Bitcoin Miner Now Going To Focus on Trading Instead

[Houseman]

I have been bitcoin mining in 1 shape or other for a while. It started out (like for many others) as an interesting technical ‘project’ (graphics cards / block erupters) and evolved over that time into an investment in single purpose mining hardware and home based IT set-up with the purpose of generating a passive income (which for a period of time it sure did).

However, over the recent months I have come to the realisation that for me that goal of passive income production from a home based mining operation has run its course. I don’t have access to free or cheap electricity and I don’t have access to industrial scale purchasing power for mining equipment, so with difficulty at 35, (insert lots of zero’s!!!) and global hashing power at 250 Peta hashes I can’t keep upscaling my hashing contribution to maintain enough profitability.  It is time for a strategy change.

The majority of my mining has been with the GHash.IO pool and that has been a great service. I have coins generated from mining within my CEX account (some of which I have been turning into Doge) and as they have recently expanded the exchange part of their service offerings (with the addition of fiat and more crypto pairs) plus the (hopefully) current low price of bitcoin my strategy change is to get out of mining and focus on trading and investing of bitcoin and other crypto coins. My CEX account is also now verified for fiat, so I have a whole bunch of funding and trading choices there, plus the platform is solid and so is the security.

I have already sold some of my oldest miners via EBAY and will probably do that with the remainder I have (which now is a handful of S3’s). I’ll reinvest that money to my CEX trading account. 

I have traded before but would far from call myself an ‘expert’ after all I have been buying Doge recently when it was 100 satoshi!! (Still buying some now with my small BTC mining rewards though). So will go on a learning journey of crypto trading, there is great resource here, CEX have a good trading blog and i will do some research. My aim will be to generate an ongoing income stream from trading, similar in intention to the aim from mining rewards.

If anyone out there has some comments on good education resource or why I shouldn't sell the miners or why I shouldn't do some trading or in fact why I should, please share. Am now off to the Speculation thread ;-)

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[xcapator]

To be honest, the first few months of mining I refused to trade blindly believing in baghoding as the key to keep the price high, but when reality sunk in I started trading and realized that trading leads to more coins per month than mining due to the costs of electricity....

[notlist3d]

I have been bitcoin mining in 1 shape or other for a while. It started out (like for many others) as an interesting technical ‘project’ (graphics cards / block erupters) and evolved over that time into an investment in single purpose mining hardware and home based IT set-up with the purpose of generating a passive income (which for a period of time it sure did).

However, over the recent months I have come to the realisation that for me that goal of passive income production from a home based mining operation has run its course. I don’t have access to free or cheap electricity and I don’t have access to industrial scale purchasing power for mining equipment, so with difficulty at 35, (insert lots of zero’s!!!) and global hashing power at 250 Peta hashes I can’t keep upscaling my hashing contribution to maintain enough profitability.  It is time for a strategy change.

The majority of my mining has been with the GHash.IO pool and that has been a great service. I have coins generated from mining within my CEX account (some of which I have been turning into Doge) and as they have recently expanded the exchange part of their service offerings (with the addition of fiat and more crypto pairs) plus the (hopefully) current low price of bitcoin my strategy change is to get out of mining and focus on trading and investing of bitcoin and other crypto coins. My CEX account is also now verified for fiat, so I have a whole bunch of funding and trading choices there, plus the platform is solid and so is the security.

I have already sold some of my oldest miners via EBAY and will probably do that with the remainder I have (which now is a handful of S3’s). I’ll reinvest that money to my CEX trading account.  

I have traded before but would far from call myself an ‘expert’ after all I have been buying Doge recently when it was 100 satoshi!! (Still buying some now with my small BTC mining rewards though). So will go on a learning journey of crypto trading, there is great resource here, CEX have a good trading blog and i will do some research. My aim will be to generate an ongoing income stream from trading, similar in intention to the aim from mining rewards.

If anyone out there has some comments on good education resource or why I shouldn't sell the miners or why I shouldn't do some trading or in fact why I should, please share. Am now off to the Speculation thread ;-)

Cex is to high in my opinion.  You must have very high cost to mine if that beats it.  I know with winter coming I'm using the free cooling to expand for a few months.  Using winter air to provide cooling with little cost.

