10 ms·

For those who've been involved in this for some time: Do you think it's too late to get into mining Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) to make any significant

by kyro 13y ago

For those who've been involved in this for some time: Do you think it's too late to get into mining Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) to make any significant payoff? I've been looking to get into Litecoin and others because I think I may have missed out on Bitcoin (and buying them at the current value just isn't feasible), and I'm trying to assess whether this bubble/trend/fad/craze will extend to other cryptocurrencies and if going in early now on them will be worth it. I know I'm asking you to look into a crystal ball, but anyone who's been in this game from early on knows much more than I do.

fishtoaster 13y ago
Mining bitcoin is thoroughly impractical. It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. The only effective way to do it is with specialized hardware built specifically for mining bitcoins. It's not too late to buy bitcoins, though: you don't need to buy a whole one. For example, if you think bitcoin will double in price over the next month, you can easily buy 0.1 bitcoins for about $100 and sell it next month for $200. One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it's highly divisible- the idea of "1" bitcoin doesn't really matter for most purposes. If Bitcoin becomes commonly used as an actual currency, people will almost never deal in whole bitcoins (any more than they would deal with $10k bills if they existed). You'd buy a loaf of bread with 0.0001 bitcoins, for example. So, if you think the trend/fad/craze will continue, you might as well buy fractions of a bitcoin. I can't speak to the alternate crypto currencies, though.
- coin 13y ago
  > It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. This is outdated advice from the GPU mining days. ASIC miners use very little electricity compared the BTC that they generate.
  - xyzzy123 13y ago
    Technically, you're right; the electricity used over an ASIC miner's lifetime is very little. The OP has the right idea though, even though the reasoning is wrong. It actually comes down to whether your mining unit can cover its capital investment. If it weren't for the huge price increases, all the people who bought ASIC miners would be underwater right now. I have a 60GH/s BFL miner. It uses about 350W or so. The fans are LOUD. When I get home the room it's been running in is noticeably warmer. They don't generate as much BTC as one might think - just 0.04 / day at current difficulty and this is decreasing at a rapid clip (1 month ago or so it was 0.11 / day). As an aside, I've always wondered if one day all heating will be computational waste heat. You could almost give away ASICs (whether for mining or other purposes) to people in cold countries and subsidise their electricity when they run their heater...
    - brian_cloutier 13y ago
      > You could almost give away ASICs (whether for mining or other purposes) to people in cold countries and subsidise their electricity when they run their heater... In San Francisco this is already a reality: http://www.icebreaker-sf.com/3/post/2013/11/heat-the-icebreaker-with-your-mining-rig-cheapest-electricity-on-earth.html http://www.icebreaker-sf.com/3/post/2013/11/heat-the-icebrea...
- piokoch 13y ago
  The fact that bitcoin is so divisible might be its true weakness in terms of adoption (given huge value of a single Bitcoin). Imagine prices in shop given as 0.000132 BTC, 0.000123 BTC, 0.0000132 BTC or even worst 0.0009999, 0.000999, 0.009999 - looks similar and it is easy to be mislead and pay for something much more then expected. People would need to get use to count zeros after decimal point. This hardly matters with any real currency.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    That's really not a big deal. If it was truly popular and highly priced relative to everyday purchases, we'd just invent names for fractions thereof, and use those for pricing, as we do in reverse for currencies like dollars or pounds. They already have satoshis etc. Far more important limitations: Built in deflation - that it is seen as a one-way bet with ever-increasing value and an ever more limited supply would cause problems if used as a currency (though not obviously as a store of value). The problem for it as a store of value is that the value is entirely predicated on it being a successful currency. Volatility - if prices change rapidly, that would make use in retail almost impossible, and as a store of value dangerous. Many of the places which say they take Bitcoin right now simply move the money immediately to another currency to avoid this issue - that's not going to work if it is actually used as a currency and to store value long-term. Imagine it replacing the USD for example and remaining volatile... Time to process transactions - takings minutes to verify a transaction is not going to work -it'd need to be on the order of seconds, and for a digital currency it really should be as fast as the network. Lack of regulation - again retailers/consumers should be nervous if their financial institutions have no regulations or guarantees that the money they say they