Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys, as the title says:
What should I do with my GPUs when ASIC arrives?
And I want to make money, I already have contributed enough to Folding@Home.

Cheers

I believe some people have switched over to litecoin mining. I myself will have to find something profitable to do with all these GPUs if the difficulty makes them unprofitable.

Get cracking!

 - http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/hack-and-password-cracking-gpus-part-i-setup
 - http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/hack-and-password-cracking-gpus-part-ii-get-cracking
 - http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/hack-and-password-cracking-gpus-part-iii-tune-your-attack

sell them!

Keep mining BTC because BFL's claims are inflated to the point of incredulity.  Largecoin's estimates are way more in the ballpark what you should expect given current ASIC technology.  While ASICs will surely change the field it is not going to be an overnight game changer.

If you live somewhere where it gets gold, mine in the winter and turn them off for the summer.  Just treat them as electric heaters that happen to pay you a few pennies a day.

just mine until it's unprofitable which should be a while yet.

Tell me more about using gpus to make gold.

I am selling (sold) the vast majority of my 5800 series GPU, and replacing them with 7000 series GPU.

Why?

One can get rid of 5800 series quite easily now, (Ebay, first round, $145-180 for the 5870's. Some bought at my buy it now at $180 almost immediately).

When/if BFL delivers on the ASIC within the ballpark of stated specs, one will not be able to give away 5800 series GPU.

Gamers will not want them (2 generations old, and the 8000 series is coming up(?)). The market will be flooded with them, as miners try to sell them off.

When I get ready ready to switch over, I will have no problem selling 7000 series GPU to gamers.

One can pick up a new XFX 7970 at Newegg for 429.99 w/ free shipping at this point (there is a HIS model that comes to 399.99 after rebate!), yet somehow people are sill buying them on EBAY for more.  :D

Yes, I lose a bit of hashing power, (2x 5870 ~ 800-840 MH, 1x 7970 ~ 650-700 MH, on the other hand I was able to pick up my first 7970 for $325  :)) but I will be able to more easily recoup my cost when the bottom falls out of the GPU mining market.

Just my .0002 BTC on how I am protecting my investment during this uncertain time.

Some ideas :
- Mine Litecoin, at current price it's more profitable to mine Litecoin and sell it to get bitcoin rather than mining bitcoin directly
- Keep mining until it's not profitable then sell it to get ASIC device

Check out the link in my sig.  I have been making Silver with my GPU for months now. :)

Where is largecoin's website?

Lol... I meant cold.  But, yeah, coinabul.

Precisely. Smart.

You can continue to mine until they arrive..... Unless you're paying tons for power.... Send them to me... i am paying nothing for power on my rigs... 50/50 split on the profits :D

Depends on difficulty.   Someone with free electricity even would be wasting their time mining on a CPU.

If difficulty gets to 100 Thash/s (from let's say $3.2 million worth of purchases of SC mini rigs) then a 0.7 Ghash/s 5970 will mine about 0.025 BTC per day (after the block reward drop to 25 BTC).  Thats just a little over a quarter dollar per day per 5970, or about $8 per month.

If I had to bet though, at this exchange rate GPUs will make the effort worthwhile for a few months yet.

^ depends how quickly this all happens..... From reading around seems like BFL should have these chips to start assembly in October..... after months of testing they'll start shipping their 30% of advertised speeds units....


I heard all this from the alien that abducted me last night...

Use them for science!

http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/

That is one project that runs very well on ATI cards!

or sell them..... if this goes tits up and I have to wait 52 days to make 2 BTC instead of 24 hours...  I'll stop mining.....


I feel for all you guys that pre ordered these ASIC's with the BTC valued at what 6 bucks?

Well this means nothing. Maybe they were ppl who bought enuff bitcoin with dollars to buy the ASIC, for them it doesn't matter if a btc is worth 5 or 10$

Yes, buying them at 5 and waiting until they are at 10 and then buying the ASIC is a good idea but it's called speculation. You would need a crystal ball to see the future to do that reliably  :D

speculation: these things will perform 10-20% of their advertised speeds, 40% will break within 4 months of receiving them. My e-peen will be the largest on the forum by the time this comes around :)

sell them and leave 1 for gaming ;D

You should join our pool, and you'll be able to profitably mine with your GPU after ASICs hit!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99643.0

why did I think of mountains of gold when I saw that ?
ugh, to bad cost still bigger then profit ...

Anny way, keep mining join a pool and be happy you have gpu's and not fpga's  ;D

I'd rather have FPGA's because I'm an electrical engineer and leftover (unprofitable) FPGA hardware can just become some compute-heavy hardware for some projects  :)

You could give it to me ;D
Go for science dude, Try for BOINC >> https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Milkyway@home is part of it. Cheers :)

I can't wait for the time when my mini rig comes and I will mine with 40 Ghash/s and you will be left with your few petty GPUs, I can't wait to see your e-peen then :D. Anyway, I don't like that people are baselessly accusing BFL of scam. Let's just wait and see who is right in the end...

Oh nice the forum has an ignore feature!

Goodbye, VeeMiner.

1. There is no MiniRig that does 40Ghash/s. It's called SC Single.
2. Your 40Ghash/s will be worth not much once the difficulty goes up so don't get too excited about mining with it.

sorry for the wrong name of the product. I meant SC single of course. I'm counting on the difficulty to go up by 15-20x, who knows, maybe more. It will still be profitable though. I'm just trying to make a point that lot of people write bad things about BFL, but it's a lot of baseless accusations.

