Bitcoin Forum

According to bitcoin wisdom's LTC chart, a 28 MH/s miner will yield about ~$1.50 a day. Excluding the electricity bill factor, it is going to take me more than 180 days to ROI (if the 2nd hand miner seller is going to maintain his selling price of $280).

This is definitely not a rational decision. But I kind of like the idea of owning a miner. If you enjoy crypto-currency, you are likely to buy the miner and enjoy the thrill of setting it up. But it will be a poor business decision.

What will you do?

If you want to own a miner, you buy buy some graphics and mine the Ethereum. You can sell your cards later.

On average, how long do you hold your rigs and graphics card before you sell them away? What is the average lifespan of a mining rig?

There is no lifespan, there is only profitability
good GPU with good cooling mixed with top rate PSU will last long more before it get outdated by new HW

Only miner worth buying is an A2 Terminator 110 M/h scrypt miner. Even that will not earn you any money, i know i got one, but you can mine new coins and hope you get lucky on one. I have done ok on a couple of newly released coins and made some money.

I have 2 zeus thunder X3 which run at about 30 or so M/h and a 28 M/h miner. None of which i even take out of the box anymore. The A2 runs at the same electricity cost as each of the others and is 3-4 times more hash for your money.

The Alchemist and titan are better then the A2 but are harder to buy the titan is harder to buy then the Alchemist the Alchemist is only better if it has the updated firmware on each board it can work off of PI's and the controller its comes with.!!! don't get me wrong if i could get a A2 id buy one in a heartbeat but every time i find one at a reason able price i miss out so i guess im not meant to have one.

but what makes A2 better is the company that makes it still makes them or a new one is coming out sometime this summer from them and you need the up dated firmware on the Alchemist to make it better. the A2 will still be very useful after the a4 comes .


don't pay any more then 150 for a 28 MH miner to me that's to much it still makes a profit but will take forever to do RoI if that's a worry or may never. I have a Alchemist 256 and a 25 mh miner both can still make a profit but the 25 MH is so low I don't plan to make a thing worth while, it all depends on power cost.

Id do eth it's faster cash atm and much cheaper to do .unless your ready to shell out at least  700 to 1200 for a A2 even more for a Alchemist and even more for a titan.

Forgot there is only one company that makes Scrypt miners now and that's is . Innosilicon http://www.innosilicon.com/A2.htm which is good for Scrypt mining there may not be another company to make any at this point but Innosilicon also does't make just miniers either which is good over btc miners makers so Innosilicon will be king for ever . or you can buy a x11 miner but i wouldn't it only does x11  type coins and totally destroyed x11 mining with GPU.

Thats a hard question to answer.  People were mining litecoin back in the day with hd 7950/70's and some are still mining with 7950's today which is a 3 year old card.  I got started on ether with a single 7950 that I bought online and then a second one and that card is still competitive today with R9 280's and R9 380 series cards.

The reason to sell your hardware is to get out of the mining business or to upgrade to newer hardware and there hasn't been alot of reason to do that until the new R9 480/490 cards are released and tested.  So with that you could speculate a life span of about 3+ years and mobo/cpu components will last about 10 years, I have lga 775 mobo/cpu that is 8 years old and mines just fine.

BEWARE if you are deciding today to jump into the game, reaching roi will be challenging with no preexisting hardware.

it's better to focus on gpu right now, much more profitable, than scrypt asic, at the very least you can buy x11, which is at least betetr than scrypt at the moment

The Alcheminer was pretty much identical efficiency to the A2, it just came in "over twice the hash" per box and didn't include the needed power supplies.

 The Titan is somewhat more efficient, but also tended to have issues with it's hash dies DYING a lot and was very marginal on power connections, pushing the PCI-E connectors VERY VERY close to or a bit over spec.


 The A4 will blow all of this stuff away on efficiency, but isn't due out for a while yet - probably late June or sometime in July before any are seen in the wild - and it's looking like it will end up costing ballpark $4k per miner from the usual resellers.


 A2 units haven't been manufactured for some months now - what makes them overall better is that they were built like TANKS, and just keep running very reliably.
 The only time any of my A2 units has gone down are (1) net connection drops - they pick back up fine when it goes back up (2) I have to turn one off to move it (3) I did have the PS die on one when I turned it on for the first time.
 They DID have issues with the original power supplies being pushed a bit harder than they could reliably handle long-term even on non-turbo mode and NOT handling "turbo" mode at all on the 110 MH/s "Mega" units - a lot of the Mega units that are available used have already had a better PS installed by now though.
 The older 88MH/s models didn't seem to have that issue, as they used less power even on turbo mode than the 110s use on non-turbo.

