Enjoy the Last 24 Hours of Profitable GPU Mining

[crazyates]

It's winter. That means we have to use heat. So, rather than running the electric base-board heaters, I'll run my BTC miner. Even if it breaks even, it's still better than having to pay for heat.

If you are unfortunate to have electric heat I guess that is true. For those of us with natural gas heaters, using miners as heat would cost more.

I just did a calculation based on current price of $12.31

Mining profitability (my rigs) per day: $5.29

Cost of whole house per day electricity (most recent bill): $4.86
Cost of mining rigs (which help to heat now): $3.44

So it appears bitcoin would still pay my electric bill plus about $10/mo and reduce my gas bill somewhat. Not enough to keep $1200 worth of GPUs unsold.

I'll give the coin price a few days to rise. If it doesn't, shutting down. In reality, with ASICs right around the corner, its either shut down today or what, shutdown in a month or so?

I don't know what size house you have, or mining rig you have (probably large and small respectively), but you're looking at it the wrong way. You have a 24/7 heater running, all electrical use in your house is paid, and it is also making you $13/mo towards any additional heating you're running.

Not saying you shouldn't shut down, but it's not just paying itself +10 bucks towards your gas bill.

You missed the part where it's not worth the $1200 he's essentially paying by not selling the hardware.

Option A: Sell the hardware and get $1200 now.
Option B: Heat the house, make $10 a month, and take what, 2 years to make back that same $1200?

Why wait?

[bcpokey]

It's winter. That means we have to use heat. So, rather than running the electric base-board heaters, I'll run my BTC miner. Even if it breaks even, it's still better than having to pay for heat.

If you are unfortunate to have electric heat I guess that is true. For those of us with natural gas heaters, using miners as heat would cost more.

I just did a calculation based on current price of $12.31

Mining profitability (my rigs) per day: $5.29

Cost of whole house per day electricity (most recent bill): $4.86
Cost of mining rigs (which help to heat now): $3.44

So it appears bitcoin would still pay my electric bill plus about $10/mo and reduce my gas bill somewhat. Not enough to keep $1200 worth of GPUs unsold.

I'll give the coin price a few days to rise. If it doesn't, shutting down. In reality, with ASICs right around the corner, its either shut down today or what, shutdown in a month or so?

I don't know what size house you have, or mining rig you have (probably large and small respectively), but you're looking at it the wrong way. You have a 24/7 heater running, all electrical use in your house is paid, and it is also making you $13/mo towards any additional heating you're running.

Not saying you shouldn't shut down, but it's not just paying itself +10 bucks towards your gas bill.

You missed the part where it's not worth the $1200 he's essentially paying by not selling the hardware.

Option A: Sell the hardware and get $1200 now.
Option B: Heat the house, make $10 a month, and take what, 2 years to make back that same $1200?

Why wait?

If he can make $1200 out the gate, which is possible as I have no idea what he's running, then certainly he is free to do so. I was not responding to the idea that he forever mine, I was responding to his response to a post about heating. Which does not rely on A vs. B as listed above.

A better way to look at it would be:

Option A: Sell the hardware and get $1200(?) now.
Option B: Heat the house, make $13 a month, pay off all other electric usage, and take what, 3 months of extra mining time until spring before selling for $1200-X? (x potentially being negligible, I doubt 3 months will make them valueless).

[bels]

Yeah, I know it's not exact, but I just noticed we had hit block 209,858, or 142 blocks from BTC reward halving.  Assuming 6 blocks/hour, we're just under 24 hours (23.66 to be exact) until we hit block 210,000 and reward goes down to 25 BTC/block.

Unless BTC/$ goes way up, at .10 kilowatt/hour here, I'll still be profitable, but just barely, and likely not worth the effort/aggravation.

It's been fun...and I'll be sad to see it go away.  

I totally agree! I'm going to stop mining Bitcoins tomorrow and switch what few gpus I have left over to Litecoin until I sell them. It's been fun, but I won't miss the heat and noise!

Agreed, the noise will not be missed.  I have already started listing my cards on eBay.

[ThaSpacePope]

It's winter. That means we have to use heat. So, rather than running the electric base-board heaters, I'll run my BTC miner. Even if it breaks even, it's still better than having to pay for heat.

If you are unfortunate to have electric heat I guess that is true. For those of us with natural gas heaters, using miners as heat would cost more.

I just did a calculation based on current price of $12.31

Mining profitability (my rigs) per day: $5.29

Cost of whole house per day electricity (most recent bill): $4.86
Cost of mining rigs (which help to heat now): $3.44

So it appears bitcoin would still pay my electric bill plus about $10/mo and reduce my gas bill somewhat. Not enough to keep $1200 worth of GPUs unsold.