I just came to bitcoin couple months ago and I really like the idea and I want to get a piece of the cake with the mining evolution that's going on right now...

In my opinion, it all makes sense when you compare what the network production/equity is now, with the one that will be, when the Asic miners come in. If you think about it a bit; the current exchange rate is about $12 for 1BC. That means you need about 100BC or $1200 for a BFL, SC and 40GH/s. You need about 100 days, to produce 100BC at a rate of 1BC/day with an average setup that sets you back about $1000 to $1200 (a couple of 5970s, a couple of 6870s, and some 6950s) and gives you 2.5GH/s.

Now, lets project this for a while to after 6 months to 1 year. By that time, lets asume that EVERYONE (who can afford it) will mine with an asic by then. The difficulty should respectively rise to actively produce an average for 40GH/s lets say 1BC/day. This means on a direct comparison that your (future) 40GH/s equals with the (today's) 2.5GH/s. Respectively you will be at the same position minus the initial 100BC you gave to buy the asic, minus the cost of the videocards (if you don't manage to sell them, or want to keep them anyway).

It's all about the Benjamins gentlemen. My advice is (that's what I'm gonna do) to quit mining and while the price is still low; I'll prefer buying 1BC per day. When this won't be feasible anymore, I will have a fair amount of BCs to buy myself a couple of asics at 1/3 or even less of the current price... and won't mind about the loss. Of course I'll stand out from mining for a fair amount of time, but what is time? Isn't money..? ;)

This is where you are wrong.  The reason bitcoin exists is because there is a problem with the benjamins... The fucking Federal Reseve (a private bank) keeps printing them and handing them out to there friends and governments that do not have our best interest in mind.

Sure bitcoin is a big risk but if it works the payoff will be greater than holding gold or silver.  This is what people like myself see and make decisions based on that not On how much federal reserve notes we will get right now.

you can never contribute "enough" to Folding@Home


that said, AMD cards suck balls at folding

Good post dude....


I am goign to mine as hard as possible with my GPU's while you guys are waiting on these ASIC's ....I'll use my coins to buy some when they are released and are working.. But I doubt i'll buy through BFL....

Hehe. It's just a phrase; as we say "a matter of speaking". The "Benjamins" were just another word for money / bitcoins / any means of exchange really. I wasn't referring to the fiat money. IMHO, Bitcoin is NOT a big risk. It's the next step; and frankly, my opinion is that's gonna be what's left after everything else has failed...

...except; if we have no computers and/or electricity and/or internet...

I agreed with everything you said, right up until the part where you said to stop mining. Why would you not mine now, before the difficult spikes and it requires ASICs to make 1BTC/day?

Absolutely agree and this was my thought on the matter as well.  The difficulty may make it eventually that the Single takes as long as a GPU to pay itself off but given that in the overall scheme of things it costs a fair bit less than a full system with many GPUs or multiple systems combined, I'm not too worried.  As long as we all get ROI, whenever that is, IMO, that's fine for me.

Luckily there are tons of other project that run very well on AMD cards

Sorry, n00b question, but about when will these ASICs arrive? I'm in the same boat with a couple of these old GPUs.

Preorders should arrive between November of this year to November of next year.

lol a one year range? That is a huge uncertainty.

He's either joking or trolling. Expected deliver of the first orders is late October or early November, according to the latest reports from BFL_Josh.

Yes - I am VERY uncertain. A BFL rep said the company was working on speedier deliverers. Also they may have thousands of pre-orders. I said November to give them plenty of time. Who knows, oh wait, I ended as Nov 2013 as the time they finish pre-order deliveries. Their goal is to start the first week of November 2012. I read into your question too much, as when do they start and finish the preorder list...

I aim to order a SC Single in January.

In case I wasn't clear: I meant that WHEN the ASICs are out I'd prefer to stop mining, (not stop mining now). I'm currently mining with 2.5GH/s, I've also revealed my setup in the post. In any case, when everyone mines @ 40GH/s, my 2.5GH/s will be a drop in the ocean and definitely what comes out of it (at that time), definitely won't pay my electricity bill.

BFL originally stated shipping in October.  They are taking on more staff to speed up the process and now hope to start shipping in November?!  It appears that getting them before Xmas may be tricky!

mine litecoin instead

why? can I somehow sell them for btc and come out ahead of simply mining btc?

They're about neck and neck right now in terms of profitability per watt, however, the profitability of BTC for video cards will be expected to drop upon the introduction of ASIC miners.  ASIC miners do not exist for litecoin's algorithm (which is designed to be more ASIC resistant than SHA256), so GPU mining LTC should remain profitable for some time.

Unlike SHA256, scrypt requires 8kb of L1 cache per process unit and as large as possible, as fast as possible RAM to store a constantly accessed buffer into.  Hence, when ASICs are created for litecoin the gain in speed/watt may not even be on the order of a magnitude, whereas the gain in speed/watt in hashing SHA256 is about 100x (or two orders of magnitude).

So if i use gpu to mine ltc, i can still be cometive with those asics in the market? in theory it should work, as only gpu can produce Ltc, or am i wrong?

Actually it's pretty easy to make ASICs for litecoin mining and it will be even more advantage over GPUs. The only thing that stops people from making them is the low demand for litecoins.