Bitcoin Forum

The difficulty increase combined with the price drop has me turning off another batch of miners. How about you?

I went from having 4 miners 2.8 th - to zero - sold them off on ebay and need bitcoin to go back to $600 if I will to have made money off the deal as electricity and cost of the miners happened when btc was over 500$ 

 :-\

I will retire unprofitable miners. At the moment nearly all mining asic's are becoming so.

Agree need to look at this as a long term investment not a day to day price comparison. Winners don't give up!

I run my miners till they die, electricity costs be damned.

I had my last Sapphire 7950 GPU finally die on me late last year. It had been running at 90 degrees nonstop for 3 years. It hadn't hashed any SHA-256d in a while, but it held up well considering how hard I ran it. Can't believe it lasted as long as it did.

Last week, I had my first Block Erupter die. No real loss. The rest are still hashing, despite their negligible speed.

I've also had one USB AntMiner die some time around the new year.

Amazingly, my fleet of BFL miners are still hashing, except for one Jalapeño that stopped working last November. But it was problematic from the beginning, so I'm happy it lasted as long as it did.

Never had a blade die on me, but they're starting to show their age, so it's only a matter of time.

The newer miners, I hope, last as long as the older ones have.

My prisma breaks even on monthly power usage in 6 days, so I'm not getting rich.
but we have super cheap power

Nothing is turned off for me. Just underclocked some and at $200/BTC I am underclocking the rest of them. At $100/BTC I am turning off miners.

Edit: But difficulty might go down again which is good.

Ain't gonna lie, starting to think about shutting down, putting my wallet into cold storage, and forget about Bitcoin for a decade.

Turned off my miners. Where I live the power costs are too high for the current price and difficulty.  :'(

Wont turning of miners just drop the price even further though?

For those of you selling off your miners, contact me first before ebay or craigslist and we can try to work something out.

i turned off my asicminer TUBE :)

GPUs are now just gaming :)
Block erupters sleepin
BFLs sleepin
kfc 28nm sleepin
kfc 20nm getting sleepy

I havent looked in many months but also have 1G a CEX and they have not sent me a bill for power yet...
Last I checked(July '14) the 1G was barely makin dust after 'fees'...

I did back of the envelope @ BTC $300 and decided $200 enters the grey area for my situation.

Not sure if I'll pack it in or throw good money after bad on the chance of a windfall price change.
The fact that I save over $100 a month on winter heating has a 1 month grace period being considered...


LOL 'the best laid plans of mice and men...'

YMMV
:)

Your 1GH/s at Cex isn't doing anything right now, they've paused their cloud mining because they can't make a profit with the bitcoin price and rising difficulty. So you aren't making or losing money there.

wait, so you've not used cold storage? lol you're too brave.

You folks are still buying mining gear?  You did not sell out 500-900 range?  Time to rethink that strategy!

I've shutdown all my miners, at $0.15 per kw it's just not worth it. I'm on the fence whether or not I sell my rigs.

are big farm making money, with the current price? would be interesting to know if they will shut down too

Only if their power is .02 per kwh  ::)

I'm hoping BTC will stay low for a few months to "weed" out these corp miners  ;D

Come on $100 or lower even  ;)

I'm in LTC with 35mh,I'll run em till they burn!!!  :D

May even get my GPU's back up for x 15 or something  ::)

What I find funny is that the more people turning off hardware right now the harder it makes for the rest of the network to survive. If we lose 50% of the hashpower tomorrow it will take 1 month to get to the next difficulty re-target which will make it harder for miners to pay the power fees.

Flashnews, people are serving their own interest first.

Are you shocked ?

I do not mine myself. But I want to know if some miners here can answer me. How this new crazy low price of bitcoin affected your mining? Is is even possible to earn something?

Hold BTC & wait for the "rise"  ::)

If you want to sell your ASICs please contact me!

Me too  ;D

I dont know about everyone else but I just bought a tone of BTC on the crash so I think keep mining and hold is the in it to win it game

Ok all you saying "please contact me for selling ASICs", I have a few Antminer S3's for sale.

I'm in Vancouver, BC Canada

I pay 0.07. My prismas pay their power in 7-10 days for the month right now

I am ramping up. As people are shutting down their farms, I am buying their equipment cheap and standing them up to mine.  Everything Antminer, KNC, Bitmine, Gridseed if it exists I am mining with it.

I am thinking to start with mining again. Not for profit, just to support network. I am from Europe, looking for reasonable miner.

bitcoin mining is done for sure, with the last dump, but other type of mining are still running good or not as a bad as btc

... Meanwhile, price has gone up $20 in the last twelve hours.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How many of them? And what price for each or bulk?

Time to turn some miners back on!

agree 100%

What price with shipping.  PM plz

In all seriousness, I finally laid my first gen BitFury rigs to rest a couple days ago. Will probably be putting up ~1.5THs of BitFury boards and controllers up for sale early next week. Still have a single S2 running that I'm looking to decommission at some point in the near future.

Worst was cloudmining services shutting down . btw is CEX refunding the amounts ?

I've got an Antminer S4, just 2 months old I'll sell. I'm in Tennessee. PM if interested.

Like rats fleeing a ship, because some water splashed onboard.

It's been a few day's. Wait. lol

Yep, many miners being turned off which will mean less btc production which should also mean more btc value.  well... eventually.  We'll just have to see how sweet btc is made if more people accept it and it can be more valuable to accumulate then miners may return.  For now... many are out of the mining fun unless they don't care about losing money or don't have to pay electric.

My miner setup is minimal. A Jalapeno, a few Block Eruptors (not in use until I get a new USB hub), and I just received a second hand Antminer S3 yesterday which is powering through computations nicely.

My small mining effort is because I enjoy Bitcoins as a concept and want to be part of something that is different and I find interesting. I don't mine to make a profit but regaining some capital is nice. Even though electricity costs are technically higher than income from a Jalapeno and even questionable for an S3, I want to be part of the BTC community.

