Understandably so.

For the most part, 2014 was the year of industrial mining. They're not in this game to hold onto Bitcoin, they're in it to dump what they mine and reach their breakeven projections as soon as possible. When you're working with a few million $$ in hardware, holding Bitcoin for the potential to have a higher return doesn't make sense.

This has been going on since the dawn of ASIC mining. Boycotting manufacturers won't stop them from producing hardware and mining with it.

You know you guys can just ignore Galdur, right? Do that, and the page depth goes from 75 down to 30 worth in actual content. Dude is trolling hard now...

@Galdur -- Your post history suggests you lurk around the forums for something like 12 hours a day (if not more). Take a breath, and go outside. You'll feel much better afterward.

Any math to back that up, or just speculation?

That's a silly notion. Of course it's profitable to mine if you don't have any other reoccurring expenses outside of the initial hardware purchase (e.g. electricity).


Ah yes, the most common questions posed to this subforum...the answers to which are already noted in some of the top threads in Mining Speculation. Good thing you already read through them all, right? 
TL;DR - Revenue depends on the speed (and quantity) of the hardware and the network difficulty. Top recommended manufacturers: Spondoolies-Tech and BitMain.

It depends on who (or where) you are.
Keeping with the numbers so far, if the network difficulty is 50B, 1GH/s can be expected to earn roughly BTC0.00000042 per hour. At $200 per coin, that's ~$0.000084 per hour.

Assuming we're using the newest mining tech @ ~0.2J/GH (supposedly coming to market soon), your electricity/hosting/cooling costs would need to be less than $0.42 per kWh to make a profit (which is just about everyone). So, yes, it's still worth mining Bitcoin.

But when will it no longer be worth it for grand-scale industrial miners? If we shoot for the best (er..worst?) case scenario using 0.2J/GH, $200/BTC, $0.01 / kWh, difficulty would need to be equal to or greater than 2 trillion (something like 14.5 EH/s ..or 14,500 PH/s) in order for them not to be profitable anymore. Assuming mining gear never becomes more efficient than 0.2J/GH and their expenses never go below $0.01 per kWh, the only other volatile variable is the price of Bitcoin. If the price goes up, the difficulty may still go up since miners can still make a profit.

Agreed, and I never mentioned judging someone solely by their posts. The quality of a member's posts doesn't (in and of itself) indicate they're trustworthy.

With that in mind, your statement is just as true for people who build trust through repeated trades. It may be that the person you're buying from has been building up to the "long con" all along...

Consistent successful trading is the most popular way to garner trust from other members, but certainly not the only way. Think of how you'd trust someone on a daily basis offline...buying and selling goods can lead to a trustful relationship over time, but so can consistent "trustworthy" behavior (i.e. following through on your promises / keeping your word, adding value to the community, etc). Personally, I value a member's historical behavior more than I do their past trades.

Well, I've got a half burned-out Seasonic X-Series 1050W Gold PSU (single 12V rail), which I know doesn't fall under your "lightly used" category (figured I'd put it out here anyway). I say 'half' burned out because 2 out of the 4 PCE-E connectors no longer work after overdrawing on an old KnC Jupiter. The rest of the PSU works great though...ran the Jupiter off of those for several more months before selling the unit.

Anyway, it's still a nice PSU...but destined for the trash unless someone wants it for a repair project or what have you. Happy to provide pics as needed.

Assuming a consistent difficulty, 1GH/s would mine roughly BTC0.00000052 per hour, which translates into $0.000026 at $50 per BTC. So unless you're paying less than that in energy costs per hour, you're going to find that mining is extremely unprofitable.

Obviously this would mean that just about every current mining conglomerate would close up shop until the difficulty dropped substantially or until the price per coin increased. But to answer your question, yes, I would continue to mine (at least for a little bit). Someone's going to have to find the 2016 blocks before the difficulty is recalculated, so I might as well take part 

Well, the miner would be running at roughly 5-5.5TH/s, assuming a minimally fluctuating difficulty and average luck on a pool. The miner would be somewhere around 0.3 Joules per GH/s...so twice as efficient as what's circulating the market, but within the realm of possibility in the future (thinking of ASICMiner's BE300 chips or Bitfury's attempt at 0.2 Joules/GH/s and lower).

In other words, since the hardware doesn't currently exist, you didn't mine BTC2 in 30 days with a single miner using 1500w. That's an easy riddle...

That's the beauty of these kinds of calculations; when brought down to just the hardware, power costs, and network difficulty, the math scales. If you buy a mining rig for $1 with a breakeven of 100 days, you can buy 100 rigs and expect the same breakeven time frame.

