Bitcoin Forum

Hi there! I'm new in the forum so this is my first post. Just I wanted to say hello to the comunity. I am interested in mining. Is it too late to enter in the business? As I read more and more it seems that just ASIC miners will change everything: With such a machines coming into game the difficulty will go so hight that it will be nonsens to mine without them... am I right?

Thanks!

no

it's never too late to make a life change

I believe your right, I would not invest in GPU farm anymore

i think wenn bfl and the other producers will send out their asics then gpu mining will be useless.

Any idea if is it currently possible to get asic mining devices? As far as I know it seems that there are long ques on orders and that some of the devices where paid long time ago (in advance) and not yet delivered.

High risk business looks to me... but tempting.

There are plenty of new companies coming out with plans to produce cheap(ish) asic miners.

KnCMiner is one of them and also TerraHash.

KnCMiner have just started taking pre-orders and I honestly believe they're not just another BFL story.

Its never too late!

I've started mining with GPUs recently (04.2013) and now i think about buying an ASIC chips machine. There will be no other machines than ASIC based in near future. We can only get smaller (65nm, 45nm) and slightly faster (not by order of 100 i think). So difficulty won't rise indefinitely.

You should not buy any GPUs specifically for mining. An already bought GPU should be able to hash for a few months and recover some part of its price, but not all.

If you want to support the bitcoin network, keep looking for good deals to buy some ASICs.

Yes, but do the math on the ROI and be sure to allow for the delivery time until you can start mining. ASIC's as currently priced will never pay for themselves.

A little worked example. The Blockfury Erupter is priced at 2BTC and mines at 300MHash/sec. Right now that earns you 0.01BTC/day and would pay for itself in 200 days. But difficulty is spiralling upwards. So let's take the figure of 20% every two weeks (a little high perhaps, but it makes the math easier and you can always plug in your own guess as to the future difficulty). After just 8 weeks the difficuty will have increased by 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 = 2.1 times, so your return from mining is halved. And here's the sting, if you mined for the rest of eternity you will only make the same return as you got in those first eight weeks (checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes for nice read). Total reward less than 1BTC, you lost money.

Now the Erupter is the ASIC that perhaps you could get your hands on soonest. With BFL or Avalon you'll be waiting months, and all the while the difficulty spiral is eating into your earnings.

The idea of mining is fascinating to many people and since BTC mining has got so difficult already, shouldn't we expect a brighter future for alt coins that give more mining opportunities to people even if they are not early adaptors? Should we be worried?

Recenlty I was considering to invest into GPU mining rig, but ended up with the same conclusion. it's not possible to get money back after invest. But powerful ASICs like Avalon or BFL still can generate some profit.
Difficulty increase history is following (http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash/2016 (http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash/2016)):

Date                 Block Number    Difficulty           Difficulty increase        Difficulty increase (%)
08.01.2013        215712            3249549,58   269 913                     9,06%
23.01.2013        217728            2968775,33   -280 774                    -8,64%
05.02.2013        219744            3275464,58   306 689                     10,33%
18.02.2013        221760            3651011,63   375 547                     11,47%
01.03.2013        223776            4367876,00   716 864                     19,63%
14.03.2013        225792            4847647,15   479 771                     10,98%
24.03.2013        227808            6695826,28   1 848 179                   38,13%
05.04.2013        229824            7672999,92   977 174                     14,59%
17.04.2013        231840            8974296,01   1 301 296                   16,96%
30.04.2013        233856            10076292,88   1 101 997                   12,28%
12.05.2013        235872            11187257,46   1 307 161                   11,03%
25.05.2013        237888            12153411,70   1 307 161                   8,64%

Last year average increase every two weeks was 3,74%. This year it is already 12,87%. And it will go up after all Avalons will be delivered. And then there will be bunch of DIY miners from Avalon chips, and probably BFL. Very soon mining will be profitable only for miners with rare elite hardware.

Mine other coins

It's depend how much GH's do You have and how much power it use :)

Which is why I chose 20% to illustrate my example, it may seem high now but once the next batch of Avalons and all those DIY chip miners come on stream it can ony go upwards. Perhaps the chip purchases will be profitable. Avalon is roughly 0.08BTC for 300MHash/s plus assembly costs, but you're still looking at up to 3 months delivery on new orders - 10 weeks for the chips, then all the business of getting them built onto mining boards. I'd have taken a punt if I had the BTC in hand, but the minimum order is typically 10 chips, and I'm a bit light on coin at the moment.

