Bitcoin Forum

I don't get it.
Perfect example is the 336 mhs usb one.  It is not worth more than $2 under the most ideal circumstance (free power.)
Yet they sell for anywhere from 5-15 and actually move. 
Wtf  ??? 
Are the parts valuable or something? 
At the rate these used mienrs move, they are going to rip more people off than mt gox  :o (ok exaggeration.)

 

Yeah, it's crazy. I watched 38Gh/s miners go for $500+ on ebay. That's more than $12 per Gh. People buying like that are what's making the price go up. A Gh is not worth more than $3.

You're right, but keep in mind that there are a lot of people who only want to "dip their toes" in Bitcoin at first. So, buying a $15 BE off ebay is actually a sane way to do that.

Now, continuing to do that once they're ready to swim out in the deep end is wasteful.

 lol its all noobies that are being introduced to mining. Some People I know buy them for fun, though just 1-2 for entertainment

If you want to dip your toes in, you might as well buy BTC for $15 rather than a BE. A BE will mine a couple mBTC at best.

That said, I can imagine the price for BEs to be relatively high because of the gadget factor. Many people buy one or two just for fun, realizing that they will never get anything close to their moneys worth of coins out of it.

So we basically have, a lack of knowledge and people that are just into the mining process.
Oh well.  Nothing we can really do about it.
I guess no used bargain deals until people wise up.     

<sarcasm>
Are you kidding!? Those things saved me hours of clicking on faucets for a slightly better return. They are a great investment!
</sarcasm>

People could mine altcoins with sha-256 equipment, just for fun.
People may not be ready to spend few K dollars for 1TH machines but $500 is ok to loose. My 2 cents.

There are actually a couple of reasons...

1) As stated above, people want to try bitcoin out.  They heard about it and instead of dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars, this is the alternative approach.

2) People will pay a premium in USD for these devices.  This could be because they do not know how to buy bitcoin or for the convenience of being able to pay in bitcoin.  Either way, there has always been a premium when paying in USD over Btc.

3) People are ignorant.  They hear about bitcoin and immediately jump in without doing their due diligence.  I have been selling the USB eruptors (among other things) on amazon for $50 to $60 a piece! (a few unfortunate souls bough new ones priced over $110) when they would make maybe .01 btc a piece in their lives.  And it wasn't like one would sell every couple of days, I was dropping off 10 to 20 packages a day at the post office.  (and since amazon doesn't let me change the shipping costs, I usually make more off of shipping costs ~$5 per device, then I do off of actually buying and selling the eruptors)

Funny story, one guy once bought 18 off of me from amazon.  He paid almost $100 for shipping that cost me under $6 to send to him.

People are just ignorant and do not do research is my thinking.  I understand it may be kind of hard to just buy bitcoin in the U.S., but with a little work and research it is not impossible.  Maybe they do not want to submit bank info, or maybe they do not want to meet someone in person?  These are both viable points, but I keep coming back to, people do not research enough before jumping in.

My experience is that the ebay buyers are looking to "try out" mining and don't mind paying what we see as a "premium". It's kinda sad though that there are people who take advantage of this, charge overly outrageous prices, and then brag about it.

Praytell, where can I buy mining hardware for less than $3/Ghash?

Assume I don't want to budget more than $1000.

I would also comment that these devices on e-bay are "in hand", meaning they may ship in less than "two weeks".

I would not say its sad at all.  No one forced them to buy anything I offered.  Also my margins were hundreds of percent less than most things you buy on a daily basis.  That drink from Mcdonalds or coffee from Starbucks, do you know the margins on those?  thousands of percent!!  I was only offering a product, that they would not know how to get otherwise, and since I have experience and have invested my time in the game and learned the ins and outs, I feel like I should be the one making money.  Would it be different in any other industry?  Those with the knowledge make the money, how do you gain knowledge?  You invest time and effort.  I was willing to do that, those paying high prices did not, but instead decided they would take a chance without fully understanding what they were doing.  That hardly sounds like its my fault.

I don't think there is such a miner. Maybe if you buy second hand, don't pay VAT and the miner eats incredible amounts of electricity. And you get it next winter.

http://www.112bit.com/product/antminer-s1-dual-blade/

Easily OC to 200GH/s. Pretty damn close.

You forget that there are other coins that they can dip their toes into other than bitcoins. So maybe people want to try this..

What if they buy this and just let that mofo roll and go long term. Would they be stupid if in 2020 1BTC=$50,000 USD?

