Bitcoin Forum

Bought, tested and saw, that they don't make the money they have expected - now selling?
I mean, everybody has some USB ports available and 333MHz should return the investment quick esp with that powerconsumption. Why selling instead of mining?

Because people think the ROI should be few weeks, not months (or a year or two?) around here.

guess they just wanted short term profit or expect the network difficulty to get to high...

I'm not sure why people bought them up in the first place, they cost the same as a half decent graphics card, they hash about as much, but have no real resell value, it's only the fact that they're USB and lower power consumption that they're worth while, for me they're worth nothing as I mine electricity cost free, I liked the idea of being able to just put loads attached to one machine though.

a lot of people keep buying them, because they get nearly twice of their purchase price on ebay. Why should they wait for a ROI with 330 Mh/s? By selling them in auctions, the profit will be much higher than mining them a year!

That gravy train is over.  Lol internet.

Well that and you can sell them for more than they initially paid for them.

Facepalm! I've been wondering about this myself, but this just hits it on the nail. Like buying overpriced beads, shipping them across the ocean, then selling them to the natives at twice the price. Good trick while it works, but don't get left holding the baby.

BTW What ROI? Forever is a long, long time.

I bought one for the following reason:

-They are cool looking
-They are not a "preorder" with infinite waiting time
-They are very small
-They are within my price range
-They have very small power consumption
-I live in a small apartment in Texas (3 video cards = enough heat for half the apartment in the winter.  Now that it is June, running 3 cards makes my A/C run all day every day)

 Probably because people are not thinking long-term.

 I've been mining for 2 years now that has allowed me to amass enough BTC to upgrade to current ASIC hardware with $0 fiat out-of-pocket.

 I hope to be mining and growing my farm over the next two years at least.

 Granted, if BTC/USD value tanks, we're all taking it in the pooper :(

 Point is, yes the USB miners are costly, but they are way more energy efficient than GPU's and will ROI faster... in theory.

 Don't think about the next 120 days. Try to think about the next two years.

We don't know what the reliability of these will be.  My two GPU's have been mining 24/7 for over two years straight.

Will these devices be able to do that?  I hope so since I bought some too.  And no they aren't for sale, yet.

Sam

Also, this is a way for people to convert their Bitcoins into fiat money without going through an exchange at very favorable rates.

Plug in 333 Mh/s for $250 into any of the calculators that take into account an exponential rise in difficulty and you will find that these never break even. If the difficulty is rising exponentially, which there are strong indications that it is, these items will make less and less at a rate that means they never pay for themselves at any power use or electricity cost.

I plan on running some and selling some on Ebay. Profits from Ebay means I won't need to cover the cost of the ones that I do run.

exactly, coz they don't make too much profit

Assuming the price of bitcoin will remain the same... - if, in a years time from now 1 BTC = $500 dollars then these little usb gizmos will have been a steel...

Then buy 2.2 BTC with USD. You get the same benefits of BTC exchange rate rising without losing 2.2 BTC on the assumption that the value will rise.

Not if you bought them with BTC though. And if you bought them with dollars, your would have made more profit by just buying BTC on an exchange and leaving it in your wallet.

Think of it this way: if your goal were to profit based on the assumption that the value of BTC will rise, then your best move is to buy one of these at 2.2 BTC (around $245 USD currently) and then sell it on Ebay for around $400 USD. Take that $400 USD and buy BTC. Repeat.

That works even if BTC falls in value (a bit anyway). Doesn't seem very ethical (taking candy from babies), but that's what Avalon/BFL/ASICMINER are doing to their customers (well the new ones anyway).

Some are trying to get a quick profit from reselling.

Because they are to expensive to give any profit?

Because at current difficult it would take about 8months for one of these to generate the ~2BTC that it costs. And, difficulty is about to skyrocket.

I think these are mostly a novelty item at this point.

Currently If you do not see a return on a rig in <70 days.... you are STUFFED.......
~+10% change every 10 days means each period you mine with significantly less efficiency than the 10%

I.E
difficulty
 100 +10% =110 +10%=121+10%=133.1

So it is already >33% LOSS of efficiency from base after 30 days.

These things are looking at OVER 1 year  if the CURRENT difficulty does not change during that period.
Then you have the idiots on ebay buying them for $500 bucks because they think they will get rich......

In november last year you could easily mine a couple of bitcoins with 200MH/s, now you can only mine dust.....

I like the idea of half life. You guesstimate how long it will take the difficulty to double, work out how much BTC you will earn in that time. That's your half life, you've earned half your lifetime earnings. You will only ever earn twice that much. Basic exponential math.

