Miners calling it quits?

[konakevin]

A miner explains why he's not buying anymore equipment...

http://www.bitcoin-board.com/index.php/Brand-new-Sapphire-5830-on-NewEgg-which-Im-passing-up

What are your thoughts?

[1715392130]

1715392130

[1715392130]

1715392130

[Jack of Diamonds]

Did AngelusWebDesign really create his own soapbox to stand on? wow.

The writer has a point though, mining is slowly becoming unprofitable and dead for smaller miners.
You need to have pretty big farms online now if you want to make decent money.

Expanding is out of question unless you get free or very cheap hardware.

[evoorhees]

Of course, many miners will call it quits. Profitability MUST fall in any competitive industry over time until the rate of profit mirrors the capital costs and risks associated with continued operations. Given the fact that some people can mine without paying electric costs, I expect them to be the long-term miners.

The "amateur miner with his video game gpu" is a temporary phenomenon. If BTC prices skyrocket again, this process is drawn out further, but it must return to average profit rates of business.

[TonyHoyle]

He's probably being overoptimistic - that calculation doesn't include power cost, and assumes stable difficulty for 2.5 months...

Do it for fun, geek value, or ideology, or because you need a room heater...  Not money.

[TheGer]

I've reaped massive windfalls selling hardware to miners.  I hope people aren't bailing.

[wegotpickles]

I'm small time, only about 1 Ghash/s, but I'm still finding this to be more than profitable enough to continue. Granted you cant earn a living on it unless you have some serious hardware already, but I'm still making a good $200-300 USD a month after electricity. I'm still buying hardware. I'm even thinking of investing in actual cases and noise dampening foam. Think about it, miners that are compact AND quiet! MADNESS!

[fascistmuffin]

AngelusWebDesign has been creating a ton of threads about the end of the world bitcoin the last couple of days.

On the other hand, I'm still benefiting from mining.

[Tx2000]

Pfft.  Quit.  There is no such quit.  I am mining on my i7 920, my 5850, my Gameboy Advance, my Terratec Aureon 7.1 (7.1 channels of hashing power!!11!) Universe and on my T-Mobile G1 smartphone.

Push it to the limit.

[bitcon]

i quit mining on 3 of my 4 rigs.  just getting too hot here. plus the market crashing isnt helping.

[SlipperySlope]

My rigs have been offline most of the day due to the DDoS attack on BTCGuild.  I have not cared to establish alternate pooling arrangements - yet.

I too am curious about the current availability of long-sought-after 5830s on Newegg.  I would not buy them, (1) because I would have to buy another motherboard, CPU, power supply, and maybe add another dedicated 20 amp circuit, and (2) because its not so much the projected difficulty increase - but rather the likely full deflation of the bitcoin price bubble that influences me. 

Mining difficulty, in my opinion, lags the bitcoin price, i.e. difficulty goes up because miners get excited about rising prices and add capacity to their rigs.  But in a situation in which prices are declining, miners may face a situation in which difficulty is not dropping, or perhaps not dropping as fast a bitcoin prices drop.

Miners not adding to their capacity are making a judgement about the future prices of bitcoins.  Therefore miner sentiment/behavior is interesting to me as I consider what signs signal a bottom to the bitcoin bubble deflation.

[hawks5999]

I just can't wait for fall/winter. My furnace never generated money for me before. I'll keep mining until my furnace is more profitable.

[lnxgod]

I'm a new miner only rocking a single 5830 and getting twin 6950 2gb cards. I jumped in because I wanted to make a buck and upgrade my video cards. I do think bitcoins have a future , But I'm not sure if this version of bitcoin will be the future. There are things about the setup i think that need to be improved to gain wider acceptance beyond the geeks.


Until then my cards will keep mining as long as its more profitable then the electric it eats.

[cbeast]

I'm just bored watching my computer sit there mining. I  am buying them about as cheap as I can mine them.

[airdata]

I just can't wait for fall/winter. My furnace never generated money for me before. I'll keep mining until my furnace is more profitable.

Yep.... i a few months when temperatures dip around here, it's going to be nice ^^

[Deimos_Anomaly]

In september mining will become "free" here.
Now I mostly mine at night.

[fitty]

A miner explains why he's not buying anymore equipment...

http://www.bitcoin-board.com/index.php/Brand-new-Sapphire-5830-on-NewEgg-which-Im-passing-up

What are your thoughts?

There's 10,000s of people folding for free, correction they are PAYING to run their folding rig. Bitcoin is "less profitable"? People will mine for free, people will mine when they lose money. That's already been proven.

