A case study in entry-level mining

[AndrewWilliams]

How's your profitability?

[BobMarley]

Thanks for sharing i found it very interesting

[LogicalUnit]

How's your profitability?

Not great. I'm making about 0.01 coins per day at 3,340MH/s (10 Block Erupters) with current difficulty. However, I have enough coins saved up to buy three Blue Fury ASICs that are rated to mine at up to 2,700MH/s each. These are supposed to ship in October.

At the time of writing, difficulty is going up exponentially. I have no idea if/when it will peak. I can either watch my income peter out, or I can reinvest and try to keep up with difficulty.

From an investment perspective, it's pretty much lose-lose.

I'm now doing this for pleasure rather than profit. So, more hardware it is!! I'll place an order to buy the new ASICs as soon as I figure out how to sign a message in Armory.

[batt01]

I was thinking along the same lines. Buying one or tow RedFurys a month to keep up with the diff increases. I currently have 12 BE's for about 4gh/hs. After getting 4 of the RedFury's you might be able to buy one per month with your generated BTC. Still no ROI, but it would slow down the bleeding. the  However there wont work with Cgminer, so you cant use MinePeon until Cgminer is updated. I am also considering getting a used Blade. I would rather have 4 Redfurys, as it would make for a much cleaner setup and not reqire a external PSU.

[timk225]

Anyone thinking of investing ANY amount of money into buying more BTC mining equipment needs to just STOP.  It is no longer profitable.  You will lose money!

And if you are so dead set on giving away money, PM me for my PayPal address, at least with me your money will go to a good cause!

[xTachibana]

Anyone thinking of investing ANY amount of money into buying more BTC mining equipment needs to just STOP.  It is no longer profitable.  You will lose money!

And if you are so dead set on giving away money, PM me for my PayPal address, at least with me your money will go to a good cause!

why should they? who gives a shit if they lose money, id rather waste thousands on a shitty investment than give a single dollar to an asshat like you

[Perseus353]

Lesson: don't spend bitcoins on mining hardware. Ever.

[murraypaul]

Not great. I'm making about 0.01 coins per day at 3,340MH/s (10 Block Erupters) with current difficulty. However, I have enough coins saved up to buy three Blue Fury ASICs that are rated to mine at up to 2,700MH/s each. These are supposed to ship in October.

At the time of writing, difficulty is going up exponentially. I have no idea if/when it will peak. I can either watch my income peter out, or I can reinvest and try to keep up with difficulty.

From an investment perspective, it's pretty much lose-lose.

You bought a batch of Block Erupters, they are losing you money. Ok, that money is gone.
You bought another batch of Block Erupters, they are losing you money too. Ok, that money is gone.
You are starting from scratch now.
It isn't lose. It is stay neutral, or lose.
Buying more hardware will lose you more money.
It will continue to do so until you have no more money to lose.
Expending capital to produce an income stream that will never replace the capital is not investing.

I'm now doing this for pleasure rather than profit. So, more hardware it is!! I'll place an order to buy the new ASICs as soon as I figure out how to sign a message in Armory.

I understand the appeal of having a Block Erupter to play with, I have one myself.
It isn't a mining device, it is a toy, and worth the money on that basis alone.
I don't understand how having 10 of them is 10 times as fun?

[LogicalUnit]

murraypaul, you abuse and insult me for doing something educational that I enjoy. This thread has had over 10K views, and is a valuable resource for many who are considering mining. I view the money I have spent on this project as 1) a hobby, 2) a contribution to Bitcoin, and 3) a source of information for other people.

But most of all, yes, I'm having fun doing it. So please take your memes elsewhere.

[Trongersoll]

murraypaul, you abuse and insult me for doing something educational that I enjoy. This thread has had over 10K views, and is a valuable resource for many who are considering mining. I view the money I have spent on this project as 1) a hobby, 2) a contribution to Bitcoin, and 3) a source of information for other people.

But most of all, yes, I'm having fun doing it. So please take your memes elsewhere.

As long as you are enjoying what you are doing, that is what is important. Other people's opinions are meaningless, even mine. But i'd say do what you like, the rest is just so much noise.

[LogicalUnit]

Stability And Other Shenanigans

Because MinePeon 0.2.3a was giving me stability headaches, and because I'm a Linux noob and thought that git pull would give me a better platform to mine with, I have had serious issues keeping my miner going for the past few days.

I tried reverting back to MinePeon 0.2.2, but guess what? The newer Block Erupters are not compatible (or at least not plug-and-play compatible) with that release of cgminer. I was getting massive comms errors on several AMUs.

