Newbie Trying to Figure out Longevity of Mining

[bo122081]

So, I was considering putting some money next month into a mining rig, after looking at a few simply calculators and testing out the software on some how computers. It looked fairly promising - however, digging deeper this morning with some better calculators like http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ I'm having second thoughts.

Are there any lower-end ASIC rigs (or any other type) available that if I ordered one next month would even be worthwhile? It seems like the profitability of mining BTC is going to dry up completely sometime between Apr2014 and June2014. There isn't a single machine on The Genesis Block's site that looks like a halfway decent longterm investment.

Perhaps I'm overlooking things - are these rigs reusable with any other cryptocurrency mining, such as Litecoin?

And, how many up-and-coming cryptocoins are showing real promise right now?

I KNOW any answer is purely speculative, market volatility, etc etc, I'm just looking for some educated guesses and opinions.

Thanks!

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[Athanasios Motok]

So, I was considering putting some money next month into a mining rig, after looking at a few simply calculators and testing out the software on some how computers. It looked fairly promising - however, digging deeper this morning with some better calculators like http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ I'm having second thoughts.

Are there any lower-end ASIC rigs (or any other type) available that if I ordered one next month would even be worthwhile? It seems like the profitability of mining BTC is going to dry up completely sometime between Apr2014 and June2014. There isn't a single machine on The Genesis Block's site that looks like a halfway decent longterm investment.

Perhaps I'm overlooking things - are these rigs reusable with any other cryptocurrency mining, such as Litecoin?

And, how many up-and-coming cryptocoins are showing real promise right now?

I KNOW any answer is purely speculative, market volatility, etc etc, I'm just looking for some educated guesses and opinions.

Thanks!

asics cannot be used with litecoin!

[xhomerx10]

  There are some 300 Mhash USB miners kicking around but the cost is far more than you will ever be able to mine with them unless you get free power.  If you bought a Jalapeno today , I believe it would still pay for itself (provided it ever shipped  ).  You can do the calculations online (at www.bitcoinx.com) and change the difficulty variable to reflect the expontially increasing difficulty.  The difficulty is directly proportional to the network hashing rate.  If the difficulty were to triple (from today) before you got your Jalapeno and triple again while you mined with it, you would still make back your outlay within 6 months (also provided Bitcoin maintains it's current value if you paid for your rig in dollars - it's simpler if you keep everything in Bitcoins.

 There are no ASIC litecoin miners yet... and may never be as the big money is in Bitcoin.  It would be a waste of money to go GPU right now even for mining altcoins unless you are in need of a time consuming hobby.  There is very little money in altcoins to be shared around.

 You might also consider buying shares in a virtual mining company.  Some pay dividends - I know of one that pays dividends daily after reinvesting 30% into upgrading their equipment (bAsicMining) and the guy who runs the company appears to have Type 'A' personality; really hands on. He's even hacked one of the miners to water-cool it in an attempt to improve its efficiency.  Seems like a good bet!

 Mix it up.  Order a Jalapeno - if you lose, it's still less than one car payment - and buy some shares.  There are some start ups promising your initial investment back and paying dividends.  Just do some research first and remember that investing is not without risk.  At this stage of the game, you're not going to get rich with a $250 outlay though... unless you can predict which if any of the numbers altcoins are going to be popular in the future.  Right now I am a little down on the long term viability of Bitcoin because it takes so damn long to confirm payment - I wonder if others are hating this too?

Take care
 

[ogrgat]

  There are some 300 Mhash USB miners kicking around but the cost is far more than you will ever be able to mine with them unless you get free power.  If you bought a Jalapeno today , I believe it would still pay for itself (provided it ever shipped  ). 
 

sorry man but usb miner has 0.3 Ghash and 2 watss
jalapeno has 5 Ghash and 55 watts

so jalapeno has lower Ghas per 1 watt ...

[bo122081]

Ok, after doing some research on the difference between sCrypt (and bCrypt) and the SHA256 used by BTC, and seeing that I can't (and why) mine LTC with an ASIC, and looking at the calc at http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ it looks like if I bought a Jalapeno in June, got it in Oct (they claim 2mo delivery) then there's very few machines on their list that would even pay themselves off. I think the Jalepeno would up up grossing around 5-600, for a net of about 100% profit. That's not bad, but for only a couple hundred, I'm not sure it's worth the hassle and the risk.

I suppose the question is, with the difficulty on BTC projected to hit 10,000,000,000 (10 billion!) by Jul-2014, is there any machine that will be able to mine cost-efficiently, that even exists right now, past the new year?

And, more important, is there any machine that, with that difficulty curve, will even be able to pay itself off?

I suppose you could take the current projection of 62% difficulty increase per mo, and temper it with the fact that ASICs just came out, and it's likely that the diff increase will drop back down a bit, but it still means you'll be competing with much bigger industrial hashing machines kicking out things in the hundreds of GH/s or even TH/s...and at the higher difficulty they've created.

