On another thread we were discussing this but it got a bit off-topic. One person posted a reasonable figure  that today with 1.5MHs hashing power you can earn about $15 per day mining the better-standing coins. Unless you have a milk crate rig, that would be 2 boxes with an investment of about $700 each and be around 500 watts consumed with each. So the ROI would be about 90 days per box or for both with the combined KHs assuming it's something along the lines of an R9 280X in each. And unlike BTC ASIC rigs with difficulties going up and up, they would still keep having a good resale value. I'm thinking due to so many different coins out there, the difficulty will be spread out so that no one would be a true leader, if one were more profitable, the multipools would jump in and lessen the mining incentive from single coin pools and folks would switch. Some of these coins too, may be a good investment if their value double, tripled, or even went up by a factor of 10. Lately, a lot of the graphs were showing a downward or stagnant trend, but just looking at http://coinmarketcap.com/ tonight I see this:
Litecoin +8.80%
Dogecoin +53.98%
Netcoin +11.07%
Earthcoin +8.97%
Bitbar +56.87%
So what's the view on profit over the next 6 months or so in the long run? Build more boxes and gear up for a new upward trend, or will profitability start to fade as too many more new folks discover all of this and crowd us out?

I'm talking about scrypt coins, not SHA-256. Anyway, prices seem to be going up today, and with so many of them out there now many have *very* reasonable difficulties. I ordered more parts. I can build a new box for $245, using an old case and the only extra cost in the PS < $50 and of course the R9 280X ($400). The last one is the killer, so it's still around $650. Looks like ROI in about 80 days, and if these alt cryptos go up, maybe less. I don't see the R-90's being worth the extra price per hash.

Just started mining these (EAC) on Chunky... looks promising. The best part for me so far is that they have a nicely done native Linux wallet, it's already synched for me, only took about 5 minutes.

This is a very rambling thread, but basically, being a fairly new miner, I'm mostly concerned with ROI over the next 6 months. According to the stats today 1.5MHs will earn $15 a day. If I built yet another rig with an R9 280X next week it would probably earn $7.50 a day with DOGE, EAC or BET. If I could build one for $7-800 that would mean a 90 day ROI before making any extra cash. After 90 days (even say in 30 or 60 days) - do most people feel that the 1.5M=$15 formula for scrypt mining will hold up or go up or down significantly, and by how much? What if the value of Bitcoin doubled, how would that affect the ROI as a variable in the above scenario? Just wanted to get this back on topic, as probably this general question is what a good number of participants here want to know. Build or just stick with what you have until a better technology comes out.

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Thanks very much !

From what I've gathered, they are only for cryptocurrency mining, but you can also mine any other SHA-256 coins with them too, like Betacoin, E-Mark, Peercoin, Zetacoin, Terracoin, etc. I've noticed though, that mining these coins, according to Coinwarz, most of them seem to have kept within a reasonable closeness in value in the amount of profit per day you can mine with these other coins vs mining Bitcoin, and their value over time is a lot less predictable, so most folks stay with Bitcoin. I think the market controls this, if one got to be a bit more profitable for a sustained time, folks would pump and dump them and this would level the playing field again. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know if the increasing rise in BTC diff would help these other coins later, probably not. Just a lesser ROI across the board.

Yes, I guess I'll have to give up on my oldest boxes, I have 3 of them, 2 are about 10 years old and one is actually from 1998. Mobos will never support anything decent. I can build an entire new computer for under $200 from Portatech.com, not including case, PS, or the GPU. But the GPU alone shoots it right up into the $600+ range in most cases.

I'm still fairly a noob at this, but all the talk about the boom in BTC at the end of the year got my hopes up that it would be a good investment. Due to a low income, anything would help. Using my credit cards I've invested about $2500 in building these rigs Bought a 37GHs ASIC rig on Ebay which mines about $11 of BTC per day, I have it connected to an old homebuilt Mac-mini-type (mini ITX)  low-wattage box (now with Ubuntu) which only runs the terminal window, and I hope to get an 80 GHs rig when Advanced Miners get their act together and starts shipping. I have another 2 boxes for scrypt mining, one I built 3 years ago and only had a PCIe v 1.0 slot, but I was able to find a new GPU for $200 that will do about 420KHs. The second one is a new box I built about 2 1/2 weeks ago with an R9 280X that does over 700 KHs. These two also net about $11 a day on 1100MHs. I also gradually invested in about $600 of BTC paying cash when it was low, so made 20% profit on that by buying when the price was lower. So all told, I've earned about $500 since Christmas, but didn't get it all up and running until about 2 weeks ago.

I invested in a block erupter cube which is running at 37+ GHs and earning about $10-11/day, even at the high diff levels now. Also trying to invest in BTC buy buying about $100 worth a week (all I can spare and making minimum payments on credit cards). Hopefully the BTC price will go up by 50% or more in the next few months and tehn I will cash part of them in to pay off bills. But I do see it as a good investment right now, as the price despite having ups and down seems like it will gradually climb due to more commercial interest like Overstock and others.

