DO NOT BUY GPUs to mine! You will not get your money back!

[Mhash pipe]

ASICs may be coming, but pre-ordering is stupid because you can at least begin to mine right now with a GPU instead of having to wait/pray for deliveries. I am speculating that the wave of ASICs will drive up the difficulty rather quickly and as a result drive down the demand (people will quickly learn that ASICs aren't "money-printing machines"). The lower demand along with increased competition among suppliers (companies won't be "scalping" once they can efficiently bring more ASICs to the market and the demand is lower; maybe even new companies will come up with cheaper and cheaper designs) will cause the price of  ASICs to drop drastically. At that point, I will probably buy an ASIC, only if I can get a return on my investment.

But, putting my money in the hands of someone else when there are still nice profits to be made right now with GPUs is stupid. You are paying the price in terms of lost opportunity and paying a premium for something that will probably depreciate by 10-100x once production increases. I'm waiting for the cheap knock-offs, but in the meantime I'm keeping my money in my own hands and using GPUs to mine. If I really wanted to speculate, I would probably just buy btcs.

You have maybe a month left of being able to mine with GPUs. No GPU you buy today will be able to pay for itself that quickly.

Yes, people will stop buying ASICs when they realize they aren't making any money with them because difficulty is way up there (in the several hundred million range).

The problem is that enough ASICs to hit that number have already been sold (but not delivered) and people will continue to buy them until the difficulty actually gets that high.

You have to compete with:
- Avalon batch 2 (just began to ship)
- Avalon batch 3 (shipping soon)
- ASICMiner USB and blades (blades available now, USB shipping soon)
- BFL 60,000+ orders (ok they may never ship all their orders, but they will ship enough to make an impact of difficulty)
- A couple of hundreds thousand discrete Avalon chips
- ASICMiner's claimed 200 TH they are adding this summer

All of those have already been paid for and are on their way. It's too late for GPUs.

I am making the argument that it's too late for ASICs at their current prices. The people that are losing are those that have paid a hefty premium on hardware that has still not materialized. I'll wait till ASICs are dirt cheap to join the clusterfuck. While I'm at it, I hope to pick up some nice gpus for cheap once that wave hits ebay.

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[zvs]

All of those have already been paid for and are on their way. It's too late for GPUs.

Don't suppose you'd like to wager on that? 

GPUs are one of the easier things to turn for a profit on eBay.  Wait for a good price, buy the correct GPU, you have a profit the day it arrives on your doorstep.

I suppose the real question would be, would I make more money by turning it over immediately, or would I make more money by mining with it for a month or two before selling it?

Well, that'd depend on which GPU you bought... and if you're buying 7950's and 7970's, the answer would probably be no.

[btchaver]

ASICs may be coming, but pre-ordering is stupid because you can at least begin to mine right now with a GPU instead of having to wait/pray for deliveries. I am speculating that the wave of ASICs will drive up the difficulty rather quickly and as a result drive down the demand (people will quickly learn that ASICs aren't "money-printing machines"). The lower demand along with increased competition among suppliers (companies won't be "scalping" once they can efficiently bring more ASICs to the market and the demand is lower; maybe even new companies will come up with cheaper and cheaper designs) will cause the price of  ASICs to drop drastically. At that point, I will probably buy an ASIC, only if I can get a return on my investment.

But, putting my money in the hands of someone else when there are still nice profits to be made right now with GPUs is stupid. You are paying the price in terms of lost opportunity and paying a premium for something that will probably depreciate by 10-100x once production increases. I'm waiting for the cheap knock-offs, but in the meantime I'm keeping my money in my own hands and using GPUs to mine. If I really wanted to speculate, I would probably just buy btcs.

You have maybe a month left of being able to mine with GPUs. No GPU you buy today will be able to pay for itself that quickly.

Yes, people will stop buying ASICs when they realize they aren't making any money with them because difficulty is way up there (in the several hundred million range).

The problem is that enough ASICs to hit that number have already been sold (but not delivered) and people will continue to buy them until the difficulty actually gets that high.