hold actually exists at all. Some exchanges have reported a massive theft and walked away with no liability, others impose arbitrary limits on withdrawals etc - this really is wild-west finance and in a crash or bubble you can expect extreme fraud to go on undetected because there are no independent auditors, regulations or laws which govern these activities. Lack of ties to identity - without verified accounts it's far too easy to commit fraud or theft - very like paper money which everyone is moving away from. Lack of reversibility - it doesn't let you roll back transactions, though one could work around this by keeping a ledger and rolling the ledger positions back by transferring coins back and forth. If you're going to do that though and trust the bank/exchange to regulate transactions, why bother with the cryptocurrency bit at all? Lack of transparency in the management process - who decides on the rules of the game here? If the official clients suddenly change rules in concert - existing bitcoin holders would have to just go along with this if the majority voted with it - when large amounts of money are involved, this sort of thing becomes very important. e.g. we hit the existing 21m limit, and those controlling the software decide to up the limit to 30m - suddenly lots of assumptions about value would be questioned. I'd be very nervous about the lack of regulated control. Lack of backing by a government, corporation or trading bloc - when the market attacks government currencies, governments are able to expend extreme resources to mitigate outright panic and collapse. When the market sharks get interested in Bitcoin and attack it in the same way as they attack say the Euro, there will be no such backup, just a freely floating rate which is open to manipulation and depends entirely on public confidence. I do think it has some interesting properties and is a useful experiment, but have extreme reservations about this being the actual digital currency which makes it into use as a global exchange mechanism.
- netrus 13y ago
  Just recently an article at Spiegel Online (main German news site) claimed something along the line of: Bitcoin now passed the valuation of 1.000 USD. For comparision, the price of gold is at 1.300 USD at the moment. As if something magical would happen if Bitcoin would pass Gold. Strange stuff ... Too many people dont realize that while it might be hard to invest 50$ in Apple, investing 50$ in Bitcoin is always possible - no matter the current price.
acangiano 13y ago
It's too late to realistically mine Bitcoin (save highly specialized hardware). It's not too late for some of the alternative cryptocurrencies. Litecoin, for example, has gone up at an incredible rate.
tlrobinson 13y ago
It may be possible to profitably mine Bitcoin using ASICs if you time it right, however you have to ask: why would mining hardware companies sell machines that can literally print money when they could run them themselves? Hardware manufacturers are likely well aware they're dumping more hardware on the market than Bitcoin can profitably absorb. They're enabled by customers willing to preorder hardware months in advance who are essentially gambling that the mining difficulty won't rise too quickly to make their brand new hardware unprofitable.
- baddox 13y ago
  > why would mining hardware companies sell machines that can literally print money Why would anyone ever sell any means of production? Why sell solar panels, or farm tractors, or metal lathes?
  - verroq 13y ago
    That's the wrong question to retort with. ASICs have no other use than to mine Bitcoins, unlike solar panels, etc, etc. The answer is obviously to raise capital to so they can make more money faster.
    - paulhodge 13y ago
      And as a hedge against a BTC price crash, or a huge jump in mining difficulty, or etc. If you're doing nothing but mining then you've got all your eggs in one basket.
  - letstryagain 13y ago
    Solar panels / farm tractors / metal lathes do not print money directly like these devices do.
  - hnha 13y ago
    Those are actually producing something useful. Bitcoin miners only produce highly volatile virtual currency which no serious business would want to rely on. Selling them to speculants for a stable currency is logical.
pera 13y ago
If you can afford an ASIC then no: it's not late, although is not really simple... GPU mining on Litecoin is still profitable since it uses scrypt, making the processing power of an ASIC or FPGA not that significant. Some people mine Litecoins just to sell them for Bitcoins, you may do it as well :)
- thechut 13y ago
  Fairly early miner here, I turned off my GPU miners months ago. It's really not worth it unless you have ASICs, but even then it comes down the electricity cost and the increase in difficulty now that ASICs are available. I would only advise you to buy an ASIC if you live an area with extraordinarily cheap power. In the US this means probably somewhere between $0.05 and $0.10 per kWh. Even then, its impossible to know how much the difficulty will increase.
  - coin 13y ago
    ASIC miners don't use that much electricity.
- riffraff 13y ago
  why is scrypt more robust to ASIC competition? Isn't it just a matter of designing another ASIC that does this?
