USB mining profitable at new price of .45 to .55 BTC?

[MineBender]

Looks like ASICMiner dropped the Block Erupter price

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=263587.0 SilentSonicBoom has a .45BTC price
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=263577.0 CanaryInTheMine has a .55BTC price

Anyone going to rethink USB mining?

[bitcoindigi]

nope, you will never make your ROI back, maybe if you had access to free electricity...

[Stinky_Pete]

Depends entirely on the exchange rate BTC -> fiat

[davewr2013]

I don't think free electricity is the issue -- just not enough horsepower for the dollars. The USB adapters with a single chip don't seem to cut it. -- maybe with two chips at the same price. ;-)

Look at the Calculator at "The Genesis Block" magazine -- you can look at the rate of  return and set the month you get your equipment. After October it might be quite tough for any equipment to  get a return.

Possibly this will change if people insist on being paid for transactions. It will have to be more than mining I think.

[simpleminds]

Seems unlikely to make profit or even ROI, but I think these miners are aimed at a different audience. If you want to get more involved in the BTC community and just want to dip your toes in the mining water, these are a great place to start playing around with the hardware/software.

[Kuschelweich]

I've been looking into the same question myself for the past few days, and was going to make a thread as well. It's indeed a very good question that should be stickied in some form at the top of this section for all new people to read, as I don't believe enough people actually take the time to figure it out before dropping pretty big bucks on them.


As mentioned earlier the profitability calculators are a good way to figure this out:

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/


After trying many different things in the calculators I believe I can safely say no, you'll never see a ROI on these even at the new "low" prices. Difficulty is just increasing too fast. At 50 bucks for one you'll end up paying $12 to run it for 6 months at which point it'll consume more in power than it makes. I feel sorry for the poor saps who just a few days ago payed .90 BTC/$80 for them. At that price, if they bought 5 they'll pay like 200 bucks to run them for 6 months. Basically they're paying to increase the network hash rate and drive up difficulty even more, therefore making even less ROI.

The way these things sell in group buys you'd think they're magic money machines, and I was almost ready to drop $300+ into BTC to purchase some of these before I actually did the math and used the calculators to help, so I can see how easy it is for new people to get swept up in this thinking they're going to profit. The only ones really profiting at these prices are the manufacturers selling them.

To actually be profitable they need to come down into the $30-35 range, or increase their has rate quite a bit. Doubling would probably do it. Even at $30 each on something like the K1 nano you'd only make like 20 bucks running 5 of them. Maybe 50 if you could manage a pretty good overclock, but difficulty increases will likely kill that as well if you're starting in Aug.

I believe I'll just hold out myself and see what happens. If they drop to a lower price where I could even make 20 I'd probably pick up a few just to have fun, but I'm certainly not going to pay to run them.

[J35st3r]

When I first joined the forum, I spent my first posts trying to dissuade people that it was worth buying these at 2 BTC. I got quite a lot of pushback too. So here we are, 8 weeks on, and the price has dropped to 0.45 BTC. Did the buyers at 2 BTC make 1.5 BTC in that 8 weeks? Course not. Do I feel vindicated? No, just a bit sad. Fools and their money ... (are easily parted).

I usually recommend http://www.coinish.com/calc/ (expert mode) as a calculator, but the site seems to be down ATM. The bitcoin phenomenon tends to the ephemeral  

[reznor]

IF electricity is an issue then  use a raspberry pi and some usb asicminer and get electricity using a solar panel. Must compute how much wattage consumption of the whole device.

Alternative energy is way to go my friend!

[bo122081]

Looking around differing calculators, it's hard to get a real feel for what's worth what. Some show that lower end mining machines look really good, others show them to be utter crap.

Are there any lower-end mining machines that are actually worth investing in anymore?

[escrow.ms]

calc http://www.dustcoin.com/

with 300 Mh/s you will get 0.147 in a month.
So you will need to wait for 5 months to get your investment back after that you can mine terra/ppcoin etc

[escrow.ms]

Peoples were paying around 20 BTC for BFL jalapeno some weeks ago, now you can get 40 erupters in that price , that's 12000 MH/s or 12 GH/s as per their official hash rate (300 MH/s), you will get more than that actually.

Now with 12+ GH/s you can get 5.88 BTC per month currently.
So you'll get your investment back in 4 months.

[ogrgat]

http://minercharts.com/?curr=0.00001&prod=330&cons=0.00001&investment=50&currency=USD&investstart=2013-08-11&datefrom=2013-07-01&dateto=2014-01-25&diff_perc=10&bc_perc=


those charts nicely calculates profitability and investment period


my opinion is with 0.15 usd/kwatt electricity price ... usb erupter for 0.6 Btc will re-pay itself in 7 months since today.

(Btc price cant fall, eurpter has to run 24/7 , your laptop, pc cant burn down..etc) 

[ogrgat]

calc http://www.dustcoin.com/

with 300 Mh/s you will get 0.147 in a month.
So you will need to wait for 5 months to get your investment back after that you can mine terra/ppcoin etc

And you have to keep in mind difficulty increasement during that 5 (or more) months

[btcton]

Not really. If you are going to mine, do the math to see if you can get your money back in a reasonable time. As for me, I'm not planning to leave my computer running 24/7.