So, if I was going to purchase something like a Jalapeno, I'd be looking for the INITIAL payoff in BTC probably, just to pay for the machine...but after that, I'd likely be trying to swap an an altcoin of some sort.

Is that doable? Is there any altcoin that's projected or even HOPED to be competitive by an end-of-the-year timeframe.

Heck, if I could find some sign of SHA256 hashing being profitable into the new year, I'd consider dropping the $2k on a KnCMiner Mercury...I even got the wife's go-ahead. >.>

[xhomerx10]

Ok, after doing some research on the difference between sCrypt (and bCrypt) and the SHA256 used by BTC, and seeing that I can't (and why) mine LTC with an ASIC, and looking at the calc at http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ it looks like if I bought a Jalapeno in June, got it in Oct (they claim 2mo delivery) then there's very few machines on their list that would even pay themselves off. I think the Jalepeno would up up grossing around 5-600, for a net of about 100% profit. That's not bad, but for only a couple hundred, I'm not sure it's worth the hassle and the risk.

I suppose the question is, with the difficulty on BTC projected to hit 10,000,000,000 (10 billion!) by Jul-2014, is there any machine that will be able to mine cost-efficiently, that even exists right now, past the new year?

And, more important, is there any machine that, with that difficulty curve, will even be able to pay itself off?

I suppose you could take the current projection of 62% difficulty increase per mo, and temper it with the fact that ASICs just came out, and it's likely that the diff increase will drop back down a bit, but it still means you'll be competing with much bigger industrial hashing machines kicking out things in the hundreds of GH/s or even TH/s...and at the higher difficulty they've created.

So, if I was going to purchase something like a Jalapeno, I'd be looking for the INITIAL payoff in BTC probably, just to pay for the machine...but after that, I'd likely be trying to swap an an altcoin of some sort.

Is that doable? Is there any altcoin that's projected or even HOPED to be competitive by an end-of-the-year timeframe.

Heck, if I could find some sign of SHA256 hashing being profitable into the new year, I'd consider dropping the $2k on a KnCMiner Mercury...I even got the wife's go-ahead. >.>

 Wow, I hadn't seen that difficulty prediction but that translates to 226 times the current network hashing rate.  Who is going to be buying all that equipment?  That's the equivalent of around 4 million 16 gigahash ASIC chips (provided my math is on) - where are they all going to come from and who is going to fork out money for them when Bitcoins are worth about $100 and there are only about 11 million of those in existence.  Remember that there are only 150 new Bitcoins per hour available that everyone is competing for and that's only until about 2016... seriously if that's the path you believe then you shouldn't buy anything but shares in a Bitcoin rig manufacturing company because individuals will not be able to afford the necessary equipment to mine successfully.  Alternatively, buy Bitcoins and sit on them because the price will have to increase to support the industry.  In that respect it's not a whole lot different than precious metals (and I don't see people paying with purchases uses precious metals these days either).  Bitcoin could die a horrible death and take all it's investors with it but there is money to be made now though - buy the KNC miner!

Take care

[HotCrypto]

Wow!! This thread is full of great information thanks guys!!

[xhomerx10]

  There are some 300 Mhash USB miners kicking around but the cost is far more than you will ever be able to mine with them unless you get free power.  If you bought a Jalapeno today , I believe it would still pay for itself (provided it ever shipped  ). 
 

sorry man but usb miner has 0.3 Ghash and 2 watss
jalapeno has 5 Ghash and 55 watts

so jalapeno has lower Ghas per 1 watt ...

Hey Troll,

 Butterfly labs demo on Youtube shows 5.5 GHash/s @ 32 watts for the Jalapeno.  USBminer Sapphire is  330 Mhash/s @ 2.6 watts.  Those two devices are based on the same transistor process so power comsumption should be very close.  That being said, you forgot to consider the price which is the other variable that matters and in this case matters the most.  Even if Asicminer lowers the price to .7 BTC it is still 3 times the price of the Jalapeno per Mhash.  By all means though, feel free to buy up all the USB miners you like - drive up my share value.

Take care

[bo122081]

Looking around at different hardware for sCrypt mining, was thinking about putting together a multi-GPU rig as cheap as I can to see what I could come up with. In the process, I came up with this spreadsheet.
Thought some people might be interested.



That's just the end ranking. The full spreadsheet is here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4SL4L9VVL-uUGt2NHE4QlhpR3c/edit?usp=sharing

[xhomerx10]

That is amazing.  Nice work!  Now get started!!! The coins are passing you by 

take care

[bo122081]

Well, I have my usual gaming rig and my dev laptop pumping out around ~175KH/s right now, to hashfaster's pool, but I think I want to swap to elitistjerk's, since their pay model is more stable for small-timer like me I think, I need to grab a new motherboard and a small HDD for the server tower I have laying in the closet (already have the PS), then I'll just grab a PCIE rise, some more fans and such, a cheap CPU and as many of the good cards as I can find cheaper than they should be.