  - bradleysmith 13y ago
    because its proof of work relies on memory bandwidth, as I understand it. ASICs are possible (and in development) but are intrinsically more expensive to produce because of memory requirements.
uptown 13y ago
Is it practical to mine if you have access to extra servers that sit dormant for long period of time?
- letstryagain 13y ago
  If your servers have GPUs then it might be worth it, but otherwise you'll pay more in extra electricity than you'll get out in Bitcoin.
- gibybo 13y ago
  It's probably not worth your time. They might generate a penny or two worth per day. This assumes you're not paying for electricity. If you are paying for it, you will just lose money.
mmaunder 13y ago
Good question. Start by looking here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison These are benchmarks of Bitcoin mining hardware. GPU's outperform CPU's by a large margin, then FPGA's outperformed GPU's and now ASICs (programs on a chip) absolutely kill everything else. Look at Xtreme Miner's "The Lion" specifically. It's only going to (alegedly) be available in Jan/Feb time, but the benchmarks they're claiming are scary. Also there are some very very large ASIC data center deployments being worked on in China with some fairly innovative stuff like teflon shelves to avoid rack/rails and innovative cooling systems all designed to provide higher ROI per watt and capital invested. China really seems to be leading the field in mining. Also keep in mind that as coins dry up they will be replaced by you collecting transaction fees. So it's not all about getting coins. If I were to start mining today, and I believed Feathercoin and other smaller variants have promise (which I do) I would buy a dedicated ASIC box that can do SCrypt hashing (keep in mind you'll need more memory than dedicated ASICs for BTC) and give that a shot. With Bitcoin you're up against some very serious players at this point and the fact that ASIC boxes have a bigger advantage with Bitcoin than they do with Litecoin or Feathercoin makes it less attractive.
- celticninja 13y ago
  there is no such thing as a scrypt ASIC yet
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
gibybo 13y ago
Unless you are in the business of chip design/manufacturing, it is too late to get into Bitcoin mining. However, due to a rapid price increase in Litecoin, it's actually pretty profitable to mine them with an ATI GPU at the moment. On the order of $10-20/day per high end ATI GPU. However, this is only likely to last a couple days until the difficulty catches up to the price. If you have free electricity, you'll probably still be able to make a few dollars per day long term with litecoin, but not if you have to pay for it.
- crassus 13y ago
  What about Peercoin proof of stake mining?
letstryagain 13y ago
It's too late unless you are AMD or Intel.
- marvin 13y ago
  It's interesting how the negativity on Bitcoin on Hacker News has from "that's a cute little experiment" to "it's too late to get in". But negativity it is.
nly 13y ago
https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margi...
pmorici 13y ago
If you have the skills and capital to design and fab your own bitcoin mining chip you can make money mining. There is nothing you can buy off the shelf though that will make you more profit than just buying and holding Bitcoin.
zenocon 13y ago
Mining bitcoin isn't worth it and has not been for quite some time (from a newbie perspective looking to jump in.) I did some Litecoin mining about 6 mos ago, and experimented with: a) firing up EC2 clusters with MIT StarCluster http://star.mit.edu/cluster/ http://star.mit.edu/cluster/ (which is awesome for other reasons) b) buying my own rigs with expensive, high-end AMD GPUs. It was worth it for a while. I also pre-ordered some Butterfly Labs HW, but bailed on it when they couldn't produce a timely delivery. tl;dr: it is fun for dorks like us, but at this point, don't expect to build your retirement nest egg mining -- just buying coins on an exchange is going to have a much better chance at ROI.
adamb_ 13y ago
Here's a bitcoin profitability calculator: http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
alandarev 13y ago
As a side note, be wary of competitors in East Europe, Asia, and other countries with electricity costing by several factors less.
corford 13y ago
There's a very useful mining profitability calculator here: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high. I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships). Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks. I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago. Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't). Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.
greyman 13y ago
I would just like to mention, that "buying at the current value isn't feasible" is only your opinion, and might be wrong. I for example buy BTC even now, since I think the value in the future will be much higher. (but I also might be wrong).
kingrolo 13y ago
I'd say it's really not worth it as an individual these days unless you're just doing it for fun. I sold my miner and bought some stock in a mining operation instead. Beware that there's plenty of scams! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0