The fact it now takes 60-70-80 days to get ALL of your money back for your hardware? It's a non-issue. The next difficulty increase will likely be under 10%. People were figuring on 50% increases a month ago. It's not longer a great way to make quick money, seems like we still have 50k miners out there. If difficulty was 3M and BTC was at $5, you'd still have boat loads of miners.

People are no longer buying up tons of hardware to make a quick buck? That's good news. Miners just dump BTCs on the market as fast as they make them to recover costs. Not having huge influxes of short term hardware which needs to be paid off flooding the exchanges will be great. Difficulty increases will slow, supply will slow, demand will catch up.

BTC doesn't need 50k miners making money hand over fist. Thankfully that's coming to an end.

[terroh8er]

I probably wouldn't buy new hardware for dedicated mining rigs. I found a 5770 on craigslist for $45 a couple weeks ago so that was probably worth it, but any additional hardware I would buy would be that which I would buy anyway in a few months.

[1.21gigawatts]

Do yourself a favor and don't listen to AngelusWebDesign and don't give him the satisfaction of visiting his message board.  He's a total hypocrite.  He will tell you that mining is not worth it, you should dump all your bitcoins, everyone is selling their mining rigs, but he will quietly low ball you on your equipment.  Then he gets mad that you won't sell him a computer that you just bought for 50% off and calls you a 17 year old pimple faced idiot who uses mommy's credit cards to buy video cards.

[DamienBlack]

Do yourself a favor and don't listen to AngelusWebDesign and don't give him the satisfaction of visiting his message board.  He's a total hypocrite.  He will tell you that mining is not worth it, you should dump all your bitcoins, everyone is selling their mining rigs, but he will quietly low ball you on your equipment.  Then he gets mad that you won't sell him a computer that you just bought for 50% off and calls you a 17 year old pimple faced idiot who uses mommy's credit cards to buy video cards.

That sounds very... specific.

[Maxxx]

I just can't wait for fall/winter. My furnace never generated money for me before. I'll keep mining until my furnace is more profitable.

I'll likely have to keep a window open 24/7 just to keep the place liveable in the Winter. There'll be a 6 foot spot in the grass outside extending from the window which will be like an oasis in 6 foot of snow. Where the grass grows healthy and green and the wildlife comes to live in harmony, outside my window.

[FlipPro]

Good for him, mining is a way for me to get more bitcoins, and guess what, I NEED MORE BITCOINS!!

[MtRev]

Many from the states will quit, but there are still countries like China who is and will keep profiting from mining for a long while.

My question is, what would happen when mining eventually stops? What would become of BitCoin? Would it still be functional? I don't fully understand how this works.

[muyoso]

Many from the states will quit, but there are still countries like China who is and will keep profiting from mining for a long while.

My question is, what would happen when mining eventually stops? What would become of BitCoin? Would it still be functional? I don't fully understand how this works.

No, if mining stopped, then bitcoin would be worthless.  Mining is what verifies transactions.

[DamienBlack]

Many from the states will quit, but there are still countries like China who is and will keep profiting from mining for a long while.

My question is, what would happen when mining eventually stops? What would become of BitCoin? Would it still be functional? I don't fully understand how this works.

If mining stopped completely there would be no bitcoin. Bitcoin is the mining. But even one person on a cpu could continue to mine. And my guess is that even if bitcoin fails completely, there will be a few people that keep mining for the next few decades.

I mean, I know people who's tamagotchi is still alive.

[Tx2000]

I mean, I know people who's tamagotchi is still alive.

lol for real?  Isn't that one of those monochrome keychain type mini-game where you keep raise some sort of virtual pet?  I remember my younger cousins having those ages ago.

[MtRev]

I mean, I know people who's tamagotchi is still alive.

LOL!!

[Jaime Frontero]

oh please.

you've got a brand new board with 40 new threads - 38 of which have been started by the board owner, and all of which appear to be somewhat negative (despite their titles.  read them.).  those 40 threads have garnered precisely 11 replies.

i don't recognize the names of the other posters.  presumably folks register at different sites using a NIC they've always used:  i always do.  don't you?

and this is cited by the OP as some kind of valid source?

Miners calling it quits?

seriously?

well, you asked for my thoughts.  those are them...

[fortismilites]

I plan on mining until mining doesn't pay anything at all. I even plan on purchasing 2 6990s to throw in my main computer for it, then building a second computer as a miner. Why? cause bit coins allow you to freely trade on the net. I could buy my next graphics card from some guy in Europe, where he may be able to get it cheaper there than in the US, and not have to worry about money exchanges. All that needs to be done is to professionalize it a little, then it will skyrocket.

I mean, I know people who's tamagotchi is still alive.

Damn really? I had one of those when I was in third grade, it died in a week, how the hell do you keep it alive this entire time?

[Jaime Frontero]

I mean, I know people who's tamagotchi is still alive.

