Is bitcoin mining worth it?

[Entropy-uc]

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating.  When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty,  My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

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[jimmothy]

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating.  When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty,  My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc..

Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden?

Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics?

[Entropy-uc]

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating.  When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty,  My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc..

Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden?

Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics?

Seriously, I can.  Learn to read.  It is not as easy as looking at mining earnings only any longer.  You must also consider operating expenses now, and the inevitable day when expenses exceed your bitcoin earnings.

Con recently posted that he sold off his Avalon because electricity costs more than it earned.  That day is coming for everyone soon.

[jimmothy]

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating.  When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty,  My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc..

Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden?

Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics?

Seriously, I can.  Learn to read.  It is not as easy as looking at mining earnings only any longer.  You must also consider operating expenses now, and the inevitable day when expenses exceed your bitcoin earnings.

Con recently posted that he sold off his Avalon because electricity costs more than it earned.  That day is coming for everyone soon.

Learn to read? What am I doing now?

Yes I understand that now (like gpus a year ago) inefficient asics will need to be shut off because they cost more in electricity than they earn.

This doesn't take away from the fact that the difficulty of bitcoin was never easy to calculate. You had no idea how many avalons/bitfurys/bitmain/bfl/asicminer were going to sell so your calculations were based entirely off guesses and that has not changed.

[Entropy-uc]

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating.  When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty,  My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc..

Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden?

Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics?

Seriously, I can.  Learn to read.  It is not as easy as looking at mining earnings only any longer.  You must also consider operating expenses now, and the inevitable day when expenses exceed your bitcoin earnings.

Con recently posted that he sold off his Avalon because electricity costs more than it earned.  That day is coming for everyone soon.

Learn to read? What am I doing now?

Yes I understand that now (like gpus a year ago) inefficient asics will need to be shut off because they cost more in electricity than they earn.

This doesn't take away from the fact that the difficulty of bitcoin was never easy to calculate. You had no idea how many avalons/bitfurys/bitmain/bfl/asicminer were going to sell so your calculations were based entirely off guesses and that has not changed.

I guess it was hard for you.  That's probably why you were buying Asicminer when I was selling.

A little understanding of economics, a couple decades in the semiconductor business, and plenty of market intelligence collected both here and from other sources made it pretty easy for me.

In fact there are several people on here who have made similarly accurate projections.  I gained a lot of credibility with my business partners when DeathandTaxes published a projection last April that matched my estimates within a couple %.

I will say that it is difficult to estimate at what difficulty growth will level out to a more normal growth level of double digit % per year.  But that has more to do with the amount of dumb money being thrown at the market, and pre-order cycles than anything else.

[jimmothy]

You are high on yourself.

You can pretend you were able to accurately predict the difficulty for the past year, but in reality you didn't.

Here's a list of unpredictable variables which influence difficulty:

- value of btc
- manufacturer delays
- manufacturer production costs
- waves of btc noobs
- hardware problems
- hardware performance
- new manufacturers
- private mining farms


Please do enlighten me as to how you were able to predict any of those.

[Entropy-uc]

You are high on yourself.

You can pretend you were able to accurately predict the difficulty for the past year, but in reality you didn't.

Here's a list of unpredictable variables which influence difficulty:

- value of btc
- manufacturer delays
- manufacturer production costs
- waves of btc noobs
- hardware problems
- hardware performance
- new manufacturers
- private mining farms


Please do enlighten me as to how you were able to predict any of those.

Ignored

[jimmothy]

You are high on yourself.

You can pretend you were able to accurately predict the difficulty for the past year, but in reality you didn't.

Here's a list of unpredictable variables which influence difficulty:

- value of btc
- manufacturer delays
- manufacturer production costs
- waves of btc noobs
- hardware problems
- hardware performance
- new manufacturers
- private mining farms


Please do enlighten me as to how you were able to predict any of those.

Ignored

Point proven.

[libitum]

I still make money from mining, and I am using KNC Jupiters. For this 2014 I am getting 3 Neptunes (already paid) to get some decent hashing power. I know most people in this forum are afraid of jumping into mining and actively discourage people who want to start mining. I guess it is anyone's take. It is a risky business, and at least to the best om my logic, it dont see how can I will lose any money. I expect to end 2014 with double my investment in Neptunes.
Here some extra reading if interested

[DrG]

I still make money from mining, and I am using KNC Jupiters. For this 2014 I am getting 3 Neptunes (already paid) to get some decent hashing power. I know most people in this forum are afraid of jumping into mining and actively discourage people who want to start mining. I guess it is anyone's take. It is a risky business, and at least to the best om my logic, it dont see how can I will lose any money. I expect to end 2014 with double my investment in Neptunes.
Here some extra reading if interested

You're welcome to your enthusiasm.  But haven't people already spelled out why mining with ASICS now is a losing proposition?