However, this isn't the reality of the situation, because as you scale up you'll have additional expenses (cooling, space, insurance, and everything else already noted here). In other words, 1 rig @ 100 days BE != 100 rigs @ 100 days BE. The only way equal scaling is possible is if the hardware discount received (when buying in bulk) is equal to the expenses generated by scaling up the operation.


That may be true, but you're not seeing all of the major problems that come with buying more gear. You're plan is to start off running equipment in your 312.5ft² recreation room, which would be outfitted with enough power capacity to run a small neighborhood, and cooled only by several exhaust fans. Even if you moved everything to a 1000ft² attic, that's still an absolutely terrible idea.


Perhaps it's the phrasing of that sentence, but no, I do not agree.

Or, perhaps I frequent the Mining Speculation subforum and read some of the threads at the top of the list. You're welcome to continue with your conspiracy theories though.

And we all understand mining perfectly well around here. When we unanimously say "You're doing it wrong", we actually mean "You're doing it wrong".

Jeez, this thread is pretty painful to read. Clearly OP is much wiser than us mining veterans. 

@dmwardjr -- You seem like you can do the math when it comes to outfitting your house with a fire hazard's worth of power equipment, but yet you still use online calculators to guess at how much money you *could* (operative word here) make mining Bitcoin? No detailed network projections or anything? I really hate to say it, but you're in for a rude awakening when you discover your breakeven period will be quite a bit longer than 100 days.

I found that link, yes, but that's the only recent update they've had (outside of twitter apparently, since I don't follow that, but that falls on me). Nothing on their own website.

I misspoke earlier, and thus stand partially corrected. I understand the companies they support have been active. My weight on the word "activity" was directed more toward Seedcoin themselves than the projects / companies they worked with. The way I see it, money was given to Seedcoin...which went somewhere (and you can't assume it went to the companies they supported until they can back it up with data)...and then that was pretty much it. For all I know, Seedcoin may have barely played even a minor role in the development of some of these companies (especially if they had additional outside funding / support besides Seedcoin), even though that may not be the case at all.

I understand and agree with your points, and I understand Seedcoin's point of view as well. I'm just hoping for others to see the other side of it; since when is it appropriate for a company, one that raised a couple thousand Bitcoins, to not make a substantial effort to communicate with the people who funded them? 140 character blurbs every couple days doesn't qualify to me, but perhaps some people find that comforting.

Oh dear, apparently I struck a chord on this one, and it's resonating well.

It seems your definition of activity is slightly different than mine. After all, if I'm working hard to make something happen, building up a venture capital enterprise in the process, I'd love to show my investors what I've accomplished and how far along the next project is. It's easy to drum up support for your venture if you involve investors from the start. Get them excited for the things you're doing!

From what I've gathered, however, you went offline essentially right after your second round IPO, ceasing all updates (or even hints) on what may be going on in the background. I judge a company by not only how aggressive they are in building a Bitcoin business (and the viability of said business), but also by how they interact with the people who funded their ventures in the first place.

So yes, you've ceased all activity in the community's eyes, regardless of what you say to the contrary. You may be working incredibly hard in the background, but you've got nothing to show for it. No updates. No dividends. No financials. No recent news articles promoting any of the startups you support. There's nothing going on that would lead any of us to believe that you haven't ceased activity.

It's actually fairly ingenious for a scam.
Step 1) create a fund that does essentially nothing, but you've got a clause in there that you can buy back shares based on 30-60 (etc) day moving average, 2) pretend that you're actually doing something for a little bit, 3) cease all activity for a time greater than a multiple of 30-60 days, so that by that time most investors had dumped their coins and crashed the price, 4) magically come back and take advantage of the clause, using the IPO funds to buy back all the shares at the dirt cheap average price.

With an IPO raising BTC2,000, and a buyback of BTC900, that's not a bad haul for 11 months of doing nothing.

.....

I'm going to go out on a limb and say this isn't a serious question...

I had a similar thought earlier as I reminisced of the early ASICMINER days. As a long timer holder of AM1 and AM100 on Havelock, what benefit, specifically, would this new asset bring to us? Especially since we're talking large quantities of ASICMINER-provided mining gear...


The only way to guarantee profit is to continually cycle out hardware to keep up with energy efficiency and the network difficulty. Are you proposing that this will be done A) free of charge and B) indefinitely?

Still have boards and cables in inventory? I just finished up retiring a number of Dell servers and managed to secure a few A930, N750, and AA2330 PSUs. Given the connectors are all the same, I imagine the boards are all compatible.