Now it's cold in my office I wouldn't mind some more miners, might get a few bits by running some miners instead of heaters... BRRR!

I switched out all my s-3's to  8 sp20's and 1 s-5
My winter power is 13 cents but  get about 3 cents in savings from the heat.
So I am 10 cents net until April.
Price drops under 100 and stays there for 1 month  I will shut down.
I may use the s-5 at freq 100 and solo mine it. Until it dies.

I run 10-12gh at a solo pool will run that till the gear dies as the cost is low.

Do you think you can be lucky with 12 gh ?? Im wondering because I also got a small setup of 12gh

It's possible, but your chances of finding a block with 12Gh/s in your lifetime is extremely small.

Low cost, but high reward. Not a bad idea.

I have just logged in to zenminer. Apparently 90% of my income goes to cover maintenance fees  ::)
Luckily I don't have much (wasted) mining power there.

not only at zenminer
zeus, genesis allready minus for Mhs cloud

Before you all decide to switch off please read this thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=924727.msg10152686#msg10152686

so the diff is rising even with the current price? another reason to turn if off

I think there is a big lag for significant hash rate to "disappear for good". I expect many big mining firms may well have negotiated a better rate for electricity, but with a penalty if they don't actually use the electricity they contracted for. Electric companies just love a predictable load. In that case, they may well lose less money by continuing to mine at a an operating loss. In general home miners aren't constrained in that way, but it seems unlikely we'll be able to detect home miners turning off gear. My miniscule 100GH/s will not be noticed, along with another 5000 folks like me.

I've sold two of my miners, both of which were not efficient at all. The reason for sale was to move across to two yukon or two S5 units. With the current value of BTC, it is still worth it if you can keep power costs down. I can cut my costs in half by switching miners.

My miners definitely don't run full time like they used to and I am finding my self investing my btc into mining contracts rather than actually mining.

If I get solar power installed in the next month, I will full time mine again(summer here and the system we got quoted for will generate up to 20kw per day).

20 kw per day is huge man.

Hope you will create a topic on that. I want to see this.  ;D

Go SOLAR ftw!

Well, I too have not bother maintaining a wallet in cold storage.  In the other token I am a professional computer tech and network administrator, knows how to keep my computer secure, I am the sole user of the computer where bitcoin is installed.  However, I do keep backups of my strongly 44 characters password protected wallet.dat on multiple media because hard drives crashes can turn to get outside my control in terms of data recovery depending on the severity of the crash - not taking any chances there.

44 characters password is basically impossible to hack or brute force. Be sure you don't forget your own password like the 123 bitcoiners does.

What about in 10 days if the price is at 250$ and the difficulty will go down?

Yet ONLY pos, can lead to holding and not using it as an currency.

Solar is definitely the way to go if you can afford a $30,000 solar system. 

I’ve been looking into Proof of Stake altcoins like NXT.org.  Both systems have their issues but PoS doesn’t have the need for massive equipment and power requirements that Proof of Work altcoins need to function.  PoS makes more sense to me since people are invested in the currency, not the equipment & power needed to support it.

You might want to commit yourself for a few years down the line before you go about buying a solar system specially for mining.

Like I said “Both systems have their issues”.  Many people wish that more were holding Bitcoins now to stabilize the value. People want their currency value to remain stable not fluctuate wildly like a commodity stock.  

The current situation is a clear example of problems the Bitcoin network will face in the future. Miners only continue to operate when it’s profitable. Bitcoin value will always be tied to operating costs of people, equipment, facilities & energy.

Will their be enough individuals running long term hashing power to support network transactions for free when mining is over?

Will the system eventually transform into something centralized that will charge transaction fees to support operating costs?  Which would be exactly like the banking system that we have today.

It wouldn't be logical to spend $10000+ on a solar system if its only for mining. Our quarterly bills here are about $600. A good solar system can offset this and potentially pay for it self in a few years. Its an investment I wish I'd have done a long time ago but technology has improved and prices have halved.

Wouldn't it be simpler and more economical to simply sell the electricity you generate from solar?
If you invest into solar AND mining equipment, your mining income will have to cover the initial investment and running costs of both. I haven't done any calculations on this, but for me this implies a longer payback period. It's different ofc if you already have either of the 2 systems running.

I'd personally do an analysis for myself about what's better? To invest 30K (today) into solar or buy electricity (today and in the future) for my miners for the same cost for x days/months/years.

btc is dead.

Why are you still here if BTC is dead ??  ;)

DEAD

Really nice to discuss with you. Full of nice points.

Go on...

What is wrong with you guys? The Bitcoin has never been more alive. Just look at the zillion good things happening in the industry right now. Moreover, there is version 1.0 of the Bitcoin coming down the road, and then you will (finally) see how well Bitcoin is doing. Also, don't forget about it's temendous marketing advantage -- basically no one on earth has ever heard of the Litecoin or one of the other altcoins. Happy 2015!

Strongly agree, based on my calculation, selling back the energy to the grid giving me more profit then mining, plus you don't need to pay for ASICs.

This increasing in difficulty of Bitcoin make me to Turn-off my Miner... :P :) :)

Bitcoin Difficulty:    43,971,662,056
Estimated Next Difficulty:    42,480,731,132 (-3.39%)

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty The difficulty is going down and the profits will go up as the bitcoin price is recovering!

Quite often (For me atleast) the highest profit I have made mining was when it was unprofitable at the time. For example back a hile ago I may have been able to mine maybe 0.1 a week on a small home operation with low ish starting costs but due to the price at the time it was not worthwhile. Now imagine if I had kept that going and maybe mate a couple bitcoin? If I sold at the right time $2k for a small gpu based rig.

This! I used to mine altcoins in a sort of similar manner and could have mad a killing based of the price increases at the time. Especially in litecoin.