If you do not have access to decent priced electricity i cannot make a argument at mining when low like now.  Only thing I can suggest is look at hosting and see if anywhere to have them mine at.  But if you cannot get a good priced hosting, you very well might be better of selling and buying coins direct.

[Houseman]

To be honest, the first few months of mining I refused to trade blindly believing in baghoding as the key to keep the price high, but when reality sunk in I started trading and realized that trading leads to more coins per month than mining due to the costs of electricity....

KnC Miner quotes:

KnC says its shift in focus reflects an industry-wide trend. “We’re seeing a complete change in the industry,” Cole said. “It’s accelerated out of the garage and the homes, to the small businesses, to the large data centers, and now you've got to have a mega data center for it to be profitable.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-21/bitcoin-miner-ditches-clients-to-chase-2-billion-coding-prize.html

[notlist3d]

To be honest, the first few months of mining I refused to trade blindly believing in baghoding as the key to keep the price high, but when reality sunk in I started trading and realized that trading leads to more coins per month than mining due to the costs of electricity....

KnC Miner quotes:

KnC says its shift in focus reflects an industry-wide trend. “We’re seeing a complete change in the industry,” Cole said. “It’s accelerated out of the garage and the homes, to the small businesses, to the large data centers, and now you've got to have a mega data center for it to be profitable.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-21/bitcoin-miner-ditches-clients-to-chase-2-billion-coding-prize.html

KNC is not who i would get my mining decisions from.

Always do your own ROI.  KNC had trouble with just meeting deadlines its own deadlines.

[Muscleminer]

many small miners are forced to go trading instead of direct mining.

[SrNtGr8]

i don't know but i started mining first as a hobby because i wanted to know what this crypto currency was all about.

started out with an antminer usb miner at 2GH/s.  This little thing does about .40 USD in about 9 hours while i'm at the office.  so that's about two bucks per week and 8 per month.  that's a small pizza that i can enjoy with my son while chatting about bitcoins.

to me is like that gold rush show on discovery.  those guys take this little specks of gold and that drives them to move tons of dirt to get more.

bitcoin mining is like that.  you get little specs.  i mean i do mine and now have digital gold (as i call it) but in tiny bits.

so i went out and got a 200GH/s miner and it mines in two pools.  it makes money but not enough to brag about it.  plus as i found out, the CEX site won't transfer fiat money to USA.  go figure.  so that kinds of forces one to keep the bitcoins either at their site or in one's bitcoin wallet.  but now i ask business about payment in bitcoins.  if they take bitcoins, i pay with them and walk away feeling great.  kind of driving the electric car pass the gas station.

money in trading?  yeah, when the price drops (like it did a couple of weeks ago) to the $360 range, i took the fiat balance that i couldn't transfer to my US bank and purchased it's equivalent in bitcoins...price went above $400 and then i saw the profit.  but these trades are temporary...one must use the bitcoins to... because the volatility of the currency value.

the way to profitability in bitcoin mining is creativity...it appears that all want to do the same and nobody wants to spend time in improving the mining setup.  buying mining contracts is a losers game.  buy a contract for $100 and make $10.  unless one is looking for tax write offs, that's no way to make dough.

now, one could invest and build a solar farm that charges a set of batteries capable of 3k or 4k watts and plug some mining rigs to it.  during the day, the sun provides the juice and at night the backup batteries.  if possible, build your own rigs.  put some dough together and buy the pcbs from the manufacturer in china.  Once the translation is handled, these folks are very friendly and helpful.  a local fabricator can build your rigs shelves or buy used networks shelfs.  build your own wiring schemes and use color cables to code which cable is for what.

it will take time but in 5 years or less you could build a mining farm that can do about 500 TH/s, you'll be looking at at least $250k/yr.  The key to this scenario is to invest in the farm every month.  if you have pcbs with 110nm asic chips, replace them with 16 or 28 nm chips.  faster hashing, less electricity, lower temperature and increased mined shares.

mining as a hobby is cool, cheap and very easy.  want to make some residual or actually live off it, need to be creative and stop buying those 200GH/s rigs for $500.  build your own for about a 1/3 of that.  Also, don't be stingy with the quality of the fans.  buy good and quiet fans. 

and winter is wonderful time to mine.  no need for cooling (mining rigs could actually heat part of the home), it'll be less electricity consumed once you unplug the fans and lower heater temp.  all you hear will be just the humming of profits coming into the you bitcoin wallet. 