by kyro 13y ago

fishtoaster 13y ago

Mining bitcoin is thoroughly impractical. It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. The only effective way to do it is with specialized hardware built specifically for mining bitcoins. It's not too late to buy bitcoins, though: you don't need to buy a whole one. For example, if you think bitcoin will double in price over the next month, you can easily buy 0.1 bitcoins for about $100 and sell it next month for $200. One of the benefits of bitcoin is that it's highly divisible- the idea of "1" bitcoin doesn't really matter for most purposes. If Bitcoin becomes commonly used as an actual currency, people will almost never deal in whole bitcoins (any more than they would deal with $10k bills if they existed). You'd buy a loaf of bread with 0.0001 bitcoins, for example. So, if you think the trend/fad/craze will continue, you might as well buy fractions of a bitcoin. I can't speak to the alternate crypto currencies, though.

coin 13y ago
> It would cost you significantly more in electricity than you would make in bitcoin. This is outdated advice from the GPU mining days. ASIC miners use very little electricity compared the BTC that they generate.
- xyzzy123 13y ago
  Technically, you're right; the electricity used over an ASIC miner's lifetime is very little. The OP has the right idea though, even though the reasoning is wrong. It actually comes down to whether your mining unit can cover its capital investment. If it weren't for the huge price increases, all the people who bought ASIC miners would be underwater right now. I have a 60GH/s BFL miner. It uses about 350W or so. The fans are LOUD. When I get home the room it's been running in is noticeably warmer. They don't generate as much BTC as one might think - just 0.04 / day at current difficulty and this is decreasing at a rapid clip (1 month ago or so it was 0.11 / day). As an aside, I've always wondered if one day all heating will be computational waste heat. You could almost give away ASICs (whether for mining or other purposes) to people in cold countries and subsidise their electricity when they run their heater...
  - brian_cloutier 13y ago
    > You could almost give away ASICs (whether for mining or other purposes) to people in cold countries and subsidise their electricity when they run their heater... In San Francisco this is already a reality: http://www.icebreaker-sf.com/3/post/2013/11/heat-the-icebreaker-with-your-mining-rig-cheapest-electricity-on-earth.html http://www.icebreaker-sf.com/3/post/2013/11/heat-the-icebrea...
piokoch 13y ago
The fact that bitcoin is so divisible might be its true weakness in terms of adoption (given huge value of a single Bitcoin). Imagine prices in shop given as 0.000132 BTC, 0.000123 BTC, 0.0000132 BTC or even worst 0.0009999, 0.000999, 0.009999 - looks similar and it is easy to be mislead and pay for something much more then expected. People would need to get use to count zeros after decimal point. This hardly matters with any real currency.
- grey-area 13y ago
  That's really not a big deal. If it was truly popular and highly priced relative to everyday purchases, we'd just invent names for fractions thereof, and use those for pricing, as we do in reverse for currencies like dollars or pounds. They already have satoshis etc. Far more important limitations: Built in deflation - that it is seen as a one-way bet with ever-increasing value and an ever more limited supply would cause problems if used as a currency (though not obviously as a store of value). The problem for it as a store of value is that the value is entirely predicated on it being a successful currency. Volatility - if prices change rapidly, that would make use in retail almost impossible, and as a store of value dangerous. Many of the places which say they take Bitcoin right now simply move the money immediately to another currency to avoid this issue - that's not going to work if it is actually used as a currency and to store value long-term. Imagine it replacing the USD for example and remaining volatile... Time to process transactions - takings minutes to verify a transaction is not going to work -it'd need to be on the order of seconds, and for a digital currency it really should be as fast as the network. Lack of regulation - again retailers/consumers should be nervous if their financial institutions have no regulations or guarantees that the money they say they hold actually exists at all. Some exchanges have reported a massive theft and walked away with no liability, others impose arbitrary limits on withdrawals etc - this really is wild-west finance and in a crash or bubble you can expect extreme fraud to go on undetected because there are no independent auditors, regulations or laws which govern these activities. Lack of ties to identity - without verified accounts it's far too easy to commit fraud or theft - very like paper money which everyone is moving away from. Lack of reversibility - it doesn't let you roll back transactions, though one could work around this by keeping a ledger and rolling the ledger positions back by transferring coins back and forth. If you're going to do that though and trust the bank/exchange to regulate transactions, why bother with the cryptocurrency bit at all? Lack of transparency in the management process - who decides on the rules of the game here? If the official clients suddenly change rules in concert - existing bitcoin holders would have to just go along with this if the majority voted with it - when large amounts of money are involved, this sort of thing becomes very important. e.g. we hit the existing 21m limit, and those controlling the software decide to up the limit to 30m - suddenly lots of assumptions about value would be questioned. I'd be very nervous about the lack of regulated control. Lack of backing by a government, corporation or trading bloc - when the market attacks government currencies, governments are able to expend extreme resources to mitigate outright panic and collapse. When the market sharks get interested in Bitcoin and attack it in the same way as they attack say the Euro, there will be no such backup, just a freely floating rate which is open to manipulation and depends entirely on public confidence. I do think it has some interesting properties and is a useful experiment, but have extreme reservations about this being the actual digital currency which makes it into use as a global exchange mechanism.
netrus 13y ago
Just recently an article at Spiegel Online (main German news site) claimed something along the line of: Bitcoin now passed the valuation of 1.000 USD. For comparision, the price of gold is at 1.300 USD at the moment. As if something magical would happen if Bitcoin would pass Gold. Strange stuff ... Too many people dont realize that while it might be hard to invest 50$ in Apple, investing 50$ in Bitcoin is always possible - no matter the current price.