You have to compete with:
- Avalon batch 2 (just began to ship)
- Avalon batch 3 (shipping soon)
- ASICMiner USB and blades (blades available now, USB shipping soon)
- BFL 60,000+ orders (ok they may never ship all their orders, but they will ship enough to make an impact of difficulty)
- A couple of hundreds thousand discrete Avalon chips
- ASICMiner's claimed 200 TH they are adding this summer

All of those have already been paid for and are on their way. It's too late for GPUs.

the only factor here are the baldes, and usb(but they have low hash power) all the others, are vaporware for now, and this trend will continue at least until end of august

Obviously you don't visit the custom hardware subforum.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209077.20

Does that look like vaporware?  Batch 2/3 should be completed by June (their new shipping got to the US in 3 days).  Those alone will double the current difficulty - putting a lot of miners into negative earnings territory.  Only people winter mining should consider continuing past June with any real hope of profits.

If friedcat gets those 200TH online then that will be nail in the coffin.

for asic blades, i mean everything produced by avalon, they are the only one legit , they also need to double the hash to make the diff x2, and those avalon asic are expensive, few people will buy them, in the end at least until the end of this summer, gpu are not dead

The 1200 Avalon ASICs from batch 2 and 3 ALREADY SOLD will add roughly 80 TH/sec to the world hashing power. That alone will double the difficulty.

i'm still not worried, i'll stop mining with my gpu only when the difficulty will reach 50m

Im willing to say it should be by the end of summer even or end of thsi year even who knows the diff is going up 1mil every ten days so by the end of summer or october could be 50 mil you never know whats out there till it happens but if asics ships its all over just go to litecoin then i guess. 

[PCMiner]

Could be worse...  I found 3 olllllld machines buried in the equipment room here at work.  Figured what the hell, I don't pay for power here so I ordered up 3 7950's and got all three machines happily crunching away in the equipment room next to all the servers and other random loud machines.  It's a massive power hungry building already so 3 extra machines is only a drop in the bucket for power.  I run "IT" here anyway so no one even noticed.  Figured I'd just let them sit there and do their thing until... well until they died.

Two months later got offered new job (yay!) out of the blue, and now I'm leaving here in 3 weeks.  Don't really want to set them up at home (power costs not really worth it) and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to set them up at the new place.

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.  Did manage to pay for almost 2 of the cards with mined BTC so no real loss really I guess.

[Tomintx]

Could be worse...  I found 3 olllllld machines buried in the equipment room here at work.  Figured what the hell, I don't pay for power here so I ordered up 3 7950's and got all three machines happily crunching away in the equipment room next to all the servers and other random loud machines.  It's a massive power hungry building already so 3 extra machines is only a drop in the bucket for power.  I run "IT" here anyway so no one even noticed.  Figured I'd just let them sit there and do their thing until... well until they died.

Two months later got offered new job (yay!) out of the blue, and now I'm leaving here in 3 weeks.  Don't really want to set them up at home (power costs not really worth it) and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to set them up at the new place.

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.  Did manage to pay for almost 2 of the cards with mined BTC so no real loss really I guess.

I can give you an address to ship them...

[ManBearPig]

Excuse me if if I've overlooked any of my points being made already in this thread, I read the first half and skimmed the second.

It seems you're overlooking two very important factors:

1) Mining LTC to trade to BTC may have dwindled in efficiency such that at the time of trading, you're making a little above electricity costs. BUT BTC is on steady growth. Who here would be involved in Bitcoin if they were convinced it was going back down to double digits or worse? Until you cash out to fiat, you have no idea how much profit you've made.

2) If you don't have a USD bank account, mining is the easiest way to accumulate Bitcoin. You won't get hassled by your bank, you won't take chances with eBay, PayPal etc. The riskiest part is if your mining pool collapses before you've taken your latest payment: a negligible risk of losing a relatively small amount.

If BTC is alive once all blocks have been mined I'm sure those without ASICs would look back with hindsight and regret not mining well into seemingly unprofitable territory.

Hell if you can make the cost of  your electricity back: carry on mining!

I'll be mining long after the snapshot "price right now" profitability goes negative.

[Quix]

Could be worse...  I found 3 olllllld machines buried in the equipment room here at work.  Figured what the hell, I don't pay for power here so I ordered up 3 7950's and got all three machines happily crunching away in the equipment room next to all the servers and other random loud machines.  It's a massive power hungry building already so 3 extra machines is only a drop in the bucket for power.  I run "IT" here anyway so no one even noticed.  Figured I'd just let them sit there and do their thing until... well until they died.

Two months later got offered new job (yay!) out of the blue, and now I'm leaving here in 3 weeks.  Don't really want to set them up at home (power costs not really worth it) and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to set them up at the new place.

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.  Did manage to pay for almost 2 of the cards with mined BTC so no real loss really I guess.

So you've been stealing electricity from work and now you can't anymore. My heart weeps for you.

