A case study in entry-level mining

[mrdeposit]

My BitFury USB ASICs are unplugged, and I plan to sell them.

Why not mine with them until they have sold?

[ChuckBuck]

Just a friendly tip using your new Ant, check Coinwarz from time to time.

Sometimes Bitcoin isn't the most profitable coin at the moment.  If you see say one of the Alts hang around the top, switch to that Alt coin pool for like a day or 2, then trade your mined alt coins to BTC on Cryptsy.

Sometimes it's mentally good to see hundreds or thousands of coins come in, instead of seeing only 0.01 or 0.02 payment a day.

After you've had your alt coin pool fill, switch back to BTCGuild, Eligius, or whatever your regular pool is.  That's kind of why there's 3 pools showing in the Antminer Miner Configuration.  Not just for pool redundancy, but easy pool switching.

My 2 millibits

Chuck

[Trongersoll]

If that is sitting on the carpet, i'd put something between that carpet and the miner. even card board would be ok. anything to insulate it from the carpet. Potential for static discharge is great.

[LogicalUnit]

If that is sitting on the carpet, i'd put something between that carpet and the miner. even card board would be ok. anything to insulate it from the carpet. Potential for static discharge is great.

Thanks for the warning. I just cut a panel of carboard from the box and placed it under the miner, ensuring to ground myself before touching it.

I'd rather not fool around with altcoins if all I'm going to do is trade them for BTC. It could be more profitable, but it requires an extra layer of micromanagement and complexity. I'd rather just contribute to the bitcoin network.

I unplugged MinePeon for a few reasons. It's messy, it requires too many power points, and -- in spite of Neil's best efforts -- remains unstable for me. I've just had enough of it.

[roy7]

Ants run great on p2pool.

[jonnybravo0311]

Interesting read!  Thanks for keeping up the thread throughout the year.  The S1 is a nice piece of hardware.  I've got 2 of them running off a Corsair HX1050 with no problems at all.  I agree that they're a bit loud... and they keep my office nice and warm    Going to have to move them to the basement for the upcoming summer months.

[STT]

Just a small heads up.  For alternative sha256 coins there is a pool which monitors which is most profitable and switches to it for you.  www.multipool.us You just keep the one address and it'll take on TRC if that is 30% more profit then btc, which I have seen at times

I think you do have to sell the TRC yourself but on such a small operation you have to grab every advantage available to you.  A massive farm will probably not be doing this or as agile as you can be with your operation.

There might other innovative alternatives Ive not seen but that site is pretty simple to use or test at least

[LogicalUnit]

Musings

So my Antminer S1 has been plugging away for a while now, and it's providing me with an income of 0.01 BTC per day. Of course this will decrease as difficulty rises, but it's nice to have an automatic daily payout from BTC Guild while it lasts.

I'm disappointed at this stage. Each of my reinvestments has lost me more of my original BTC capital. As has been pointed out, my original 13 BTC for AUD$2000 would have been all I would ever have needed. Instead I decided to go all in with mining, and lost virtually everything.

What's really killing me here is rising difficulty. As ever-faster hashing hardware comes onto the market, return from mining rapidly decreases. You can either watch your income diminish into nothing, or reinvest at a loss. It's a lose-lose situation.

My major conclusion from this experiment is all hardware seems to have an effective lifespan of just a few difficulty adjustments (which occur approximately every two weeks). As every new generation of mining hardware enters service, current-gen hardware quickly becomes obsolete. This makes it extremely difficult to achieve ROI no matter what hardware you buy. Add in utility costs like power and bandwidth and you lose even more.

The other thing working against me was my stubborn insistence on using USB miners with MinePeon. I had to spend extra money on USB hubs which don't provide any return, and MinePeon itself wasn't exactly super stable either. Maybe if I had gone with different hardware things would have been different -- then again, maybe not. At least I didn't get scammed into buying something from Butterfly Labs.

I'm beginning to wonder how anyone makes a profit mining. It seems impossible from an individual's point of view.

[googlemaster1]

mining profitability is hard for sure, but the ants get you there, if only by just barely.

[miffman]

Pretty cool case study    if you ever plan on dumping those block erupters for cheap, please hit me up with a PM.

[timk225]

Bitcoin adjustments seem to be happening every 12 days.

[freedomno1]

I'm beginning to wonder how anyone makes a profit mining. It seems impossible from an individual's point of view.

