Investment Opportunities

[emargolin]

me and a friend of mine are looking to invest in a bitcoin miner.  We were looking to spend about 200$ on it, with the rising interest in bitcoins is this a wise investment?  I have one block erupter at the moment and it's putting out about 350 megahashes, the one i was looking to buy is 5 gigahashes.

[mackler]

There's no good reason to mine. It would be better to put the money in bitcoins and hope they inflate or in a bigger mining company.
Why?

1) The difficulty will get harder, so even if there is profit to be made now there won't be the time it happens.

2) Your marginal costs are higher than the big players.

3) Maintenance issues.

4) Delivery date issues. Setup issues. All kinds of issues.

I know people don't like it when I say it, but it's like mining gold. At one point it could be profitable to do yourself, but now you need specialized equipment. Maybe you get lucky, but it's not really worth the required effort.

If there was good money to be made by the miners, people would buy them and use. This would raise the difficulty usually above the point of profitability.