Will this rig pay for itself if it runs 24/7 for three months?

[Kubba]

Greetings, I'm planning on purchasing a dedicated mining-rig but first I would like to get a hint on how much money it will generate and if it will cover the costs of the machine itself.

Components:

• CPU: AMD Sempron 140 2,7GHz = 44$
• PSU: Fractal Design Newton R2, 800W = 187$
• RAM: A-Data 1024MB DDR3 = 17$
• MOBO: ASRock 3N78D = 76$
• GPU: XFX Radeon HD5970 Black Edition 2GB = 570$

Total: 894$

Other information:

• I will get electricity for free so the electricity costs is out of the picture.
• I will be using Ubuntu as OS.
• I will probably be overclocking the GPU.
• The machine will be running 24/7 for three months.
• After the three months I will be selling all the bitcoins I generated through Mt Gox.

So, will three months of mining cover the costs of the rig (894$) or is it just a waste of time and money?

/Kubba

[sirky]

If electricity were free I would buy 5x 5830's for the price of your 5970.

Anyway, no one knows... the price could stay stagnant and difficulty could explode... the whole currency could blow up...

The best you can do is make some guesses and see what you get.

At current difficulty and price you will pay off your rig though.

[Jack of Diamonds]

If electricity were free I would buy 5x 5830's for the price of your 5970.

Anyway, no one knows... the price could stay stagnant and difficulty could explode... the whole currency could blow up...

The best you can do is make some guesses and see what you get.

At current difficulty and price you will pay off your rig though.

Current difficulty lasts for 1800 more blocks.

If it keeps increasing beyond 2 million, some rigs will never pay themselves off even if ran 24/7 unless value of bitcoin is increasing radically.

That will drop mining capacity until difficulty goes down again.

[Meatball]

You're probably not going to be able to find the 5830's anymore.  Most places sold out yesterday.  The simplest thing to do is to look up GPU you are considering on the Mining hardware comparison wiki page and get an approximate idea of how many MH/s it'll do.  If you want to be conservative, pick the lowest one there.  So, for the 5970, the lowest number I see is 530 MH/s.

Next, hit up the Bitcoin Mining Calculator and plug in your numbers.  With the current difficulty level and BTC prices, with 530 MH/s you can expect to make $541 USD/month.

Of course, difficulty will increase ~ every 2 weeks, and you'll be making less coins each bump.  Plus BTC prices can fluctuate wildly up and down.  In the month or so I've been doing it I've seen prices from $5 to $19, so you really never know, but you can at least make an educated guess.

[Kubba]

Current difficulty lasts for 1800 more blocks.

If it keeps increasing beyond 2 million, some rigs will never pay themselves off even if ran 24/7 unless value of bitcoin is increasing radically.

That will drop mining capacity until difficulty goes down again.

Approximently how long will these 1800 blocks last and how long do you think it takes for the difficulty to increase beyond 2 million?

[Uzza]

The network regulates difficulty to produce about 6 blocks each hour. So those will last roughly 12 days.

[Meatball]

Current difficulty lasts for 1800 more blocks.

If it keeps increasing beyond 2 million, some rigs will never pay themselves off even if ran 24/7 unless value of bitcoin is increasing radically.

That will drop mining capacity until difficulty goes down again.

Approximently how long will these 1800 blocks last and how long do you think it takes for the difficulty to increase beyond 2 million?

That's pretty much impossible to tell when we'll go beyond 2 million.  If you follow the charts over on Bitcoin Charts you can get an average of how fast people are solving blocks and how many blocks are left to at least guess when the next difficulty bump might be.  Look at the top bar there.  As of right now there's 1863 blocks left before the next difficulty raise and on average, 6.63 blocks are getting solved/hour.  1863 / 6.63 = 276 Hours or 11.5 days from now.  The charts also guesstimate what it thinks the next difficultly raise will be based on how fast blocks are getting solved.

Of course it's impossible to predict increases or decreases to the total network power or difficulty levels, so there's really no way of knowing for certain when and what to expect for the next coming difficulty or anything beyond that.

[dayfall]

I'd just buy the coins.  That is if you think the value will stay as high as it is.  I do.  However, I am having my mining parts come in today, so i obviously chose to mine.  I did that just so I could have the hardware if Bitcoin fails. 

It's a wash, really.

[Sukrim]

• After the three months I will be selling all the bitcoins I generated through Mt Gox.

[/list]

This is the 2nd highest risk option that you can have in mining at all. Highest risk would be to keep your BTC even beyond these 3 months, lowest risk would be to sell them as soon as you get them until you broke even.

