Just bought hardware for my first rig - did I fail ?

[mistersaturn]

well, so i recently purchased hardware to build my first rig, i know it's a little late and i hear a lot of people talk about the bitcoin bubble bursting soon etc. but I really did not invest that much money so basically I know it's a gamble but i don'r care.
anyways, cuz i'm not a complete dumbass i took a look at

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

before purchasing anything and after a little bit of thinking i decided to buy ONE HD 5970 and maybe a second one later if this project turns out to be success....

my question is: was that the wrong card to buy, i mean all i see in the forum is ppl talking about their 6990 (or dual 6990) miners, whereas the 5970 is way cheaper and, according to the chart, will get
approx. the same megahashes/s.

so tell me, did I fail, didn't I fail, and if a wanna buy a second video card should i buy another 5970 or a 6990.

sorry for my crappy english, it's not my first language but hopefully you can still understand me.

[SomeoneWeird]

You did good.

--edit, say that in Heavys voice

[Dyaheon]

5970 is more efficient than 6990 and also cheaper, probably gets more hashes too when both are overclocked to the max. So no.

[Jack of Diamonds]

i decided to buy ONE HD 5970 and maybe a second one later if this project turns out to be success....

That's an economically illogical decision.

If you add a second card months down the road, difficulty level will be already in the millions. And your benefit from then having double the hash power of today will be negligible at best if price of BTC doesn't keep up. (making 0.04 bitcoin per day instead of 0.02 wont mean much)

The only thing that makes sense is putting up as much mhash/s as possible this minute.

[mistersaturn]

i decided to buy ONE HD 5970 and maybe a second one later if this project turns out to be success....

That's an economically illogical decision.

If you add a second card months down the road, difficulty level will be already in the millions. And your benefit from then having double the hash power of today will be negligible at best if price of BTC doesn't keep up. (making 0.04 bitcoin per day instead of 0.02 wont mean much)

The only thing that makes sense is putting up as much mhash/s as possible this minute.

deep inside i know you are right but as i have not seen a single dollar profit on my bank account yet i hesitate to spend more....probably i will sell my first bitcoins asap ( will do pooled mining btw) and buy another card then. so that might be within a week or so. and would you really say it's getting less profitable? a 30% dificulty increase and a 100% price increase, doesn't sound too bad for me.

[Cluster2k]

Mining can bring in money.  I have gathered $110 so far in a couple of weeks on modest hardware.

The only thing I do wonder however, is how many miners sell bitcoins as soon as they get them?  I do, so as to not be stuck with worthless bitcoins if suddenly everyone else loses interest.  That does however put me at the risk of selling far too soon.  Indeed that's already happened, with the first few going at $7 instead of $18.  The web site buying them off me seems to be constantly out of stock (to sell) and always wants to buy.

I'm looking at adding another 6950 in a few days time, and the 1.5kw solar panel system coming in a few weeks should do a lot of good for the running costs :-)

[Cluster2k]

and would you really say it's getting less profitable? a 30% dificulty increase and a 100% price increase, doesn't sound too bad for me.

I've been following the price and think that the recent rapid rise was due to several articles about bitcoin hitting financial news web sites.  The speculators may have piled in for a quick profit, and may exit just as quickly.  I wouldn't be surprised to see bitcoins back at $10 with difficulty higher than it is today.

[cablepair]

whoever is telling you that the "bitcoin bubble is going burst" is absolutely crazy.

things are likely to even out and not grow as fast as they have been growing but nothing is going to burst any time soon.

I say to anyone only to sell your coins if you need the money, this is an investment and the longer you can hold onto them the better

bitcoin is the future of digital currency and I believe this completely.

So you invested in some hardware. a 5970 is a great card, it will probably mint you at least 1.5 btc per day
also if you ever decide to get out of mining or the difficulty gets too hard or whatever you can always sell your hardware
mining hardware is also gaming hardware and its always going to hold its value pretty decently.

[SimBesh]

thank god, because i just bought a pair for $1100 off ebay

[gat3way]

If the bubble bursts, the market would be flooded with cheap GPUs so you are not likely to sell it at the price you expected (not even sell it).

[mistersaturn]

whoever is telling you that the "bitcoin bubble is going burst" is absolutely crazy.

things are likely to even out and not grow as fast as they have been growing but nothing is going to burst any time soon.

I say to anyone only to sell your coins if you need the money, this is an investment and the longer you can hold onto them the better

bitcoin is the future of digital currency and I believe this completely.

So you invested in some hardware. a 5970 is a great card, it will probably mint you at least 1.5 btc per day
also if you ever decide to get out of mining or the difficulty gets too hard or whatever you can always sell your hardware
mining hardware is also gaming hardware and its always going to hold its value pretty decently.

THIS is what i thought when i purchased my hardware at all, its a nobrainer, even if i would not earn one single dollar with all of my efforts i still got AWESOME new hardware i needed anyway, the only thing i would have wasted is a little bit of money for electricity, but that really does not matter, despite the fact that its about three times more expensive here in germany than it is in the us so for one mining rig with dual 5970s you gotta calculate about 140 dollars electricity or so, but if i make 1,5btc per day (was also my calculation btw) and sell thos 45 coins at the current price of 19 dollars each it would be still a huge profit. anyway, my workday is over now, gotta get home and get the rig runnin'.

thanks for all you guys who answered my post, great, active and helpful community.
see ya guys, i'll stick around.

[zamarok]

If the bubble bursts, the market would be flooded with cheap GPUs so you are not likely to sell it at the price you expected (not even sell it).

There is an upside to this for every PC gamer out there. If the BTC bubble bursts, I'm buying like four 6990s for dirt cheap and playing Crysis 2 in an eyefinity setup lol

[Freakin]

If bitcoin crashes just start a password cracking service 

[cablepair]

If the bubble bursts, the market would be flooded with cheap GPUs so you are not likely to sell it at the price you expected (not even sell it).

I'm waiting for this so that I can grab a couple 6990s.

hahaha

*****************

be proud your a part of something so revolutionary as bit mining

I really believe in this thing, I have only been mining like 2 months but I just reinvested in a new rig - I spent about $1000 on it and it will add another 1/ghash approx to my mining capacity

bitcoin has been really good to me and if the whole thing comes crashing down tomorrow I will have no regrets.

[bcpokey]

If the bubble bursts, the market would be flooded with cheap GPUs so you are not likely to sell it at the price you expected (not even sell it).

This is total bullshit. Bitcoin is a worldwide distributed effort, there are at best estimate 20-30,000 miners/cards floating about mining right now. The United States alone is made up of about 20-30million gamers. Dropping 20,000 second hand gpus across the nation is not going to be some huge glut that gums up the workings of the entire second hand market.

It's weird how misinformation seems to catch fire so much more easily than real information. That's why the OP hears "oh 6990s! awesome for mining!" when they are in fact one of the worst mining investments.

5970s are far superior to 6990s for bitcoin mining, though their resale value will be likely a bit lower.