Bitcoin Forum

I live in the UK and I am eager to start bitcoin mining.
From what I've heard, block erupters are redundant, as are red/blue fury (and the cost is pretty high too, for the amount of power).

I have been considering purchasing Butterfly Labs 10GH/s and/or 4-5 Antminer US1 ASIC USB miners for use with my Raspberry Pi (plus fan and usb port).

Am I doing the right thing in purchasing these antminers? In the UK, I can get four of these for £240 asking price on ebay, possibly more if I barter considering I'm buying more than one.
However I've seen them for around £35 on here plus shipping, but I'm unsure how I would pay, and if I can trust people on these forums.

Combined, I can get around 7.2 GH/s with these machines for around the same/less cost per GH/s as Butterfly labs, which is especially enticing considering their low power draw.

So yeah, is this a good idea, how can I trust, and how do I overclock?

Thanks!!!

If you look and search in right place you can get 38Gh/s cube for arrount 1BTc. Do some research and see how much you will pay for one BTC now.
Need more info? Pm me, i will help you start your bitcoin adventure.

I'm sorry, I don't really feel like sending you a PM, as I'm new in this area and I'm not sure what is legit and what is not.
Please don't take it personally.

If you dont feel like talking to anyone, why would someone help you?

Nothing wrong with PMs.

I also vote cubes, those are good starter units

if your in UK, i highly recommend this guy

http://www.mininghardware.co.uk/en/200ghs-/30-200ghs-bitcoin-miner.html

Thanks for the useful references.
2.5K is quite a lot to spend for me, I just want to start mining as a hobby and I am not (yet) looking to use it to make serious money.

+1

cubes wont make back more than 1/2.
an antminer should make back its full price at 3.15BTC. I have the 4.75BTC and 4.25BTC antminer systems for the first auction and first groupbuy and have mined roughly 5.25BTC between them in only about a months time - they will definitely reach profitability by summer. (The 3.15BTC might make 2.75-3.5BTC in my guess)

I think the OP was talking about antminer sticks.

Your right though...the 180GH/s Antminers at 3.15BTC are one of the better deals out there.

I am suspecting the OP does not have 3.15BTC to spend.

why bother mining bitcoin? asics have ruined it. better off to use gpu to mine script until someone eventually ruins scrpt coins. ;)

you have it all backwards. ASICs have 'legitimized' it. who on wall street would invest in a currency controlled by a bunch of geeks with dozens of graphics cards? having an efficient dedicated device makes a lot of sense.

The trick is finding the right device and time to invest, and antminers have been lucky in that noone else is substancially shipping yet. (cointerra is late JAN if lucky, hashfast is being accused of scamming and is still weeks from shipping, and KNC/BFL have a lot to do before they bring thier next gen - BFL promised a product to be ready a month ago already, much like with thier first-gen)

The longer these 2-4PH of hardware are delayed, the longer current miners can enjoy a few small difficulty jumps (the next jump may only be 15-20% looking at the charts) before we have a few 30% jumps in a row from 28nm gear dropping

Any of those small usb asic miners are good to start off with to see how things work, but think how much money you would need to spend to get a cube? Ebay is even selling cubs around the 800-900$ mark.

IMO, you can't go wrong with purchasing a single 180GHs Antminer right now. I currently own a number of them with more on order, and have been very happy with them.

I would recommend avoiding anything Butterfly Labs entirely.

Furthermore, I would recommend avoiding anything using the Avalon Gen2 chips.

I think this is also a good value machine, and quite powerful for this price range.

Help appreciated but currently I am looking to spend no more than 150 pounds.

Spending 2K+ on a machine that serves no purpose if/when bitcoins are no longer consumer minable is a huge risk I am not willing to take...

You know I actually agree with you that I wouldn't risk much money on something that can someday, possibly soon, be a waste if BTC dies out.  But if you think it will survive it seems like the best way to get the most hashpower is to invest in something that can ONLY mine BTC.  So you kind of have to make a choice.

Why, thanks. Glad to see you agree.