I say we just shut the forum down for a day or two every week. It seems to work wonders for the price.

prices are going back up a bit these last few days, looks like miners will come back

Turned my S3 back on. Small profit or break even but plan on holding BTC so see how it goes.  ???

all of my S3 alive now
back from the dead
since price is up it will got a little profit :)

If I was mining farm owner, I would shut down my farm if the price gets below X BTC, because I need to sell those BTC to cover my electricity cost in fiat, clear.

But if I'm an average bitcoin miner with a couple ASICs maybe, and I'm expecting the price to go up anyway, why would I ever shut down my miners? Do you really convert your earnings immediately and then pay your bills with that? If not, isn't it nonsense to turn off miners?

My goal is to invest a set amount of fiat every month increasing my btc stash. I do that mining and buying. When mining becomes less productive than simply buying btc, the miners get turned off and I start buying instead.

Ok, in this case I got it. Buy if its cheaper to buy.

All S3 back to dead for me..

With the price which falls, I think that it is completely useless to mine for the moment, with the difficulty.. Some Cloud Mining companies are probably going down too soon, zeushash !?

 We are seeing a big increase in difficulty......maybe it led to my miner turning off!!! :(

Maybe it's a combinaison of the network being a bit unlucky and more power coming to the network.

By the way the previous difficulty change was a decrease :

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

The difficulty to begin with was already too high. Bitcoin was on a steady decline over the months and it hit rock bottom a week ago. I stopped mining a bit ago, but I don't blame anyone for stopping now while they're ahead. Saving the Bitcoin while paying for the mining, which I have seen some do, is a horrible idea. The charges will keep racking up while the BTC never rises up in price. For me, it was nice while it lasted, I'm sure it was for you too.


It was minimum. Nothing too notable or to make a difference in OP's case.

about time. Idk how it's even worth the energy costs

I was really happy to buy my antminer s3 on september, i knew that ROI was gonna be impossible but mining is so much fun, to know that you are mining is.. awesome :P, had to turn them off and I'm just setting up some nodes to help the network.

Thinking of doing the same because my miner runs only occasionally for (gamble) solo mining.

send me your miners and i will plug them and send you some satoshis xD.. i have "free" electricty xD

By the end of the week, I'll be retiring my lone S2 and all my S3's; only running SP20's and S5's.

Starting to feel like an end of an era...

yeah does not look good.

it's such a shame reading that a lot of miners are going to shut them down.. i have 3 SP20s running smoothly and i only pay like $3 per month in electricity.. luckly the goverment have fixed the issue with that :D

I think home miners quitting the mining business also has effects on the bitcoin economy as a whole. In the 2013 BTC boom hardware was solely bought with BTC, fuelling the rising prices of BTC. In 2013 und 2014 I spent most of my BTC at buying hardware. After my miners were obsolete in spring last year I did not need additional BTC. So I kept my BTC except some humblebundle purchases. So loosing the home miners is not a good prospect for bitcoin.

Home miners, are bitcoin users, those big bitcoin farms are not bitcoin users, they're abusers and dumpers. I can't wait til they decide to boot them self off the network.

$3 per month for 3 SP20
you are lucky to be born at your country dude
btw what country are you live ?

The country of doesn't exist ;D, turkmenistan has free electricity for its citizens though

How is the noise between the S2 and the S3?

Someone is selling an S2 on the classifieds and wondering if its worth getting as a home miner.

Venezuela man.. i made a bad calculation.. it's $6 bucks

For the sake of argument, the S2 and S3 are about the same volume.

A bunch of S3s all stacked together will be bothersome. Best to keep them in a separate room.

_Regards,
°._{°°°°°°°°} a.k.a 10⁸

Currently have my S2 in the room next to mine and actually its not even noticeable. If you had multiple S2's (or S3's) then yeah... I could see how it could be bothersome. I do have a BFL SC 60 and umm... The S2 is a lot less noticeable thanks to there not being a whine sound.

With the new increase in difficulty and the super low price I think it is time to shut down my S3+ again. I hope the price recovers but I don't think it will.

sorry to hear that. BTC will acquire value if it's constantly backed up by miners and nodes.

I've only been renting power. Too expensive to run @ current price.

https://blockchain.info/pools

Look how much the Unknown slice has grown. It used to be tiny. Difficulty going up another 6%. It would appear there are huge private setups running.

Its not a good thing to turn off miners.....because it is my earning source :) ;D

Yeah, it is this kind of industrial mining that finally drives me away from BTC  >:(

Having home miners was one part of BTC that I enjoyed. All over for months now. The other part was being part of a new and more democratic way of payment. That was probably naive but I nonetheless did appreciate it. For a while now bitcoin just feels like greedy mafia business and third world money making machine. For the mafia part: not only do asic producers try to rip you off but also cloud miners and payment exchanges. And for the third world: throw coal in on the one side and feed btc miners on the other side; let's not talk about ecological consequences.

From my GPU times till now bitcoin has turned from hobbiest enjoying themselves into a twisted Lovecraft version modern currencies. Two years ago I would encourage people to try bitcoins, try mining and try being part of the community. But nowadays I would say stay away. There is nothing (positive) to experience anymore. Rip off and industrial mining await you  :-\ I mean I actually think it is fair to pay a few percentage points when using paypal and not having to deal with all that bitcoin hassle.

I think now is time for me to also turn off my bitcoin node I've been running since my miners were turned off. It just makes no sense to give anything back anymore.  :'(

I took a couple S3's that have been replaced with SP20's and decided to swap out the fans for silent ones, and downclock two of them to 150mhz doing ~300GH/s each @ ~242W.

Kinda sucks that the efficiency doesn't scale better on the S3's as you clock them lower :( Was a bit disappointed to see that.

I'm guessing this is why the difficulty has been going up and down the last few adjustments.

