Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine.

[Chucksta]

I'm still making $60 on average per day (with 1 BTC = $15), and at max my electricity usage for my rigs is $4 per day, therefore mining is very fine

[jhansen858]

to generate 4 btc / day you must be doing 4000 mh/s? 

That's 10x 6970's...

So your running 5 boxes for $4 a day?   

[hugolp]

I'm still making $60 on average per day (with 1 BTC = $15), and at max my electricity usage for my rigs is $4 per day, therefore mining is very fine

Can you tell us your rig and your Kwh rate?

[Cluster2k]

Mining is still very profitable, and if it wasn't, these assholes wouldn't be spending their free time trying to convince you not to do it.

Mining is profitable, right now, but will not be profitable for anyone if people mindlessly pile in with thousands of dollars in additional hardware without taking into account the regular 50% difficulty increases every 10 days or so.

There's also nothing like trying to bring people over to your side of thinking and convince them by calling them names.

[hugolp]

Mining is still very profitable, and if it wasn't, these assholes wouldn't be spending their free time trying to convince you not to do it.

Mining is profitable, right now, but will not be profitable for anyone if people mindlessly pile in with thousands of dollars in additional hardware without taking into account the regular 50% difficulty increases every 10 days or so.

There's also nothing like trying to bring people over to your side of thinking and convince them by calling them names.

Mining is profitable right now if you have the initial investment paid. But if you expect to get the initial investment back that is another issue.

[no_alone]

A bunch of harpies who are angry at reduced profits due to difficulty increases have taken it upon themselves to whine loudly on the forum about how mining is a bad investment.

These people invariably have their own mining rigs: they don't follow their own advice. They're trying to avoid further difficulty increases, which may make them lose money.

Mining is still very profitable, and if it wasn't, these assholes wouldn't be spending their free time trying to convince you not to do it.

In conclusion, if you think it would be fun to participate, go for it. Hopefully you know something about hardware, software, and trading. You'll probably make your money back no problem. It may take a few months. Bitcoins probably aren't going anywhere though.

Just remember: all of these people trying to convince you not to do it, are themselves not following their own advice. If they did follow their own advice, they would sell their bitcoin machines RIGHT NOW to other miners via craigslist.

I'm not selling my mining rigs, and they aren't either, because we all know that mining is profitable and fun and will most likely remain profitable.

These people invariably have their own mining rigs: they don't follow their own advice. They're trying to avoid further difficulty increases, which may make them lose money.

Ok if the miners are trying to avoid further difficulty increases which will make them loss... What stop the new miners that you say for them that minning is profit to losss??
You contradict yourself

[royalecraig]

You can mine and hoard all the bitcoins you like, they will be worthless unless the Bitcoin community gets more involved in setting up shops and businesses, most people are not interested in trading, they just want to know if they can buy a pair of shoes with bitcoin, and if they can't, or it's difficult with few options, they won't buy in.

[Chucksta]

I'm still making $60 on average per day (with 1 BTC = $15), and at max my electricity usage for my rigs is $4 per day, therefore mining is very fine

Can you tell us your rig and your Kwh rate?

0.34 pence per kwh

8x 5870 gfx cards (410 - 420 Mhash/s each) ... 600 watt PSU .... 50 pence per day per box, max

Mining NMC, not BTC

That was based on NMC = 0.06, but that has now changed

NMC price is dropping faster than a whore's knickers in brothel... currently 0.03 BTC per NMC

Now it is definitely more profitable to mine BTC...

Make way, I am coming back to the BTC miner's way...

[nebiki]

i thought it would be fun to write a calculator for this. i know people have been trying to do it with excel spreadsheets, but honestly they suck and usually don't work with openoffice.

here's my calculator's result for mining in germany and within the US. it's funny. this example shows buying a 6950 at 200€
.



[edit] "in the minus" sounds very german. oh dear. i hate myself. and changed the picture. because 200 eur is not 200 usd.

