New to SHA256 mining. Am I understanding Bitcoin calculators correctly?

[dreamreamer]

I have been CPU and scrypt mining since November, but thinking about getting into SHA256 and mining in a bitcoin pool. My first goal is to make back the cost of equipment and second is to make a little extra. Reason for that is you never know how much used equipment will sell for and I just want to be apart of bitcoin mining. I have been looking at a AntMiner S1 from BITMAIN. They have it for sale for what looks like .614 BTC shipped.

Using the default numbers and putting in 180 GH/s and 350 watts at https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator it looks like the best I could do is      8-1 – 8-31 (126 days) RETURN -0.156 and from then on profit is negative and revenue goes downhill.

Is that a fair calculation or am I missing something.

[BitchImightbe]

Pretty much yeah 

[Shogen]

Is that a fair calculation or am I missing something.

With default setting, it assumes you can get your hardware tomorrow and start immediately.
Can you get it delivered within 24 hours? Probably not.

With default setting, the difficulty goes up 20% every time, but it looks like the increase has been slowed down a bit recently.
If you set it at 15%, you can get a tiny bit of profit.

You should also input your local electricity cost to have a better estimation.

[Gate559]

Indeed the difficulty jumps seem to be lower and lower.

Also you might be able to sell the miner after. Or use it as a heater  .

I think those will ROI by a small margin if you don't pay a huge amount on electricity. You would need quite a few of them to make a nice profit though.

But there is nothing really appearing on the horizon to compete with those...maybe a 1.8-2.1k 1TH miner.

[freebit13]

Those calculators are pretty accurate, bitcoin mining is not a goldmine, the margins are thin and the game is plagued by scammers, but nobody can predict the future.

Like anything in life, you need to put in money to make money and the more you put in the more you profit, but things can always go wrong.

I'd suggest giving it a go, but not with the idea that you're going to make a lot of money. Take it as a learning experience while adding value to bitcoin and supporting the network before diving in deeper when you've acquired more knowledge, which also doesn't leave you stuck with a ton of old equipment when the next generation comes out.

[tesene]

Bitmain has the antminer price setup so that you will just get it paid off and make a teeny bit before it loses profitability mining BTC.  Don't forget, it will mine other SHA-256 coins though...