Bitcoin Forum

Hi I am new to the bitcoin community. I heard about it for the first time a few months ago and have been very interested in it since. I believe this is the next generation. I have done tons of research and have learned both positive and negative opinions on mining bitcoin today. The question I really want answered is I have some money put back that I want to invest in something and was thinking of buying one or two of the Neptune rigs from knc miner. Do you think this is a good idea?  Is bitcoin worth mining anymore. Should I take a different route to mining bitcoin that would work better and what would u suggest.  Thanks!

Some may disagree but continue to save your money, or buy some BTC while it's around $400 a piece. Then wait till the next gen ASICs are announced and be one of the early adopters of those. Current miner are over priced and their isn't much return on investment with current projections.

sure it is worth mining if you have >5000$ to invest into a nice rig! :)

why wouldn't it be profitable?

Sure it is!
...

It is, I sold out of mining contracts this week, I'm adding more hardware now. 

Here's what I've noticed:
-People are going to tell you it's not worth it because the difficulty keeps rising.  Difficulty will rise, but don't panic over it...
-You're going to hear to just buy BTC and don't bother mining... do both. The old advice still holds true, buy low and sell high.
-You are going to have to "buy in" now, expect to spend a several thousand dollars now (upwards of 5k) to mine for profit. If you just want to have fun and mine, just get a used 5 or 10 gh/s asic from ebay. The days of starting with a bunch of computers with GPU's and making a few thousand a week are long gone. 
-Don't ignore the other alternative cryptocurrency, remember though that they all trade in for BTC at some point.

I had a 12000% profit in mining, so don't let people scare you out of the mine.  Grab your asic and jump in...

There are two opposite view on it but still people continue to mine coins. Actually I think it depends on your hardware's and software's capabilities.

i no reocmmend investing directly 5k dollars to a newbie. But watch and observe. Start small grow or take position later.

It's worth it if you jump first on the new asics.

Depends.

If you're looking to get the cash ROI back, probably not at this point, because of BTC's low price.

Now is more of a great buy and hold opportunity because Bitcoin is so cheap.

The amount you mine back won't equal the Bitcoins or cash you put in.  Only hope is Bitcoin makes a major spike up in price to make mining worth it.  At least for 2014.

As I said I'm looking to buy 1or 2 of the new Neptune machines from kncminer. I've done tons of research and have a friend real knowledgeable in bitcoin mining/ buying selling. I just wanted some other input. So you think if I buy the new 3th/s machines I will be able to profit?

Nope, 100's of thousands of people are buying high cost miners daily because there is no money in it!
 ;D

Lol thanks!  I think what I'm going to do is buy 1 rig at this point and see how it goes and from there I will decide on buying another. I don't want to invest 20k and it be a total lose

There's barely even 100k ASICs out there and that's counting USB devices.  The total number of 300GH/s+ devices is probably under 15k.

People are buying because they are new to mining and don't understand trends, can't read graphs, and see people who started mining in 2010 and 2011 with thousands of coins.  The truth is at present no miner appears to be profitable compared to buying coins directly.  It's possible a company can ship something really early and you come out ahead (BTC profit, not fiat). Possible, but unlikely.

The only reasons to be mining BTC are:
1) you like mining and don't care about profit/loss
2) you want to help keep the network decentralized
3) you think you can earn more coins by purchasing a miner and running on cheap electricity than if you had just spent the miner money on an exchange and bought the coins directly.
4) you want to solo mine to get coins with no history or taint

Also keep in mind if you are after a profit it is better to keep the coins until the price is high!

If you sell every few days you won't make much profit!

Great advice. I didn't know if it was worth it too. Glad to see the community is still for it. I'm starting out too and want to do a combination of both buying and mining. USB ASICs look like a good starting point, at least for me.

As I have read noone exactly can answer this question as there are 2 opposite opinions on it. Btw I think the opinion that mining is worthless is more popular than the opposite opinion.

Mining is not worthless, it supports the blockchain and secures the network.  Without mining, there is no Bitcoin.

