If Bitcoins Go Up Will USB Bitcoin Miners Be Profitable?

[bernard75]

Once BFL ships /irony they are just expensive souvenirs anyway.

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[Shak]

You can't say one thing, argue the completely different side, and then refuse to understand what I am trying to say one bit. I am not sure who made the rule that you are not allowed to calculate speculation into mining but it is wrong. Any bitcoin miner immediately becomes a speculator the second they help solve a block. You can be safe and immediately sell it, or you can take a risk and speculate. If you speculate on coins that you mined yourself you are making a profit off of mining because you mined the coins that you are speculating with. If I just bought the coins I would be speculating, but because I mined them I am allowed to combine the profit. There is no logical argument against that as far as I am aware.

Then to follow your approach by combining the apples and pears:
The amount of profit you accumulate overall by speculation and mining will be - in case of rising Bitcoin prices - always lower then the possible profit made by pure speculation without any mining. So your maximal profit that you can achieve with a given amount of money will be diminished by mining, leading to the conclusion that mining generates a loss.

Have you ever even owned a usbminer? I feel like most of the people on this thread are talking but they have absolutely no evidence to back up their claims. Let me make this very clear: I am not endorsing usbmining I am just saying that they will one day in the very distant future make a profit. I do not and will not ever buy more than one of these purely for the sake of experimentation because they are interesting devices and if the technology was perfected they could one day become a viable source of income.

Yes, I traded a MMOG-Account with a friend for his USB-Miners. He was eager to get rid of them, I didn't play anymore, so it was a quite reasonable trade.
(Ah, but to follow my argumentations: Of course I made a huge loss in this trade. Because I have to calculate the money that I could have gained by selling this account for money, then buy Bitcoins with this money. That would be the 100% that I could have made by selling this account. By trading it for USB-Miners I lost roughly 70%-80% of this value. This already includes an assumed scam-rate of 20% during the selling process of online-gaming-accounts.)

OKAY I will meet up halfway with you because I am a good guy, let's use your side of the argument that mining generates a negative profit. Even if it takes years to do, if the usbminer somehow magically mines .00000000000000001 more btc than it took to buy the thing(not counting speculation, we will assume price never increases but difficulty does) a profit has been achieved, do you agree? And you can't just say "No that will never happen" because you don't know for sure so please don't go there. You will not make as much as just flat out buying the btc, and definitely not as much as a legit rig, but if it one day makes more than it cost to buy you get a profit purely from mining. My arguement is that this is possible. Slow, but possible.

You are saying that a usbminer will never reach the initial investment that it cost to buy purely from mining btc and selling them immediately? Correct? Just try to see my point because we aren't being productive anymore we are just going in circles.

If the miner generates more bitcoins than it took to buy, it generated a positive profit. But it won't.
By using the numbers of the mining-speed-delivery-thread in this forum, my calculations show that the current Hardware won't make even half the amount of Bitcoins that it takes to buy those things. Even if i assume a complete stagnation after the delivery of the current preordered Hashrate, it wont return the investment in a 20 year timeframe. After that I stopped calculations.
It takes several - and at this point in time very unlikely - assumptions to get to a positive ROI. And those have to factored into your profitability-calculations as a risk-factor.

The other problem in your logic is still, that you assume the hardware investment as only parameter in calculating the overall profit. To say your miner generated more money including speculation than it's initial cost in Dollar is profit - is flawed. It only works if the Bitcoin prices are rising. And when the Bitcoin prices are rising, the maximum amount of profit you can make is by buying Bitcoins without mining. Again, this value is 100%. Everything less is a loss, because you did not get as much money as you could have gained.

[Tobias]

The amount of profit you accumulate overall by speculation and mining will be - in case of rising Bitcoin prices - always lower then the possible profit made by pure speculation without any mining. So your maximal profit that you can achieve with a given amount of money will be diminished by mining, leading to the conclusion that mining generates a loss.

To say your miner generated more money including speculation than it's initial cost in Dollar is profit - is flawed. It only works if the Bitcoin prices are rising. And when the Bitcoin prices are rising, the maximum amount of profit you can make is by buying Bitcoins without mining. Again, this value is 100%. Everything less is a loss, because you did not get as much money as you could have gained.

I will answer both quotes at the same time.

Yes! That is all I was trying to say, you completely misunderstood me. Of course there will be a loss because you will never fully get back what you paid for the miner, and it would make more sense to just buy bitcoins. Then you will have an extra 35$ to speculate with. The only point I was trying to make was that there is some "profitability" if you account for successful speculation with mined coins, but definitely not as much as just flat out speculation profit. And of course my argument is flawed because I can't predict the future, I am not sure if btc prices will ever rise, but your argument and every other argument is flawed as well because everyone is making their own assumptions. That is why I am ignoring the irrelevant people in this thread and I am just debating with you. We have the same train of thought, you just think it's more profitable to speculate, which I agree with. For the last time I was trying to point out that a profit is possible, no matter how minute. Please admit that so we can spend our time more wisely

[kano]

... you could solo mine with a BE and find a block ...

I'm not sure which is more likely ...

(yeah that's what I do with 2 of my 3 coz there no f'ing way they are useful doing anything else ... when I have 144GH/s of mining hardware)

[Keyser Soze]

Util all of the world takes BTC, at the end of the day you will be converting to fiat (i.e. USD) and so you generally can't mine without some speculation being involved. 

That is unless you spend in BTC strictly which of course you can't do because you had to either buy BTC (which was started by fiat) or buy mining equipment to mine with (which would again require fiat or BTC purchased with fiat).

The exception here is if someone gives you a miner - then you have virtually no capital expenditure just operating costs.

