Bitcoin Forum

I am very surprised to see a lot of postings on here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=21112.920 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=21112.920) of people mining at rates of 30-300 Mhash (just randomly chosen numbers)
I'm pulling about 3 Ghash and I'm debating when should I stop and sell my 7970's to recoup some of my investment.
I think that at the current difficulty, almost 5m, it gets pretty pointless to mine at anything less than 2 Ghash/s unless you have free power.

About 1/3 of what I make needs to be converted to USD to pay for the electric bill. Also, my rigs are heating some of my rooms. The Maine Winter is usually pretty brutal, but I won't need the heat come late April. So I'll keep using them even if 90% of what they mine will be used to pay the electric bill. I'll sell once I start losing money. However, I plan on switching over to LTC once the BTC hashrate picks up. So unless I am breaking even with LTC, I'll be getting rid of mine.

I'm in it for the long run.

Well although I'm making less bitcoins, I'm making around the same amount in USD from the time I used to make ~1btc a day and it used to be 10$. I have pre-ordered 2 ASIC SC Singles, the ~$5 month delay has actually allowed me to gain ~$1300-$1500 in mining. I'm shutting down my GPU rig when profits reach ~$4 a day. And to touch on what Mufa23 said, my rig is watercooled and has been heating my room throughout winter! I just hope the singles get here before the summer weather rolls in.

I tend to look at this a little different than most, People see this as a "business" and have to account for cost, I am looking at it as a investment in the freedom of mankind, I will allways be mining to what I can afford in electricity, Any BTC I can make will be seen as a bonus.

So in answer, I am in it for the long haul, GPU's, FPGA's even ASICS If/when they arrive.

It was 89F here in SoCal today - 94F in the rooms with my miners even with AC going (commercial) so I've already taken down my older cards and sold locally before it becomes impossible to sell them. What's the point making $30 in BTC in 2 months of mining on a 6870 if the card will sell for $30 less. I just buy BTC with my proceeds.

When the GPU farms hit eBay the prices will drop for resale - at least until Xmas.

I had over 50GH, now down to 18GH.

At current price, it's profitable to mine all the way up to 50-60 million diff. That's what I'm going to do.

I shut my miner software down late last year (only a single cardnoteven high end) when myreturns fell off a cliff. Now i am buying some coins out of every pay cheque instead.   

 I intend to go ASIC   once they actually  hit  the market in volumes because i am  a believer.

I do not understand why anyone would shut down their rigs when mining Litecoin to dump for Bitcoin yields more. We are not going to see a Litecoin ASIC for a while yet.

I shut them down after reward halving and opened them again after BTC $30

The market is pricing bitcoin as though ASICs don't exist at $40-50 GPUs are still profitable.

The heat is useful in winter and as long as it covers the energy bills keep 'em running until you have an ASIC in your hand.

I'm not sure how sound a strategy this is.

If I hadn't let my rig sit broken through last spring/summer in the $4-6 times, I'd be sitting pretty right now.

Speculation of course...

Yes, in hindsight I should have let them run at a loss.  ::)

I just run the mining on my PC I get ~ 170 Mhash/s which is not a lot but it's better then nothing. I usually let it run during the day and I work on the PC while mining in the evenings. With current BTC price it's still profitable, even when 30% of proceeds go to payment for electricity. I have preordered one BFL ASIC Single so once the ASICS are actually here I will stop mining on the GPU for sure.

Sold 3 out of 4 of my 7970s already. It's an awesome time for 7970 resale.

Shut down all of my rigs earlier this week.  Got a few interested buyers in some of the parts (SSDs, video cards).  The hard part now is the silence throughout my home.  I really do miss that whirling noise, especially in my bedroom.  I had a rig in there and it actually helped me fall asleep a little easier.    :'(

Oh well, I knew this day would come eventually.  I was originally planning on stopping back in October but soon realized that the added heat output from the miners was warming parts of my house that don't get it otherwise from the heater.

Still not thinking about that. Since my electricity is free, gear payed of, I think it will be few more months

I have relatively cheap power ($0.10/kWh), so I still have a while to go before the rigs get turned off. 

