You didn't make $500. If you sold right now you'd make about half that due to the drop in price since February. You don't make a profit or a loss until you sell. Until then, it's imaginary.
 

You're not profitable. At least not if your using USD.

BTC Cost: 5.35BTC*$900 = $4800 (Average of December and January BTC prices)
Power Cost: $300
Current Value: 6.6*$650 = $4290
Profit/Loss: -$810

That's better than if you had bought BTC and held it.

BTC Cost: 5.35*$900 = $4800
Current Value: 5.35*$650 = $3477
Profit/Loss: -$1323

But what if instead you had split that $4800 over 6 months and just bought straight BTC(dollar cost averaging)?
(Buying .892 BTC at the beginning of every month for 6 months beginning in December)

Cost: $1000*.892 + $800*.892 + $800*.892 + $550*.892 + $450*.892 + $450*.892 = $3612
Current Value: $3487
Profit/Loss: -$125

That's better than the $800 loss from mining. But an ever better situation is if you bought at a low point like April.

Cost: $4800 = 13.71BTC @ $350
Current Value: $8914
Profit: $4114

With mining, you're accepting a loss out of the gate and hoping that at some point in the future you can not only make back what you paid for the hardware but also make a profit. In other words, your hoping that:

1. BTC prices don't drop.
2. Difficulty doesn't increase to the point that renders your hardware unprofitable to run before you reach break-even.

With buying BTC, you just hope the price goes up. In addition, you can employ various investing strategies (such as dollar cost averaging) to reduce losses and improve profits. And unlike mining, if the market starts plummeting you can just cash out.

Better for small timers to just buy BTC or set up a regular investment strategy than to mine.

Cloud mining and home mining are both losses at this point. You'll be lucky to break even with all the new hashing power that's coming online.

If you want to lose money, buying mining equipment is a good way to do it right now.

A lot of people fail to take everything into account when calculating their ROI, especially difficulty increases. And just think, if you've got the money to buy an ASIC miner how many other people do too? What happens when all this new hashing power comes online?

Only if you can't do math. Check the prices on Betarigs vs. expected profit on CoinWarz.

In a word: Don't.

Seriously there are much better ways to invest that cash. If you absolutely don't care what happens to that money and are free to piss it away, then sure, burn it any way you want.

No SEC. No FDIC. No central bank. No audits. No rules. No regulations.

Put simply, exchanges don't have to do shit. They don't have to answer for shit. They don't have to tell you shit. They can be the most corrupt greedy bastards on the planet, steal all your coins, and simply walk away. And the best part is, you can't do shit about it.

Welcome to reality friend. The exchanges are going to do whatever the hell they want to make the most money. If that means taking a percentage by posting a known scam coin, you can sure as hell bet they'll do it. They can/have/will straight-up lie to your face. What are you going to do about it? Take your coins elsewhere? Go ahead....awww....are you having withdrawal problems? Well golly gee will get someone to work on that right away! In the meantime you can try visiting our new site: 404 Not Found So Fuck You And Thanks For The Coins.

Treat exchanges and new coins like they're being run by greedy assholes with no morals and no laws. You'll be a lot better off.

The primary use of a CURRENCY is a medium of exchange. Bitcoin and related cryptos behave more like COMMODITIES. Actually, they behave even worse than commodities since there is nothing to control them and no oversight. This leads to wild fluctuations in values which, understandably, is a turn off for a lot of businesses (especially now that the law has been clarified on how bitcoins are treated).

More on topic, Bitcoin will remain king of the hill for a while since it is the most well established crypto. Everyone has heard of Bitcoin. It would take a group with considerable financial backing and a really good team to dethrone Bitcoin. Unfortunately, everyone and their uncle have created a veriatable Niagra Falls of turd coins hoping to get rich quick. No innovation. No serious groups. No serious backing. Maybe one of the X11 coins might gain enough ground eventually.

If you trade hashrate, then CEX or Scrypt.cc could be profitable. You might also end up profiting if you do dollar cost averaging on Scrypt.cc and things don't get too weird in the market. But the fees on CEX will destroy any long term holding position.

PBMining...well...let's just say I don't really trust them. A 5 year contract is just plain stupid given the rate that hashing power and difficulty increases. You'll be lucky if you make back your principal, and in a year your hashing power won't mean jack. Plus, their numbers don't make sense. After you figure out the cost for maintaining a data center, buying hardware, electricity, etc. then look at what they're charging for contracts there seems to be something missing. A couple other things don't smell right either, but to each their own.

Basically, you're just better off buying BTC directly and holding than any mining contract.