I'm hoping to hit at least 512KHs, if I can get to a MH/s, I'll be happy with that.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Butterfly labs demo on Youtube shows 5.5 GHash/s @ 32 watts for the Jalapeno.  USBminer Sapphire is  330 Mhash/s @ 2.6 watts.  Those two devices are based on the same transistor process so power comsumption should be very close.  That being said, you forgot to consider the price which is the other variable that matters and in this case matters the most.  Even if Asicminer lowers the price to .7 BTC it is still 3 times the price of the Jalapeno per Mhash.  By all means though, feel free to buy up all the USB miners you like - drive up my share value.

The price on USB miners is 0.6 BTC (0.45 BTC in bulk).  Still a USB miner may never pay for its cost of capital but I would point out that IF true then a NEW Jalapeno purchased today is a far far far worse ROI%.  I mean if you buy a USB miner today you can probably start mining next week.  If you buy a Jalapeno today what is the fastest you would predict you would receive it (even being naively optimistic)?  3 months? 6 months? More?  What do you think difficulty will be in 3 months? or 6 months?

Using price per MH/s is incomplete. What matters is price per (MH/s) * (difficulty).  If two units are shipping at the same time then difficulty becomes a constant however if one unit can start mining at difficulty X and the other can't start until difficulty 2x then for all intents and purposes its effective price (when normalized by starting difficulty) is double.  The reality is the vast majority of BFL gear will never break even no matter when it was bought.  Many people bought Jalapenos over a year ago at a cost of 30 BTC or more.  Even if they were the first one delivered they will NEVER recover 30 BTC by mining.

[smoothie]

Mining is similar to trading, it has a lot to do with the timing of entry and exits in the market.

[xhomerx10]

Butterfly labs demo on Youtube shows 5.5 GHash/s @ 32 watts for the Jalapeno.  USBminer Sapphire is  330 Mhash/s @ 2.6 watts.  Those two devices are based on the same transistor process so power comsumption should be very close.  That being said, you forgot to consider the price which is the other variable that matters and in this case matters the most.  Even if Asicminer lowers the price to .7 BTC it is still 3 times the price of the Jalapeno per Mhash.  By all means though, feel free to buy up all the USB miners you like - drive up my share value.

The price on USB miners is 0.6 BTC (0.45 BTC in bulk).  Still a USB miner may never pay for its cost of capital but I would point out that IF true then a NEW Jalapeno purchased today is a far far far worse ROI%.  I mean if you buy a USB miner today you can probably start mining next week.  If you buy a Jalapeno today what is the fastest you would predict you would receive it (even being naively optimistic)?  3 months? 6 months? More?  What do you think difficulty will be in 3 months? or 6 months?

Using price per MH/s is incomplete. What matters is price per (MH/s) * (difficulty).  If two units are shipping at the same time then difficulty becomes a constant however if one unit can start mining at difficulty X and the other can't start until difficulty 2x then for all intents and purposes its effective price (when normalized by starting difficulty) is double.  The reality is the vast majority of BFL gear will never break even no matter when it was bought.  Many people bought Jalapenos over a year ago at a cost of 30 BTC or more.  Even if they were the first one delivered they will NEVER recover 30 BTC by mining.

 Sounds like we agree you would never get your money back with a USB stick at todays pricing provided the Bitcoin stays at current levels or devalues.  I see they are on back order at BTCguild though so you'll be waiting for one of those as well.  I agree that it could take a couple of months to get a Jalapeno... maybe 3 months even.  That being said if the network hashing rate quadruples before you get it - so were talking about 1200 THashes/s you'd still be able to recoup your capital in ~160 days(at current Bitcoin value).  You'll still make money - you wont make as much but you'll do okay.  With BFL, the pricing is pretty much standard across all of their units in $/Ghash/s  but you're more likely to get your Jalapeno before the larger units it seems!
 So the value of the bitcoin has increased and it will have to continue to increase to support this race for the fastest miner... best then to buy bitcoins at this bargain price and sit on them.

 Good luck!

[Arros]

Buying dedicated hardware for mining is quite risky. The difficulties are shooting up and up. If you buy ASIC now, you probably won't get it until it's already too late.

[xhomerx10]

Well, I have my usual gaming rig and my dev laptop pumping out around ~175KH/s right now, to hashfaster's pool, but I think I want to swap to elitistjerk's, since their pay model is more stable for small-timer like me I think, I need to grab a new motherboard and a small HDD for the server tower I have laying in the closet (already have the PS), then I'll just grab a PCIE rise, some more fans and such, a cheap CPU and as many of the good cards as I can find cheaper than they should be.

I'm hoping to hit at least 512KHs, if I can get to a MH/s, I'll be happy with that.

Hey Bo,

 I have not had much luck finding risers - get powered risers if you can find them.  Hashfaster's pool... hmmm
Should be lots of people selling off their GPUs soon!

Take care

[xhomerx10]

Buying dedicated hardware for mining is quite risky. The difficulties are shooting up and up. If you buy ASIC now, you probably won't get it until it's already too late.

 Probably not... but then maybe you will and maybe Bitcoin value will increase.... or you can keep your 9 to 5 and tell your grandkids how it could have been.

Take care