If you have some gpu's around that you still want to put to work than i would suggest mining LTC and than just trading it for bitcoin. Or you can just hold onto LTC in hopes the price goes up.

I wouldnt recommend gpus for bitcoin mining anymore sadly, just not up to snuff. Also the asic game as mentioned above is a bit sketchy to say the least so do your research before investing
as the only person who will lose money is yourself.

If your looking for a good LTC pool, checkout my pool at:

www.weloveltc.com

Yup, I've been doing more LTC now. I'm recently into the game and am starting to realize that to be successful you either have to be 1) The first person to the mines... (Sadly we missed that for BTC by about 2 years) or 2) the person selling the miners shovels.

I have some plans in the works for number 2. :-P

ASIC's cant mine Scrypt coins. i guess they saw this coming.

This is why the five post rule is stupid...

Well such a stream of useless replies just urges me to click on "ignore" - problem solved.
The 5 post rule also serves to show who does not have anything meaningful to say...

Onkel Paul

now, but there is work on fpga Scrypt mining. ASIC is just next step

Though it might not be too late to start mining, it's an extremely competitive business and it would require ALOT of careful planning and taking risky investments (buying asic preorders)... You might be better off investing in securities (see the securities subforum) - there are stocks that have a one to one correspondence with MHash, and you get dividends from mining.

This should buy another 1yr at least.

They already have CPU's with Memory caches for Scrypt, its called a PC / GPU, Literally to get the CPU / Memory ratio correct they need to compete with AMD / Intel and NVidia. its not a simple case of placing chips in array like BFL are doing.

either-way the coming months are going to be very Interesting, I'm holding back from adjusting my setup/Spending more money until the dust clears.

btw its good to join the forum, ive been reading for some time but just decided to sign up.

e2a: spellims & grammaticals

FPGA scrypt is tricky as you need to attach high bandwidth RAM, and what you end up building is not that much different from a GPU card (albeit with a much more flexible processor core). ASIC would take this further by building the RAM on-die, which will give much faster access times. Its doable, but will anyone make the up-front investment to make it happen?

Edit: cross posted with your's Spectrome, but it looks like we're in agreement. Welcome!

I'm currently mining Litecoins with my GPUs, though I have a 4.5GH/s miner on order from BFL (ordered in March). I'm not holding my breath...

I will definitely not buy chips. For not engineer it seems impossible to assemble something useful with them :(
I am planning to spent few thousands on working ASIC. Avalon batch 4, or BFL if they will prove their legitimacy, or other new dealers on market.

But, again back to difficulty. Its impossible for it to grow geometrically too long.
With 120% increase of difficulty every two weeks for next 6 months - result will be around 100,000,000.
This number seems impossible for me. The thing is that each ASIC does not increase difficulty by multiplying it to some coefficient. Otherwise, it just adds some value to it. And total amount of added difficulty is limited by ASIC production speed. Current difficulty is 12,153,411. All Avalon batches #2 and #3 ASICs together are 1200 pieces * 70GH/s each = 84TH/s. This will give difficulty increase for 12,000,000. If some amount of them is already delivered and working - increase will be even less.
Then, there will be BFL. I have no idea about their produced ASIC quantity. Lets assume BFL will provide total hashing power the same as all Avalon ASICs together - 1500 pieces * 70GH/s each = 105 TH/s (corresponding difficulty increase is 15,000,000).
Totally that will be 12,153,411 + 12,000,000 + 15,000,000 = 39,153,411 (difficulties).
To fill remaining 60,000,000 difficulty points - someone will need to produce chips with total hashing power of 430 TH/s (it is Avalon chips, BlockEruptors, private ASICminers, BFL chips..). To compare - current power of all miners in network is around 86 TH/s, and is increasing for ~8 TH/s every two weeks. Additional 430 TH/s is way to much, it seems impossible.

I'd say that difficulty will reach this 40M mark as soon as Avalon and BFL will deliver ASICs, but then it will grow much slower.
Now in my calculations to find possible profit of ASIC - I assume 2M increase of difficulty every two weeks (two times bigger than current).
In this case - BFL 50GH/s received in September will generate 270 BTC profit in two years.
USB Block Eruptor received today will generate 2,5 BTC in 2 years (and then subtract its price of 2 BTC and you have profit of 0,5 BTC. In case if difficulty increase is only 1M/2weeks (like average now) - then profit is bigger for 1 BTC. But its best case scenario, better profit is impossible. If difficulty increase will remain 1M/2weeks - it will be completely unprofitable to buy it after 6 months. In reality it will become unprofitable even faster)

PaperClip

True, nothing can grow forever in the physical world,

You may enjoy the threads in this subforum https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=81.0
Optimator is predicting 250M by December https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=216358.0  (though he has his critics)

The direct chip orders may well be the decider. If the third-party board manufacturers get their act together, then we may see a huge spike in chip orders, which the foundries will be glad to supply with their 10 week leadtime (provided Avalon and BFL don't decide to choke off the supply ... its their Intellectual Property after all).

