Newbie question about how long bitcoins will be mineable

[toi]

Hey guys,

New here and doing some research on BitCoins/LiteCoins and such.

A friend of mine says buying a rig right now ($2500 for a 120GH/s) is a bad deal. On his calculations it would take about 6 months to pay off the price (estimated 10% of profit back into maintenance/energy). And after that the rig wouldn't even be able to mine, because of difficulty.

Is that possible? I haven't found anything online stating that some computers just `won't be able to mine` due to high diffs.

So my idea is to buy a [GPU] rig to mine LiteCoins instead, so when it loses profitability I'd just sell the hardware (which is much easier/simpler to do).

Feel free to post any good articles on the subject. And yes, I'm still digging through the forum looking for related info, don't hate me if I haven't reached a 6 months old post.

Cheers,
Toi

[guybrushthreepwood]

Hey guys,

New here and doing some research on BitCoins/LiteCoins and such.

A friend of mine says buying a rig right now ($2500 for a 120GH/s) is a bad deal. On his calculations it would take about 6 months to pay off the price (estimated 10% of profit back into maintenance/energy). And after that the rig wouldn't even be able to mine, because of difficulty.

Is that possible? I haven't found anything online stating that some computers just `won't be able to mine` due to high diffs.

So my idea is to buy a [GPU] rig to mine LiteCoins instead, so when it loses profitability I'd just sell the hardware (which is much easier/simpler to do).

Feel free to post any good articles on the subject. And yes, I'm still digging through the forum looking for related info, don't hate me if I haven't reached a 6 months old post.

Cheers,
Toi

You can mine but it probably wont be worth it. You don't have to mine BTC/LTC either. Choose an alt and swap them for BTC or LTC.

[Starscream]

Hey guys,

New here and doing some research on BitCoins/LiteCoins and such.

A friend of mine says buying a rig right now ($2500 for a 120GH/s) is a bad deal. On his calculations it would take about 6 months to pay off the price (estimated 10% of profit back into maintenance/energy). And after that the rig wouldn't even be able to mine, because of difficulty.

Is that possible? I haven't found anything online stating that some computers just `won't be able to mine` due to high diffs.

So my idea is to buy a [GPU] rig to mine LiteCoins instead, so when it loses profitability I'd just sell the hardware (which is much easier/simpler to do).

Feel free to post any good articles on the subject. And yes, I'm still digging through the forum looking for related info, don't hate me if I haven't reached a 6 months old post.

Cheers,
Toi

Your friend is right, in a sense. It's not that your rig won't be able to mine, it's that the amount it will mine will be so low (and will keep dropping with each difficulty increase) that you will not get your ROI.

It's like the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise.

[toi]

Hey guys,

New here and doing some research on BitCoins/LiteCoins and such.

A friend of mine says buying a rig right now ($2500 for a 120GH/s) is a bad deal. On his calculations it would take about 6 months to pay off the price (estimated 10% of profit back into maintenance/energy). And after that the rig wouldn't even be able to mine, because of difficulty.

Is that possible? I haven't found anything online stating that some computers just `won't be able to mine` due to high diffs.

So my idea is to buy a [GPU] rig to mine LiteCoins instead, so when it loses profitability I'd just sell the hardware (which is much easier/simpler to do).

Feel free to post any good articles on the subject. And yes, I'm still digging through the forum looking for related info, don't hate me if I haven't reached a 6 months old post.

Cheers,
Toi

You can mine but it probably wont be worth it. You don't have to mine BTC/LTC either. Choose an alt and swap them for BTC or LTC.

Gotcha! I was interested in mining some DogeCoins as well. I had a computer at home mining it when idle, but diff on it has grown quite a lot. Doubled in 2 weeks.

Hey guys,

New here and doing some research on BitCoins/LiteCoins and such.

A friend of mine says buying a rig right now ($2500 for a 120GH/s) is a bad deal. On his calculations it would take about 6 months to pay off the price (estimated 10% of profit back into maintenance/energy). And after that the rig wouldn't even be able to mine, because of difficulty.

Is that possible? I haven't found anything online stating that some computers just `won't be able to mine` due to high diffs.

So my idea is to buy a [GPU] rig to mine LiteCoins instead, so when it loses profitability I'd just sell the hardware (which is much easier/simpler to do).

Feel free to post any good articles on the subject. And yes, I'm still digging through the forum looking for related info, don't hate me if I haven't reached a 6 months old post.

Cheers,
Toi

Your friend is right, in a sense. It's not that your rig won't be able to mine, it's that the amount it will mine will be so low (and will keep dropping with each difficulty increase) that you will not get your ROI.

It's like the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise.

I see your point. Maybe the idea of going to alt coins would be worth it then..

Cheers!

[Quinlan]

Yup, bitcoin is out of your league now. As it is out of mine lol
Alts are the only profitable option at this point I'm affraid.

[BitCoinDream]

Yup, bitcoin is out of your league now. As it is out of mine lol
Alts are the only profitable option at this point I'm affraid.

I dont really understand why people go for alt ? every new day there will be a new alt and you think they will be universally accepted like bitcoin ?

[guybrushthreepwood]

Yup, bitcoin is out of your league now. As it is out of mine lol
Alts are the only profitable option at this point I'm affraid.

I dont really understand why people go for alt ? every new day there will be a new alt and you think they will be universally accepted like bitcoin ?

They mine them, dump them, collect their money then move on to the next. Quick profit is their game. They don't care if they're universally accepted.

[Hesiod]

Hi Toi,

I'm new to the forum as well, although I've been reading it for a while. I built a ~2000$ GPU rig myself 2 weeks ago and already got ~200$ worth of litecoins out of it.
However, difficulty IS increasing (more people are mining hence everyone gets less coins per khash), and quite fast: by 20% since I started mining (Christmas must have had a lot to do with it) and the rig is making 20% less coin per day than it did 2 weeks ago.
Everyone who tries to predict whether it will interesting financially to mine really is just making guesses, as too many factors are at play, the profitability of mining resulting of an equilibrium between people buying the coin and people creating it by mining.

A few facts remain that got me into mining:
- Whatever the short term return or not on investment, you can just hold on to your litecoins and wait for their price to go up.
- It is fun if you are a bit of a computer geek, you'll get to learn or improve your knowledge of linux.
- It is really cool to participate in something that could change society.

And just to answer your question, GPU rigs won't be unable to mine litecoins as the difficulty increases, the number of coins they can mine will just be reduced, unless as for bitcoins 100x speedups can be achieved with scrypt-ASICS, which is very unlikely. Scrypt-ASICS will surely be able to reduce electricity costs but won't give massive speedups, and GPU rigs will be less profitable in comparison, but not completely outdated like for bitcoin mining.

Cheers