I pay 0.26C per kw/h --- so sold my all my GPU's  about 12 months ago when bitcoin's price were low
Today at high bitcoin prices I still would sell them as they are noisy - and hot - and only a small profit can be made
I am waiting on asic rigs --

why don't you come to alt coin?

everything like factory, when it first time introduced it needs bare hand to make something, later, automatic, robot, but new factory open everyday, like old they still need bare hand :D

sr 4 my poor eng

"why don't you come to alt coin?"

what is alt coin?
do u have a link ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

=))

I mine with only 2.2 Ghs of GPU
it cost me 2$ of power each day
I mine arround 1 BTC each 4 to 5 day (current diff)
So, each BTC cost me 10$ of power
and are currently sold for 50 Canadian $
it's arround 8$ / day profit... But I dont see that as simple as this.

I do not sell BTC as they are mined,
I hoard, buy, donate and buy fiat when badly in need of..

Hoard a small part for my retirement.
buy stuff (even stuff I dont need/want, like reddit gold, namecheap domain name)
donate,
buy fiat when I'm really broke.

As for their value.. for a while I'm concidering each BTC at a value of at least 100$ each..
100$ / BTC = I donate a lot, I buy stuff at very high price, etc..

I'm using part of those BTC to promote growth, encourage the braves who start accepting it so early.

I sold more than 5k BTC before it gets to 1$, and have no regrets at all.. I also mind myself to not regret a donation made today that could worth thousands (fiat $) in few years..

If I had hoard all mined BTC, and sell those today = It could paid in full a house and more..  I dont care, I'm in for the long run, mining and spending..

For the OP question.. I dont think I'll shutdown my little 2.2 Ghs of GPU.. they may be used until they broke.. they have paid themselve few times already.

Buying ASIC as I can.. I'm all in forever !!!!

I don't understand the "I don't mine bitcoin, I mine xxxcoin and sell them for bitcoin" angle.  Are you saying there is a price differential between the difficulty ratio of btc to say litecoin, compared to the exchange rate?

Because if that were true, I'm pretty sure people would mine (say) litecoin and drive its price down until the difficulty/price ratios match.

Thats exactly what people are doing, but litecoin adjusts every 2 or so days :)

http://dustcoin.com/

One problem I encountered was that tuning a particular GPU for scrypt was not as well documented as tuning it for SHA256. I briefly tried LTC mining on 5870's and 7970's but could not figure out how to get the hashrates other people were getting. I was getting nowhere near the 1000:1 magical ratio so I gave up.

My guess is that as GPUs become more unprofitable more people will figure out how to tune their GPUs for LTC mining and this arbitrage opportunity will be closed.

Just a brief point...

If you think BFL will ship within the next 60 days (approx) then you would be better off selling your $1300 worth of video cards mining at 1gh/s, and pre-ordering a BFL ASIC for the same amount, and 60x as powerful.

very very basic maths, I think 1gh/s of GPU's would probably cost more than $1300, or not, but the sentiment remains.

My gpu's are long gone.

How about mining LTC for fun and speculation?

 I had a bit of trouble with this myself. I didnt try to mine ltc with 5 seris, but with 7, feel free to ask

Since my electricity is at 0.0532/kWh, and I am only having 3 7950 and 1 7850, the utility bill is really acceptable.

I actually mined only about a week of BTC, I'm mining LTC most of the time, it's still more profitable to do so.

Actually you don't really have to turnoff you GPU rigs at all, unless you really fed up with the noise, there are coins like TRC/PPC you can mine and change it to BTC daily, at least doing it now is still more profitable. :-\

For those of you with more than 2x GPUs, are you using risers? open air cases? How d you keep the temps down?

I finally stopped mining even LTC now.  It's nice to have my PC back in a state where it's not sluggish and I can put the side cover back on.

So how can we get more than 4Ghash?

Buy 8 Radeon 7950s.

I've been mining with a single 6950 for a couple years. Everyone said it wasn't profitable back then too. Fast forward to today and I have a nice little stockpile of bitcoins.

I'll stick with mining until my graphics card dies or electricity is vastly outstripping BTC generation rate. With so many alternative cryptocurrencies around, I doubt the electricity issue will ever happen.