Some people (and perhaps farms) are shutting down. Then when they see the difficulty adjust slightly lower, they power up again. Then the next adjustment goes up slightly. Just back and forth until they decide to get out of the business entirely.

This isn't any different in fiat, we get ripped of every day, apple, google, facebook etc etc

I don't think it adds value if the cost of electricity surpasses the value of the BTC mined. I actually think it decreases BTC's value overall if it is just wasting resources and money.

I just shut down some KNCMiners that have been profitable for the past 14 months, and actually managed a positive ROI on those I received in November 2013.  All of my S2s and S3s ROI'd as well. 

I sold all 20 of my S3s, and upgraded to 6 X S5s, which I plan to run in my apartment until they're insanely unprofitable (or until summer hits, and I can't justify them anymore).  I'm not sure if they'll ever ROI, but if the hash rate continues its plateau, then there's a good chance of ROI (eventually).

They make great space heaters, and I definitely prefer large power bills when they're offset by BTC earnings vs. just paying for electrical heating.  It would be amazing if they could last 2 winters.

I reinvested some of my profit into Umisoo-hosted miners, and I've also been testing out some cloud mining contracts for a few months now.

So although I'm reducing my overall at-home hash rate, I'm adding a bit of cloud mining to offset the reduction - assuming that all of the companies are actually mining, and aren't ponzi schemes like PBMining!

Well, I am pretty sure I have a great scenario for Bitcoin mining since I don't pay for electric. All of my bills are included in a one month price, which is fairly cheap, as well... I have a Rockminer R-Box (older model) that mines at 30-34Gh/s overclocked a little.

Time to buy real miner! S5 or SP20 or Avalon4  ;D

Yeah, like 10 of them ;) I would have made an server room with 3 AC's, broem broem ;D

Did you turn them back on?

Yeah, I can justify them back on for a bit for some winter heating. This year-and-a-half price slump is getting annoying. I'm ready for the next moon trip.

The only reason I'm keeping my miners on right now is because I don't have to worry about power and it's winter.  If summer hits and Bitcoin's price hasn't skyrocketed, these things will become nothing but novelty toys packed away in my closet.

Cheap power and that is all you run? If my power was flat rate, one fee every quarter, I would be smashing it. At this point in time, if you bought say 3 S5 miners and ran them I still think you could make a couple BTC and sell the miners without a loss. You currently cannot buy S5 miners from Bitmain but you can buy them second hand for $100 more. Pretty confident there are large sales of Antminers straight from Bitmain for people to resell at a higher price once Bitmain is out.

If you don't pay for electricity, of course you will profit heavily from mining.

No you won't because you have to pay for the equipment.

could also run into the case where the landlord starts questioning the tripling of the power bill. I remember reading an article back in the day about a guy who had free electricity and setup some GPUs to take a crack at mining (yes, that far back in the day), and apparently he had a LED-fan blowing on them to keep it cool, and his landlord saw the LED from the street and investigated or something, and ultimately the lease was terminated due to "testing of equipment" or something.

so, free electricity, sure... but don't wanna upset the landlord!

My blizzards are sleeping since this being this year..

2 x 1.4 MH/s normal blizzard   (batch 1!)
1 x 4.0 MH/s blizzard X6

They did cost me around 400 euro (including shipping and import tax) and alot on electricity and in total they mined maybe 50 litecoin :(

Mining never really was and will be profitable, it's decentralization what it's all about!

I turned all my miners off about 5 months ago. But recently powered up my s1's. With the cold weather figure I'd run them rather than a space heater in my office  :)

Jack

I turned off all my S1's in October 2014. And sold them all in November for almost what I paid for them. So in the end, I got my ROI plus a bit of pocket change. I would say it's a good experience on learning about Bitcoins and mining, but I won't be doing it again any time soon.

I still have two modded HP server power supplies that I don't know what to do with. They're only worth about $10 or so on Ebay.

The price is getting lower and lower. I had 300ghs on cex.io .. Last year i won a lot of bitcoin from mining with cex.io but now..cex is lost,mining with gpu by myself is useless..I'm going to alt coins

Eventually it's going to get to the point where it will be pointless mining, the rewards are just not worth it anymore.

For me I am already there. Mining is just an even exchanges of power for bitcoins or more often a loss. It is cheaper to just buy bitcoin with fiat.

Same here, except with scrypt GPU's, when the asics came out.

Well I'm expanding my mining.  Adding about 3TH per month.  Great deals out there on miners at the moment.

You need more power. And if the price of Bitcoin goes up, the price of electricity will go down.

Turning more on to mine altcoins

Unfortunately, difficulty is increasing faster then bitcoin goes up, so electricity price ratio is always going higher and higher.

if you want to sell some SP20 or S4.. contact me :)

It's funny seeing some people thinking that free electricity = profit. When you take into consideration deflation of the mining equipment, you most of the time end up losing, unless you have a way you can sell the equipment fast.

Turned my miners off 6 months ago as it was getting to the point of no return on braking even each day and eventually started costing more in energy then it was producing BTC and the drop in prices and energy costs continue to spike or go up is not cost effective. It was a hobby but turning out to be way to expensive. I will only put my miners to work when a new sha coin comes along and mine it for a few days to get a chunk of them. Maybe when something comes along to be better or btc prices go up then might consider to turn back on but right now their staying off until prices are better or theirs a better alt coin out to mine.

why dont you sell the miners , and then later on buy an more updated ASIIC for the money ? imo this would be the most economic choice atleast.

You get nothing for the miners no days. Maybe get $50 to $100 at most for an  S1  old 80GH Avlaon maybe $20 if that lol and to compare with Antminer s5 are 370 USD for 1.1TH mining power so for 200GH miner going to get what a fraction so its pointless to sell on when can use it to mine towards other coins when they come out and make that 10x over when the coin goes to exchange. It is far better to keep and m ine the odd few days here and their with antminers than to sell for next to nothing.