I have been pondering that myself for a while, the only way I see it working is if you have free electricity since difficulty increases with price or if you purchase something with fiat and see the price naturally appreciate over time like the early miners or had spare processing capacity to use, basically profitability is only achieved given time since it is never profitable to mine in the short term example early adopters had to pay for electricity but bitcoin had no value, and as the value increases so does the difficulty making it a chasing game.

That said given the case study your right holding BTC wins over using it to buy mining gear
Using Fiat to get gear to acquire bitcoins might be a bit different
Thanks for hanging in there so long though
Almost a year

[Perseus353]

Hi Entry-level miner, would you like my Jupiter?

I put it on eBay for £50.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KNC-Jupiter-October-Batch-550-600-GH-s-/251531846462?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item3a9077633e

[STT]

I'm beginning to wonder how anyone makes a profit mining. It seems impossible from an individual's point of view.

  When you up against companies its incredibly tough to beat them, as they can just write off their costs against their profits.
You are probably correct that its not paying profits immediately, however a company can carry losses upto 6 years forward so they can wait it out.   

If they make loss then big deal, the person can walk away from the business where a person doing always takes the hit up front

Alt coins are probably more suitable as they are more haphazard with markets appearing from out of nowhere with features not seen before.   That whole assessment favours the quicker mover that a single person can be.   we seem to be at a point with btc where its all about economies of scale, strange to apply to a distributed network

[timk225]

Or you could do what I did last August and figure out that mining whatever alt coin is hot at the moment is far more profitable than mining BTC and securing the network.  To hell with securing the BTC network!  What has it done for you lately, besides cost you money?  All right then.

[ABitNut]

Musings

I'm disappointed at this stage. Each of my reinvestments has lost me more of my original BTC capital. As has been pointed out, my original 13 BTC for AUD$2000 would have been all I would ever have needed. Instead I decided to go all in with mining, and lost virtually everything.

What's really killing me here is rising difficulty. As ever-faster hashing hardware comes onto the market, return from mining rapidly decreases. You can either watch your income diminish into nothing, or reinvest at a loss. It's a lose-lose situation.

<snip>...</snip>

I'm beginning to wonder how anyone makes a profit mining. It seems impossible from an individual's point of view.

Yeah, I've been looking at entering BTC mining, but even with free electricity and internet it's difficult to get a good return. The few miners I found that promise a (really good) return on investment are most likely scams. It seems safer to just purchase BTC and sit on them than trying to mine.

For now I'll pass on the mining. Thanks for sharing your experience.

[timk225]

I'm going to solo mine BTC with my 9 GPUs, then I'll get the whole 25 BTC reward all for myself!!!

[kabopar]

I'm going to solo mine BTC with my 9 GPUs, then I'll get the whole 25 BTC reward all for myself!!!

We thank you for your modest contribution to Global Warming....

[STT]

Even 9 gpu will take an extremely long time to find a btc block.    Im not sure but you might even have better odds buying a lottery ticket, its comparable anyway.       There are cheap old asic that are no longer worth it but at least dont use up any power, might as well use one of those over a gpu which could be useful doing something else

[xrobau]

My major conclusion from this experiment is all hardware seems to have an effective lifespan of just a few difficulty adjustments (which occur approximately every two weeks).

This is exactly correct. People look at the current difficulty, and go 'Man, I'm going to recoup my investment in no time!', without realising that difficulty is - currently - on an exponential growth curve.

Here's one of the best calculators around, if you were to start mining with a S1 _now_.

http://www.evolyn.net/bitcoin/mining_calc.php?version_major=2&version_minor=4&presents=none&h=180&MinerPowerDrain=0&MinerCosts=428&MinerDeliveryTime=0&NetworkBlockHeight=302160&Difficulty=8853416309.1278&DifChange0P=%2B25&DifChange0A=0&MiscUSDBTC=1000&MiscUSDBTCChange0P=%2B0&MiscElectricityCosts=0.32&MiscCalculationLength=360&MiscShownIntervalLength=1&btn_startcalculate=true

After 120 days, you've actually recouped your investment.  You haven't paid for the electricity. Of course if you were to BUY one, today, you'd never ROI. (Really. Go set the 'delivery time' to 7 days. That's it, your window is gone)

It is an amazingly fine knife edge to balance on, and, I'm using a worse-case scenario for difficulty increases. However, with petahash of new products being shipped from factories over the next few months, I may be -under- estimating at 25% compound growth.