acangiano 13y ago

It's too late to realistically mine Bitcoin (save highly specialized hardware). It's not too late for some of the alternative cryptocurrencies. Litecoin, for example, has gone up at an incredible rate.

tlrobinson 13y ago

It may be possible to profitably mine Bitcoin using ASICs if you time it right, however you have to ask: why would mining hardware companies sell machines that can literally print money when they could run them themselves? Hardware manufacturers are likely well aware they're dumping more hardware on the market than Bitcoin can profitably absorb. They're enabled by customers willing to preorder hardware months in advance who are essentially gambling that the mining difficulty won't rise too quickly to make their brand new hardware unprofitable.

baddox 13y ago
> why would mining hardware companies sell machines that can literally print money Why would anyone ever sell any means of production? Why sell solar panels, or farm tractors, or metal lathes?
- verroq 13y ago
  That's the wrong question to retort with. ASICs have no other use than to mine Bitcoins, unlike solar panels, etc, etc. The answer is obviously to raise capital to so they can make more money faster.
  - paulhodge 13y ago
    And as a hedge against a BTC price crash, or a huge jump in mining difficulty, or etc. If you're doing nothing but mining then you've got all your eggs in one basket.
- letstryagain 13y ago
  Solar panels / farm tractors / metal lathes do not print money directly like these devices do.
- hnha 13y ago
  Those are actually producing something useful. Bitcoin miners only produce highly volatile virtual currency which no serious business would want to rely on. Selling them to speculants for a stable currency is logical.

pera 13y ago

If you can afford an ASIC then no: it's not late, although is not really simple... GPU mining on Litecoin is still profitable since it uses scrypt, making the processing power of an ASIC or FPGA not that significant. Some people mine Litecoins just to sell them for Bitcoins, you may do it as well :)

thechut 13y ago
Fairly early miner here, I turned off my GPU miners months ago. It's really not worth it unless you have ASICs, but even then it comes down the electricity cost and the increase in difficulty now that ASICs are available. I would only advise you to buy an ASIC if you live an area with extraordinarily cheap power. In the US this means probably somewhere between $0.05 and $0.10 per kWh. Even then, its impossible to know how much the difficulty will increase.
- coin 13y ago
  ASIC miners don't use that much electricity.
riffraff 13y ago
why is scrypt more robust to ASIC competition? Isn't it just a matter of designing another ASIC that does this?
- bradleysmith 13y ago
  because its proof of work relies on memory bandwidth, as I understand it. ASICs are possible (and in development) but are intrinsically more expensive to produce because of memory requirements.

