Yes, mining equipment purchased now is very likely to cost more to run than it will earn within 6 months... so when you get it you essentially have a few months to hopefully return a profit or you won't. If you paid for the equipment with fiat (dollars), then your odds of ROI are increased as the BTC price increases. If you paid for it with bitcoins, in most cases it will never mine the amount of bitcoins you spent on it.

So it comes down to when you get it, and how much you paid per Gh/s. I have orders from BFL from March that I'm expecting soon (I paid with PayPal), and the $ per Gh/s is still very competitive to new ASIC miners being offered (I ordered before BFL doubled the prices across the board)... and even these machines probably won't ROI without a decent bump in BTC price. If I would have paid for them with Bitcoin, they would most likely never mine the amount of Bitcoins I spent on them (I haven't done detailed enough calculations but I'm betting they won't).

As someone else mentioned, you can look at mining sha256-based alt-coins with ASICs. As the prices fluctuate, they become more or less profitable than BTC so if you mine a coin while it is more profitable than BTC and then exchange it to BTC while it is still more profitable, you've made more than you would have by just mining BTC. If you have a Windows PC you can check out CGWatcher's Profitability Mining which will automatically mine your most profitable coin, checking however often you set it to. If you setup auto-withdrawal from your pool to a Cryptsy account, and set your Cryptsy account to auto-exchange those coins to BTC, then you've mostly automated the entire process... although you have to make sure you exchange the coins while they're still more profitable than BTC so you have to ensure your pool will payout often enough.

There are pools that attempt to do this all for you, like middlecoin and hashco.ws, but they're for scrypt-based alt-coins. We'll probably see similar sha256-based multipools in the future. But it is not an exact science and with the volatility of alt-coins, there is no guarantee the coin will be more profitable long enough for all this to take place, nor that there will be any buyers when you go to sell... so many people prefer using CGWatcher and handling the exchanging part themselves.

If you want to see how much money you'll lose with your ASIC, plug in the numbers at http://mining.thegenesisblock.com but you have to watch which month you set as the month you'll start mining, because they adjust difficulty for the entire month on the 1st of that month, which isn't reality - whatever the estimated difficulty increase for that month is isn't the difficulty for the entire month... it increases throughout the month and stops at that amount. So changing the start date even by one month can make a big difference which may not be entirely accurate.

Which monitoring options are you using? If a condition is met that requires a miner restart, CGWatcher should kill the process if the miner is unresponsive or ignoring the quit command. Regardless of monitoring options, it will also restart (or kill & start if necessary) the process if Windows reports that it is not responding. There are special circumstances where CGWatcher is unable to kill the process, but Task Manager is also unable to kill it. This is rare and caused by driver or hardware problems.

I'm just curious if this is something I can fix. If you're able to kill it in Task Manager, CGWatcher should be able to kill it. So it's a matter of figuring out if an existing monitoring option will trigger the restart in this scenario or if a new option needs to be created. And if the restart is being triggered, why it isn't working properly. I'd appreciate any more info you can give me on what happens when it fails to restart (i.e. debug log entries).

Loft:

If the coin doesn't have values it was either not on CoinChoose when profitability data was last updated or an error occurred while updating the data. It was requested that coins that drop off CoinChoose just get set to zero rather than being removed (I can't remember the reasoning offhand), but if you would prefer coins not on CoinChoose to be removed you can open CGWatcher.exe.ini and change RemoveMissingCoins=False to RemoveMissingCoins=True. You can also go to the Settings tab, click the 'Other Tools...' button and select Coin Manager from the popup menu. This will allow you to remove coins individually (or add/edit coins).

The Pools not displaying correctly is because there are so many that cgminer's API data is being truncated (cut off). I'll look more into how I can correct this, I may be able to get a few more pools but there will always be a limit because all API data has a maximum size and anything beyond that is lost and ends up looking like those chinese characters. When there is this many pools, I can get the info for the truncated pools from the config, but I won't know of any changes to priority for truncated pools. For example, if pool 40 gets changed to priority 0 and pool 40 is truncated, cgminer will be unable to tell CGWatcher the new priority. So the url/username/password will be fixed, but the priorities for pools 38+ may be inaccurate or unknown (if they have changed from the priority set in the config).

Edit: I forgot there is a checkbox in Coin Manager you can use to enable/disable removing of pools not on CoinChoose, so manually editing CGWatcher.exe.ini isn't necessary.


Wipeout2097:

This will be in the next update, along with CPU affinity. You can set CPU affinity and priority for each profile.

So guy sees it on Bitmit for $999 with 0 bids, then offers you $4500? Sounds reasonable. Can you let this guy know I have some mining equipment for sale?

I expect this domain will get WhoIsGuard shortly (because OP is lying about selling it).

Fair enough, I didn't read through the other thread entirely to see you had even already addressed this. You just made me a little happier in regard to other asics I ordered that should be arriving within the next week, because I had been going by October as the start date on that calculator.

Your calculations on theGenesisBlock (http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/44fc645248) have September as the start date. The auction ends October 1st. After changing the start date to October it shows losses or at worst break even (if you stop using it in May) even at 15 BTC and 55% difficulty increases.

No, but I suspect more sha256 coins may start popping up as asic miners look for something more profitable to point their machines to and habitual alt-coin creators see this as an opportunity. This may lead to a sha256-based multipool.

If you're using Windows you can use CGWatcher to do this: http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/2013/07/profitability-mining-in-cgwatcher.html

You can run two instances of CGWatcher, one for GPUs and one for ASICs, so they can each have their own profiles/coins. You just have to copy the CGWatcher folder to another location so each instance has its own folder, and set each instance to override the API port (e.g. first instance uses 4028, second uses 4029 so they don't cross-communicate.) If you try it and need help let me know.