Waste of money. You'll never make back what you spent. Use their calculator.

I'm aware of how ROI works.

My argument is that even with all the new hashing power coming online it won't be enough to jack the difficulty high enough to stop a gridseed from ever achieving a positive ROI. I really don't see multiple coins reaching 50,000 difficulty by years end.

There is no trading site I'm aware that requires less than 3 transaction confirmations, and the average bitcoin confirmation time is around 10 minutes. Even if it was just 10 minutes for all three that is more than enough time for the arbitrage opportunity to vanish or reverse.

There are people a whole lot smarter than you who have tried all sorts of different variations of arbitraging. There aren't a whole lot of people doing it and even fewer who manage to turn a profit as a normal investor. And yet you come on here thinking you've discovered some awesome new scheme without even having tried it yourself.

Seriously, do a search on the forum for "arbitrage". This subject has been discussed many times. You aren't bringing anything new to the conversation.

The thing is, they're rapidly approaching the efficiency barrier if they haven't already hit it. There are physical limits to what can be done with the chips. Once the limit is reached it becomes how much you can cram into a package without melting itself into a pile of slag.

Gridseeds will likely have a positive ROI for some time. With multipools along with multiple lucrative coins, it's going to take awhile to get enough hashrate online to saturate everything to the point where the power sipping gridseed is no longer profitable to run. At average US power rates, LiteCoin would need a difficulty greater than 50,000 before it became unprofitable to run a Gridseed.

Never. Use their calculator. The default is 100 GHs. At the current rate of difficulty increase that 100 GHs will earn you BTC for 6 months, then you will start losing money due to fees and whatnot. During that 6 months you'll get about .53 BTC, but it will cost you .82 BTC to buy the 100 GHs.

Not exactly the best investment.

Just because a few people have successfully pushed their devices to 1000+ with these mods doesn't mean you will have similar success. Depending on how stable the components are on your gridseed, mods may even degrade performance.

As an example, the bridge mod is supposed to push the stable overclock from 850 to 950. I have two gridseeds running with just the bridge mod. One runs perfectly fine pushed to 1000 (1 or 2 HW errors per 24 hours). The other I can only push to 925 (any higher and I go from 0 HW errors to multiple HW errors per hour). The only difference is the 925 one came from a later batch.

EDIT: This is not to say that modding won't get you any benefits. In most cases, modding will allow you to get more hashing power. However if your expecting to order 10 gridseeds and mod them thinking you're going to get 1200 MHz out of each one then you may be in for some disappointment.

What you're doing is arbitrage, and it isn't anything new or special. In order for it to work though, you need to be able to move assets quickly and you will need to be able to buy and sell assets quickly.

For arbitraging coins:

1. You need coins that actually have volume. Sure, the price on one exchange may be higher than another but that doesn't do you much good if no one is actually selling or buying the coins. There are plenty of low value coins that have significant exchange price deviations but their volumes are so low you can't actually arbitrage them.

2. You need to be able to move coins quickly between exchanges. If you have to wait 30 minutes for your deposits to clear then there's more than a good chance the arbitrage opportunity will vanish (especially with heavier traded coins).

I'm not sure what people are complaining about. I'm actually surprised it took them this long to address it.

It comes down to this: You can't make free money. If you make above a certain limit, then it has to be either income or property. In either case, you get taxed. Now that there has been a ruling this should allow more businesses to work with bitcoin without worrying about what kind of tax or legal rigmarole they would get in for doing so. This should also put a dent in big mining operations (at least in the US) since now they actually have to pay taxes on what they make.

Also, before claiming something is a "huge tax burden" it's usually a good idea to actually take a look at the tax schedules. Unless you've got your own datacenter running in your house you probably won't be paying much, if anything once all deductions and depreciation are taken into account. In fact, it may end up as an additional tax write-off.

It is a rip-off. You'll be lucky if you break even, and with all the new hashpower coming on line it's likely you won't ever break even. Even "smells like a ponzi" PBMining with their low rate will barely break even after a year, and at that point you'll be earning tiny fractions.

These cloud providers make money off the fact that people either can't or won't do the math. It's the same with rig leasers. If people really want to invest, they're far better off just buying bitcoin and holding it than trying to mine it.

You're getting ripped off if you're buying 10 gridseeds for $2000. You can order 10 gridseeds for around $1300 from ZoomHash. And if you actually do your own mining as opposed to relying on a multipool you can make a bit more per day. If you just stick with multipools you have around a 7 month payback. Manually you could probably get that down into the 5-6 month range.

Regardless, people buying this equipment know that the breakeven point has always been months and not days.