I hope more and more miners get shut off, especially the large farms.  I'd like to see mining done mainly by individuals and pools of individuals, not large-scale industrial facilities.

Would be nice for that to happen but seems more company's been jumping on it seen on news the other week that one company has gone bust due to buying millions of $ worth of equipment and it was working out good for them then comes the bills for them and they had to cease business and turn off some kept running to squeeze the last bits of profit out of it but most are seeing that it is only profitable if prices sustain them self and energy is  cheap. I only turn my lot on when needed now or when new coins come along and even then sometimes rent the hash power as its a lot cheaper to or just buy up the coins instead.

When miners are obsolete for generating a profit, the consideration of having to pay shipping costs would ensure that the buyer would be more likely to incur a loss (in almost any case except where a buyer has free power).

im thinking s1's value is closer to $20. 

I am actually surprised if S1 still have value, can't even break-even electricity cost. Who buy them anyway?

What about alternative energy to power the equipment.
Wonder if there is even a calculation for that. Solar, wind etc. ???

I'm serious.. If you are wiling to sell any s4.. PM :-)

All of my miners (ZeusMiner Blizzard, GridSeed Orb, AM S3+, 2 RockMiner New R-Boxes, and 2 RockMiner R-Boxes) are paid for and my electric is currently free... So I'm keeping mine running; I will for quite a while.

They're paid for by the government... I got a $2800 government Pell grant for college. $800 of which I didn't need to use for college.

Nice way to start up and that you got free electric. Wonder how their bill looking with using more energy :P  is good to so no harm in mining at all as it will be free for you and generating coin.

Ya, same thing happened to me.  Witht he oversaturation of the market, I am not making nearly enough for the combined effort and electricity bill to make sense.  I think a lot of people are going to be turning away from mining and finding other ways to get their bitcoin fix!

The difficulty went down 0.2G, a sign of the times?

The high cost of buying and setting up a solar farm to power a btc farm would make it hard to justify with bitcoin not being the most stable thing in the world. It might even be a safer bet and more profitable to just set up a solar farm and sell power back to the city than it would be to use the power to mine depending on the scale of the mining operation.

A lot of people should turn away from mining due to electricity bills, but a lot of them are mining at a loss and they give this reason "to secure the network".

I mine "at a loss" because I do it for hobby.  I only have about 300gh in gear I picked up for a song, so it's not like I could expect to make a profit with that, and I'm not going to spend the money on hardware that would net me a profit.  I'm mining because I find it fun, I'm happy that I am contributing to the network, and I do have a chance, ever so small, of solving a block.  Fun stuff!

There is also the mentality that even if you are mining at a loss currently at the current bitcoin price in the future if the price goes up you could be making a profit.

Very true... technically speaking, pegging the price of BTC to USD and saying you're mining at a loss is a bit of a fallacy. If you hold BTC and the price relative to USD doubles, you didn't lose anything.

Exactly if you say I am not going to sell until BTC reaches $500 then you would calculate your profits as if it were $500 so you can get the future profitability not the current one were you won't sell,

The theory is that if you are mining at a loss, you could easily stop the mining and use the loss to buy more bitcoin. You would get more bitcoin for the same amount of USD spend.

That makes sense assuming the person has the money to buy bit coins on the spot.

You would be lucky to get $50 for an S1 in my opinion. I see them going for $20, and then the rest of the price would most likely come from the shipping of the actual unit. Most people will not buy a large lot of S1's. Another large problem is actually finding people to buy your miners.

I stopped mining too

Yes, difficulty / price ratio is killing miners.
My CPU only works for some Monero sometimes.
Others are off. No chance to gain a cent.

I paid $19 for my S1, plus about that again in shipping.  I would not pay more.

Bitcoin only exists because of the miners. Without, kinda loosing ... incentive.

If they have the money to pay their power bill, wouldn't they have money to buy the coins?

Many people find mining enjoyable as it looks like your machine serves you to literaly mine some assets from an unavailable source, or create something from basis. Others may like all this hardware-related things. Now, as the home mining keeps becoming less and less reasonable, the question is how much money one can expend for all that fun.
And in comparison buying coins could be perceived as boring - within few minutes whole process is copleted. In that case I suggest to try trading.

I turned off my mining rigs in december 2014. Now I only mine altcoins at launch, with cloud mining.

how has that worked for you?  Sometimes I think about giving it a go with alts, then I remember how I threw away .25 BTC worth of mining power back in 2014 for a day on some 21 coin and I could never sell it for anything worthwhile. 

There are sites to help you choose the best coin at any given moment. If your'e on top of it, you might do well, as there are sometimes brief distortions with various alts, where you can swoop in, mine them, even for just a couple of hours, and make 5x or 6x what you would have gotten from mining a mainstream coin.

Most of those are Scrypt coins, though, not SHA256; of the SHA coins, generally BTC is the most valuable to mine...

42 coin was another coin like that. They were trading for more than a btc, but there was one 42 of them.

After one year of mining, I just stopped my small time mining operation :) In the past 4 months, I was paying so much for power, my bills were so high, and I was barely making anything. Not even close to breaking even each month. Now I just buy direct, and cloud mine. I have to keep the feeling of getting new coins each day. I think I will turn on my miners maybe for a week each month (maybe).

But I will say what a year experience it has been. From being ripped off and miners never coming that I paid for from minersource/blackarrow (prospero x-1), and from cloud mining sites shutting down after 2 months of offering service (GAW miners).

I learned, and it's been fun, and I will say we are in the infancy stage of bitcoin. And I can see how it will stay around, and not go away anytime soon.

So I will be cloud mining on trusted sites, and buying my bitcoins for the foreseeable future. And having a lesser power bill :) With the money I save, it's more worth it to just direct purchase bitcoins. Right now that has the most value (to me anyway).