I'll give the coin price a few days to rise. If it doesn't, shutting down. In reality, with ASICs right around the corner, its either shut down today or what, shutdown in a month or so?

I don't know what size house you have, or mining rig you have (probably large and small respectively), but you're looking at it the wrong way. You have a 24/7 heater running, all electrical use in your house is paid, and it is also making you $13/mo towards any additional heating you're running.

Not saying you shouldn't shut down, but it's not just paying itself +10 bucks towards your gas bill.

You missed the part where it's not worth the $1200 he's essentially paying by not selling the hardware.

Option A: Sell the hardware and get $1200 now.
Option B: Heat the house, make $10 a month, and take what, 2 years to make back that same $1200?

Why wait?

If I lived in British Columbia or similar this guy would have more of a valid point. In terms of electric and heat though I (unfortunately?) live in the southern united states so there are still days where I have to use AC. December should end all that, but I did not disclose this so I totally understand why the arguments for continued mining were made.

It is a gamble. I believe my solution is to sell my cards for "market rates" which usually takes time. So I think i'll mine with them and shut down and sell off as they sell. I remember when the $2 per coin price hit I sold a lot of my 5000 series cards for decent prices (slightly below market) and at the point I was just trying to break even. Luckily I did but it was still 2 or 3 months of listening to fans in various rooms for nothing but some fun experience.

Again, with ASICS on the doorstep its either shut down now or shut down when that package is opened... which is who knows when.. but supposedly soon.

I was really hoping that in the 10 hours since the payout drop we'd see coin prices move to $14+ but no such luck. I'll give it some more time before ebay and craigslist become my mistress.

[bitboyben]

Little bit sad to see so many have to go. Hope lots of GPU miners will be able to stick around with ASICs or higher prices when they hit. Not really a good thing to have people leave the BTC community.
Maybe you can sell the GPUs for BTC and make $$ as the BTC price rises.

[Meatball]

Yeah, I'm pretty much done mining for the time being unless things change drastically.  Currently for every $1 I earn in BTC, it would cost me $0.75 in power.  While it's still profitable, I'll make more selling the cards I have now than I would in a few years of mining at that rate.

[RyanRed]

I think Ill contiune to GPU mine for another month, and hope the price goes up. If it doesn't, then its pointless. Ill just be twiddling my thumbs until the ASIC start showing up.

[bels]

I'm not going to leave mining completely, just taking a break.  Once the ASICs start shipping and there isn't a massive backlog I'm going to order several and start mining again.  I'm just hoping that the ASICs actually start shipping soon.

[Meatball]

I'm not going to leave mining completely, just taking a break.  Once the ASICs start shipping and there isn't a massive backlog I'm going to order several and start mining again.  I'm just hoping that the ASICs actually start shipping soon.

I tell you, I've been running the numbers, and I'm beginning to wonder if ASIC's are even going to be able to cut the mustard.  Figure the most efficient unit announced so far is ASIC at 60 GH/60 Watts for $1,299 and the most powerful per dollar is the BTCGPGA at 72GH/80-120 Watts for $1,069.

So, let's kick in a _conservative_ difficulty increase of 10x, and I say conservative because BFL has already said they have enough orders to bump the network at least that high.  With power costs of .10/kwh and a BTC/$ rate of $12.50, the hardware breakeven is:

BFL: 132 Days
BTCFPGA: 88 Days

So at _best_ you're looking at a minimum of 3 months before you can break even, and that's assuming the difficulty doesn't ramp up higher during that time, which is rediculous.  I'm beginning to think that if $/BTC doesn't jump drastically or BFL/BFGA don't increase their hashing/watt/$ drastically, you could easily end up in a situation where you never actually break even.

[Jutarul]

So at _best_ you're looking at a minimum of 3 months before you can break even, and that's assuming the difficulty doesn't ramp up higher during that time, which is rediculous.  I'm beginning to think that if $/BTC doesn't jump drastically or BFL/BFGA don't increase their hashing/watt/$ drastically, you could easily end up in a situation where you never actually break even.

A smart miner always buys hardware to support the network AND buys bitcoin to support the price.

Thus I recommend a 50/50 split of your mining equipment budget into hardware and bitcoins. You may be tempted to only do mining and sell all the bitcoins for a low margin profit (which is/was a way to ROI on the graphic cards), however this behavior becomes increasingly irrational once the ASICs arrive, since an ASIC is an investment which gets rather CONSUMED by the activity (graphics cards have ulterior usage patterns).

[Aseras]

So far I've made just as much per day after the block split as I have before....

[bels]

Well i'll let people here know how my unloading of all my mining hardware is going.  I am getting about half of what I originally bought my video cards for from ebay right now.  I'm guessing bitcoin miners were a decent chunk of people buying video cards on ebay back in the day.  Just wanted to share this so people thinking about winding down their mining operations can take that into consideration.

