There are a couple of coins that have done well long-tem (XMR for example) but yes the majority of alts have lost ground against BTC (effectively losing money).  Most alts simply enrich the exchanges and whales praying on small time investors without discipline.

Faucets produce dust (very small satoshi amounts) which would raise your transmit fees - effectively you may end up losing money if you have faucet dust mixed in your wallet.

Mining, selling goods or services for BTC are the common ways of earning BTC.  Easiest method to acquire would be to buy it on an exchange.

That is not the main purpose. The purpose of a faucet is instructional - to teach people how to use digital wallets and understand basic principles of blockchain technology.  Once you get your first couple of deposits and can see them on explorer you should quit.

Some people will never stop doing stupid things. Somewhere out there somebody is eating soup with a fork. If they want to do that with their time so be it. If somebody wants to collect pennies from around vending machines so be it. If somebody wants to feed of faucets....

The purpose of a faucet is to learn how to use blockchain technology and digital wallets/keys/currency for the first time.  Once you understand it after a couple of payments the learning is done.

If you live in a 3rd world country and have marketable skills you should advertise them in the marketplace section - the rewards are magnitudes better than a faucet.

If you live in a place where digital currency can be bought with fiat then doing your regular job is just easier/more rewarding.

Bitcoin is effectively being used a currency currently.  So to acquire it as you would with most other world currencies you could simply exchange your local currency for bitcoin on a money exchange website like Coinbase

Alternatively, if you have a skill which is easily marketable over distances (ie web design, blogger, counselor) you can market those services in the marketplace.

I'm surprised people are still buying S3s.  I had trouble selling mine last year and that was almost 15 months ago. Guess they don't build 'em like they used to

The only winner with cloud mining is the cloud mining company.  It also promotes centralization. No point in supporting it when the OP is willing to support decentralization.

At the halving revenue drops to half but operating cost stays the same (assuming nobody quit mining) so discounting for fees the income should be less than half.

BFL SC Single

Distant second was Avalon B3 scam that dogie noted above.

Dropped it to $100 + shipping/escrow.  Feel free to make a reasonable offer - I would feel bad sending these to ewaste before the halving.

$150 bump - if you're local in SoCal send me any offers via PM and I'll consider it - these things are taking up precious space

$0.30 per KWH from Southern California Edison (Los Angeles area)
$0.02 per KWH from Seattle (commercial rate)

15x difference for 1000 mile separation.  Might as well be on another planet.

Good for beginner - Yes.  They require no maintenance after they're configured.  If you can comfortably navigate the basic info in your router you can configure these.  You just plug them in to a PC, set the desired IP, plug into network, configure the mining address through the interface and you're done.  Well other than plugging in the power supplies.

I just brought these home this past week and just realized how heavy they are (I haven't moved them since I first got them) - it's definitely not worth shipping these unless you have some corporate shipping account or discounted shipping you could use. Ship weight for all 4 seems to be about 40 pounds.

I am dropping the price to $150 - still available for local pickup and anybody that has a cheap shipping option.

Bumping again. 4 S3s running stable at > S3+ speeds for $200 + shipping.  Need to find a home for these.

It's probably not worth it to ship just one and I would prefer to sell them all in one go.

Price dropped to $200 for all (4) plus shipping.

DOGE is a perfect example (actually all coins are but DOGE is almost exactly 2 years to the date).  Everybody who had cards was able to switch over from PPC or Scrypt and pile on DOGE for a couple of months until that price tanked.  The coin is still alive, but nowhere near its high.

Pop into the ETH threads and you'll hear people talking about insider pumping and dumping.  I cannot validate the veracity of these claims but I would not be surprised if true.  Even LTC which was the darling for 3 years was pumped to 0.03xx a few months back and is back down to 0.007x right now.

Sure some can sit on idle cards for months on end if they have the space (remember some people have warehouses or literal farms).  Some people living with an a wife or GF may not have that luxury 

Again, do a little planning and research before jumping head first.

Price lowered to $100USD for all four + shipping/escrow.

Hello HCT peeps.  I have (4) Antminers S3s (batch 6) I'm looking to find a new home for.  I overclocked them a week after I got them and they've been running a consistent 476-478GH/s each. No other modifications. They have only seen a downtime once in the past 1.5 years and that was when the power went out for a couple hours.  They are still mining at present in a temp controlled, smoke and pet free commercial building.  No bad hashing units and fans all work fine. Total combined rate is just over 1.9TH/s

People in SoCal are welcome to do local pickup.

I will ship anywhere in the continental US but I don't really have access to discounted shipping so a commercial delivery address may be helpful. I'm OK with escrow with somebody reputable like OgNasty - buyer pays.

All four are mining about 0.0057BTC/day at F2Pool - they should mine a bit more with the upcoming difficulty drop.


http://imgur.com/tCuASwn

Sigh, let me explain some basic mining concepts.  There's no need to get all wound up people.

Eth right now is valued quite high compared to its difficulty.  That's why it is a profitable coin for some miners.

Any coin would be profitable if you had free electricity since your operating cost would be near zero and the only investment would be your hardware assets.

Any coin would also be profitable if it were valued 100x what it currently is  - ie if the exchange rate on Polo or cryptsy were to shoot up 100x everybody would mine it.

Conversely

Any coin would be trash if you cost more in electricity to mine than it generates in fiat to cover the cost of the electricity - this is irrespective of the hardware cost. At this point if you believed in the coin it would make sense to buy it with fiat unless you believed so terribly in the coin that you just had to support the network by mining at a subsidy.

Most any coin would be trash if its value relative to other currency went down 1/100th of it's current value.

Putting aside the talk about ASIC (I don't even know why that was brought up - nobody will bring ASIC to the market for a coin/algo that hasn't shown lasting power), the real question is will the ETH mined be worth more than electricity by the time you sell or trade it for $, Euro or BTC.  Looking at history - almost every coin has become less valuable relative to Bitcoin than it has been in the past - some coins almost by a magnitude of 10 or even 100.

So if you can mine RIGHT NOW with hardware IN HAND then by all means go ahead and do so and enjoy the coins rolling in. If you don't have hardware - ask yourself what are you going to do if ETH price tanks because it was manipulated by some cheap dev or some whales. What do you do with 10 R9 390s other than sell them at a loss to somebody else who can mine with free electricity. If you order the stuff from Newegg right now and you get mining 7 days from now the global hashrate will probably be over 1.2TH.  Some with cheap power will still make profits.  Some will be near break even.  Some will be losing money (like myself who has CA electric rates near $0.30/KWH).

If you're expecting ETH to climb in value vs BTC it just makes sense to grab some now while it is "cheap" and ignore the mining aspect and focus on trading and understanding the platform.  This holds true to any coin really.  If you're buying the currency at least you have access to the full assets instead of having to wait for it to trickle in over time from the miners.

Having mined well over 20 different coins which were all touted as the silver to Bitcoin's gold or even being better than BTC - I'm still waiting for one to knock the giant off his thrown.  All of these coins have come down significantly from their highs - LTC, XMR, XMP, PPC, etc.

Mine with enthusiasm, but don't jump in head first just because others are doing so - there's plenty of idiots out there.  The trend has been that most people except early adopters will not make significant profits when mining.