You should use a bot on altcoins announcements section, they are all potentially profitable if you start mining as soon as they are released. Then you can always sell on exchanges. Lots of coins today are immediately listed in sites like Yobit. For example, I'm keeping an eye on dragonsphere xdb now (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=986534), supported by manhattanmine and suprnova. For people like me who bought multi-gpu rigs a while ago it's a good chance to make profit.

I recognize that Bitcoin isn't 100% perfect, that someone in theory could create something that poses legitimate competition. But 99% of the time when you see an alt coin announcemt, you can just tell it has no future. Yet people go off and mine it, and sell to others. Don't get it.

I recognize that Bitcoin isn't 100% perfect, that someone in theory could create something that poses legitimate competition. But 99% of the time when you see an alt coin announcemt, you can just tell it has no future. Yet people go off and mine it, and sell to others. Don't get it.

I have always wondered "who" is on the other side of the transaction when I sell an alt-coin? Who wants to give me Bitcoin, or better yet USD, for this alt-coin that I "mined"? That's why I could never see a long term model for the various GAW schemes that mined "X coin", but paid out in Bitcoins.

Answer is simple, imho:

1) newbies
2) traders
3) whales

Stopped mining a few months ago. Power costs too much. Cooling is an annoying overhead.

Selling any of your miners? Really interested in expanding my farm :)

I dont home mine anymore, just a bit of cloud now. I think that currently besides cloud the only thing you can make money with is trading. Get a nice bot and skim profits.

If any of you is willing to sell your miners.. Plz contact me.. I want to buy a few of them :-)

The only time you should be turning your miners off is to power cycle them, lol.

Also, It's heading into winter here in Australia, so of cause we stacked a few s3's around the house to warm things up. BTC

If anyone has a Avalon 4 or Spondoolies SP35 I might just be interested in taking it off your hands  :)

got a SP31 Yukon  from spondoolies ... you can make me an offer.. ( i have to shipped it from France)

I have some miners for sale
2 X SP20's
4 X Neptunes
8 x Antminer S3's
6 x Antminer S2's

Location NY willing to do local pickup or deliver in the NY Metro Area

Switch em all on again, agree to mine to a specific address and use the money to set up several Solar Power / alternative energy hosting facilities so you can host your and other people's (for a fee) rigs and run them till they fall to pieces.

You have better luck posting it on the computer hardware and auctions thread then this one.

And the sale is only successful if you have a damn good price since you have way too many units.

Why not go with people who are legit in the cloud mining services?

Spoondoolies has partners like genesis mining that accepts all payment providers.

And you can still be in the mining game, and catch a break to get back in slow amounts at a time?

Sorry this does not exist.

The whole cloud mining concept is made to separate idiots from their money. Its so obvious  don't even understand how could anyone not see it.

because some of them are risky even if they are legit, due to the fact that contracts last a bit too long, and you can't resell them in many cases, also maintenance fee is high in some clouds, and on top of that you should add the fact that if bitcoin skyrocket, or begin to rise in price , you can't resell your contract for the same amount at which you bought it

they are done in a way that will prevent you practically, to earn something significant

you know why? actually for same reason is somebody able to sent thousands of dollars to some fucker thousands of kilometres away and wait for some "money machine" couple of months..:)

reason is obvious, and same, again and again. GREED.

and because of this, bitcoin is still alive. not because of some "haha cool, freedom, tech, idea behind), just because of pure greed. (well, some of guys around bitcoin just believe it, but maybe ~5%, no more). rest is just waiting for easy money.

As the difficulty of BTC mining is changing, you may turn off unprofitable miners but most of these turned off miners are solo miners and still there are networks that are profitable. You must calculate for yourself wether your miners still worth working or not.

Mining is getting more and more centralized. I don't mine anymore.

edit: nah.. who am I kidding, can't stop  ;D

yeah, because of prices of mining gear and other needs like placing miners to DC..in good old times with GPU and FPGA, it was somehow suitable to run it at home/garage..actually, it is quite scary, because there is nothing less secure then some kind of centralized cloud:(

I also stopped and I think that this will be worse and worse..

It's almost a 100% safer bet to just purchase Bitcoins than mine for them. With the rising difficulty, increasing hardware costs, and electricity prices being a burden, not to mention heat/cooling, you will likely break even, or even lose a little. It's sad that Bitcoin has moved on to ASIC-only mining, I remember the days of GPU/CPU mining, the key to a great, usable currency is to make it obtainable from anyone who owns a computer.

We are expanding our facility and looking to buy large numbers of secondhand miners.
Requirements:
Efficiency: > 0.8W/G
Price: <0.6 BTC/T
Quantity: >500T
Interested parties please contact me at eric.mu@haobtc.com

Set 1:

Ant S1 - half board working 90-100 Ghs
Ant S1 - perfect condition 180 Ghs

without PSU

never overcloacked just updated stock cgminer to get extra nonce

looking to sell both of them excluding shipping for 0.5 BTC

Set 2:

6 GAW furys with PSU
avg hash rate 7.5 mhs
0.5BTC excluding shipping


can take reasonable offers.

The company that I work for owns around 9P hashrate and is looking to expand until hitting the 50,000 KW max limit. The hydropower price is very competitive, but on the downside, we have to go to the mountains.

Eric Mu
CMO of HaoBTC
E: eric.mu@haobtc.com

eric are u still intrested in buying miners ?

Yes, but only bulk sale - 500T minimum.
E: eric.mu@haobtc.com

I am on the fence of shutting down my 7 S3's - I live in SF and feel like I am actively losing money, but I enjoy doing what I can to decentralize the network.

I wish it wasn't so slanted by silicon/ASIC producers with access to cheap power.

I also got ripped off $6000 by bitmine in 2014 with a miner/refund that never came.

I wish there weren't so many bad people motivated by greed in this world.

