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April 18, 2014, 07:40:37 PM |
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At this point mining is just an expensive hobby unless you have millions of dollars and ASIC manufacturing access.
The difficulty is rising so quickly, and the miners retail price so expensive, profit is all but guaranteed impossible for small timers.
Since Bitcoins are valuated in Dollars primarily, you have to think of buying a miner as an investment. Lets say a 1 Th unit for a $3000 price, which would be about 6.5 BTC bought outright on an exchange. Buying a miner is a bet that the machine will generate more BTC than was invested in its operational lifetime. This lifetime is dependent on the difficulty and hardware life. As it stands, mining profits would be quickly mining at a loss against the energy consumed, only producing say, 3 BTC before profits are minuscule. Assuming BTC doubles in price for this example, you would break even on your fiat investment, but lose out on the value increase overall as you would have had 6.5 BTC instead valued at $6000. In this case just buying and holding BTC at the current market price when the BTC was purchased would have been a much better investment.
Until the difficulty flattens and/or equipment becomes much cheaper, profitability in mining will be mighty difficult.
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