Is Mining Viable Anymore?

[xephireusMMX]

Yes, because of the difficulty increase, it's almost impossible to reach ROI.

The only way you can do that is if you can get about $10/GHs.

Unless you get a good deal like that immediately, don't start mining btc.

No one is selling for such low prices 
But I agree, carefully reconsider the investment if you can reach ROI

[miners78]

Bitcoin not so much because of how fast the hardware becomes unprofitable. It you know when to sell the hardware it can be good, but it's too much hassle for me anyways.

[Itun]

Yes, because of the difficulty increase, it's almost impossible to reach ROI.

The only way you can do that is if you can get about $10/GHs.

Unless you get a good deal like that immediately, don't start mining btc.

No one is selling for such low prices 
But I agree, carefully reconsider the investment if you can reach ROI

Exactly, I wish people did...

I think if you are looking into mining, mine some alt-coins.

[pontiacg5]

If you want into bitcoin, just buy the damn things. You just missed a solid opportunity, though.  

If you want to mine, like really mine, go with altcoins. Many are profitable right now, so much so that you can't buy a 280x or higher GPU for $200+ over launch price. It's always possible to trade and add to the BTC stash with altcoins, a lot easier than buying with fiat.

And the hardware you buy will depreciate at a much much slower rate, especially if alts keep climbing relative to BTC. The supply chain has been hit hard lately, if these trends continue and the hardware supply stays the same scrypt difficulty can't possibly grow as fast as BTC. You'd be doing good to have GPU hardware around in that case.

  

[donkeykong9000]

If you want into bitcoin, just buy the damn things. You just missed a solid opportunity, though.  

If you want to mine, like really mine, go with altcoins. Many are profitable right now, so much so that you can't buy a 280x or higher GPU for $200+ over launch price. It's always possible to trade and add to the BTC stash with altcoins, a lot easier than buying with fiat.

And the hardware you buy will depreciate at a much much slower rate, especially if alts keep climbing relative to BTC. The supply chain has been hit hard lately, if these trends continue and the hardware supply stays the same scrypt difficulty can't possibly grow as fast as BTC. You'd be doing good to have GPU hardware around in that case.

  

Agree 

[Aeityo]

Bitcoin mining? You are too late
Altcoin mining? Probably still profitable

[CryptoDuck]

You can be profitable in alt mining without a major investment that would be required with Bitcoin. Plus you won't have to wait months for your hardware. I've looked into a few alts. LTC, XPM, FTC, SBC, and NMC.

NMC seemed the least profitable of those. I like Namecoin because of the DNS purpose behind it but it's to easy for Bitcoin miners to co-mine it to allow me to get any significant amount of NMC collected.

LTC and FTC appear to be similarly profitable right now. Things change fast though.

Stablecoin is slightly less profitable currently but very young and you can collect more of them. I guess you can bet on it's adoption by the community.

I like XPM but Primecoin is a different beast as it is only CPU mined. There is also no good statistic that I can find to determine profitability. Chains per day may be the best but doesn't always correlate to actual blocks found. It has the benefit that you can use VPS to mine since you are only using CPU power. Here is a tutorial I wrote on that if you are interested:

http://cryptoduck.blogspot.com/2013/12/primecoin-tutorial.html

For me I'm new to this and entering it as a hobby. I now have a couple of video cards I'd be happy to keep in my systems and I'm experimenting with mining.

[Megabit monster]

Yeah I am a noob too and I got hosed on ebay.  Bought BFL 50 for 2500 and a 60 for 3k.  I was fooled by some of the calculators out there that don't include the diff. increase.  I am not a stupid person in general but I totally noobed out here. These things won't come near my investment and I'm about to just start solo mining with them and consider them a loss/bad investment. 

[TiagoTiago]

Remember to take energy consumption in consideration. If you have to pay more on the electricity bill than you are earning mining, you would be better off just using that money to buy bitcoins directly.

[Bitcoin-hotep]

Doge coin is still new enough to mine but popular enough to trust to gain value

[hunkster]

Hmmmm is FTC = Feathercoin?

[yahma]

Mining in general is a losing proposition.  While mining some of the lower difficulty alt-coins may net your more alt-coins, the exchange rate is so low that you won't earn really any more than you would if you mined for bitcoin.

[eythank]

Unless you through gh/s bitcoin mining is not profitable.

However, with mh/s you can mine alt coin and later sell it for profit.

[jimdrake]

Thanks for all the responses

I have been reading all about scrypt coin mining and decided to give it a go.

I built a little system based on various recommendations, with room to add more graphics cards.

I am using multipool.us at the moment and the estimated balance in BTC is a healthy profit over energy costs and hopefully I can pay for the hardware in 1-2 months.

But I guess there is more/less profit to be made if you are good or not at trading the scrypt coins for bitcoins and then for local currency at the right moments.

To give a rough estimate I spent about the cost of 1BTC on hardware last week and have been running just less than 24 hours and have a balance of just over 0.01BTC at multipool.us.