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You could mine, even if it was unprofitable. Spending 10 million in mining costs to produce $5million in bitcoin is still a win for a lot of people trying to m
by rblatz 9y ago
You could mine, even if it was unprofitable. Spending 10 million in mining costs to produce $5million in bitcoin is still a win for a lot of people trying to move money out of China.
- lifeisstillgood 9y agoDoes that work - I think the mining reward is 25 BTC, about 75,000 USD. So for 7.5million thats being the winning miner 100 times. I honestly don't know what setup it takes to be reasonably certain to be the winning miner these days - does anyone have stats on how many miners and how often one might be expected to "win"?
- lmm 9y agoThe stats don't really matter, because the market is designed to equilibrate the price: it costs 7.5 million to mine 7.5 million's worth (in expectation, net present value and all that), and always will. If you're worried about reducing your variance you can join a pool rather than mining directly.
- Nursie 9y agoBut over what time period?
- corysama 9y agoThere was an article posted a few weeks ago about a large Chinese mine that was doing $200K/day.
- Nursie 9y agoSure, and that's a lot, I'm just wondering if there's anything approaching a investment->return timescale. Not that it really matters! It's not like I have a few mil hanging around looking for something to do...
- lmm 9y agoAt a guess we'd be talking 6 months - 2 years - my vague memory/impression is that's roughly the timescale on which mining hardware goes from new to worthless. If you're more vertically integrated in terms of buying datacenters/chip fabs/what-have-you then I'd imagine longer.
- aianus 9y agoYou can mine in a pool that distributes the pool's winnings proportionally to hashpower to its members. You don't need to actually mine any blocks on your own.
- bonzini 9y agoThe largest mining pools were based on China.