I Have $500 To Invest In Bitcoin Mining, Can I Be Profitable Or Is It Too Late?

[Yoga4]

I have affordable electricity that will let me run an intermediate setup. The downside is that I am only willing to risk $500 in equipment right now. My question to you guys is whether or not I am too late in the game for this amount of investment costs. Keep in mind I am a beginner. I do not know much about mining equipment. I am not even sure how much I can make per day running it effectively. However, any help or responses that could help me would be awesome!

[dsattler]

I have affordable electricity that will let me run an intermediate setup. The downside is that I am only willing to risk $500 in equipment right now. My question to you guys is whether or not I am too late in the game for this amount of investment costs. Keep in mind I am a beginner. I do not know much about mining equipment. I am not even sure how much I can make per day running it effectively. However, any help or responses that could help me would be awesome!

Being a miner myself I must say that it probably won't be profitable for you. It's a nice and nerdy hobby to fiddle with miners, but the times for profit are gone wrt to the current difficulty and btc price. Bitmain's S7 is around the corner, this will increase the difficulty a lot and will make older mining hardware obsolete.

TL;DR
Skip the mining business, buy btc instead. Now it's a good time to grab some while their cheap.

[Enzyme]

It's definitely not a good time to mine, you won't make any profit, only losses. If you want to heat your house, and earn some money back, mining is a nice way to acquire cheap heating.

[jonnybravo0311]

The answer depends on your power costs.  The lower the cost it is for you to run a miner, the better.  If you've got $0.04 per kWh, pretty much any gear is going to work for you.  If you're paying more than $0.15 no gear is going to be profitable at current conditions.