Bitcoin Forum

I just found out about Bitcoin today, but I've been doing a lot of research and it seems that mining is hardly feasible.  The difficulty is increasing at a ridiculous rate and it will only get higher.  I was considering the possibility of investing some money into a mining rig, but by the look of things now I doubt it would ever pay for itself.

Has mining been ruined by FPGAs?
Is it even feasible anymore, or did I miss the boat?

This is pretty much what you would expect. If there were free money available, people would pile on with new GPUs to get it until the difficulty rose to the point of marginal profitability. In fact there was, and they did.

ETA: I don't think FGPAs are to blame, at least not yet. More likely it's just influx of hobbyist miners with already-owned GPUs.

I'm sure it's too late, but I just spent $200 on two 5830's.  If I at least make enough to recoup the cost of them I'll be happy.   ;)

I wouldn't say it's too late really. In a decent enough pool the difficulty increase hasn't hurt things too bad. Granted, you might not become a millionaire joining in at this point, but even my little card is making me enough btc to support my video game and smoking vices :)

i just picked up 3 that arrived last night.

spent the rest of the money i had priced for a dedicated rig directly on BTC

I've had the same hashrate for a few months now, still making about the same as I was before. Its all about picking the right pool!

And what that right pool be ;)? Slush? Deepbit?

It depends on your hashrate and how luck you are feeling ;D

Let's just say 2 Ghash/s..and feeling very very lucky ;)

Which super duper secret pool do you use?

if you consider that you are generate 0.5btc/250Mh then you can make the maths.
there is no such thing like super luck pool. :)

Sure there is, for a casual miner. Pool luck evens out over long periods of time, but someone could be lucky as a casual miner by hopping on only during pools fast block breaking time, though if it were a score based pool the hash rate would have to remain constant.

I know i'm done running 250mhash been getting 1btc a day today it cut me in half i will only be able to get 0.48btc a day. Forced  out ... good luck guys i feel like once the small guys are forced out a lot of interest  will go with it. :(

a week ago your one BTC exchanged at $6.50.  now it's almost $9.00.  in another week it'll be over $12.00.

why are you thinking in terms of the number of Bitcoin you generate?

think about what they will buy.

Hmm, it could just as easily go down in price.

i can hardly imagine who will buy bitcoins for 20...30...50? dollars? What for? In hope that they will grow even more?? Why they should? There must be the point to stop growing :)
The pools... deepbit for me brings in less than slush's pool. By the way i tried to switch this two pools at some points to earn more, but it takes a lot of time...

For BTC to "stop growing" in comparison to USD, the Fed would have to stop printing money... I wouldn't expect that. ;)

That doesn't make sense. If the Fed printed money, as in increasing the amount of $s that are out there, the value of the $ will decrease. Okay, your BTC wil be worth more $s but the $ will be worth less.

The only thing influencing the actual value of the BTC is trading in it. Okay, companies accepting BTC as payment affects its value, but only in that people see that there is future value in the currency and therefore they start buying and selling BTC.