If you're thinking buying mining hardware, read this first

[film2240]

Speaking of mining,I do wonder how many people are now stopping mining (as it's unprofitable for the ones with weak GPUs) and how quickly can difficulty go down as well as up?

This isn't my intention to complain or whine,but I simply wish to understand more about what's making it more difficult for me to get as much money as before aside from the currency losing value for a bit.

I wish the value of BTC rises again soon so I can finally cashout my mined BTC without making a loss.What is the current value of BTC?

[1714003050]

1714003050

[1714003050]

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[nebiki]

Speaking of mining,I do wonder how many people are now stopping mining (as it's unprofitable for the ones with weak GPUs) and how quickly can difficulty go down as well as up?

This isn't my intention to complain or whine,but I simply wish to understand more about what's making it more difficult for me to get as much money as before aside from the currency losing value for a bit.

I wish the value of BTC rises again soon so I can finally cashout my mined BTC without making a loss.What is the current value of BTC?

it's much faster to decide to start mining than to stop mining. if you want to stop, you have to start counting your losses, you might want to sell your rigs slowly etc. so stopping is a pretty hard decision unless you already amortized your investment. theoretically it's possible for the difficulty to go down as well/fast as it can go up. not very likely, though.

current value is $14 (bitcoinwatch.com). i'm waiting for $20 (which might never happen again) to sell my coins. probably gonna buy a 2nd 6950 then and stop mining.

[iopq]

If you think now is a bad time to invest in mining, it was even worse for the early adopters 1-2 years ago.  At least now you can expect somewhat of a return for your money.  Early adopters were looking at absolutely zero for their investment.

except now those pennies they were making became thousands of dollars
how terrible for those early adopters

[nebiki]

If you think now is a bad time to invest in mining, it was even worse for the early adopters 1-2 years ago.  At least now you can expect somewhat of a return for your money.  Early adopters were looking at absolutely zero for their investment.

except now those pennies they were making became thousands of dollars
how terrible for those early adopters

i don't really see the point. investing thousands of $ into mining gear and investing some idle cpu cycles are 2 whole different things. nobody has invested in mining 1-2 years ago. nobody. they have used what was available.

[Mousepotato]

If you think now is a bad time to invest in mining, it was even worse for the early adopters 1-2 years ago.  At least now you can expect somewhat of a return for your money.  Early adopters were looking at absolutely zero for their investment.

except now those pennies they were making became thousands of dollars
how terrible for those early adopters

B-b-but early adopters shouldn't have mined Bitcoins to begin with because it was unprofitable!

[Mousepotato]

i don't really see the point. investing thousands of $ into mining gear and investing some idle cpu cycles are 2 whole different things. nobody has invested in mining 1-2 years ago. nobody. they have used what was available.

Never PRESUME, because it makes PRES out of U and ME...


...or something like that

[nebiki]

i don't really see the point. investing thousands of $ into mining gear and investing some idle cpu cycles are 2 whole different things. nobody has invested in mining 1-2 years ago. nobody. they have used what was available.

Never PRESUME, because it makes PRES out of U and ME...


...or something like that

:O i've read the difficulty chart. i thought that's enough to assume nobody invested in mining.

[shotgun]

i don't really see the point. investing thousands of $ into mining gear and investing some idle cpu cycles are 2 whole different things. nobody has invested in mining 1-2 years ago. nobody. they have used what was available.

Never PRESUME, because it makes PRES out of U and ME...


...or something like that

:O i've read the difficulty chart. i thought that's enough to assume nobody invested in mining.

I love how this thread just continues to be negative; ten whole pages of it. It's like you guys think that you can dissuade new miners from getting into the game by saying it's pointless and unprofitable and the sky is falling and we're all going to die if we buy more hardware.

personally I just dropped $5k on hardware in June and have another $1k in cards going live next week. If you understand anything about enterprise capacity planning, TCO-over-time analytics, or the like you can build rather efficient hardware. Then you rack and stack it, cool it, monitor it, and understand your electric usage. This is not rocket science but it's not a child's game either.

But hey, I'm all for keeping the difficulty low

[mvoss]

I work a desk job. If I bought the best video card that fit in the thing (it's a decent system, I design tools with Autocad Inventor 3D modeling software) then mined all night while I wasn't there, no power costs. THEN, surely it is very profitable...

[faille]

I work a desk job. If I bought the best video card that fit in the thing (it's a decent system, I design tools with Autocad Inventor 3D modeling software) then mined all night while I wasn't there, no power costs. THEN, surely it is very profitable...