 The Alchemists appear to have been well-built also, but had issues with not working well with a lot of pools on their early firmware versions and not achieving their rated hashrate. I believe those issues have since been mostly or entirely fixed though.


 There is no such thing as "average lifespan of a mining rig" - it varies a LOT. For example, the S5 or SP20 if you bought them early on, or during the Bitmain/Spondoolies price war, had a profitable lifetime that exceeded a year EASILY unless your power cost was very high. The S7 on the other hand you'd have to have FREE power for it to be profitable more than about 8 mohths, unless diff drops a TON at the halfing.
 Some GPU rigs were profitable on Litecoin for about a year, were profitable on DASH and the like for a while after that, and are enjoying a THIRD profitable period right now on Ethereum. Other folks got into GPU mining too late, and were lucky if they had a MONTH of profitable mining on Litecoin.

 Timing has a lot to do with it, electric cost has even more to do with it.


 I've had some motherboards last 20+ years, but more commonly in the 5-10 year range. GPUs tend to not last as long in mining service, as folks tend to push them harder.



 28MH/s litecoin miner - would be a Silverfish or Zeus, neither of which are going to be profitable AT ALL right now unless you have VERY cheap electric cost. Both of those were fairly INefficient miners even when they first came out. They're also going to get hit on profitability hard once the A4 starts going online in quantity, which I anticipate pushing Scrypt network hashrates up quite a bit LONG before 6 months is through (I'm figuring on Litecoin hashrate DOUBLING by the end of this year).

This is very good advice. This has never crossed my mind.

Basically you incrementally improve on your hardware and the cost is offset by mining efforts.

Yes and the resale market on GPU cards is huge as they will always be in high demand by gamers or multimedia people.

So you take on much less risk , if the coin market were to collapse.

Alchemists has been fixed and works on any pool i try it on it just works no questions asked and it is built like tank but can get hot even with a lot of air flow but it has to have jat updated firm ware flashed to each board and that only works with BFG 5.1 i think on and works on any kind of PI controller as long as you get the right bfg update but it runs solid it's sister is the Excalibur which you can't find any place we all know why. that company was a a ripe off  and made just enough miners to ripe off millions. but the Excalibur is like the A2 Alchemists etc runs like a tank and there are very few who got one and won't sell it. the company that made the Alchemists went bankrupt shortly after they said they were making a miner that would be = to the A4 and had a upgrade path for for the older scypt miners like Zeus mainly to use there heat sinks and was even tried to some extent i read some place just not sure what happen.  now  jstefanop the guy that wrote the updated  firmware for the Alchemists has access to BW chips and wants to make a miner for the old platfroms like side hack does for home use but jstefanop also likes scrypt miners and maybe putting out some kind A4 chip USB stick maybe even miners for home use i may be wrong on the miners part he is under NDA for BW im also guessing with . Innosilicon why he won't say to much on the  A4 chips but does have some sample BW BTC chips is under NDA but is for the small guy aka home miners as is side hack but side only likes or wants to make btc miners . if i made some miss info it is only because i misunderstood some stuff but other wise I'm pretty much on the money .

There seems to be demand for scrypt hash power with many rental services increasing their prices. Is there a particular reason why scrypt is extremely popular? Is it due to the flexibility of the coins it could generate?

LTC is dying ,4years has passed ,still no any application.

LTC isn't dying yet, given the price has climbed about 70% over the last couple months.
I'm still at a TOTAL loss to explain the 20% hashrate dump this past week though.

 LONG term though, they need to get more widespread acceptance to survive - though they're already more widely accepted than most coins.

Can you even get roi ? Won't the difficulty just nulify the increas in hashrate ?  ???

LTC was one of the first few coins that came after BTC and gain acceptance. There is still strong demand for LTC in the Chinese market, for reasons unknown, Scrypt seems to be one of the more preferred algo choice?

LTC is there when need arise, you can bet ppl will chose decentralized fair and secure coin over hyped IPO scam/bullshit, we all invest in IPO just for sort term profit, don`t lie to yourself

Litecoin has a purpose....

It provides markets for other shitcoins that have to trade below 1sat. Shitcoins worth only fractions of other shitcoins.. Shitcoin liquidity.... diarhea if you will....

i love LTC and i will take any you dont want lol drop them here # LgQb5fUpGGJHUg9TkBcgZEWuU5o9mBSz3E i only have 30 i will gladly take more

Is there a reason why you love LTC? There must be a reason. I am still trying to find a reason to buy more LTC.