Topic: A case study in entry-level mining - page 2. (Read 53570 times)

Good for you, but you didn't state how much electricity you use. You might be paying more then 1BTC electricity....

While I don't wish to discourage you, assuming that the electricity prices in the ACT are similar to NSW and that you have a 'time of use' meter, the S1 already consumes more in electricity during Peak and Shoulder times than it can theoretically make in BTC.  Most of my S1's are gone and the remaining pair are awaiting their upgrade to S3+.  Even the S3 is already in 'negative territory' during Peak electricity times (despite some compensation from solar panels).  Looks like we need to either co-locate the hardware to some cheaper electricity place, or say goodbye to mining

Cheers

Return On Investment

As of right now, my Antminer S1 has been hashing nonstop for 147 days. It has generated a shade under 1 BTC. That's good enough for ROI!! This marks an important milestone for my case study, as it proves that money can indeed be made from entry-level mining. Hopefully my ROI timeframe will provide a useful yardstick for other investors, who want to know roughly when they will start turning a profit.

Yes,as the rise in bitcoin ATMs many people to whom bitcoin is just another internet story had also started trying and adopting bitcoin.But I haven't used bitcoin Atm till now.Heard it's lousy and takes a very while to complete the transactions.

Congrats Logical on your pending ROI!  

Threads like yours should actually be stickied so all newbies and newcomers to the mining scene can actually see how difficult it is to mine at home for ROI or profit, nevermind those industrial sized mining operations.

Great service you're doing for the community with your behind the scenes blog like study.

I just read through this whole thread. God, if anyone deserves ROI it's you lol.

Getting my first mining machine tomorrow! A Fury I got for $16 Hope I can at least hit ROI on that...my electricity is dirt cheap.

Uptime

My Antminer S1 has been whirring away in the cupboard for over 136 days now, with absolutely no issues whatsoever (unless you count maybe three restarts of the miner process). Dare I say it, I might actually make ROI on this hardware!

This made my day. Thanks for the positive energy!!

I have another suggestion. Just buy and hold your bitcoin. Pbmining is not going to earn you back the bitcoin that you in. Read up on it in several other threads. Cloud hashing in general is not a good strategy.

I commend you for actually taking action and getting started.  Most people just sit and talk about how they can make all this money but never try anything.  The money you lost is minor compared to the knowledge you gained.  Keep trying never give up and don't listen to the pessimists on this forum.  If you never try you'll never make it!

Remember 99% of people in the world conform to the system and don't want to think out of the box, go be the 1% buddy!  Good job!

With the benefit of hindsight I'm glad I did not do mining but I went into speculation instead lol...
That wasn't very beneficial but pretty much still have a bit of a gain/loss in the end more less at break even only thing that really worked was depositing in Just-Dice after Nakowa went in XD

I hope that the holding strategy works out for you my main one right now is that and a bit of mintpal/betmoose since I'm a better predictor than 50% of the time.

Where's the fun in buying and holding?  In all seriousness, I've read through the thread and you had a number of unfortunate incidents throughout your mining experience, which more than likely impacted your ROI.  Anyway, best of luck with the new speculation approach

This is what all the new people to the forum seeking riches don't understand.  You don't necessarily need to mine to make wealth, and in the case of Bitcoin, currently you lose wealth by mining (for the most part).  Temporarily use Bitcoin as a hedge against fiat.

From miner to speculator Good luck.

What I Should Have Done

With the benefit of hindsight, it has become increasingly apparent that I should have just held my original 13 BTC. I would have multiplied my investment tenfold.

BUT it's not too late. I have bought 3 BTC @ AUD$695 each from a trader on http://localbitcoins.com and sent them to three paper wallets worth 1 BTC each. The plan is to hold them in a safe for a year, and then see what they are worth.

My prediction: they will at least double in value

PS: If you use a web wallet, be sure to set up Two-Factor Authentication!

I just started using Armory for my paper wallet and I find it is much nicer for my needs than the basic QT wallet.

I'll have to try out Electrum soon, I would love to get some of my friends interested and nothing motivates like free money.