[HellDiverUK]

So you've been stealing electricity from work and now you can't anymore. My heart weeps for you.

Heh, if it's too cold in my office, I turn on a 2KW fan heater I have under my desk.  Is that "stealing electricity" too?  Or boiling the kettle to make a cup of coffee?

[nwoolls]

Heh, if it's too cold in my office, I turn on a 2KW fan heater I have under my desk.  Is that "stealing electricity" too?  Or boiling the kettle to make a cup of coffee?

That is for your comfort at the workplace, not for your profit outside of the workplace. Pretty obvious difference.

[kinitex]

Yes stop buying gpus, start selling what you have, and pm your prices

[Ace5high]

I 100% agree with the original poster.

But people seem to want to buy GPUs anyways, so good luck.


I think there is kind of a gold rush mentality presently.

Like the people who are spending $30k+ on pre-order Avalon ASICs. Or block eruptor USBs.

They will never make their money back. Yet they still buy.

Your absolutely right and completely wrong all at the same time  

It is a goldrush mentality with all these btc newbies flooding in and they all want the new best thing, so they order themselves a BFL rig and two weeks later wonder why it didnt arrive??? So then they start reading the forums     Whoops.

IMO GPU's are the only thing worth buying at this stage of the game. Anyone building a rig at this particular moment to "turn a financial profit" is just an idiot to begin with.

[favelle75]

You know, back in September of last year I sold my 7970s after BFL and Avalon where all over the news.  ASICs are coming, ASICs are coming...
scare.  I should have run them until they would stop running.  I've run them for about 8 months before I sold them, a local guy who bought them is still running them.

Since then I picked up used 6950s cards for $140-160; they paid themselves off in three months. 

In short, buy them if you can get them cheap.

Exactly.  I bought four 7870 Tahiti's that easily get 450Mhash each. They were $199 (after rebate which has already come in) and came with THREE games that I sold for $25 each.  So that $800 was automatically down to $550 after I sold the games, and they are generating about $12-14 per day.  Yeah, a month later they are 1/2 paid off.  If I listened to every chicken little out there a month ago, I'd be missing out. In short, do your OWN calculations and let the forum jockeys figure prey on some other newb.

[ISAWHIM]

I beg to differ on the "outlook of alt-coins".
http://dustcoin.com/mining

Value in coins = DEBT, our DEBT/LOSS (For buying cards, for processing transactions with power, and for maintnance.)

When BTC goes ASIC... THEY will have less debt, less loss, and "can sell for a lower price, because it is not a loss to them." However, the majority of all coins have already been mined by (DEBT/LOSS), and thus, the price is highly resistant to negative change. (I said resistant, not immune.)

However, once we move to ALT-COINS, the first thing we do is cash-out the BTC, which leaves even less for them to be able to "cash out", since we (the majority), will not be participating in the promotion of something we can't make, and since we (the majority), were clearly pushed-out and the only real major purchasers of the coins. (Us and our friends.) Plus, our debt is "in hand", they still have to MINE for the debt they just created for themselves.

Thus, the value, will shift from the "easy to earn" (for them), BTC... to the "harder to earn", alt-coins (for us). Well, the alt-coins that they can't effectively participate in.

Or, we simply come up with a whole new set of code, that better secures a place for ASIC's, GPU's, and CPU's... and we all win.

When it is down to "3-top-dogs" running the market, with no effort put forth to securing the network, the users, or those who built the foundation... Then the only thing they will end-up with is pure DEBT, and a bunch of worthless coins that no-one wants to use.

Do you want to use a dollar that doesn't maintain its value? A dollar that you can't cash-in, or exchange for another purposeful currency? A dollar that was created by smothering greedy thieves, who openly used and manipulated everyone into believing that they would be doing THEMSELVES good, by giving them money, which was going to be used to smother them out of the market?

I doubt it.

The community (majority), has spoken, and people are listening. Bitcoin is now hitting the "news" in a new light, due to ASICs... At this moment, I wouldn't want to be in any ASIC users shoes. Though I have one shoe coming, sometime this year, I hope... but not enough to threaten the state of the market.

I am all for adding value to debt. There are plenty of ways to add value to our "processing network", besides JUST mining for coins, to get coins. (Hint hint... "render farms", "cloud super-computing", "Formulated compression", etc... The hard part is convincing them to PAY us in BTC or an ALT-COIN of choice... instead of "cash". Thus, supporting the "exchange".)