Bitcoin Forum

First, have you ever got real dollars in your hand from mining? That's the biggest question for me, because I am willing to buy a HD 6990 video card and even buy some coins, but I want to know before I do that that I will eventually get the investment back, not only as bitcoins, but also as dollars that I can put in my pocket.

Also, how can I easily make the exchange and transfer the bitcoins from my wallet to my bank account, since paypal is not an option? I have seen there are exchange websites, but I have no idea how to do this.

There is no guarantee that you will ever reclaim any portion of your initial investment.  Be prepared to live with that fact before you continue.  Please read up on difficulty adjustments and estimated earnings before deciding if you can part with the money.

That said, pick a mining pool, fire up your video card and collect payouts to your wallet.  Transfer the coins to your favorite exchange and sell them.  Then you have to choose how to get the money out of the exchange.  If you're US based, dwolla is one option that most of the exchanges support.  I would recommend doing this in at least 1.0 BTC increments.

Entire process from payout from the pool to bank account will take about 3 days if you sell at market rates.  Expect to pay 0.7% (or less) to the exchange site and $0.25/transaction to Dwolla.

I can personally say yes, I've got cash in hand as a result of mining. 

Great! That's all I wanted to know :D .

I am prepared to take the risk with an investment in an expensive mining computer, since I am not actually really losing something, in the worst case scenario I just get a super powerful PC. But before taking that risk I wanted to know that there is at least a chance that I would get my investment back, and maybe slip into profit for a while.

Also I would support a very interesting new monetary system, and that sounds great.

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, I've gotten cash in hand.
No I haven't paid off my mining rig(s) (though I'm 33% the way there).
Yes, I've purchased hard goods with Bitcoins, including a 5830 card.

1 6990, at the current difficulty, will gross you about 0.8 BTC/day, or $12.40/day, not including the electricity to run the card.
That means it will take you just over 60 days to pay off the card (again, not including the electricity you'll spend during those 60 days).

This also doesn't include Pool fees, or fees from the exchanges to convert the BTC to USD (or your local currency).

Oh, and the difficulty is expected to go up (again) in 366 blocks to 1,574,821; if it happens, that will lower your BTC/day another 12% to 0.704 BTC, increasing your payback by another 7 days. 

And difficulty will increase again inside of that payback period, probably at least twice more.

Do the math before buying gear.

How are you getting 0.8BTC/Day with only one 6990? If you overclock and pump out 400MH/s/core that's still only 800MH/s. Which would only result in a gain of 0.6BTC which is about $9/day.

I wouldn't get 6990's if you are buying new, personally. If you go for dollars/mhs then it still seems like the 58XX series is king. If you hunt around you can pick them up for 200 (or less) used. My 5870 is putting out 390mh/s on slight overclock (880) that I picked up for $175. That's better than 2mh/s per $1. If you have lots of pci-e slots, the 5770's are amazing. The one I have has been running nonstop for a month at over 200mh/s (link on how to do it, plus I've read some optimizations elsewhere http://www.smpake.com/?p=59) and those sell from between $80 and $100.

I was just doing back-of-the-napkin.  Ran the 800Mhash/sec through a calculator, you're right, it's between 0.58 and 0.60.  Of course, that just makes the payback even LONGER.  :)