The correct question is "Is mining worthless for the home user to ROI?"

If you only have a few hundred or a grand or so to spend, yes it's worthless.

It's an arms race right now, and many of the home miners are exhausting getting new circuits installed, and you're slowly seeing a shift to the datacenter for cooling and electrical needs.

It's like the old saying "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight".  Biggest and most power efficient Asics win.  Unfortunately, it costs significant amounts to keep up.

Data center hosting fees are going to eat profits very shortly.  They are already over 10% of miner earnings and the growth of difficulty will bring it over 100% by the end of summer.  The smart folks are offering hosting contracts.  Once the rent exceeds earnings, they will get free miners.  Even if the only value is as scrap, they win.

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.  But now, power, network and labor are significant chunks of earnings and dramatically extend the time to break even.  Another down leg in the BTC exchange rate will ruin many people if it comes.

Better buy BTC or other coins.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Were not accurate because it was hard to say what is going to happen with a difficult - hardware and other stuffs :)


anyway bitcoin mining is still profitable and miners cant say that it is not :) (if they got nice rigs)

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating.  When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty,  My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc..

Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden?

Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics?

Seriously, I can.  Learn to read.  It is not as easy as looking at mining earnings only any longer.  You must also consider operating expenses now, and the inevitable day when expenses exceed your bitcoin earnings.

Con recently posted that he sold off his Avalon because electricity costs more than it earned.  That day is coming for everyone soon.

Learn to read? What am I doing now?

Yes I understand that now (like gpus a year ago) inefficient asics will need to be shut off because they cost more in electricity than they earn.

This doesn't take away from the fact that the difficulty of bitcoin was never easy to calculate. You had no idea how many avalons/bitfurys/bitmain/bfl/asicminer were going to sell so your calculations were based entirely off guesses and that has not changed.

I guess it was hard for you.  That's probably why you were buying Asicminer when I was selling.

A little understanding of economics, a couple decades in the semiconductor business, and plenty of market intelligence collected both here and from other sources made it pretty easy for me.

In fact there are several people on here who have made similarly accurate projections.  I gained a lot of credibility with my business partners when DeathandTaxes published a projection last April that matched my estimates within a couple %.

I will say that it is difficult to estimate at what difficulty growth will level out to a more normal growth level of double digit % per year.  But that has more to do with the amount of dumb money being thrown at the market, and pre-order cycles than anything else.

You are high on yourself.

You can pretend you were able to accurately predict the difficulty for the past year, but in reality you didn't.

Here's a list of unpredictable variables which influence difficulty:

- value of btc
- manufacturer delays
- manufacturer production costs
- waves of btc noobs
- hardware problems
- hardware performance
- new manufacturers
- private mining farms


Please do enlighten me as to how you were able to predict any of those.

Ignored

Point proven.

I still make money from mining, and I am using KNC Jupiters. For this 2014 I am getting 3 Neptunes (http://www.libtium.com/?page_id=74) (already paid) to get some decent hashing power. I know most people in this forum are afraid of jumping into mining and actively discourage people who want to start mining. I guess it is anyone's take. It is a risky business, and at least to the best om my logic, it dont see how can I will lose any money. I expect to end 2014 with double my investment in Neptunes.
Here some extra reading if interested (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=477616.0)

You're welcome to your enthusiasm.  But haven't people already spelled out why mining with ASICS now is a losing proposition?

Figure out how much fiat you laid out for those 3 Neptunes, divide that total by $550 (or even $420 if you are a quick trader and caught the bottom).  That's how much BTC you should be able to mine to come out ahead.  If your 3 Neptunes mine more you have profit.  If they mine less you have loss.  Simple as that.  Difficulty modeling suggests you will come out losing, but nobody can say with certainty.

Basically, I agree with you that BTC mining is likely going to burn money (the exponential growing hash rate makes winning this game very unlikely).