[Hook^]

i thought it would be fun to write a calculator for this. i know people have been trying to do it with excel spreadsheets, but honestly they suck and usually don't work with openoffice.

here's my calculator's result for mining in germany and within the US. it's funny. this example shows buying a 6950 at 200€
.
http://www.abload.de/img/lolamericansnna2.png


[edit] "in the minus" sounds very german. oh dear. i hate myself. and changed the picture. because 200 eur is not 200 usd.

Looks like Delphi!

[nebiki]

Looks like Delphi!

how could you tell? no, it's the only thing i've learned in school. never felt the need to switch to something cooler.

[Hook^]

That is because everyone knows that ASICs are the inevitable end game.  Whoever has those wins.

Even a ASICs design will have a hard time vs a few million gamers worldwide who consider their graphics cards free and GPU shrinks that happen every 18-24 months on average. Any ASIC design brought out today will have to compete with the radeon 7xxx series and not current hardware.

The problem is that an ASIC can be custom designed to go orders of magnitude faster than a GPU for a specific task.  As just a very rough estimate, one SHA256 engine with bitcoin hash difficulty detection would take something like 1 million transistors.  The latest ASIC technology allows 2 billion transistors.  So that would allow 2,000 of these engines per chip.  If you layed them out by hand, you could probably get them up to 4 GHz.  Assuming one hash per clock, this ends up being 8 TH/S per chip.  In other words, this one chip could outperform the entire current BitCoin network.  And once the multi-million up front tooling costs are covered, you can make each chip for $50 each.  So for another $10,000 you could make a system with 200 chips that would be able to dominate the entire network at 200 times its current capacity.  It would pay for itself in about 20 days, because you would get every bitcoin made in that period.

If the exchange rates hold, you could multiply your earnings and buy thousands more chips for a low incremental cost to maintain your dominance.  I don't see how GPUs could begin to compete with this.

it all sounds so good except that one or a group of people have to come up with millions of dollars to do this. And i have a feeling
2 million is just enough to go bankrupt trying without producing a single thing.

sure.. if you get lucky and manage to rope in a few experts in the area you have a greater chance of success.. and if they donate their
time for basically a shot at making bitcoins... and if several stars align just so... maybe someone will make a package that can do this.

i am not an expert in the field. i am known to be wrong and probably am. this is just a gut feeling that if people guess that it will take
1 million dollars to do the job.. i normally multiply that in my head by a factor of 5 to really make it happen.

edited to add:

10:31    TD   so it's $1000 per gigahash?
10:32    ArtForz   well, if support components, PCBs, cases, ... grow on trees, yes

----

but he wins on the power side of things for sure.

According to rumors I have seen around the forums in the last few weeks, there is a group called LargeCoin that has managed to secure a couple of mil and the ASIC engineers to do just that.  If I were one of the original bitcoiners that just made 5 million in the last week, this project is exactly what I would be doing with half of the proceeds.

ArtForz used structured ASICs which are just one step above FPGAs.  They won't have nearly the performance of a full custom ASIC.

[Hook^]

Looks like Delphi!

how could you tell? no, it's the only thing i've learned in school. never felt the need to switch to something cooler.

Delphi is my fave.  I have V10 now.  Unfortunately our company switched to C# two years ago.  Although C# is actually a more powerful language, its syntax isn't as nice as Delphi.

[Elokane]

By the time these magical ASICs are designed, produced and put in use GPU mining will mostly be inefficient anyway unless the price per BTC increases by A LOT. It takes time to produce such a chip.
Buying equipment for mining NOW would be STUPID. It'd be safer, as an investment, to just buy some bitcoins on the market. However, if you're a miner and have some bitcoins, it would be prudent to urge more people to mine and acquire bitcoins for the sake of increasing the size of our economy despite the impact on your mining profitability in bitcoins.

