(4-5kUS$) Would it be worth investing in a mining rig or something similar?

[unixunderground]

Hi,

I was wondering whether or not it would be worth to invest in a mining rig/fpga or equivalent hardware , to be set-upped at home.

I currently got about 4-5k US$ in spare money , and I was wondering if in your opinion , it would be worth investing it into buying some sort of mining hardware of some kind..
Now, the power/electricity consumed isn't really a concern for me, since it's included in my rent bill, and I pay a fast fee and get unlimited usage, so I wouldn't have to pay attention to "ad-hoc energy sparing methods"...

Anyway, do you think that it would be convenient for me to invest that sort of money into mining hardware? And if so, what should I expect to earn (approximately of course) per day with 5k$ worth of mining hardware with the current difficulty rates [and maybe in a year or so of continued usage]?


Thanks in advance to anyone who will take time to answer, and sorry for the really newbie question , but I don't really have much idea of how the whole bitcoin ecosystem works - yet.

[Stephen Gornick]

the power/electricity consumed isn't really a concern for me, since it's included in my rent bill,

Well, you definitely would be profitable mining without any additional costs for electricity.  The next question is, how much power can you consume before you have a.) issues with the heat generated (can you vent it outside?), and power capacity (how many amps before you are at 80% of the rated level for your circuits?

You might get to the 4 Ghash/s level on a residential circuit for instance.  It might cost less that $4K USD to get 4 Ghash/s.

That would generate, at today's difficulty, about 2.5 BTC per day (worth about $16 at current exchange rate).

So that would generate maybe $500 per month in revenue.

So your breakeven might be, on investment, might be under a year, even considering that the block reward will drop in December.

That's assuming the profitability level stays at this level.  That is in no way guaranteed.  It currently is about twice the level it was in the Spring:

 - http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin

With no marginal cost for electricity, you can mine competitively against those mining with FPGA and ASIC, and have a lower risk because you can always sell the GPUs when GPUs are no longer profitable.

[ccliu]

You can then use the mined coins to buy silver from me, which is an excellent investment in itself.

[HonorMe]

You are probably better investing in the coins themselves with the rate they are rising, than buying a mining rig. Power consumption costs a lot

[Tittiez]

I would buy 7 BFL Singles with that money, about 5.7GH/s for $4193 @ only 560watts

[HonorMe]

Wow, i didn't realize you could get that sort of G/Hash for that money. Do you know what sort of power output you'd be creating? As the power bills would surely be enormous?

[Tittiez]

Wow, i didn't realize you could get that sort of G/Hash for that money. Do you know what sort of power output you'd be creating? As the power bills would surely be enormous?

At 560watts from all 7 of the singles, and $0.10/KwH, it would cost $1.344 a day worth of electricity.

I like to use this calculator for things:
http://allchains.info/calc.html

ButterFlyLabs Website:

http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/

[HonorMe]

Wow, so that is a very profitable setup then a 5G/Hash is going to be pulling in a fair bit more than $1 a day. I am currently in the process of building a mining rig of my own, so if i can get anything like this sort of build, i will

[Tittiez]

Wow, so that is a very profitable setup then a 5G/Hash is going to be pulling in a fair bit more than $1 a day. I am currently in the process of building a mining rig of my own, so if i can get anything like this sort of build, i will

Remember you need USB ports to hook the singles up to, and the miner runs on the computer. At least that's my understanding.

Also those singles will make you 3.7BTC a day, and that exchanges for about $23 currently.

[suigeneris]

Rasberry pi with powered usb hub is an inexpensive solution to manage the BFL singles.

[chefjc]

Which way are you leaning?

[unixunderground]

Thanks for all of your replies!

the power/electricity consumed isn't really a concern for me, since it's included in my rent bill,

Well, you definitely would be profitable mining without any additional costs for electricity.  The next question is, how much power can you consume before you have a.) issues with the heat generated (can you vent it outside?), and power capacity (how many amps before you are at 80% of the rated level for your circuits?

I don't think I would encounter any problem with the heat , since as I am based in Norway, and the average temperature outside where I live rarely goes over 12°C (53°F), I believe that it would be enough to just leave the nearest window halfway open, in the room I would designate to mining...

And as far as the power capacity goes, I don't really have any idea of what that may be, but I don't think that even the most power craving rigs would use up as much electricity as the 8x heaters [1500W/ea] I run during winter periods, along with the dishwashing machine (2000W), dryer (2800W),washing machine (1800W) and the electric stove (9800W).. [even though norway exports tons of gas, nothing is run by it strangely]

Anyway, I run into a deal the other day, where I managed to get 19 Lenovo workstations for free (they were throwing them away at the office), as per the pics below (some are missing from the image)

http://d.pr/BL9q+
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/4646/img3175al.jpg
http://d.pr/CrMy+


All of them are running on Intel Core 2 Duo processors clocked at 1.80GHz, and have RAM ranging from 512 to 2048MB.
They all also seem to have a free PCIe slot, as per the following pictures:

http://d.pr/UK5a+ (full size img)

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/2531/img3210j.jpg

http://d.pr/32Po+ (full size img)

http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/6171/img3214j.jpg

And that's the really interesting thing, since I think that it would be quite easy to snap in some GPUs and beging mining without any additional cost..

So now comes the question.. What would the most cost-effective and profitable way to use these 19 workstations? What kind of graphic cards should I be looking for, to be compatible with them?

Thanks in advance again for any inputs...

[Bitcoin Oz]

daaamn