[Meatball]

Well i'll let people here know how my unloading of all my mining hardware is going.  I am getting about half of what I originally bought my video cards for from ebay right now.  I'm guessing bitcoin miners were a decent chunk of people buying video cards on ebay back in the day.  Just wanted to share this so people thinking about winding down their mining operations can take that into consideration.

That's actually not bad.  Anything used that's more than 6 months old and half is probably a normal rate you'd see on eBay.

[AngelusWebDesign]

So far I've made just as much per day after the block split as I have before....

Being as that's impossible, I call ignorance and/or B.S.

[Aseras]

So far I've made just as much per day after the block split as I have before....

Being as that's impossible, I call ignorance and/or B.S.

Just good luck...  Been hitting twice the blocks I normally do.

[AngelusWebDesign]

So far I've made just as much per day after the block split as I have before....

Being as that's impossible, I call ignorance and/or B.S.

Just good luck...  Been hitting twice the blocks I normally do.

You mean your pool is super lucky. What pool is it?

I seriously doubt you're "hitting many blocks" solo mining.

Anyhow, it's besides the point. Your "luck", even if it exists, will run out sooner rather than later and then you'll be faced with the same economics the rest of us have dealt with.

[-ck]

I tell you, I've been running the numbers, and I'm beginning to wonder if ASIC's are even going to be able to cut the mustard.  Figure the most efficient unit announced so far is ASIC at 60 GH/60 Watts for $1,299 and the most powerful per dollar is the BTCGPGA at 72GH/80-120 Watts for $1,069.

So, let's kick in a _conservative_ difficulty increase of 10x, and I say conservative because BFL has already said they have enough orders to bump the network at least that high.  With power costs of .10/kwh and a BTC/$ rate of $12.50, the hardware breakeven is:

BFL: 132 Days
BTCFPGA: 88 Days

So at _best_ you're looking at a minimum of 3 months before you can break even, and that's assuming the difficulty doesn't ramp up higher during that time, which is rediculous.  I'm beginning to think that if $/BTC doesn't jump drastically or BFL/BFGA don't increase their hashing/watt/$ drastically, you could easily end up in a situation where you never actually break even.

I'm glad others are starting to work this out. Check my post here (which you already responded to):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg1368704#msg1368704

I think diff will go up 50x

[bcpokey]

I tell you, I've been running the numbers, and I'm beginning to wonder if ASIC's are even going to be able to cut the mustard.  Figure the most efficient unit announced so far is ASIC at 60 GH/60 Watts for $1,299 and the most powerful per dollar is the BTCGPGA at 72GH/80-120 Watts for $1,069.

So, let's kick in a _conservative_ difficulty increase of 10x, and I say conservative because BFL has already said they have enough orders to bump the network at least that high.  With power costs of .10/kwh and a BTC/$ rate of $12.50, the hardware breakeven is:

BFL: 132 Days
BTCFPGA: 88 Days

So at _best_ you're looking at a minimum of 3 months before you can break even, and that's assuming the difficulty doesn't ramp up higher during that time, which is rediculous.  I'm beginning to think that if $/BTC doesn't jump drastically or BFL/BFGA don't increase their hashing/watt/$ drastically, you could easily end up in a situation where you never actually break even.

I'm glad others are starting to work this out. Check my post here (which you already responded to):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg1368704#msg1368704

I think diff will go up 50x

It will almost certainly go up 50x, and probably even more. How long it will take to do that is anyones guess though. I mentioned in a previous thread that BFLs own estimates are that they can produce and deliver about 21THash/sec of machines (though admittedly this might go up as they become more efficient) per week. The other vendors considerably less. So assuming that BFL is the sole deliverer of ASICs (averaging the addition of the slower vendors against the slower rate of delivery vs BFL and possibility for not enough orders to max everyone out constantly), that still leaves ~59 weeks from start to finish to reach 50x difficulty increase.  At which point machines are still profitable, just less so, a BFL Single SC would net about $60/month. Not that bad really, unless you went into some crazy debt to buy them, which would indeed be bad.

Just to play devil's advocate.

[-ck]

I suspect all manufacturers will be delivering ASICs within 2 months of each other. I don't expect difficulty to rise slowly at all, nor do I believe BFL will corner the market early on.

[bce]

Chinese new year, assembly cost vs cash flow of asic providers, block reward change and related BTC price, end of the world, etc... this is a foggy time for whom may prove to be the guardians of the worlds first decentralized cryptocurrency.  In the short term, I'm sure the stumbles in production process will prove to be evenly distributed across ASIC offerings, and will have made pre-ordering from any of the promised ASIC projects a good decision.