Bitcoin miner couple of questions

[KingOfSports]

Hi,
I am interested in mining, but I have noticed I would have to spend thousands to get a miner actually worth using for mining bitcoin. However I noticed that people mine alt currencies and this could be profitable if an alt currency rises to such a level like bitcoin. I have always posted in the gambling and currency exchange section and as I am not new to bitcoin per say, I am relatively new to mining.

My questions are this:

-Is there a miner that has a breakeven point of 3 months or less at the current difficulty that costs under $500 for an in hand unit?

-Also, of these units are there any that are compatible with mining other currencies as this is what I would be mainly using it for, not mining bitcoin as the difficulty is so high.

-Third, how hard honestly is it to mine and get it all set up for someone who does many investments but does not know much of installing or running commands on a terminal.

-I saw those USB 330mg/s mining units that were just released which can be bought for roughly $125 each, would they be able to mine alt currencies at 330 mg/s too?

-Finally, can I mine at a successful rate and the advertised rate on mining units using a Mac, I know Macs are horrible for hash rate so would this hurt the units effective mining rate? Sorry for all these questions, but I definitely would appreciate any answers!

Regards,
-KingofSports

[SirMintALot]

-Also, of these units are there any that are compatible with mining other currencies as this is what I would be mainly using it for, not mining bitcoin as the difficulty is so high.

You can only mine SHA256 coins like Bitcoin, Namecoin, Devcoin, Ixcoin, PPCoin, Terracoin, Geist Geld, i0coin, Freicoin, Liquidcoin, Bytecoin, Tonal Bitcoin or Coiledcoin with them. You can't use them for cryptocoins that use an other hashing algorythm, like Litecoin.

[Synethstesia]

Mining isn't really profitable for small time players... It's more of a hobby. I'm only making a dollar a day under the current difficulty! Even you bought a 6 Block eruptors at $625 at a rate of 1.65Gh/s (best case scenario) it would take you 297 days to break even... and thats not taking difficulty change into account. If you some how got your hands on 2 Jalapenos (break into bfl? Does anyone have the floor plans?) you might be able to break even in ~34 days. I just think it's interesting to follow the economics and I like watching my BTC wallet slowly climb towards 1.0 all by itself. Now if you happen to have thousands of extra dollars laying around, or know one of those eccentric billionaires, you could build yourself a machine for under 20 grand which would break even in around a month. Good Luck!

[Trillium]

[KingOfSports]

Haha thanks for the replies guys, I am not trying to get rich, honestly would just want to start mining alts at a good hash rate that I could build up a decent sized portfolio of alts using a couple hundred dollar miner. Not trying to get thousands invested or anything haha.

[polarhei]

Hi,
I am interested in mining, but I have noticed I would have to spend thousands to get a miner actually worth using for mining bitcoin. However I noticed that people mine alt currencies and this could be profitable if an alt currency rises to such a level like bitcoin. I have always posted in the gambling and currency exchange section and as I am not new to bitcoin per say, I am relatively new to mining.

My questions are this:

-Is there a miner that has a breakeven point of 3 months or less at the current difficulty that costs under $500 for an in hand unit?

-Also, of these units are there any that are compatible with mining other currencies as this is what I would be mainly using it for, not mining bitcoin as the difficulty is so high.

-Third, how hard honestly is it to mine and get it all set up for someone who does many investments but does not know much of installing or running commands on a terminal.

-I saw those USB 330mg/s mining units that were just released which can be bought for roughly $125 each, would they be able to mine alt currencies at 330 mg/s too?

-Finally, can I mine at a successful rate and the advertised rate on mining units using a Mac, I know Macs are horrible for hash rate so would this hurt the units effective mining rate? Sorry for all these questions, but I definitely would appreciate any answers!

Regards,
-KingofSports

To answer the question, there are few points to point out first.
1. Having eruptor USB or Avalon array, the being only targets on SHA256  due to non-flexible
nature to provide high speed. You can mine other which supports SHA256, I think the other crypto is a fork of something in order to simulate different elements.

2. There are many people knowing how. Keep asking these fatty.

3.  Let me see. The question is on GPU.

[mokahless]

Hi,
I am interested in mining, but I have noticed I would have to spend thousands to get a miner actually worth using for mining bitcoin. However I noticed that people mine alt currencies and this could be profitable if an alt currency rises to such a level like bitcoin. I have always posted in the gambling and currency exchange section and as I am not new to bitcoin per say, I am relatively new to mining.

My questions are this:

-Is there a miner that has a breakeven point of 3 months or less at the current difficulty that costs under $500 for an in hand unit?
No. I've looked into it and I keep my eye on the scene with my massive google spreadsheet. There currently isn't.

-Also, of these units are there any that are compatible with mining other currencies as this is what I would be mainly using it for, not mining bitcoin as the difficulty is so high.
All are capable of mining any double SHA256 based coin. Because that is what they do. Double SHA256

-Third, how hard honestly is it to mine and get it all set up for someone who does many investments but does not know much of installing or running commands on a terminal.
Depends on who you buy from (ASICs). That said, there are comprehensive guides for all this online and a lot of people willing to help, myself included.

-I saw those USB 330mh/s mining units that were just released which can be bought for roughly $125 each, would they be able to mine alt currencies at 330 mg/s too?
If SHA256, yes. There is no difference between the algorithm if the author of the alt coin didn't change it from bitcoin (litecoin uses scrypt, for example, which is completely different from SHA256)

-Finally, can I mine at a successful rate and the advertised rate on mining units using a Mac, I know Macs are horrible for hash rate so would this hurt the units effective mining rate? Sorry for all these questions.
Depends on optimization. Since the grunt of the work is done on the ASIC and only the communication is done on the machine, though, I would assume zero difference.

Regards,
-KingofSports