Topic: Are any ASIC miners making ROI anymore? (Read 4541 times)

Well BFL has made a nice little profit off you (and me) and with those funds they can easily purchase some competent mining gear for their own hidden farm.

Similar story here.  Purchased 3x upgraded 7GH jally's and 2x 30GH little single's.  Haven't even re-couped half of my initial investment on them and literally can't even sell them for 1/8th what I originally payed for them.  I suspect these kind of stories will get less common as asic technology reaches some of it's physical limitations but who really knows.  It appears as though quite a few people are addicted to this mining crap at this point and a great number of these people could really give two shits about ROI (being in a position where they don't really have to worry about it, i.e. have been mining since the good ole CPU days)

Right.  It's like miners buy the gear just so they can do something "cool."  However, they'd make more buying BTC with fiat straight up and then just hodling.

So, the point of the last sentences in this thread are that, as I said earlier, you should invest in 20-50 last-hash miners to ROI. Or in the best ways you can get 50% ROI instead. No matter what cost of power you have, stupid TH that will drive you as a Russian tank to your ROI.

But we all know that a medal has two sides. On the other side you could get only 50% ROI in a very very very good case. Even if you are going to sell them on ebay.

Mining is a such complecated game like chess, where on one hand are the ASIC (now ASIC yes, not GPU) manufacters (who are mining for the full mf power in their plants) and on the other are your strategy how to buy cheap (BTC or ASIC, no matter) and sell with some expensive interest.

Btw, I'm watching for the interesting cheap proposals miners in ebay and ali almost every day. Yeah, I'm a quite low now in a budget, but I can afford to buy some "hexes" 30Gh+ for 50-60$ + 15-20 delivery costs. Why??? I'm never ROI with them, because the delivery is so long to Russia from US, but I'm funky loving that small machines. May be I can buy a full computer instead to mine X11, X13 or even Scryot-N?.. Why not? Credit organisations will make their ROI faster ha-ha I'd love too, but I have a free power cord in my room, I'm not interested in computer! I like these machines which are blinking with ssh access leds power-cord-webs.

So, everyone chooses what his heart whants this time. But brain understands that this is wrong. That's like smoking may be...

So, let there be punk-rock and BTC! Oi!

If you had, things would have been different.

That's what bugs me about statements like this. It's not "If I got my miner 3 months earlier", it's "If I had gotten my miner and NO ONE ELSE HAD GOTTEN THEIRS 3 months earlier".... That doesn't make sense.

The pizza thing is the same. Yes it was a 10,000 bitcoin pizza, but if it had never been bought then Bitcoin would not have made CNN that first time and it would have gone the way of flooze or whatnot. It's because the person bought the stupid pizza that we are where we are.

Seriously, you can't change the past without affecting the present so don't bother.

C

IF ONLY I had known in December 2008 what I know now about Bitcoin, and how to mine it, buy it, and buy/sell on the major price pops and dips, I would have hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least, I could possibly even be a billionaire from nothing but Bitcoin.

It drives me crazy to think about it and "WHY didn't I know about it THEN?!?!?!?!?!"   

Exactly.  I can't help but think of the opportunity cost though, that I would have a lot more BTC if I had saved them instead of spent them on miners.

I invested in mining equipment on three separate occasions since April 2011.  GPU's, FPGA's, and ASIC's.  Looking back, in every instance, I would have been better off just buying BTC instead of mining equipment.

That said, I still have some BTC, and I still expect it to continue rallying long term, so I am excited for the future!  I can't "if only" my life away. 

That's exactly the same post as you wrote to me, do you just wait till thet question comes so you can paste your text?

Here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7850340

It all depends on the price of hardware. Maybe you will be able to get some cheap antminers, i have seen some guy selling them in bulks of 20 pieces for 230$ per piece, which could be ok, but still not good enough. If you find a good deal your ROI might be positive. Remember that guys selling hardware rather mine themselves than sell for cheaper than ROI.

The difficulty will increase since the ASICs were sold pretty fast. When more miners are in, the higher the difficulty rise. If everyone got their ASICs, it is possible that the total hashrate will increase and difficulty will also rise.

Chopstick, you have a different notion of ROI than what most miners envision.

Buying a miner for 10 BTC of fiat funds and mining 8BTC on it is a net loss - even if the coin goes to $1,000,000 per coin.

If you buy the miner for 10BTC and you mine 12BTC that is a +ROI, but very few miners did/do that.

If you're mining until the miners don't pay for themselves in power then you're never going to see anything close to ROI unless you have free or really cheap power.  However, if you time it right it's really easy to sell it way overvalued and make your money back.  You also are going to need to buy in bulk to get a decent price on it, so small miners are really out of the game at this point.  Unless you're putting down 10-20k on hardware you'll be spending way too much.

tl;dr not unless you have a lot of money and cheap power, then maybe

if you believe in the future of bitcoin and that it will hit 10K or more, then technically everyone here will make ROI assuming they hold their coin. The question is whether or not you would have made more bitcoin just from outright buying coins as opposed to mining.  Making lots of $$$ off mining in the short term is a very difficult if not impossible thing to do now.