So, I asked for some help on the MinePeon forums, and Neil helpfully suggested I run MinePeon 0.2.3 instead of 0.2.3a. I also reconfigured how my hubs are connected to my Raspberry Pi. Additionally, I put my wifi dongle on an extension cable, keeping it somewhat away from the miners and RPi.

I also abandoned the LCD stats module. It uses massive resources on the RPi, and just isn't stable enough yet.

Currently the setup has been performing well, but there's a glitch with the miner uptime. It keeps counting miner uptime from 1970, which breaks all of my statistics. Neil provided a possible fix here that I have just implemented. I'll let you know how it goes.

EDIT: Hrm, my pool settings just reverted to default values for no particular reason.

My cheap chinese fan arrived, damaged and broken in the post. Fortunately, I was able to fix it with my trusty hot glue gun!

[LogicalUnit]

Downtime

Due to continued instability in cgminer, and somehow being unable to get bfgminer working, my rig has been offline for a couple of days. Also, the delivery of my three Blue Fury ASICs have been delayed by Chinese holidays. Grumble.

Hopefully MinePeon 0.2.4 will address these issues.

[xTachibana]

http://softlayer-dal.dl.sourceforge.net/project/guiminer/GuiUSBMiner.zip

this program runs bfgminer and its what i used when i noticed i couldnt get bfgminer running for my computers, works great so far

[LogicalUnit]

A New Hope

MineForeman has pre-released a new version of MinePeon: 0.2.4 PR1. The most significant change is the use of bfgminer as the default platform. I've had it running perfectly for over a day now. Hashrate is steady at 3,351 MH/s, error rate is 3.24%. I'll keep it going for a few more days, then see about reintroducing the LCD stats module.

[xTachibana]

A New Hope

MineForeman has pre-released a new version of MinePeon: 0.2.4 PR1. The most significant change is the use of bfgminer as the default platform. I've had it running perfectly for over a day now. Hashrate is steady at 3,351 MH/s, error rate is 3.24%. I'll keep it going for a few more days, then see about reintroducing the LCD stats module.

thats a bit high, maybe its because its using a pi, but my average error rate is <1%

[madcratebuilder]

A New Hope

MineForeman has pre-released a new version of MinePeon: 0.2.4 PR1. The most significant change is the use of bfgminer as the default platform. I've had it running perfectly for over a day now. Hashrate is steady at 3,351 MH/s, error rate is 3.24%. I'll keep it going for a few more days, then see about reintroducing the LCD stats module.

thats a bit high, maybe its because its using a pi, but my average error rate is <1%

High error rates may be a sign of marginal power at the usb ports.  I try and have 0.5 amps headroom on each hub.  This has been a enjoyable hobby, the fact of getting any investment back is a plus.  Hell of a lot better return than most my hobbies like cars and bikes.

This well be payed for...never.  I could care less.

[timk225]

You are only saying you could care less because you know you made a bad choice and blew a lot of money on junk that will never ROI.

I LOL at you and point a finger at you while LOLLING away.

 

[Trongersoll]

You are only saying you could care less because you know you made a bad choice and blew a lot of money on junk that will never ROI.

I LOL at you and point a finger at you while LOLLING away.

 

This isn't a debate thread. Everyone knows that there is no good choice when it comes to mining. Go look for a fight somewhere else.

[LogicalUnit]

Reality Check

BTC has just jumped to AUD$190. I bought in at AUD$135. If I had just bought the BTC and sat on them (or possibly put them in a Certificate of Deposit) I would have earned a return of ~ 20% in 5 months. As it stands, I'm about AUD$2,000 in the red.

My prediction that the value of BTC would go up was correct -- but I do acknowledge that it is still very volatile and could come down.

My mistake was getting into mining without understanding rising difficulty. I just assumed the return from mining would be constant over time. Instead of a stable return, I have seen an exponential decay in my revenue, as Moore's law rapidly pushes up the total computational power of the network.

At this point, I'm sure some of you are thinking "I told you so", but that is not constructive. I'm still glad I executed this experiment, and now we have some hard data to look at.

As many of you have probably concluded, buying ASICs for mining probably won't make ROI. Why not? Well, why would you sell something that makes you more money by using it? It's the big companies who, through economies of scale, mine with their own hardware who really make the returns. I have learned that if you want to seriously get into Bitcoin, just buy them from a reputable vendor.

After five months, my investment has made me no AUD or BTC. But, it has been a lot of fun for me, and I'm glad I could contribute to both the network and the community. I'll continue to update this thread, but we now have a result:

Entry level mining won't make ROI.

[timk225]

I don't know what planet you are from, but I've never thought it was fun to lose money on an investment I made.

Sell the mining items you have now, and hope some noob is dumb enough to buy them without doing their research.  Kinda like what you did.