Paper Wallets

As a Bitcoin enthusiast, one of my goals is to get other people interested in the currency. To do this, I'd like a convenient way of sending BTC to someone who doesn't have a wallet yet. This can be accomplished with a physical wallet. A physical wallet is just a bitcoin address (public) along with its private key (hidden). You deposit money to the address, which can can viewed and verified. Then, when you're ready to collect your BTC, you import the private key into your wallet and withdraw the funds.

Think of it like a piggy-bank. You can add as much BTC as you like, then, when you're ready, you smash it open to reveal the private key and get the money.

There are two kinds of physical wallet: the first is where the actual physical wallet is worth something, such as a coin made from gold or silver. The second kind is where the physical wallet is worth nothing ie made from paper.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why someone would make a physical wallet out of something valuable. Once a gold/silver/platinum coin has had its BTC withdrawn, why would someone want to collect it?? It's basically an action figure or other collectable item that loses all of its value when you open the original packaging!

On the other hand, a paper wallet is completely worthless once its funds have been withdrawn. This is fine because you're not losing anything more than a piece of A4 paper and some printer ink. You can optionally add tamper resistant tape and a waterproof bag. Pretty cool, and inexpensive.

Electrum, as I discussed earlier, is a lightweight client that doesn't need to download the blockchain. It supports scanning QR codes using a plugin. However, I haven't been able to get this working on Windows yet. I've made a post asking for help with it in the Electrum Alternative Clients subforum.

The basic idea is that you give someone a paper wallet who has never used BTC before. They install Electrum, crack open the paper wallet, scan the QR code with a webcam, and hey-presto! They've got the money and are ready to spend it.

Check it out here:

https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/

All the more reason to get "one more Ant" LogicalUnit. You already have the PSU   I put 2nd fans pulling air out to keep the temps under 50  because it's hot and humid where I'm at (52c seems warm).
BTW Thank you for this post, it's always informative.



"Antminer S3....so precious, so lovely. " : it really is. I hope they price the upgrade reasonably.

Are you able to sell your excess solar energy back to the electric grid? If so then you would still be essentially be "paying" for the electricity that these miners use in the form of less funds from the utility company

A Word on Wallets

When I started out, I used the Core Bitcoin-Qt client. It seemed like a good place to begin. Now, having tried a couple of other clients, I thought I'd post about my experiences with them here.

Armory was recommended to me by other users on this forum, so I installed it. It basically sits on top of Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind and provides additional functionality. Importantly, it provides offline wallets. An offline wallet is when you store the private key on a computer that is not connected to any network, and therefore cannot be hacked. I fortunately had an old Windows XP laptop lying around that is perfect for this. Additionally, Armory allows you to print a "paper backup" that will completely recover a wallet in case it is lost or damaged. Very useful. Functionality as of 0.91.2 is pretty good, although I admit there is one thing I don't really understand: in previous versions of Armory, the entire blockchain would be scanned once the client was synchronised with the network -- a process that takes as much as 15 minutes. As of this latest version, that doesn't seem to happen; once synchronised, wallet functionality is available immediately.

Electrum is different because it doesn't store the blockchain locally; it retrieves transaction data from a list of servers. Current as of writing, the blockchain is in excess of 23GB. So, if you want to save a bunch of drive space, this is the way to go. Electrum provides a backup feature similar to an Armory paper wallet in the form of a "seed". A seed is a string of twelve words that can be used to recover a wallet. I just printed out the seed and pretty much have something similar to what Armory provides. If you're clever, you can memorise the 12 words and use a brain wallet -- but I wouldn't trust myself with this. Electrum can also use offline wallets in a process very similar to Armory. Electrum also provides QR codes that you can scan with your phone.

I have an Android phone but have not yet used Hive on it. In this situation I would use an online wallet with a small balance so I could easily scan QR codes. The only danger is that if my phone were hacked/stolen, the attacker could take my BTC -- but this is the tradeoff for having quick transactions. If you're really worried, you could probably encrypted your Android wallet.

I'll give Hive a go now and report back.

UPDATE

Hive Android is a good wallet too. It provides functionality to make an encrypted backup of your private keys, and upload it to various places (I just used my email account). Sending BTC using QR codes is easy. I was also able to easily share my payment address on Facebook. The private keys stored on the device are not protected, so if your phone is stolen they can steal your BTC. I just put 0.1 BTC on my phone wallet and I'm ready to go