If Bitcoin was to die out or something, would I be able to use my USB U1 Antminers for the purpose of mining other altcoins that require SHA-256 hashes?

yes, you can mine other sha-256 coins.
but for 150 pounds you can't earn anything. I mean you can start mining with some usb erupters and play a little bit but you will not earn anything.
If 150 pounds is all you are willing to invest then forget about it.
take your wife to a nice dinner, buy her some sexy laundry... it will be much more fun then invest in some worthless mining gear.

You're saying 8GH/s is worthless?

 Depends on what you pay for it. Either way, 8GHs is not a significant amount of hash rate presently :(

 It might not be a bad idea to forego mining altogether, and just purchase BTC outright with whatever you were going to spend on mining equipment.

I'm paying 150 pounds plus shipping for it.

Once bitcoins are too hard to mine with my hardware setup, I plan to mine alternative cryptocurrencies - freicoins possibly.

 Apologies for being blunt, but it's not worth it to get into mining with 150 pounds to spend IMO.
 

 

8Gh/s is worthless even if you get it for free!

You have no idea how high diff is!

30gh/s and even 50gh/s is worthless right now.

I have 170gh/s and I am earning 0.07btc/day. And in abouth a month I am pulling a plug for them!

What do you think you will earn with 8Gh/s???

Just forget about it.

Also there is no sha-256 coin more valued to mine instad of btc. At least not that much to make any diference.

English is not my 1st language, but don't you mean sexy lingerie lol.

Sexy laundry, is how the sexy lingerie looks after the...  ::)

Sorry for the off topic

now it's worth it. roflmao

Other than that HashFast thread, this is funniest thing I've ever read on bitcointalk.

LOL
you got that right!!
my bad.

Antminer is about the best deal out there now for immediate delivery. 

Here is the Eligius predition for a current Antminer running overclocked at 200 GH

"Your approximate maximum potential earnings at the current network difficulty of 1,418,481,395.26 and maintaining your 3-hour average hash rate of 202.80 Gh/s is 0.07190112 BTC per day."

The one I am looking at has been mining since Dec. 19. 

In 13 days it returned 1.25 BTC.

In the next 15 days it will return only 1 BTC

Let's say the 20% increase in difficulty is an average that continues,  (may be a bad assumption for long considering 28mm ASICs), and give ourselves roughly 2 cycles per month, although it looks to be faster now.

Jan 1s Half:  1 BTC
Jan 2nd Half: 0.8 BTC
Feb 1st Half: 0.64 BTC
Feb 2nd Half: 0.51 BTC
Mar 1st Half: 0.4 BTC
Mar 2nd Half: 0.32 BTC

Total Jan through March = 3.7 BTC.

I think the above is optimistic since the 28nm ASIC miners will eventually begin shipping somewhere in this time.    CoinTerra has photos of their first ASICs back from the foundry and packaged ready to go into the first boards.  They could be shipping by mid January... or "test" mining until some later first delivery date.

Current Sushi Group Buy of Antminer ships on Jan 6th so let's say you miss the first 0.7 BTC of January if you buy one now.  You need to spend another $100 (0.125 BTC) on a decent power supply

Then if you believe the above, you will be at 3.0 BTC or less by the end of March and I have not subtracted the cost of electricity or the power supply.

As stated, the 28nm ASICs will start delivering and could force a much more pessimistic result pushing total ROI out into May or June.

By the time you are returning 0.01 BTC per day the miner may be worth about 0.5 BTC in resale or just keep it and mine out a final 0.5 BTC and keep is a historical piece that may be worth more some day.

Some would say, missing from the equation is the price of Bitcoin which might go up.  If you believe Bitcoin is going to go up, the lowest risk way to make money is to just buy some Bitcoin.  You can get in and out of a speculative Bitcoin investment fairly quickly.  Getting in and out of a hardware investment takes more time. 

One of the riskiest ways to bet on Bitcoin is to pre-invest on future hardware and especially future 28nm ASIC hardware.