[notlist3d]

now, one could invest and build a solar farm that charges a set of batteries capable of 3k or 4k watts and plug some mining rigs to it.  during the day, the sun provides the juice and at night the backup batteries.  if possible, build your own rigs.  put some dough together and buy the pcbs from the manufacturer in china.  Once the translation is handled, these folks are very friendly and helpful.  a local fabricator can build your rigs shelves or buy used networks shelfs.  build your own wiring schemes and use color cables to code which cable is for what.

Sadly solar to expensive to justify it for mining.  I think you are better off finding a place with lower price electricity.  If you are lucky you live in one of these places, but many are not this lucky.  The highest point I ever had was during GPU days and i was using 8500+ watts of electricity mining.   I have since sold off my GPU's and switched to asics and have used less electricity.  But the price of thousands of watts is just a huge setup cost.

If you have space and low priced electricity mining is still alive.  I am using winter to expand the free cooling you mentioned is very nice to mine with little money spent on heat extraction.

[Houseman]

many small miners are forced to go trading instead of direct mining.

Question is, why would you trade mining shares if you can trade coins? Why not mine where it's profitable the most and trade where it's the safest.

CEX is a good example here, it's not as good in mining profits as other cloud mining sites and not as good in trading as coin exchanges.

CEX is a coin exchange, it has a bunch of trading pairs (30 or so from a quick look plus fiat), their GHS product is just 1 option for a user.

On a related topic about the viability of home mining, this is a good thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827480.0

[Snorek]

To be honest, the first few months of mining I refused to trade blindly believing in baghoding as the key to keep the price high, but when reality sunk in I started trading and realized that trading leads to more coins per month than mining due to the costs of electricity....

Exactly. Electricity, hardware maintenance, heat problems. Hardware mining may be too much of a hassle for people. Trading may be better but I would join trading with cloud mining.  I have to say that this combo brings the best effects.

[pumawolf]

many small miners are forced to go trading instead of direct mining.

Question is, why would you trade mining shares if you can trade coins? Why not mine where it's profitable the most and trade where it's the safest.

CEX is a good example here, it's not as good in mining profits as other cloud mining sites and not as good in trading as coin exchanges.

the answer is u do them all, not all markets are goin to be profitable during certain times. you flow with which ever market is suitable for ur skill set.   my personal  opinion on ghs at cex, theres so many customers that  are greedy ,cant add, all they do is whine and complain instead of coming up with strategy, my point is  all u gotta do is outsmart  this bunch. and belive me when i say im not even that much smarter than this bunch ,i make gas money here nothing special. the iq bar/standard at cex is set pretty low.

[Houseman]

Last miners now sold via good old EBAY. Interestingly one of the guys who bought off me had only just sold his own miners 2 weeks before and found he was missing 'mining' so bought mine. That kind of sums up how mining gets into your psychology a bit, as I must admit I miss my lovely S3's  

Putting the $500 net profit (after EBAY costs) into my CEX trading account.

[pumawolf]

yea man mining can be quite addictive, im letting my  miners die out so to speak and thats it ,only trading for me now. u should look into the mining stocks on havelock as well. its smaller markets so  dont expect much out of it, just another weapon u can use. b mine/bsell, and amhash1 is bout to start soon. peta, its about to die so careful with that one, i wouldnt touch it. the other stocks on havelock are iffy,do quaility research b4 investing in havelock . alot of shitty companys.  u can also trade at hashnest.not very liquid tho. i find that that are periods at cex, where ghs are constapated  for quite sometimes, i like to follow all avalible markets. happy trading bud.

[SpanishSoldier]

many small miners are forced to go trading instead of direct mining.

A lot of miners are turning to cloud mining by selling all their existing hardware.

[sumantso]

Good call, but remember that while mining won't give you RoI, it still some guaranteed income. On the other hand, trading, if not done conservatively, may wipe out your entire investment in a matter of days. It also requires a lot of monitoring and is quite stressful.

[SpanishSoldier]

Good call, but remember that while mining won't give you RoI, it still some guaranteed income. On the other hand, trading, if not done conservatively, may wipe out your entire investment in a matter of days. It also requires a lot of monitoring and is quite stressful.

Someone told me "No risk, No gain".

[BTCish]

Trading is more risky as you may understand,but good luck with that.