Figure out how much fiat you laid out for those 3 Neptunes, divide that total by $550 (or even $420 if you are a quick trader and caught the bottom).  That's how much BTC you should be able to mine to come out ahead.  If your 3 Neptunes mine more you have profit.  If they mine less you have loss.  Simple as that.  Difficulty modeling suggests you will come out losing, but nobody can say with certainty.

[Wintermute]

Figure out how much fiat you laid out for those 3 Neptunes, divide that total by $550 (or even $420 if you are a quick trader and caught the bottom).  That's how much BTC you should be able to mine to come out ahead.  If your 3 Neptunes mine more you have profit.  If they mine less you have loss.  Simple as that.  Difficulty modeling suggests you will come out losing, but nobody can say with certainty.

Basically, I agree with you that BTC mining is likely going to burn money (the exponential growing hash rate makes winning this game very unlikely).

However, I recently started to take an alternative path to mine BTC that works extremely well, so far. Instead of directly going the sha256 mining route I invested in scrypt mining. Well, at the end of the day I am only interested in BTC. Therefore, I use a multi-pool that mines different types of altcoin and automatically converts them back to BTC (for example: middlecoin and clevermining). The advantage of altcoins is that the hashrate does not expand like crazy, it seems the hashrate is much closer to the equilibrium, e.g., see http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty .


My thought is as follows:

http://clevermining.com/profits

For the last months clevermining returned about 0.011 BTC on an average day per MH/s. I rented 25 MH/s for ca 28 BTC and will likely get a bit more than 7 BTC this month, which is a good value. If the hashrate goes a bit up I am still fine (but for the last three months it was pretty stable). As long as the hashrate does not increase like in Dezember (which is unlikely as GPUs are hard to get these days) I am fine. And even if this happens, this likely means that BTC / LTC prises soared and in this case I am happy for my saved BTC.

First I built a mining rig on my own, but later I found that "genesis mining" is cheaper than building my own rig (and no noise and heat at home).

[samsonn25]

Figure out how much fiat you laid out for those 3 Neptunes, divide that total by $550 (or even $420 if you are a quick trader and caught the bottom).  That's how much BTC you should be able to mine to come out ahead.  If your 3 Neptunes mine more you have profit.  If they mine less you have loss.  Simple as that.  Difficulty modeling suggests you will come out losing, but nobody can say with certainty.

Basically, I agree with you that BTC mining is likely going to burn money (the exponential growing hash rate makes winning this game very unlikely).

However, I recently started to take an alternative path to mine BTC that works extremely well, so far. Instead of directly going the sha256 mining route I invested in scrypt mining. Well, at the end of the day I am only interested in BTC. Therefore, I use a multi-pool that mines different types of altcoin and automatically converts them back to BTC (for example: middlecoin and clevermining). The advantage of altcoins is that the hashrate does not expand like crazy, it seems the hashrate is much closer to the equilibrium, e.g., see http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty .


My thought is as follows:

http://clevermining.com/profits

For the last months clevermining returned about 0.011 BTC on an average day per MH/s. I rented 25 MH/s for ca 28 BTC and will likely get a bit more than 7 BTC this month, which is a good value. If the hashrate goes a bit up I am still fine (but for the last three months it was pretty stable). As long as the hashrate does not increase like in Dezember (which is unlikely as GPUs are hard to get these days) I am fine. And even if this happens, this likely means that BTC / LTC prises soared and in this case I am happy for my saved BTC.

First I built a mining rig on my own, but later I found that "genesis mining" is cheaper than building my own rig (and no noise and heat at home).

I starting mining ltc by building 4 rigs.  I later found it more profitable to buy Asic machine to mine btc  then convert back to ltc. 

Now I am not sure about ltc so I will keep the btc. 

Now with the mining difficulty growing too fast I have sold my 1.8TH system and just going to buy btc to trade.

[samsonn25]

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating.  When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty,  My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc..

Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden?

Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics?

Seriously, I can.  Learn to read.  It is not as easy as looking at mining earnings only any longer.  You must also consider operating expenses now, and the inevitable day when expenses exceed your bitcoin earnings.

Con recently posted that he sold off his Avalon because electricity costs more than it earned.  That day is coming for everyone soon.

Learn to read? What am I doing now?

Yes I understand that now (like gpus a year ago) inefficient asics will need to be shut off because they cost more in electricity than they earn.

This doesn't take away from the fact that the difficulty of bitcoin was never easy to calculate. You had no idea how many avalons/bitfurys/bitmain/bfl/asicminer were going to sell so your calculations were based entirely off guesses and that has not changed.