That's great news, if Amazon and others soon followed suit it would be a huge plus for Bitcoin. I just noticed a little while ago that there's a site called "gyft.com" where you can buy gift cards from various retailers and store them on your mobile phone, as well as now being able to pay for these online with bitcoins. Almost like a bitcoin type of paypal but only for getting gift cards. This site is being advertised on Coinwarz now.

I know it's not too secure, but I just use the "my wallet" extension on Firefox which stores the wallet on Blockchain. The I have the Identifier (in text) backed up to my saved emails as well as the hard drive and a cloud storage site, as well as the wallet file in both places. Still have to remember not to forget the password, but it's quite long and should be un-guessable. 

The adapter sounds like a great idea. I too have an older box with an AGP slot and an ancient GPU to ditch, but the PCI Express 1.0 adapter you mention above could work to be able to use a newer card. Trouble is, I think the rig only has about 1/2 GB memory and a 280 watt power supply. even with a good card, I wonder if the memory will slow it down or overheat the PS?
Also, my PS only has the 4-pin power cables (for older hard drives and CD drives), if the GPU needs to be externally powered could I use these with some sort of adapter?

I'm liking Dogecoin right now, it's earning me 50% more per day than mining Litecoins , and coinwarz.com is showing it as fairly stable (in mining) vs the other choices (but with exchange rate variability below average). The value is low, but hopefully will not vary by more than 5% on the downside. As the BTC diff goes up, maybe more people will take a look at these other altcoins.  Should I hold onto them or trade them for BTC every few days as I mine them, to be safe?

The bitcoin difficulty just went up to 1,418,481,395
One site (bitcoinwisdom.com) says it will go up:
Estimated Next Difficulty:    1,619,198,809 (+14.15%)
Adjust time:    After 1909 Blocks, About 13.3 days
But another site predicts it will go down slightly (bitcoinwatch.com)
Next Difficulty in 1909 blocks    1,416,645,623

Been using poolerino based on the recommendations. No problems at all, no mandatory fee, and the payouts are frequent and regular.

I have an old "mini" box with a wi-fi card, and I built it to run Apple OSX about 5 years ago. It only has a single CPU without a fan (about 1.0 Ghz), but do you think if I installed Ubuntu on it I could run my BTC cube miner off of it and free up my Litecoin box? I think you can run mining_proxy and it won't even mess up your meager video card and such, on an old box like that. It would just be the terminal window running.

Thanks to you all for the input, especially Ivanlabrie, I finally got it to work best with this, after doing extensive research:

./cgminer --scrypt --url=stratum+tcp://xxxxpool.com:3333 --userpass=xxxx:x -I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --lookup-gap=2 --temp-target=75 --auto-fan --no-submit-stale --gpu-engine=1070 --gpu-memclock=1800 --gpu-powertune=20

Some of the other parameters are redundant, even thread-concurrency & shaders, but I got it to mine steady (the R9 280X / 7970). They say every rig is slightly different so you have to play around.
It now mines Litecoins at a steady ~650 KHs rate.

What I didn't mention was that when trying also mining BTC on an external Block Erupter (mining_proxy.py), and even though it's external, the console and system memory takes a hit from that and dropped my LTC mining down quite a bit to under 500 again. Then I tried using the -q (quiet) option on the  mining_proxy (which quiets but doesn't eliminate all output), so now I'm back to the 610+ range.

I only have 4 gig memory installed on that box right now, but will have 8 Gb soon, so hopefully that will improve things.




 

According to Coinwarz, there are several other SHA-256 coins out there, like E-Mark & Terracoin. Right now though, it would take longer to mine an equivalent value in BTC with the same hash rate (for example at 30GHs would take you over 70 days to mine enough to be equivalent to one BTC). But if the bitcoin difficulty became high enough, could these just as easily be mined using ASIC's enough for a better ROI?

Regarding the above post, all is working well, but after 2 days, now I'm only averaging in the upper 500KHs range. The GPU stays at 72-75 C, and upon a restart in the console, it goes back to the same range, not higher as originally. What would be the best thing to tweak without making it hotter? For example, thread concurrency > 8192?

I just built a new rig yesterday with a single R9 280X on Ubuntu Saucy (13.10) - bgfminer didn't do the trick, so I installed cgminer 3.7.2 (the "built" version)  into my home folder and with the help of all the posts above I put together a script. If you see anything to improve on, let me know, but it keeps hashing just above 700KHs and now about 17 hours later without a restart, it's still going +/- 660KHs. And the GPU temp stays under 75 C.
Of course I also installed fglrx for Ubuntu and did the initialization, reboots, etc.-- It does include the amdcccle app now.
Wanted to share the results:

export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

./cgminer --scrypt --url=stratum+tcp://MYCHOSENPOOL.com:3333 --userpass=WORKER.1:x --url=stratum+tcp://MYCHOSENPOOL.com:3333 --userpass=WORKER.1:x --failover-only --shaders=2048 --intensity=10 --thread-concurrency 8192 --auto-fan --vectors=1 --worksize=256 --lookup-gap=2 --temp-target=75 -I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --gpu-powertune 20 --gpu-memclock=1500

I don't want to go any hotter than 75, so I guess this is the best to expect, and I'm happy so far.