uptown 13y ago

Is it practical to mine if you have access to extra servers that sit dormant for long period of time?

letstryagain 13y ago
If your servers have GPUs then it might be worth it, but otherwise you'll pay more in extra electricity than you'll get out in Bitcoin.
gibybo 13y ago
It's probably not worth your time. They might generate a penny or two worth per day. This assumes you're not paying for electricity. If you are paying for it, you will just lose money.

mmaunder 13y ago

Good question. Start by looking here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison These are benchmarks of Bitcoin mining hardware. GPU's outperform CPU's by a large margin, then FPGA's outperformed GPU's and now ASICs (programs on a chip) absolutely kill everything else. Look at Xtreme Miner's "The Lion" specifically. It's only going to (alegedly) be available in Jan/Feb time, but the benchmarks they're claiming are scary. Also there are some very very large ASIC data center deployments being worked on in China with some fairly innovative stuff like teflon shelves to avoid rack/rails and innovative cooling systems all designed to provide higher ROI per watt and capital invested. China really seems to be leading the field in mining. Also keep in mind that as coins dry up they will be replaced by you collecting transaction fees. So it's not all about getting coins. If I were to start mining today, and I believed Feathercoin and other smaller variants have promise (which I do) I would buy a dedicated ASIC box that can do SCrypt hashing (keep in mind you'll need more memory than dedicated ASICs for BTC) and give that a shot. With Bitcoin you're up against some very serious players at this point and the fact that ASIC boxes have a bigger advantage with Bitcoin than they do with Litecoin or Feathercoin makes it less attractive.

celticninja 13y ago
there is no such thing as a scrypt ASIC yet

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

gibybo 13y ago

Unless you are in the business of chip design/manufacturing, it is too late to get into Bitcoin mining. However, due to a rapid price increase in Litecoin, it's actually pretty profitable to mine them with an ATI GPU at the moment. On the order of $10-20/day per high end ATI GPU. However, this is only likely to last a couple days until the difficulty catches up to the price. If you have free electricity, you'll probably still be able to make a few dollars per day long term with litecoin, but not if you have to pay for it.

crassus 13y ago
What about Peercoin proof of stake mining?

letstryagain 13y ago

It's too late unless you are AMD or Intel.

marvin 13y ago
It's interesting how the negativity on Bitcoin on Hacker News has from "that's a cute little experiment" to "it's too late to get in". But negativity it is.

nly 13y ago

https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margi...

pmorici 13y ago

If you have the skills and capital to design and fab your own bitcoin mining chip you can make money mining. There is nothing you can buy off the shelf though that will make you more profit than just buying and holding Bitcoin.

zenocon 13y ago

Mining bitcoin isn't worth it and has not been for quite some time (from a newbie perspective looking to jump in.) I did some Litecoin mining about 6 mos ago, and experimented with: a) firing up EC2 clusters with MIT StarCluster http://star.mit.edu/cluster/ http://star.mit.edu/cluster/ (which is awesome for other reasons) b) buying my own rigs with expensive, high-end AMD GPUs. It was worth it for a while. I also pre-ordered some Butterfly Labs HW, but bailed on it when they couldn't produce a timely delivery. tl;dr: it is fun for dorks like us, but at this point, don't expect to build your retirement nest egg mining -- just buying coins on an exchange is going to have a much better chance at ROI.

adamb_ 13y ago

Here's a bitcoin profitability calculator: http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

alandarev 13y ago

As a side note, be wary of competitors in East Europe, Asia, and other countries with electricity costing by several factors less.

corford 13y ago

There's a very useful mining profitability calculator here: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high. I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships). Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks. I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago. Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't). Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.

greyman 13y ago

I would just like to mention, that "buying at the current value isn't feasible" is only your opinion, and might be wrong. I for example buy BTC even now, since I think the value in the future will be much higher. (but I also might be wrong).

kingrolo 13y ago

I'd say it's really not worth it as an individual these days unless you're just doing it for fun. I sold my miner and bought some stock in a mining operation instead. Beware that there's plenty of scams! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0