Mining vs. Buying calculator?

[kiko]

Hi.

I'm curious if any of you have seen anything like this for back-testing the decision between buying vs. mining bitcoins?
It would need to take into account historical prices and difficulty, and make estimates about the cost of GPUs at the time.

Thanks for your help.

[1714843521]

1714843521

[1714843521]

1714843521

[glendall]

As far as I know there is no calculator for this.

But on the other hand, figuring out your profit from buying and selling coins is pretty easy.  You could also just use some of the calculators for mining, but merely change the price of BTC/USD that they use (many allow you to put it whatever value you want. ) 

[computerparts]

Buying has always been the better solution for profits. It has been said (and ignored) time and time again that if you're going to mine, you should be in it for the long haul.

[kiko]

Thanks, I didn't think I had missed something like this. I might knock one up.

[Nova!]

Buying has always been the better solution for profits. It has been said (and ignored) time and time again that if you're going to mine, you should be in it for the long haul.

Depends on the miner.  I'm sure the malware infested machine with 5 count 'em 5 different bitcoin mining applications running in the background and surreptitiously installed along side of various free smileys, free video codecs and other junk this guy downloaded off the internet, all netted their authors a tidy & low risk profit.

[Nova!]

Thanks, I didn't think I had missed something like this. I might knock one up.

Yes there is in fact a few calculators.  Some just off the top of my head.

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
http://bitclockers.com/miningcalculator
http://tpbitcalc.appspot.com/

[Signus]

I was thinking about this earlier today. I was going to make a simple script to take the list of known (average) results that people obtained, and use that to calculate on the fly what power, speed, etc. you would be expecting. I'd either write my own version of Bitcoinx's calculator or just give values to input there.

So essentially I would just have the script poll the user to ask them how many cards they want, whether they need to purchase a motherboard, CPU, etc., and if they do then just ask for their expected price and add that to the total capital investment.

If I did that, it might make things too easy for people