However, I recently started to take an alternative path to mine BTC that works extremely well, so far. Instead of directly going the sha256 mining route I invested in scrypt mining. Well, at the end of the day I am only interested in BTC. Therefore, I use a multi-pool that mines different types of altcoin and automatically converts them back to BTC (for example: middlecoin and clevermining). The advantage of altcoins is that the hashrate does not expand like crazy, it seems the hashrate is much closer to the equilibrium, e.g., see http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty .


My thought is as follows:

http://clevermining.com/profits

For the last months clevermining returned about 0.011 BTC on an average day per MH/s. I rented 25 MH/s for ca 28 BTC and will likely get a bit more than 7 BTC this month, which is a good value. If the hashrate goes a bit up I am still fine (but for the last three months it was pretty stable). As long as the hashrate does not increase like in Dezember (which is unlikely as GPUs are hard to get these days) I am fine. And even if this happens, this likely means that BTC / LTC prises soared and in this case I am happy for my saved BTC.

First I built a mining rig on my own, but later I found that "genesis mining" is cheaper than building my own rig (and no noise and heat at home).

I starting mining ltc by building 4 rigs.  I later found it more profitable to buy Asic machine to mine btc  then convert back to ltc. 

Now I am not sure about ltc so I will keep the btc. 

Now with the mining difficulty growing too fast I have sold my 1.8TH system and just going to buy btc to trade.

Double digit only per year??

Riight now btc difficulty is 3.8 B    I would be surprised if it isnt more than 100 Billion by end of year.  Thats 2600% in only 10 months.  Who knows, maybe it might only be 50 Billion (still 1300%), but it could just as easily go to 200 Billion also.

Data centers incur huge extra cost.  Usually their electricity is more expensive, and just paying the rent for the space is the most expensive cost. Big deal if they can guarantee uptime and cooling if you get some decent equipment, which by the way doesnt exist because all the equipment manufacturrs mine with all their own stuff for awhile then resell their (burned in-used equipment) back to the public after it starts becoming obsoltete, then the cycle starts again.. Alot of extra cost, unless your company is so big you absolutely have no room to put all the machines.

By the time KNC finishes their data center, they would have blown alot of the pre-order money people gave them and they will be surprised at how fast the competion has caught up and they are not that fast to ramp up as the middle end players like Cointerra and Bitmain.

In hindsight, I just want to say this is some of the best advice I ever gave anyone. ;)

Actually it depends. Bitcoin mining requires you to invest money for the equipment and even time to set up everyrhing. Also, you have to consider the electricity bill because it will take a lot. If the odds is against you, perhaps the electricity rate is high in your area, then you must consider on just trading or investing into other stuff.

But before, it was really worth it. This is because the competition before was not that tight as to now. Today, in order to be profitable and keep up with the others, you have to take advantage every source you have and be ahead of the others.

It really isn't very good advice.

I wish I had just bought bitcoin and held it with the money I invested in Bitcoin mining gear back in 2011.  I'd be shopping for a used yacht from a distressed Saudi prince now.  Plenty of people even then were arguing that mining was a negative ROI in bitcoin terms even back then. (Vladimir stands out for this particularly in my mind).

Bitcoin has been kind to me, but I wasted a lot of money, and time pursuing mining when it was vastly more profitable to just buy coins.

That only applies if the price is rising constantly , for 2 years the price went down and then was proberbly best to mine at a loss and wait for the recovery. That could happen again. And new asic miner came out today so it could be a good time to start.

Not at all.  If you are mining at a loss, that means you could buy more bitcoin on the open market than you earned. Plus your tax position is much worse and you have to spend a significant amount of time managing your gear.

Note that the time period I discussed covered 3 boom cycles and an extended bust.

I think it's worth it because there are more and more people are choosing this way to earn profits in Bitcoin. It's a guarantee way for miners too because they can sell the hardwares if they don't want to mining anymore.

I think bitcoin mining yet profitable but risk for you if you go for it. Maybe sometimes other people must go for other way so that they have a lot of earnings but for me I can say that this will be good.
Why not try to go for campaign were you will be useful and safe no risk also you will be challenge in answering forums.