Hi, questions about the electric factor when mining

[HnB]

Hi everyone, this is my first post, i discovered Bitcoin not too long ago and took some time to figure out what mining is, now that i figure out a bit better how the process goes on, i have some questions for you.
I am mostly interested in how to make mining profitable, so here are my questions if you can answer.

Let's pretend i don't pay electricity.

1. Does it make mining a lot more interesting ? or is electricity not that much of a charge.
2. Electricity problem solved, is ASIC still the best device to use ? Or does it make CPU or GPU mining a good option ?
3. Is Bitcoin a good cryptocurrency to mine ? Or do you guys feel like some other crypto is worth giving a look at by now ?
4. Is mining in pool interesting when you can provide a lot of Hashrate ? Or is it only good for weak machines.

Thank you for the answer i would like you to bring 
And have a nice day.

[Domdom22]

Just to answer your first question.

If we assume that you are not paying any electricity then every dollar you make is profit because there is no overhead. If you are spending $2 in electricity to get $1 in BTC then you'd be losing money. But if you are spending $0 and making that $1, this is good stuff.

Then that money would be going towards paying the cost of your equipment.

[Sparky_eMunie]

With no electricity cost mining with a Radeon 7950 or 7970 GPU would make sense, but it will be months until you get the money back for purchasing such a card.

CPU mining makes no sense unless you have a 12-32 core CPU.

Bitcoin mining with ASIC could be profitable if you get a great deal on an ASIC (10GH/s+) and get it right away and not weeks or months later. But in most cases you will never get the money back you spend on the ASIC.

[marcovaldo]

To answer your first question:

Even if you do not pay anything in electricity, it does not really change anything....
Indeed, if you want to mine btc, you have to spend thousands of USD in mining equipment (ASIC), and it will take years for you to break even on your initial investment. You might even end by losing money.

Electricity (10 usd per month?) is almost nothing compared to 10k usd you have to spend for the equipment.






Now, if you want to mine with your own equipment, and free electricity, you won't lose money, but you won't win anything, cause you will never make enough btc

But you can try to mine altcoins and sell them for btc

[HnB]

Thanks guys, well i didn't want to put too much emphasis on the ASIC, i feel like this is like concept cars you know, you can see an exemplar on a picture but you'll never see it on the road.

I had a question that marcovaldo started to answer, i want to know more about these alt cryptos, i started to simulate something on CoinWarz with a three ATI 6990 config which apparently would cost about 3k and CoinWarz says that if i mine DiamondCoin right now i would get a BTC in 0.01 days, so i kind of feel like i don't know how to use the calculator 

[marcovaldo]

You can read the altcoin forum:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

You can compare coins here: http://www.coinchoose.com/

[Domdom22]

If you wanna do GPU mining one of the alt coins would probably be best.

[HnB]

Am i right if i start to think GPU mining is the easiestly accessible ? Is it superior to CPU ?

Thanks for the links, this website is nice, can you guys tell me if i messed up with my calculation ? I may not understand how this works, because 0.01 day for a bitcoin seems far too utopic, why SHA 256 is in GH and Scrypt in KH ?

[skenera]

GPU mining is better than CPU mining and I think SHA-256 is in GH because it needs higher hashrate than Scrypt because of its higher difficulty since ASICs can only mine SHA-256 based currency.
Useful link: https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison
And anoter calculator: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator

[USB mining]

This was very helpful, thanks.

[HnB]

Thanks for your links, i'll give it a look, this table will probably allow me to find the device with the best raw power, because people tend to think with a kH/W efficiency.