So who wants to send me a USB unit? 

Of course there will be speculation involved in you are mining or holding bitcoins. Mining and speculation are two different activities. To find out if your mining operation is profitable, you should really try to separate it from the speculation.

[Wipeout2097]

The metric that matters is Mh/$, regardless of the device. Block erupters at 0.17BTC or ~$23 are as good or as bad as a Japaleno.

If I were to buy today, I wouldn't go below ~30 Mh/$ and even then it had to be "in hand", not scammy pre-orders.

[kano]

The metric that matters is Mh/$, regardless of the device. Block erupters at 0.17BTC or ~$23 are as good or as bad as a Japaleno.

If I were to buy today, I wouldn't go below ~30 Mh/$ and even then it had to be "in hand", not scammy pre-orders.

Then you will lose out.
Funny how so many people don't even understand that.
At the moment there are few if any ASIC devices you can buy that will not lose you BTC.

[polarhei]

Profitability depends on what you do first, then the process.

There are many options which can be tricky to follow up. If There are many Big arrays (For example, 256Gh/s by 4 with Cooking Oil cooling at least, which represents 1,300W) poured into, then The Smallest USB miners will be broken unless you have thousands of to follow up.

P.S The case is from PRC, 300Mh/s by 1000 can be impressive number but the wattage can be problem as each 30Gh/s (100 x 300Mh/s) represents as 250W, You can count on it.

Before January 2014. if you have these trustful miners, then you have little chance to get profit due to low power cost. I have purchased six with the necessary via ebay for pressure test, I have bidded it for USD 210 instead of spending USD 330 for six.

[Wipeout2097]

The metric that matters is Mh/$, regardless of the device. Block erupters at 0.17BTC or ~$23 are as good or as bad as a Japaleno.

If I were to buy today, I wouldn't go below ~30 Mh/$ and even then it had to be "in hand", not scammy pre-orders.

Then you will lose out.
Funny how so many people don't even understand that..

Your reply is a non-reply. If the metric to decide profitability isn't Mh/$, then what is? There is none?

Perhaps what you have in mind is that most or all vendors sell ASIC devices at inflated prices for the current and future difficulty. They are too expensive. That means too many $ for a particular hashing power, ergo too low Mh/$

Of course there is the operating environment to take into account, power usage, cooling, but that tends to scale proportionally with the operation. Nobody is talking about purchasing 2kW units with low hash rate or leaving an high-end PC on 24/7 just to control a block erupter.   let's be serious and have common sense.

At the moment there are few if any ASIC devices you can buy that will not lose you BTC

If there are such devices, they are exactly the ones that provide the highest Mh/$

[wormbog]

Consider the case where buying bitcoins directly is problematic. Let's say you don't want to link in a bank account, prove your identity to an exchange, meet with a stranger from localbitcoins, etc.

You can go buy a block erupter via credit card for $19 + shipping from Amazon, get it in 3-4 days, and start hashing. If the bitcoins you mine are eventually worth more than $19 + shipping, your purchase was profitable. And you've still got the miner. Personally I think that even the lowly block erupter, if bought with fiat currency, will eventually be profitable.

Buying bitcoin directly will most likely be more profitable, but that option may not be available to everyone.

[Keyser Soze]

Consider the case where buying bitcoins directly is problematic. Let's say you don't want to link in a bank account, prove your identity to an exchange, meet with a stranger from localbitcoins, etc.

You can go buy a block erupter via credit card for $19 + shipping from Amazon, get it in 3-4 days, and start hashing. If the bitcoins you mine are eventually worth more than $19 + shipping, your purchase was profitable. And you've still got the miner. Personally I think that even the lowly block erupter, if bought with fiat currency, will eventually be profitable.

Buying bitcoin directly will most likely be more profitable, but that option may not be available to everyone.

I suppose if you refuse to use the more normal channels, then you could overpay for coins through unprofitable mining.While people in some areas of the world may have trouble buying coins, generally it is better to buy x coins now then receive < x coins in the future.

[kano]

Consider the case where buying bitcoins directly is problematic. Let's say you don't want to link in a bank account, prove your identity to an exchange, meet with a stranger from localbitcoins, etc.

Yeah I could see that being a problem if you were doing something illegal ... gotta keep that paper trail clean.

You can go buy a block erupter via credit card ...

Lucky credit cards hide your identity ...

[blub]

If you can't buy bitcoins via the standad exchanges the profit calculations would be:

<amount of bitcoins generated by miner> - <amount of bitcoins the miner costs> +<amount of bitcoins it would cost me to get bitcoins in some non standard way>

Lets say you need 0.1 bitcoin, pay the equivalent of 0.15BTC in fiat for the miners and get your 0.1 BTC of them, but otherwise would have had to bank wire the money to some scetchy exchange with prices 10% over market, for 15% fee and a risk of 30% of getting scammed buying the miner gives a profit 0f ~0.03 btc

[kano]

If you can't buy bitcoins via the standad exchanges the profit calculations would be:

<amount of bitcoins generated by miner> - <amount of bitcoins the miner costs> +<amount of bitcoins it would cost me to get bitcoins in some non standard way>

Lets say you need 0.1 bitcoin, pay the equivalent of 0.15BTC in fiat for the miners and get your 0.1 BTC of them, but otherwise would have had to bank wire the money to some scetchy exchange with prices 10% over market, for 15% fee and a risk of 30% of getting scammed buying the miner gives a profit 0f ~0.03 btc

The point is that you won't see a profit in BTC at all.
The price you pay for them in BTC is less than the BTC they will earn PPS mining.

[lalakies23]

Why still bother with Bitcoin when Betacoin exists?