I still believe in bitcoin.

buy bitcoin instead, leave this mining thing for the big farms, don't need to play their dirty game

also this is the right time to buy, the price is good and stable

The summer heat is starting to get here.  It seems it's getting past the rain sadly. 

If it was not for a good amount of fan's I would be pushing gear pretty hard, possibly stopping and selling.  But if I am right I think I should be able to mine through summer and have one more winter before the having. 

You're mining in San Francisco?

PG&E's A-1 Small General Service peak use rate for San Francisco is one of the most expensive in the country. Even if you're on an E-9A (handicapped on social security) tiered pricing schedule and only mine at night you still would pay about 40% more for electricity than the rest of the country. The only way you could pay more to mine is if you moved to Hawaii or New York City.

well currently only big farms can keep farming,without loose, since btc value is 250dollars ,soo to ROI would take more and more for solo miners,as someone said is time to sell them or atleast buy bitcoins with the money you were willing to buy a new rig....if bitcoin returns to 700 dollars maybe it will be the return from solo miners...

It's pretty amazing actually.  There are some farms with extremly low electricity.  And in some they still mine with A2 Dragons with a profit.

If you think about dragons still running at a profit from a farm it's crazy.  They have ROI'ed and a god amount of profit at this point.  I know of at least one that is in this period of just pure profit on a good amount of dragons.

Difficulty just is not getting the double digit changes like we suspected we would get like last year.  We actually just got another negative change.

Hawaii it is!

That's the spirit! lol

I turned off my last miner last year..... Kinda sad.... I think mining now is only for the people who is smart about buying/selling hash power at the right time... and the pro's who can invest in giant farms.
I still encourage people to mine for fun.... it is a good educational tool, even without any profit.

I turned off my miners too (twenty four HD7970 farm)
I guess mining is profitable only for ZERO power
Just holding my few LTC for moooon time :-)

I'm working on setting up a cheap solar-powered Bitcoin miner.  It's going to run one of my three U2's I have collecting dust by pairing a solar-charged 4000mAh battery bank, a USB solar panel charger to charge the battery bank along with its built-in panel, and a Raspberry Pi or TL-MR3020 router with OpenWRT to control the U2.  I'll add more solar panels so I can have a powered USB hub and the other U2s run later.  It definitely won't generate a lot of Bitcoins, but hey!  No more power costs of leaving my PC on 24/7!  It'll also be a fun little project.

Mining is almost dead for the little guys its unfortunate but its the facts. Maybe its time to start mining new coins and hope for the best.

What is considered a little guy? Serious questions here.

100TH/s and less might be a good cut-off point, somewhere around there?

Screw that, I'm on my S1 going strong.  Strong on electricity bills, that is.

I guess it matters that I have free power  ;D. I will run them till they die of old age.

Is there someone thinking about selling their rig?

Did you start yet? I have 2 nanofurys and I want to do the same. My thought was to use a panel from harbor freight tools 15 watt panel which more could be added later. Some people do say to not waist your time on these panels and just by  one bigger one similar to Solarcities yet won't invest until it works. I also liked Teslas battery maybe a small time electrician would install it one day.

My other solar project was a solor powered flood light with the little solar panel clipped to the rain gutter using the plastic Christmas light clips. This system can be used for the 15watt panel too. Might try the corner of the house first.

Not sure where to start first. Probably panels first and attached to the corner siding or temp post at the corner of the house. first step would be to make sure I get 6 hours of charging time.

My battery was going to be the charged battery jumpers. Those are good for plugging led flood lights if you have to work on the car or power goes out for awhile. One small problem is it stopped taking a charge so we will see if solar power can trickle charge it. Funny probably used it once to jumpstart an actual car battery.

List of things to buy.
Centech 5-in-1 Portable Power Pack with Jump Start (battery and power converter builtin)
Thunderbolt 15 watt solar panel kit

well sollar energy as wind would be the way to be able to roi but how many time you think withoyt pay eletricity would take 1 year? more less with the current price of 230 dollars.... would be better to sell and buy it ?

Yep, I haven't done a lot of work on it since cause I've been pretty busy with some other stuff, but here's the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1077811.msg11510674#msg11510674.  It's basically finished, just needs a few more optimizations.  I'll finish it eventually, but like I said I'm pretty busy.  The skies have been pretty cloudy lately anyways, so I'm not in a rush.

Don't forget that with solar and wind (or any other electricity source you buy and generate your own) you will have to ROI on the investment for that device too, on top of the miner. Essentially, it only extends your ROI and makes your income higher after the break-even point, where the difficulty probably would have already risen.

maybe offtopic but what was the deal about the $6000?

For me mining at home is not profitable due to the high electricity costs. I recently bought some GH's from a trustworthy cloud mining service. This makes some profit after the costs are paid.
Time will tell if i break even or end up with a little profit :)

China has basically taken bitcoin over for the most part. I still have my miners here but only 2 of them are running. And they're not running all day.

sollar as wind energy would be only to mine lol you can use it at home there is a lot things to spend those energy from them lol...soo this investment is to ROI around 5 to 10 years of bills

I didn't fully get what you were trying to say. However, there is a big difference between 5 and 10 years of ROI.

Very true, but a miner that mines for free is never obsolete so theoretically you could keep mining forever.  Technically you'll always make your ROI eventually, although as you have said because of difficulty rises and other factors like price that could take some time.  I really only think green/free energy is the way to go for people that really want to get into mining but have really high power costs or people who don't care as much about the money as they do the fun of mining and other cool and interesting projects.

if you think in future you can say on the next 20 at 40 next years that you expect to be  alive ,what i meaned is that is currently several people that invested on wind and solar energy soo mine bitcoins for any person that goes into these new ways of energy will be roi on the next years that is around those time as the country you present at brazil is around 10 years....the normal energy costs....