And there are others planning ASIC designs too (some will be scammers, but not all). There is money to be made here with the examples of Avalon and ASCIMINER (and perhaps BFL too, who are sitting on a pile of preorders they are failing to supply).

Good luck with your investments, at least you are putting your money where your convictions lie.

Thanks! Those forum topics have a lot of information, I can try to estimate hashing power of new chips, based on information from there.
Btw, I have created this excel document to estimate profit for devices, you might find it useful: http://depositfiles.com/files/ujh878mvm (http://depositfiles.com/files/ujh878mvm)

Thank you for the usefull info here, I think i will wait with my "investment" of about 2grand and will see how the situation develops

If you invest in a high Hash asic it is not to late, but any other device is not profitable right now.

Yup, just i wish they are in stock. Preorder sucks

Not to late.
  split your hashing power to a few different coin and you will be fine..

with my one GPU it would be slim amounts of mined coins though.

Why not choose only one coin  ???

Never too late.

I feel like if you have enough money to spend and risk loosing, then sure its not too late to start mining.

Something about having all your eggs in one basket  ;)

I think its profitable mining new alt coins right now.

Well, it's rule to at least try to weed out the idiot spammers...  it makes it just a little more time consuming for them tso the trolls with the small attention spans go elsewhere...

You may not make much, if anything, now once you factor in electricity and A/C but if you expect BTC to appreciate in price (look what it's done in the last year) what you mine today could be worth something eventually.

There's always the $75,000 pizza: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/this-pizza-is-worth-750000. Even if it's not true, it illustrates my point.

Do you have faith in it or not?

Keep your eye on KCMiner this week, the news will be out tomorrow and we should have a clearer idea if these guys have a chance to deliver...Just make sure you go on their site and get yourself in the queue.. Also ,your gonna need big cash to get into the game if you wanna run with the big boys (ASICs)

Agreed... There's alot of risk in this hobby. But I look at it in this respect... The more we use it, and more importantly, the more we offer services and accept payment in bitcoin, the more people will come to value it, we are in essence creating a self fulfilling prophecy

I just hope that guy was smart enough to keep some of it... I can't even imagine what I would do If I screwed myself that hard... Hind sight is 20/20, but damn...when its that undervalued, you really have very little to lose in keeping it... go figure... hope that pie tasted good...

Thanks to all of you for the replies. Good advices and I appreciate all the comments. Actually I am getting to the conclussion that ASIC will be the king and GPUs FPGAs will have to move to other coins. As far as I read many ASIC miners will mine only BitCoin (at the moment), so the difficulty of bitcoin will raise like crazy. If these ASIC devices do not mine other coins, then GPUs and FPGAs will be displaced to that area.

I'm trying to go for ASIC mining with KNC... let's see how it works. I hope they will not be delayed like BFL and still I am curious to see how it affects the difficulty in 3 or 4 months.

Notung

If i was just entering the mining market, I would enter via Litecoin.

You need to study, and then study some more.
I have mined for a few months now but so much more to learn. (linux is my next step)

You need to keep overhead down if you are poor.

Get a used gaming computer for cheap of Craigslist.
   ~you have to work to get them to come down in price.  These are proud people.

Get a nice 7950 or 3 with warranties if can afford it.

Read up on installation and such, and then Mine some Litecoin :)

It may take a couple days to get everything working - but fret not - you can do it - these forums will teach you or direct you where to go for Litecoin or Bitcoin.

The biggest thing that led to decent success in Litecoin was the correct thread concurrency.

AND

If you want to get into Bitcoin - I would look into Asics and study the crap out of them too.
I ordered a Terrahash machine - I hope it pays off.

I currently have 2.3 megahashes on Litecoin (gpu) and 1 gig on Bitcoin (Asicminer usb and gpu)

Look with your future eyes - If people thought only of the today's Return on Investment 2 years ago mining bitcoin, they would have never done it.  These are today's Bitcoin Millionaires.