Don't do this, unless you can afford to loose as much as: (electricity + time invested + initial hardware - whatever the hardware is worth after selling it).

A possibility would be to do some kind of futures contract, like "I will hand over 80% of the "0-variance Bitcoins" I have mined with a 600 MH/s machine until x. September 2011 (it can be calculated and prooven by looking back how much you can expect at that time then) for a price of 1000USD at that day". This guarantees your income, gives you a 100 USD bonus, a free rig that you can then use to really mine and 80% should be enough for private miners to keep as uptime (since you would loose out a bit due to errors, bad luck etc.). The other part of that contract would get some potentially cheap bitcoins. On the other hand it could also be that these bitcoins then are very expensive, but that's not your risk any more.

[Litt]

No

[Jack of Diamonds]

Current difficulty lasts for 1800 more blocks.

If it keeps increasing beyond 2 million, some rigs will never pay themselves off even if ran 24/7 unless value of bitcoin is increasing radically.

That will drop mining capacity until difficulty goes down again.

Approximently how long will these 1800 blocks last and how long do you think it takes for the difficulty to increase beyond 2 million?

11-12 days, give or take some hours. Current estimate is too low because at the end of block curve (~500 left), collective thash/s has always increased by nearly a third. 750000 is more realistic than the current estimate of 670000 (which is calculated at a constant 6.56 blocks per hour)

For 2m difficulty, ~70 to 90 days, but much more if $/BTC stagnates, because this will make 1-gpu miners drop out of pools due to very low profitability, which will make huge impact on difficulty (it will drop to 1.7m or less). The vast majority of miners are casual hobbyists with a few hundred mhash/s at maximum, not huge mining farms.
If many of them deem bitcoin to be too expensive to create in comparison to electricity costs it will push difficulty down and keep it in check until price matches again.

Also, if price crashes at massive difficulties, there is relatively low risk of big farms hogging the hashing power to themselves. They have no more guarantee than the hobbyist that the price will ever come up again so they would be mining at a loss creating something potentially worthless in the future. But that scenario has yet to happen.

[MiningBuddy]

No

[Gameover]

At current price and difficulty increases of 33% you will not pay it off in 6 months.  This is assuming a high overclock and getting 700Mhash.  With difficulty increase of 20% you would pay it off in 60 days, but after 6 months of running would only make a profit of around $400, and only because you have "free" power, not really worth it IMO.

[Jack of Diamonds]

At current price and difficulty increases of 33% you will not pay it off in 6 months.  This is assuming a high overclock and getting 700Mhash.  With difficulty increase of 20% you would pay it off in 60 days, but after 6 months of running would only make a profit of around $400, and only because you have "free" power, not really worth it IMO.

Your chart assumes static price of BTC/$ in relation to difficulty which is simply not true.

[Sukrim]

Your chart assumes static price of BTC/$ in relation to difficulty which is simply not true so far.

/fixed 

[Jack of Diamonds]

Your chart assumes static price of BTC/$ in relation to difficulty which is simply not true so far.

/fixed 

It didn't stay at $4 a month ago for all eternity or at $1 in April. If you made calculations based on those prices then the chart would already look unprofitable.

I'm not denying it can't temporarily crash at some point. But as difficulty rises in a linear curve it's obvious the price is not going to stagnate. If difficulty goes too high the market will simply adjust the diff. level down by reducing mining until it becomes profitable.

[shakaru]

Here is the deal. This is a temp bubble. People read the articles about Washington police mistakingly raiding a miner or two thinking they were cultivating marijuana only to find $20k worth of equip at one of the houses. That got people thinking that "Hey. 20k? that some serious money, maybe this thing is awsome." and the price went up $12.

now that ive said that, watch it fall.

[Jack of Diamonds]

now that ive said that, watch it fall.

I'm sure the currency will come crashing down after your brilliant revelation. Give it 20 minutes and it will be at $0.01 and Satoshi will face the death penalty in seven different countries and a fatwa from the grand ayatollah of Iran.

[Kubba]

Thanks for all the replys! Guess I'm late to the party once again   

[exahash]

So, will three months of mining cover the costs of the rig (894$) or is it just a waste of time and money?

Answer this: Is losing $894 going to hurt you terribly?  Or can you afford to blow $894 and some time on a hobby that may or may not pay off?

If it won't hurt you to have some worthless bitcoins and a ~$600 computer in 3 months, go for it.  Maybe you'll get lucky and wind up with $1000 worth of bitcoins and a ~$600 computer instead.

You should probably run the numbers yourself using SgtSpike's Mine or Invest spreadsheet.