What i meaned is you can take a shower turn on light ,turn on pc ,turn on tv, and mine bitcoins with the new energy soo is what i meaned

The thing is that your miner will mine less and less every month and your income will gradually reduce.  Eventually to a point where you can already call your miner obsolete. At this point you are "wasting" your renewable energy on something that is not profitable. For example, I could sell the electricity for 15c/kWh, but by using it for mining if I make less than 15c/kWh of Bitcoins, then I am losing money (wasting energy that could be sold).
If my expenses are double for the same income (understand: I have to invest in e.g. solar plus the miner) then the ROI will be longer, for sure. However, since your income is gradually decreasing (linearly or maybe even exponentially!) you may never even make a ROI  if you keep your miner running.

I think investing in solar/wind is a good opportunity, I just don't see why it would have to be combined with mining, apart if it is a hobby project then for sure it is fun. For me these 2 will be separate investments. The idea of having "free" energy from renewable seems very appealing, but I am not sure if I couldn't rent a place with cheap electricity that would make more economical sense and give me a fast ROI at the end of which I'd sell the miner and invest in a new technology.

I ain't turning off my miner, i'm mining other sha256 coins.  ;)

I got a ant miner u3 off $50 of ebay.

well the way to go is another coins ,but with renew energy otherwise no miner profitable to pay the bill

I hadn't thought of it that way before, seems you're right.  I guess it's the only way to go if your electricity is super high, you can't sell to the grid, AND you like Bitcoin mining as a hobby.

I will mine bitcoin even in minus, because I'm believe in bright future.

well isn't better to buy it then and setup a full node? a better combination than wasting time mining, while still maintaining the support for the network

that sounds insane keep mining bitcoin with the low worth of it and well bills will accumulate and it can stay for a long time on the current price soo how long you are able to wait for a raise on them?

I'm miner, not trader. And full node already working for decentralization of bitcoin. This is my small contribution to support network. I'm not spending mined bitcoins now, money from my main job is enough to pay electricity bills.

the only good thing about this is anonimity, via mining, in comparison with buying bitcoin, but if you don't mind this, you can go ahead and buy with your wage instead of paying the bills, which would be basically the same thing

but you can have some edge on the price if it skyrocket later, while with mining you can't mine quickly enough, in the case the diff will rise

well in the end all the same thing,but well would be better to buy the bitcoin direct on exchanges instead buy a miner,and pay a huge bills of energy,this way you would be helping the bitcoin world but without loose your money to pay bills... but well for me makes no sense i were to buy a miner but i thinked on the ROI soo now i buy bitcoin on exchangers ,,,less cost and i can roin in days or weeks. All money invested gets in the end ,the called results.

When you buy Bitcoins you can close your position with few clicks and get your funds back instantly. When mining you are attached to your gear, that you have to find a buyer for.
When I had a scrypt miner over one year ago I've been refraining from buying coins, because mining seemed more entertainable for me and thought it brings more opportunities.

Unless you have very cheap electricity I'd suggest to buy coins instead of mining. Especially if you are not selling them to get profit now, but holding.

yes that way buy them directly is loose money some kind of hoby? at the moment you are throwing money away ,if you wanna do that send them to my wallet lol,there is several ways to support and those one just killing your precious money

Yes, I agree. Electricity costs are too high, when BTC go up, then may be  ;)

you have only two weeks for that, than the diff will match the price and the ratio will be the same as before, there were users in the past that were exploiting that time window to earn more and then sell the miners, in the era where those asic miners were replaced quickly with a more efficient miners

how much you get from your mining for that?
because electricity cost are too high.

I purchased a CoinCraft Desk miner from Bitmine.ch in 12/31/2013 for $5,938 USD - sent by wire to Switzerland. The miner was supposed to be delivered in March 2014. It never came. The company just went public with its bankruptcy.
http://bitmine.ch/

Also feel free to check out a bunch of their customers complaining about never receiving the miners or the refunds they were promised.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291141.4500

edit: dates

If profitability is your main focus this will be the case in most countries.

Some will continue to mine just to help protect the network.

I have a feeling mining will come back quickly if BTC prices skyrocket again

DONT TURN THEM OFF, ILL RUN THEM FOR YOU!  Hahaha... Ill pay like 3 USD in electricity running 4 Antminers s4+, its so cheap that I dreamed of offering a cheaper cloud mining service, but i guess it would be harder than i think... Right??

the big problem is not to create a cloud but keep it profitable, than that today only a few companies can keep paying its members avoiding prejudice , today who have bitcoins simply invest or games or altcoins and wait for your valorization and sells and this is the best way to invest bTC .

0.03 is even cheaper than china, because of thi, i might be interested if you can do a privare renting or something, but seeing how you are a new user we must use escrow

if you use antminers s5 you can sve even more on electricity, reaching almost free power

Has anyone seen a solar generator that would be able to run a 1000 watt miner 2ths, i know the cost could be a lot higher but at lease it would be self sufficient, i wish we could get an eco friendly miner package from some of the big companies developing new miners.

There are a few threads about mining with solar power here on the forums. The thing is, to tell you whether or not it would be feasible (economically) in your case a lot of other information would be needed.
One can design a system to run a 1000 Watt miner for you, but without knowing local electricity prices for example, one can't say whether or not it is worth it.

I can suggest e.g. this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1041769.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1041769.0) I wrote down a few of my thoughts on the topic. If you need any further help and want to look into this, I'm happy to help you with the details.

Does anyone keeps running miner without being solar or other kind of green energy,pretty sure you running miner in loss all knows those but to build a system solar just to mine i guess not the way to go,if change energy full house ,and use it to mine well that is the right way to go

Not meaning to hijack this thread, but i posted about a bitcoin mine option in my country and would like you all to consider it as an option.

I'm not currently asking any money, i'm just looking to get some ballpark figures on interest, and if it goes through, start everything as it should, in person, or via multisig wallets, with lawyers on my country etc.

It is almost up there at the top of Bitcoin > Mining https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1125379.0