Damn really? I had one of those when I was in third grade, it died in a week, how the hell do you keep it alive this entire time?

they have a reset button.

my daughter thought i had supernatural powers...

[gjy4ygfds]

If mining stopped completely there would be no bitcoin. Bitcoin is the mining. But even one person on a cpu could continue to mine. And my guess is that even if bitcoin fails completely, there will be a few people that keep mining for the next few decades.

Right, only one miner is actually needed. With less people mining, the difficulty drops accordingly. The only way for bitcoin to die with >=1 miners still active would be if every single other person mining stopped at once, and that remaining person couldn't ever finish enough blocks to trigger the difficulty to drop. The idea of which is of course rather absurd.

[The Script]

I mean, I know people who's tamagotchi is still alive.

Damn really? I had one of those when I was in third grade, it died in a week, how the hell do you keep it alive this entire time?

they have a reset button.

my daughter thought i had supernatural powers...

^^  Awesome.  Way better than dealing with dead gold fish...

[Klestin]

Pfft.  Quit.  There is no such quit.  I am mining on my i7 920, my 5850, my Gameboy Advance, my Terratec Aureon 7.1 (7.1 channels of hashing power!!11!) Universe and on my T-Mobile G1 smartphone.

Push it to the limit.

Amateur!

[foggyb]

*YAWN* . This little germ-bag is MUCH slower. I expect he'll find a block for me before I am 90. I plan to add more miners soon. I run a daycare. Is this going to get me in trouble? Please respond!

[dentldir]

According to the naysayers, the difficulty was supposed to sky rocket to 7 million, the price was supposed to crash, and large institutions were supposed to have taken over mining completely.  None of these things have happened yet.  As a matter of fact, I woke up last night to find another 10% of my rig had already paid for itself.

So the hardware investment is a essentially a call option that exercises itself slowly over time.  You can sell that option anytime when you liquidate the hardware and take the depreciation (ala time decay).  There is a small premium to rollover the option from power bill to power bill (measured in kW).  So to me, mining is a low risk way of going long Bitcoin and establishing a core position to execute a trade plan around.

I don't expect to see linear motion in either price or difficulty, which makes it even more compelling for me.  Plus, had I never done this, how would I know which pins are the sense pins on a PCI-e 1x connector or that the Fermi instruction set doesn't have a rotate instruction? Learning alone is worth the price of admission for me.  I certainly lost a lot more learning how to trade options on securities and real currencies, for sure.

[Eri]

Many from the states will quit, but there are still countries like China who is and will keep profiting from mining for a long while.

My question is, what would happen when mining eventually stops? What would become of BitCoin? Would it still be functional? I don't fully understand how this works.

mining will never stop. when transactions are put into a block the fees go to it as well, the person that mined the block gets the transaction fees as well as the current 50 BTC each one produces. so even when the btc produced reaches 0, they will still have transaction fees and likely those fees will be higher and their will be more of them, something similar to giving a waitress a tip. "want your transaction verified sometime soon? give a bigger tip to guarantee it." so no need to worry. not 100% on this but i don't think there is a limit on the number of transactions a block can hold, it just makes the data size for the block bigger.

[MtRev]

Wow that brings back memories! I remember play this tank game with my uncle's commodore back in the days.

[The Script]

*YAWN* . This little germ-bag is MUCH slower. I expect he'll find a block for me before I am 90. I plan to add more miners soon. I run a daycare. Is this going to get me in trouble? Please respond!

What's his hash rate?  Or more specifically: what's the hash rate per dollar?  I might be interested in picking up a few to add to my mining operation.  PM me with details.

[ctoon6]

how hard is it to make free transactions now? what client will allow me to do this?

[DamienBlack]

how hard is it to make free transactions now? what client will allow me to do this?

Any client lets you make free transactions, as long as it larger than 0.01 bitcoins.

[Gabi]

Of course, many miners will call it quits. Profitability MUST fall in any competitive industry over time until the rate of profit mirrors the capital costs and risks associated with continued operations. Given the fact that some people can mine without paying electric costs, I expect them to be the long-term miners.

The "amateur miner with his video game gpu" is a temporary phenomenon. If BTC prices skyrocket again, this process is drawn out further, but it must return to average profit rates of business.

Remember that videogamers buy the GPU to play, mining is an extra. While miners buy their GPU to mine.

So gamers have to calculate only electricity used by mining in their expenses (because they would have a good gpu, bitcoin or not).

[foggyb]

What's his hash rate?  Or more specifically: what's the hash rate per dollar?  I might be interested in picking up a few to add to my mining operation.  PM me with details.

I am also selling miner shares. The company is called Daddy Daycare Diaper Miners.