuming hardware efficiency of 0.7W/GHS
Assuming current BTC value of $390

Mining would no longer be profitable once difficulty hits 233,500,000,000

Any thoughts or observations are welcome!

I think the number is more like $90-$120 right now.   You must realize that rational people will shut down before hitting marginal cost (where your operating costs of producing one bitcoin equals the price of buying one bitcoin).
Your costs are in fiat and MUST be paid.   So, when what you are producing has high vol to the fiat you MUST pay, approaching marginal cost production is very risky.

my number is about 150 with 0.064-0.068 elect and no overheat costs

but ppl are also going to think if its actually worth it. its not worth it industrially to break even, and its not worth it with minimal profit either

Still profitable for the big farm and free electricity (pay by landlord). heh..

I put almost everything back into my farm and I'm staying well ahead of the difficulty and growing. So, yes it is profitable for myself at 0.10 per kw/h.