[Swishercutter]

By the time these magical ASICs are designed, produced and put in use GPU mining will mostly be inefficient anyway unless the price per BTC increases by A LOT. It takes time to produce such a chip.
Buying equipment for mining NOW would be STUPID. It'd be safer, as an investment, to just buy some bitcoins on the market. However, if you're a miner and have some bitcoins, it would be prudent to urge more people to mine and acquire bitcoins for the sake of increasing the size of our economy despite the impact on your mining profitability in bitcoins.

I don't know if you realize this but people have been stating the exact same thing as you for over 6mos yet people have still managed to pay off their rigs...you can probably make more money buying stock in an electronics manufacturer as opposed to selling their item but it doesn't mean either way is better...they both have their pluses and minuses...just like mining/investing.

I would have made more investing for sure...doesn't mean mining was stupid...just different methods/risk/end goal.

[[Coins!]]

I don't know if you realize this but people have been stating the exact same thing as you for over 6mos yet people have still managed to pay off their rigs...you can probably make more money buying stock in an electronics manufacturer as opposed to selling their item but it doesn't mean either way is better...they both have their pluses and minuses...just like mining/investing.

I would have made more investing for sure...doesn't mean mining was stupid...just different methods/risk/end goal.

I would really like to see the price of BTC continue to rise, like it has in the past 6 mo.  If it does, that will help the current adopters to pay off their rigs.

Really though, we seem to be running into a GPU limit.  1.0 Ghash (3 cards) puts out 1.0 BTC/day.  In the next difficulty that rig only puts out .6 BTC/day.  Then, 10 days later, will put out .4 BTC/day.  The amount of media attention and network growth is impressive.  The hardware is not keeping up.  By mid August we're going to have hit a wall in terms of producing BTC simply based on ever-increasing difficulty, and nothing being faster than the 6990.

[Swishercutter]

I don't know if you realize this but people have been stating the exact same thing as you for over 6mos yet people have still managed to pay off their rigs...you can probably make more money buying stock in an electronics manufacturer as opposed to selling their item but it doesn't mean either way is better...they both have their pluses and minuses...just like mining/investing.

I would have made more investing for sure...doesn't mean mining was stupid...just different methods/risk/end goal.

I would really like to see the price of BTC continue to rise, like it has in the past 6 mo.  If it does, that will help the current adopters to pay off their rigs.

Really though, we seem to be running into a GPU limit.  1.0 Ghash (3 cards) puts out 1.0 BTC/day.  In the next difficulty that rig only puts out .6 BTC/day.  Then, 10 days later, will put out .4 BTC/day.  The amount of media attention and network growth is impressive.  The hardware is not keeping up.  By mid August we're going to have hit a wall in terms of producing BTC simply based on ever-increasing difficulty, and nothing being faster than the 6990.

There may be nothing as fast as the 6990 but you can certainly get rigs with a much better cost/mh/s.

[[Coins!]]

There may be nothing as fast as the 6990 but you can certainly get rigs with a much better cost/mh/s.

My point is only that with continually increasing difficulty, the BTC/day drops dramatically in a very short time.

If you spend $800 on a rig instead of $1000, sure you get a better rate.  But you're still only getting 0.1 BTC/day with your $800 or $1000 rig in mid August.  Is that 0.1 BTC/day going to pay itself off?  Not at $17/BTC. 

[Swishercutter]

There may be nothing as fast as the 6990 but you can certainly get rigs with a much better cost/mh/s.

My point is only that with continually increasing difficulty, the BTC/day drops dramatically in a very short time.

If you spend $800 on a rig instead of $1000, sure you get a better rate.  But you're still only getting 0.1 BTC/day with your $800 or $1000 rig in mid August.  Is that 0.1 BTC/day going to pay itself off?  Not at $17/BTC. 

Again...most speculator who have stated the exact same thing in the past ended up being wrong.  Always factoring in difficulty increase but always assuming a stagnant or declining value.  Really though nobody knows what will happen. 

[Grouver (BtcBalance)]

Can the difficulty decrease?
If the hardware cannot keep up and there are less blocks created then what was it 7 blocks an hour?
Then the difficulty just decreases to X amount so it still maintains the 7 blocks an hour.

Just wondering...