Of course nothing grows exponentially for ever, but you'll probably be bust well before then.

With a lot of folks still on the grid, this is important.

I assume there's a way to bring power off a 12-25v solar cell pack
[ like the ones JC Whitney sells to charge car batteries ]
or a less-overkill cell
and down-regulate it to 5VDC for a USB hub?

Their kind of neat but you would have to have 15 of them to equal just one 5 GHZ Butterfly Lab unit. Maybe you could buy them for way less than $250 direct from China. Otherwise, I would even feel better about ordering from (gulp) Butterfly Labs. You could buy four 5 GHZ units from Butter fly for the same cost. Then you'd have 20 GHZ if you ever received them.   

Google "buck converter" (sounds like some shady finance shop. but its a PSU). Though I don't understand the hype about solar powered mining, any significant downtime (like overnight) hits your ROI hard. Maybe its more environmentally friendly (but not with all those batteries you're going to need to run 24x7), but it hits your pocket.

Except you can't buy anything from Butterfly at the moment and the Erupters are in hand. When you can get 5 day Delivery from Butterfly, Erupter's price will adjust accordingly.

The batteries are expensive because partly because of the expensive metals in them. A used battery can be sold and will be recycled, meaning that the environmental impact is fairly little.

The battery would just be for the USB/ASIC miners.
I was thinking more of tapped off a user's PC, not stand-alone.
Even w/o solar cells, the power savings over BFL/GPU rigs are enormous.


[Unless you're in mom n dad's basement, and they're paying the utility bills...]

The power savings is not enough to justify the price, at least not unless you are off-grid.

Still - it's probably better to invest the money directly into bitcoins.

My guess is that the eruptors might become dirt-cheap in a couple of months. Then It might become interesting to have powered usb-strips with eruptors.

You're so full of shit, it's hilarious. The Jalapeno consumes about $0.07-$0.10/day to run, depending on local rates. If you believe that $0.07/day in operating cost is significant, you are almost CERTAINLY already living in your parents' basement...  ::)

how long is the wait from purchase to arrival ETA

is a hardware for the museum and for hobbyist to admire as a collector's item.. Asicminer is dumping his outdated hardware ... smart guy though

I have 6 of these now, and I look at it the same way as Xian01.  I have been running my 12 cards for 2 years now.  Some of my cards are just giving up.  I broke even a long time ago, and now I can upgrade to ASICs, keep running something, and use a tiny amount of electricity and air conditioning.

So I spend a few coins and stay involved, as my lovely rigs slowly burn themselves out.  =)

doesn't work that way. you could just buy 2.2BTC instead and have no energy costs and make 1100.
at this rate, a USB miner won't ROI, ever.

But where is the fun in that?

Because some of them bought it just to resell it to some other sucker and some realized they were suckers themselves by buying it at first place and now want to find some other sucker to hold the bag.

That's one way to do it.

Another is to replace existing gpus with these (aka sell gpus that already earned themselves out) use the profit from that to buy usb devices. Net effect - keep your hashrate - lose most of the electric cost. That's what I've done. Sure they're overpriced if I were using them to grow my farm but replacing gpus means these earn themselves out in a ~3 months based on power costs.

How is this possible, [assuming Jalapeno=>new BFL parallel ASIC]
if you hafta fan/refrigerate the crap out of em?

blockerupter should cost 20eu max, I had one in hand yesterday, guy asked 2btc for it... we both agreed it's too much, with poor chance of ROI... and apparently, it gets really hot, passive cooling, you need a hub, can't plug it directly into comp...

Yes it gets too hot to touch, but it will run fine like that. You can plug it directly in to a computer, i ran 6 like that for over a week. Hubs just make it easier to run larger numbers of them and the fans just make people feel better running them cooler, not needed.

people keep saying there is no resale value.. all I know is they can be bought from source for around 200 USD and sold for a little under twice that on ebay. I might be wrong but that looks like an 80% profit derived from resale benefits.

Currently people are paying < $300 on eBay. the demand is dropping quickly.

Right, because the product is not worth 2BTC and folks that can do basic math realize this. Fair value for a 300 MHs bitcoin miner at the moment is probably ~$50.

but BTC could be $50 too!

These are selling on eBay now for around $280 - $300, down from ~$400 a couple weeks ago.  Some are not even selling, either.

Looked at from a purely financial aspect, these are not a good purchase unless the USD price per unit stays the same but the BTC --> USD value increases or the BTC price of the unit drops.