Topic: Antminer S3 - Profit is Impossible (Read 20094 times)

   no 2 s-3's at free power = 900gh about 13.43 usd a day.

hosting at gawminer for an s-3 is 90 cents a day. or about 14 s-3's as 14 x .90 = 12.60 usd

so free power for 2 generates paid for power for 14. so you have 16 s-3s not 2 .

Disregard the purchase cost.  As they will get sold on ebay as time goes on.   it is pretty easy to turn s-3's into a profit if btc price stays above 580.  don't forget it dropped as low as 400.

Hey man, not all of us can rock 20 th/s.  I was thrilled to get past 5! hah.

Absolutely!

I'm so tired of these jokers with "free electricity". Is running one or two 200-500GHs miners off of a university dorm room outlet a real "mining operation"? Enjoy you $6 per day. That's really going to help with tuition and beer money!

Most free electric only have like 15 amp which is really low profit..

Free electricity is a big factor, imo. Those who pay higher rates will have a much harder time receiving ROI.

Right now the mining manufacturers are just packing more chips with the same hashing speed and power requirements into larger form factors. A good example is the rbox and the antminer s3. So we aren't seeing any new innovation right now in hardware, probably the latest advance was the KNC Neptune but at the wrong price point.  Right now, twice the mining power at twice the power requirements isn't allowing the miners to get ahead of the difficulty very far. For now, were just seeing the 400ghs and 1ths clones which aren't doing us much good.

Uh uh - posting twice in a row.

This is a good example of the point I just made:

+1

Google "end of moore's law"
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/165331-intels-former-chief-architect-moores-law-will-be-dead-within-a-decade

that was a missed decimal point. and 2 miners for 1.28 was a good deal for me.  they have earned more then .4 btc back against that price.

you need to look at it from watts per gh. 

 300 for 1gh was a money making gpu in april 2013
10 for 1 gh was a money making AM cube in July of 2013
2 for 1 gh  was a money making bitfury chip and still can make money
many pieces of gear were 2watt gear.
1 for 1 gh  was and still is money making gear
.75 for 1gh  is the current common money maker  the s-3
.64 for 1gh  is the sp30

the improvements in watts are ending so diff slows.

june 2013 to dec 2013 = 25%
DEC 2013 to july 2014 = 18%
July 2014 to Jan 2015 = ?    my guess is 12% at worse 15%

Two go for 1.17btc with coupons....

So where do you get 2 S-3's for .128 BTC (i.e less than $100)?

That sounds like the steal of the century, or is the price wrong?

Is it safe here?
Can I say that the S3s lack of active blinkenlights disappoints me more than my units finicky performance?

 

right now gawminers is hosting your antminer s-3.  you can pay with a cc. you get 1 month free hosting

it is better then the normal cloud hosting deal.  I have a thread link


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=698679.0;all


these are far better deals then most cloud mining places.

cex.io
scrypt.cc

cost way more then hosting a miner you purchased from them.

if you use a cc mine for the free 30 days. then have them ship the miner to you. it should earn miner.  I have the 3 miners with them.

i plan to run them until hosting ends then ship them to my home and list them on ebay or mine them at home when the need for ac will be gone.

Agreed.  I have yet to see a cloud mining contract that makes sense as an investment.  Think about it.  The owners of the asics doing the mining are only writing cloud contracts because they make more than just mining on their own.
You might find someone, like jjc326 pointed out, who has a razor thin margin.  But you are still taking a big chance for very little potential upside.
At least with live mining YOU are in charge of your costs and you get to sell the equipment.  You also can decide your own timing for getting out, depending what the market does.
But I also understand that not everyone can house a 10 Th/s mining farm in their house/office etc.  I had to move mine to a datacenter.  Maybe there is some justification for these folks to have a cloud contract if they were going to be buying the btc anyway.  Not sure about that though.

Well said you lucky you.  But yeah, them lights shure are purdy

You do raise some interesting points but I think cloud mining can be profitable.  For instance the company in my signature, you know what your costs are going to be.  Then you need to put the numbers into a spreadsheet and figure it out.  If you think the difficulty increase is only going to be like 5-10% then you will make money with lunamine.  There are some cloud mining companies which are "too good to be true" and you have to watch out for those going out of business, but not all of them.

I don't understand how anyone can justify investing in cloud mining.  You get zero residual on the purchase unlike hardware (no matter how small that residual resale value is, it still exists) and the $/GH/s is ridiculous.  No matter what anyone says, investing in BTC be it mining or in coin is risky, and not a single person on this forum has accepted that without making their own assumptions. The problem is asserting one's assumptions as facts, and calling another's fallacy.  Nobody knows what's going to happen, don't make it sound like gospel.

What I like about mining vs buying coin is the flexibility.   Markets naturally self-adjust, so if BTC was to plummet, then a significant amount of miners using less efficient hardware and/or paying more for power will pull the plug, far sooner than those of us who secure electricity/hosting deals or have access to cheap power, driving the difficulty down.  Now tell me this, if we are to measure ROI in BTC and BTC alone, what would happen if BTC plummeted to $100 US?  I'd wager that the drop in difficulty would result in an S3 paying for itself in a real hurry, even if the exchange to fiat wasn't exactly favourable from an investment point of view. The problem I see is that many people have turned their assumption that BTC will significantly increase in value into fact.  Miners can hypothetically make a return on investment if the exchange stays flat for the years to come, buy & holders cannot.  Should I start a thread labelled "Buy and hold - Profit is Impossible"?  (...aaaand putting on flamesuit)

I find it interesting that the buy & hold types on here try to discourage mining as much as possible, when it is a major driving force behind their investment.  Leads me to believe that maybe the ones discouraging mining have a vested interest in mining themselves...

I completely agree that everyone should have balance, just like any other portfolio.  Buy some coin, buy some hardware.  Buying coin can be made more advantageous by deciding when to buy in, unlike hardware.

I agree with OP.  We need more candid and frank assessments about mining.  I really don't know what is supporting all these people buying these high priced items.  I think you're better off with cloud mining as long as it's a legit company.

Agreed. Plain and simple, this notion that you cannot be profitable under the 10TH mark is simply nonsense. Even with more conservative jumps around 18-20% ROI is more than realistic if you are even the slightest bit bullish. If you're not bullish on BTC, you probably shouldn't be mining...

If you:
 A) own a spare atx psu that will run 2 s-3's
B) already are paying for the internet
C) have a few cat 5 cables and a spare gigbyte switch.

you need only buy a pair of s-3's and pay for power .

2 s-3's are .128btc

if diff = 11% over the next 6 months they do btc roi