Also, Cryptsy's new auto-sell feature means you can probably set up auto-payout from your pools to Cryptsy and have them automatically exchanged to BTC. I haven't looked into this so I can't say for certain how well it works, but something you may want to check into. This would solve the final step in the process (which a pool like Middlecoin or Hashco.ws does for you).

Try TeamViewer or LogMeIn. I've used TeamViewer personally so I know it works, and I think I've seen LogMeIn recommended often by others.

I'll also plug CGWatcher and CGRemote, which when used together allow you to manage your miners remotely... even if display drivers crash.

Yeah, you're right about security of the network. If someone did plan ahead and spent money developing an ASIC that just happened to be for the right algorithm, they could essentially control the network when the algorithm switches.

This is why I posted, I knew there would be things I hadn't considered (although admittedly I didn't spend more than 5 minutes thinking about it).

This isn't a serious suggestion, just an idea and I'm curious to see what others think. Obviously if you are heavily invested in current (double sha256) ASICs you're not going to be in favor. I'm not trying to make anyone's blood boil... I have also purchased ASICs so this would be detrimental to my own investment too.

And this is also assuming the algorithm can be changed without causing any significant obstacles (other than raising a bounty for ck to implement it in cgminer  ). I realize it would also take a lot of work from the bitcoin/bitcoin-qt core developer(s), so maybe a bounty would be raised by everyone without ASICs to try to even the playing field every so often.

So, for example, the hashing algorithm changes every four years when the block reward halves. It would be unknown which algorithm it was going to use, maybe it would randomly choose from a pool or it would be left to bitcoin core developers who would hopefully keep it secret. But it would essentially send us all back to the stone age of CPU and GPU mining, followed by FPGAs and then ultimately ASICs. Then four years later it would start over again. All those GPUs you have sitting in your closet could be dusted off and have a purpose again... at least for a little while. Difficulty would essentially reset every four years.

It would add another variable into mining, so along with taking a gamble on which pool, coin, asic vendor, etc. to mine, you could also bet on which algorithm would be used next by trying to prepare for it early. Just think of all the additional ASIC companies that could spring up!  

Feel free to tell me how impractical or stupid it is... I don't mind. I mentioned it in the trollbox and some people added to it, but the conversation was mixed in with political debate and whether or not fontas is really satan and the end is near. I also realize this could be done with an alt-coin... but I'm not interested in that.

'I want to link my Bitcointalk name with BTCJam's. Verification code: a136855f-e8fb-4656-a7df-7bc6c271bf00'

CGRemote will be able to do this soon. It's still in development while in beta so there are many features that aren't yet finished, but it will make managing all miners from one computer very easy. It will work with miners on any OS but for miners running CGWatcher there are many more features. Along with being able to switch all (or selected) miners to a different coin, there will be scheduling options similarly to scheduling options in CGWatcher but they can apply to several or all miners. Right now you can already create, edit, and delete CGWatcher's profiles for each miner; create, edit, and delete files on remote miners; navigate the remote computer's filesystem; start, stop, restarting mining; and a few more things. CGRemote can monitor miners on the same computer, local network, or over the Internet.

You can follow development and information on beta access at http://www.minerremote.com

I base all my investment decisions on what my magic 8-ball tells me:

It's never too late. If you sell your mining gear at a loss, and then lose more money buying back your computer and armchair... then congrats, you're well on your way to becoming a cryptocurrency miner.

I say this as a joke made up of sarcasm and sadness, because I am a miner and we're like crackheads -  always chasing a little more hashrate no matter what it costs us or how much our families are destroyed in the process.

That said, you should join us -  its fun!

Forget real mining, you've already struck gold by finding this forum. You can mine over 50 different coins ranging from diamonds to turds without ever leaving your seat! It's fate, don't fight it. Sell your gear and buy cryptocurrency mining equipment that may or may not ever recover its costs. It's how we do.

Yeah, this mining is unprofitable and purely done for nerdgasms... "show me that hashrate!" 

Guys this is a scam... Anything great coming out of North Korea has been designed by dear leader himself, not engineers. They would not be getting credit if this was legit. He even choreographs the killer whale show at their sea world (see vice videos). I would suggest the OP isn't even the real dear leader... but then again he is the only one in the country with Internet access so who else could it be?

Kim Jong un, please update me when you design an asic yourself. I know it will be better than anything "engineers" could design. And preferably make one that doesn't require electricity so people in your country can use it.

(good thing this isn't reddit so I don't get banned from r/pyongyang for questioning this)   

I don't know if there are differences but normally for BFGMiner adding -G to the arguments disables GPU mining (case-sensitive). I haven't used EasyMiner so this is just a suggestion.

In theory you'd make the same either way over a long enough time period. But with solo mining it might be several decades before you get paid anything, or even centuries (depending on hashrate, of course). So I wouldn't recommend solo mining unless you're immortal.

You can use CGWatcher to restart the miner if accepted shares stop increasing for X minutes, along with several other monitoring and scheduling options.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=185553.200

Nobody can say for certain what is causing your problem unless you post more info (specifically your config file or arguments, you can remove the username/password if you wish). Is it possible you have both a scrypt pool and a sha256 pool set in the config? (or vice versa?) Then something is causing the first pool to go down and when it switches to the backup the rejects start.

Do the rejects stop at a certain point or go on indefinitely? or have you not waited around long enough to find out? (which I don't blame you, but may be helpful in identifying what is going wrong).