Except that you'd be stealing the electricity from your employer, not to mention that they would have claim to the bitcoins for providing the system, even if you provided the video card, assuming that your employer / network admin is ok with you making hardware changes.

If none of those things bother you and you're confident of getting away with doing it, then easy profit for you!

[grod]

Wouldn't it be easier to use batteries designed for solar installations to charge at your employer and use them to power your rigs at night?  Depending on how meaty of an individual you are (or want to become) it may be possible to lug a few thousand kwhr a day out that way -- a 380 amp/hour, 20 hour 6 volt deep cycle battery is only about 110 pounds.

[mike678]

Wouldn't it be easier to use batteries designed for solar installations to charge at your employer and use them to power your rigs at night?  Depending on how meaty of an individual you are (or want to become) it may be possible to lug a few thousand kwhr a day out that way -- a 380 amp/hour, 20 hour 6 volt deep cycle battery is only about 110 pounds.

I like it Everything about this idea makes me laugh.

[grod]

This could work!  Rig up some sort of sling for your groin to hold the battery (or batteries) and smuggle them in a pair of hammerpants.  When co-workers ask you why you're walking funny tell them you just got a vasectomy.  If they ask again a month later tell them you had to get a couple more because of how potent you are, and they'll stop asking ever again.

You could expand your operation by siphoning gas from cars in the parking lot and running a generator.

[finnthecelt]

This could work!  Rig up some sort of sling for your groin to hold the battery (or batteries) and smuggle them in a pair of hammerpants.  When co-workers ask you why you're walking funny tell them you just got a vasectomy.  If they ask again a month later tell them you had to get a couple more because of how potent you are, and they'll stop asking ever again.

You could expand your operation by siphoning gas from cars in the parking lot and running a generator.

LOL!!!

[max in montreal]

there is an engine that spins at about 300 rpm. it runs on any fuel, used motor oil, french fry grease and so on. These engines are bulletproof. They use them in india for power, and some have been running for 30+ years. You can get the fuel from restaurants, you can even charge them to take their used oil away...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GJgg-L95G2M

[Synaptic]

there is an engine that spins at about 300 rpm. it runs on any fuel, used motor oil, french fry grease and so on. These engines are bulletproof. They use them in india for power, and some have been running for 30+ years. You can get the fuel from restaurants, you can even charge them to take their used oil away...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GJgg-L95G2M

Hey that's pretty cool.  That guys whole video was interesting.

Thanks.

[checkmate]

I work a desk job. If I bought the best video card that fit in the thing (it's a decent system, I design tools with Autocad Inventor 3D modeling software) then mined all night while I wasn't there, no power costs. THEN, surely it is very profitable...

Yeeaaa... you probably thought about getting some Nvidia Quadro or Tesla, eh?

Over 9000 GHash/s with one of those cards, fine quality - really nice.

[Jack of Diamonds]

I work a desk job. If I bought the best video card that fit in the thing (it's a decent system, I design tools with Autocad Inventor 3D modeling software) then mined all night while I wasn't there, no power costs. THEN, surely it is very profitable...

Yeeaaa... you probably thought about getting some Nvidia Quadro or Tesla, eh?

Over 9000 GHash/s with one of those cards, fine quality - really nice.

Workstation cards like Nvidia Tesla M2090 are horrible for integer calculation like bitcoin mining. They will yield about 200-300 mhash/s but cost $7k to $20k dollars.

They have phenomenal performance for single and double precision floating point operations though (1 Nvidia Tesla M2090 card @ 1300gigaFLOPS equivalent to over 200 radeon 6990's)

[Synaptic]

In all honesty, what could a card do if it was designed by NVIDIA or ATI for the specific purpose of mining? In realistic terms of today's usable technologies I mean.

Could any card ever do 9000mh/s? What about 9000gh/s?

In all honesty if ATI/NVIDIA devoted even a minuscule fraction of their R&D twoards developing a bitcoin mining specific product, a Th/s rating of over 9000 is certainly not out of the question.

[Synaptic]

In all honesty if ATI/NVIDIA devoted even a minuscule fraction of their R&D twoards developing a bitcoin mining specific product, a Th/s rating of over 9000 is certainly not out of the question.

If that's even a possibility, I think miners need to start spending a little bit of time on the infrastructure, along with their hardware of course.

Perhaps, starting bitcoin businesses, providing services to accept bitcoins locally, start mini exchanges, etc. If it could all disappear one day because of a single rich company (rich in either liquid assets or resources) then mining is only going to work if it's a secret forever.

Oh absolutely.


Absolutely...