The most often cited argument against that is that it would have been more profitable to purchase BTC with fiat now rather than a miner. For a $600 investment you return $49,400. For $600 worth of usb block erupters (30 of them?) at 10GHS you'll "never" mine 1BTC, however you'll pay roughly $100/yr in electricity at 0.15/kwh and depending on the difficulty it is debatable whether "never" is actually true. At any rate, in 6 years of mining you'll have spent $600 in electricity which is what that 1BTC would have cost you in the first place, and you wouldn't have had the hassle of babysitting them. Oh, and I also left out the cost of running a computer or PI 24/7 because some people do that anyway, yadda yadda. The argument works without factoring it in.

Now if you have cheap/free electricity and you pay for your used miners with BTC and you make some calculations about the equipment's longevity and the rate of difficulty increases, you may find that you can return a profit in BTC, which is worth it.

People were willing to "waste" electricity on computing activities such as Distributed.NET, Prime95, SETI@home, Folding@home, etc when there was no chance of seeing a positive ROI. Mining has a far better ROI (positive or not) than any of those activities, and they were in no way small endeavors.

I'm not saying he will have 1btc. I'm saying what if one = 50k in years to come. For a USB miner and just letting it roll, it's kind of like their own little mini faucet. That $10 investment was insanely easy to make and could generate a good return. I'm just trying to say some people wanna dabble in mining and see what happens without going balls deep. What have they lost if it craters?

For what it's worth, I agree with you. The novelty / geeky-fun factor is what is relevant here. Some people would run these things even if there was no hope of a profit. That there is one (hope of a profit) makes it all the more appealing.

^^^^^^^^^^ this

Some may just be a novelty. The hash rate just isn't profitable. Sentimental value perhaps?

entertainment purposes = wow, look every month i'm loosing money to energy cost and I overpaid for the amount of coins I am getting? wtf

The increasing difficulty and reducing payout per block mean that Block Erupters already have a trivial value and will fairly quickly be entirely worthless. There is no 'leave it on and after a long time it will return something'.

I did some calculations last Monday (St. Patrick's day - I'm Irish) :

If I started mining (24/7) with a Block Erupter on March 17th then the Bitcoin returns would be :
In 1 month : 0.0011 BTC   =  USD 0.69
In 3 months : 0.002357 BTC  =   USD 1.48
in 1 year : 0.003549 BTC  =  USD 2.22
in 2 years : 0.003603 BTC  = USD 2.26

So it will earn only 4 US cents from Paddy's day 2015 to Paddy's day 2016 (and use 43Kwh of electricity in doing it - not including the power costs of the infrastructure)

There are approximations in this (pool type - hardware growth [i.e difficulty changes] etc) - but if anything they are conservative as the more power that comes on stream the higher the difficulty curve goes and the sooner these little USB miners become completely worthless as miners. 

The residual value from selling the BEs on Ebay is by far the most significant factor in their current value - so sell 'em while they're still worth something.

The same maths worth for any  piece of mining hardware - the only question is where on the curve it is - but pretty much everything on sale on Ebay (even the newest, fastest and least power hungry of the USB miners) is selling for more than its medium turn return and most are selling for more than their total future return.

And if the underlying belief is that BTC will increase in value enough to make it worth while - then the correct response is to invest in existing Bitcoin.

John SL

I just started mining. I bought an Antminer U1 (1.6GH/s) off Amazon. I think I paid around $60 which was more than I should have... I found some later for around $40... but it got my foot in the door and helped me to figure out how this stuff all works, or at least gave me the illusion of understanding!  :P

Once I got a little comfortable with it I bought a 5 blade BTC Garden Miner setup that runs at about 40GH/s total. I just got it up and running a few hours ago. I'm going to let that run for a few weeks to see if it measures out relatively close to the estimating calculators online. After that I plan on investing into several Antminer S1's that run at 180GH/s...

So far so good... Just trying to better understand how the luck works and the best way to manage my miners. But those little USB things is how I got started...

Brandon

The key to being successful or at least make back what you invested is to only mine for about 45-90 days max then sale on eBay.. Then take all the bitcoin you mined plus the money from sales on eBay and upgrade to the next best miner.. This is the only way to keep up with the difficulty rise and stay in the game.. We are getting close to a point where its going to slow down some with the advancement in hashing power making it more modular so you can keep building on what you got allready going. After 20mm miners are more wide spread I see it pretty hard to get much more hashing power for what technology we have available. Under .5 watts per Gh/s will be hard to beat I think...