I guess it was hard for you.  That's probably why you were buying Asicminer when I was selling.

A little understanding of economics, a couple decades in the semiconductor business, and plenty of market intelligence collected both here and from other sources made it pretty easy for me.

In fact there are several people on here who have made similarly accurate projections.  I gained a lot of credibility with my business partners when DeathandTaxes published a projection last April that matched my estimates within a couple %.

I will say that it is difficult to estimate at what difficulty growth will level out to a more normal growth level of double digit % per year.  But that has more to do with the amount of dumb money being thrown at the market, and pre-order cycles than anything else.

Double digit only per year??

Riight now btc difficulty is 3.8 B    I would be surprised if it isnt more than 100 Billion by end of year.  Thats 2600% in only 10 months.  Who knows, maybe it might only be 50 Billion (still 1300%), but it could just as easily go to 200 Billion also.

[samsonn25]

As I have read noone exactly can answer this question as there are 2 opposite opinions on it. Btw I think the opinion that mining is worthless is more popular than the opposite opinion.

Mining is not worthless, it supports the blockchain and secures the network.  Without mining, there is no Bitcoin.

The correct question is "Is mining worthless for the home user to ROI?"

If you only have a few hundred or a grand or so to spend, yes it's worthless.

It's an arms race right now, and many of the home miners are exhausting getting new circuits installed, and you're slowly seeing a shift to the datacenter for cooling and electrical needs.

It's like the old saying "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight".  Biggest and most power efficient Asics win.  Unfortunately, it costs significant amounts to keep up.

Data centers incur huge extra cost.  Usually their electricity is more expensive, and just paying the rent for the space is the most expensive cost. Big deal if they can guarantee uptime and cooling if you get some decent equipment, which by the way doesnt exist because all the equipment manufacturrs mine with all their own stuff for awhile then resell their (burned in-used equipment) back to the public after it starts becoming obsoltete, then the cycle starts again.. Alot of extra cost, unless your company is so big you absolutely have no room to put all the machines.

By the time KNC finishes their data center, they would have blown alot of the pre-order money people gave them and they will be surprised at how fast the competion has caught up and they are not that fast to ramp up as the middle end players like Cointerra and Bitmain.

[meccaflare0]

Some may disagree but continue to save your money, or buy some BTC while it's around $400 a piece. Then wait till the next gen ASICs are announced and be one of the early adopters of those. Current miner are over priced and their isn't much return on investment with current projections.

In hindsight, I just want to say this is some of the best advice I ever gave anyone.

[franco123]

Actually it depends. Bitcoin mining requires you to invest money for the equipment and even time to set up everyrhing. Also, you have to consider the electricity bill because it will take a lot. If the odds is against you, perhaps the electricity rate is high in your area, then you must consider on just trading or investing into other stuff.

But before, it was really worth it. This is because the competition before was not that tight as to now. Today, in order to be profitable and keep up with the others, you have to take advantage every source you have and be ahead of the others.

[Entropy-uc]

Some may disagree but continue to save your money, or buy some BTC while it's around $400 a piece. Then wait till the next gen ASICs are announced and be one of the early adopters of those. Current miner are over priced and their isn't much return on investment with current projections.

In hindsight, I just want to say this is some of the best advice I ever gave anyone.

It really isn't very good advice.

I wish I had just bought bitcoin and held it with the money I invested in Bitcoin mining gear back in 2011.  I'd be shopping for a used yacht from a distressed Saudi prince now.  Plenty of people even then were arguing that mining was a negative ROI in bitcoin terms even back then. (Vladimir stands out for this particularly in my mind).

Bitcoin has been kind to me, but I wasted a lot of money, and time pursuing mining when it was vastly more profitable to just buy coins.

[RussIT99]

That only applies if the price is rising constantly , for 2 years the price went down and then was proberbly best to mine at a loss and wait for the recovery. That could happen again. And new asic miner came out today so it could be a good time to start.

[Entropy-uc]

That only applies if the price is rising constantly , for 2 years the price went down and then was proberbly best to mine at a loss and wait for the recovery. That could happen again. And new asic miner came out today so it could be a good time to start.

Not at all.  If you are mining at a loss, that means you could buy more bitcoin on the open market than you earned. Plus your tax position is much worse and you have to spend a significant amount of time managing your gear.

Note that the time period I discussed covered 3 boom cycles and an extended bust.

[alexpayne]

I think it's worth it because there are more and more people are choosing this way to earn profits in Bitcoin. It's a guarantee way for miners too because they can sell the hardwares if they don't want to mining anymore.