Buy coins or a card?

[nemo]

Hey guys, I hate bugging you with things I could research myself, but I'm lazy and I think this might help others. Someone is selling a 5950 for 160 locally on craigslist.

I want to buy the card, mine, then sell the card once I decide to quit. The thing is, I'm a gambler and think bitcoins might hit $100 in the next few years here.

What wold you do?

Edit: Electricity is cheap here .04 - .025 a kwh. I won't start mining until the 1,200,000 difficulty rate hits.

[1715254364]

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[nemo]

Because I don't shit out stacks of cash. I mine already, but I bought 10 coins @ 17 and I regret it. I should have bought a card back then and just mined 10 coins and sold the card.

[jdebunt]

buy coins, at the current rate

[Reikoku]

If you regret losing about $20 on a coin investment short-term, which could turn into a profit long term, I'd suggest maybe doing neither until the market stabilises, or trying to think of a service you can provide for coins to limit your risk.

[NetTecture]

What wold you do?

Scap that card. Get 3-6 servers full with 6990 and put the same amount into bitcoins straight away.

[nemo]

If you regret losing about $20 on a coin investment short-term, which could turn into a profit long term, I'd suggest maybe doing neither until the market stabilises, or trying to think of a service you can provide for coins to limit your risk.

How do you figure only 20? I would have still had the card.

[RyNinDaCleM]

I don't know what a 5950 is! If you meant a 5850, think of it this way!
A 5850 at 325Mh/s, or even heavily OC'd at 375Mh/s will bring in about .2 BTC/day (perhaps a little more OC'd). This would be $3.40/day (@ $17/BTC, the current going rate), before electricity cost, Or $102/month assuming difficulty stays the same (which it won't). If you factor in the rise in difficulty (every 10-14 days), in 8-12 days that $3.40 turns in to $1.70 or so (for another 10-14 days. Difficulty will keep rising, and profits will keep dropping, until you are using more power than BTC would pay for. The card might eventually pay itself off  but, there would be very little profit if any!

Now for the electricity! At a modest rate of $.08/Kwh, you would be paying about $.38 per day, turning your daily earnings into $3.02 currently, or $1.32 next re-target.

You need to take these things into consideration, before making a miner purchase! At this point it is not very cost effective to buy GPUs for this sole reason. Even resale of your GPU will be harder to do in another month, when everyone starts to realize they are no longer making money from mining. There will be HUGE amounts of used cards on the market, forcing the price way down! It will truly be a "buyers market" for GPUs!