LOL

If you're mining Bitcoin with USB ASICs, then you're doing it wrong. There are other SHA256 coins which offer a faster RoI. Mining newly launched coins for speculative purposes also speeds up getting your RoI by at least a factor of 5 (based on my experience, not generalized facts).

I like to have one or two of my old USBs solo mining. I know I know, the odds are ridiculous but just for fun :)

Are we talking for the usb miners only?

I think they are all overpriced on ebay and will never make ROI... but as a hobbyist, thats probably the only way to buy a 1TH machine quickly like a KnC. For ROI, I'll stick with products that actually deliver on time like Antminer S1s instead of Ebay. Also beware of scams on ebay especially when people try to sell you their pre-orders from BFL and such. These forums are full of sorry tales of getting scammed on them.

And use common sense. If a machine was making ROI and tons of BTC, why on earth would anyone sell it to you?

As far as USB ones go, remember you can buy them brand new for $15 a piece at today's BTC/USD price. Anything above that is you throwing your money away. It's still too pricey for me (price per ghs) but someone is buying these for sure

https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020140227111546291QgbvQbVr06FB

They may have some collector's value as well.

When bitcoin is over , you mean?

met  a few miners at the local bitcoin meetup

there are miners who learned about bitcoin and want to contribute, or want to try it out for fun, so they spend a couple hundred to check it out

bitcoin is a movement and it engrosses people who learn about it.

money is a side effect for many people.

People who pay those prices are often new miners who dont understand the difficulty.
And the fact that most calculators only show current revenue. Or even worse, just multiply current value into the future. Asuming a year from now a miner makes the same amount of btc per month as it does now.

The only decent calculator i found until now is on the second page of google. The rest of the calculators are garbage or plain misleading. But most people use the ones on top of googles listings and are paying prices based on false information.

for the people selling on ebay you have to add the fees.

In auction prices are also often insane, and those are set by buyers who dont care about the sellers fees.

Good job. Those USB miners are also great gifts that introduce people into mining :) I gave some of my units to friends to let them experiment and decide if they want to invest.

Still many people think that bitcoin rice will reach $10000 with in two years.They just want to get in to mining. But they don't understand the current situation.

if you need a rise in btc prices to roi your miner you shoulnd`t buy it. just buy some btc and hold it. buying a miner only makes sence if it wil produce more btc then you can currently buy with that money.

+1

Not everyone pays for power though.  Who knows, maybe they just like getting stoned to trip out on the flashing light, LOL!

Nothing wrong with people willing to overspend on outdated mining hardware, it helps to keep the ROI possible.

People want to try first.. I personally wanted to do a POC on bitcoin mining before investing couple of thousands, so i bought "block eruptor asic miner cube", used it for 1 week and sold it for 80% of my buying price.. Yeah so that's the premium i paid to test the concept.

+1

although if you don't plan on buying with fiat but the price drops suddenly like it is now and you decide to invest you could calculate your ROI starting from your initial fiat investment. I know, it's just mental acrobatics but still...I don't like to buy low but I like to invest low.

Well most miners could be considered used. I'm not sure why people buy from ebay while they are cheaper in China. Yes it takes longer but  is +50% price justifying few days of delay? Maybe if the seller is from your country and in the end you don't pay VAT...

For some people it is a lot more convenient to pay with a credit card than it is to pay with Bitcoin.  For some, buying coin isn't all that easy. It's also a way for people to buy equipment without having the money up front.  It's not a smart way to do it, but thats how a lot of people use credit cards.  Buy now, pay for it later.

Do you guys think there will be uses for the Old generation of ASICs in the future? Act as nodes for processing transactions?

The idea is not the same for everyone, think it is worth it will start up!

I am a noob to mining and I am have been reading.  I first started reading about the block eruptors and thought it would have been a cool setup but then thought twice about it when I read somewhere on here if you are not mining upwards of 200 Gh/s it isnt worth it.  Then I fgured the cost of making a rig that would put out that kind of power with eruptors and the cost isnt worth it.  So I found the Antminer S1 Dual Blade.  I see them around $700.  I was wondering for anyones opinion on this machine actually making its money back with say litecoin and a rate of .08 Kw/h electricity costs.  I was trying to use one of the calculators I found but I wasnt sure I was entering the correct info.  Thanks in advance.

You can't mine Litecoin with an antminer S1. Litecoin is a scrypt coin and the S1 can only mine SHA-256 coins. As for making your money back mining Bitcoin, not likely.

definetly not worth it with block eruptors anymore






.