The S3 boat has sailed since they have already sold 3 batches.  By the time you get 1 now you'll be at least 1 difficulty behind.

I believe antminer s3 is the closest to ROI if the difficulty did not increase much like the last one.

Overprice is a complicated word. If the asic companies priced it for less then more people would mine, difficulty would go up, and more people would complain about "not making ROI"

And people would buy the miners for less, then sell them on Ebay for "more" and pocket the difference. Who is adding more value here, the company who makes it or the middleman who marks it up for profit?

The root problem is Bitcoin mining is a perfect marketplace where the cost of entry is low and profits are not possible to make. That is a flat fact, and it is the lack of this kind of understanding that drives 99% of the Bitcoin angst here. :-)

Wait, we should build a miner powered by BITCOIN ANGST! :-)

ASIC sellers always overpriced their machine. Even if your $/Gh level is cheap, people would also be buying one of those hardwares and difficulty would rise easily. You also have to consider about the efficiency and the expected lifespan. Cooling may also be a problem.

btc roi is  meh.   if you have 10 btc today july 14th 2014  it is worth 6300 usd.

 if you have 7 btc Nov. 2013  it was worth  about 7700. 


 So   the guy with 7btc  then and 10btc now made a btc profit of 3 btc.

but he lost 1400.

Mining gear is about active investment .  buy and hold is about passive investment. 

 completely different  don't compare them it is a trap.

They key is cheap power and your $/Ghs ratio.  If you can attain a farm larger than 5Th/s under $1/Ghs for under $.10/Kw you should ROI in around 90 days,and turn a small profit before having it flatten out and turn negative.

No, that's nowhere near the 30-45 you'd like to see, but still, it will at least return something.  Plus if you liquidate the equipment after you're ahead of the game.

Not everyone can assemble that type of a farm for themselves easily, so that takes they hobbyist out of it.  But any semi-pro should be able to do it if they line up things properly.

This would hurt no one except the customers who had preordered the ASICs. The customers would have to wait longer for their orders to be filled, while the manufacturer would simply have to bear a small increase in their production costs as it does not cost very much to build these machines. The major costs are in the R&D phase of production.

That's a good idea! We need just another 14 Ocean's friends   and... Salma Hayek, e.g., to distract the guards  
Why 14? But who then will carry out all the miners from the data center lol

Prefer the last one 

ASIC? any old miners wont be profitable anymore, yeah... with this kind of diff.
i suppose, u guys just place it in ur garage, or use it as a heater
its not worth it 

Mmmmmm.... no, I like my way better.  Your way would make me smile, but my way would put cash in my pocket.

Or, instead of taking the ASICs, find their wallets and transfer all the BTC to my wallet!

You don't treat crime with crime.

What you mean to say is you would like to hear a story:
Of how the management one of these companies went to jail for mail fraud/deceptive advertising
Of how one of the CEOs of the company got pancreatic cancer
Of how one of the CEOs was electrocuted to death by their private farm

Something along those lines would be nice.

I'd love to read a story about someone breaking into one of these ASIC manufacturers and stealing a ton of ASICs.  I'd consider it fair payback for all they have stolen by mining with the ASICs for months before filling the pre-orders.

You earned as many BTC as it would have cost you when you bought the KNC in just 23 days?  I find that impossible.

You mean you ROIed in fiat?  That's possible, but only if BTC went up and you actually liquidated the coin.

I wouldn't expect much of this anymore. You would need a really low electrical cost. As more people are into the mining game, difficulty would increase at a faster rate.

My two cents in your conversation, guys. I've bought a single 5-chip gridseed in 04.2014 for 200 bucks. All I earned is 0.1 BTC. My thoughts are: if you wishh to get your ROI you should invest 5-10k $. But as for the small miners, you will never ROI.

I don't doubt that either heh

Last year, asics were ahead of the difficulty curve. My kncminer in December ROI'd in 23 days. These days you would be hard pressed to get your ROI in less than 45 days.

Maybe we will see some better equipment towards year end. These Chinese manufacturers are going to drive intense competition in 2015 for bitcoin and scrypt mining.

While we would all love that I doubt any company would ship a miner that would return that quickly.  If it had that much potential then it would just "sit" on their shelves a few more days, you know, a little more burn in testing would be needed 

I recently liquidated a large portion of my asic farm, partly to invest in some more efficient gear later on. The mining gear that is out right now doesn't provide a good ROI.  I figure the sweet spot would be around $100 a day, 30-45 day ROI, so you would be looking at 6 to 9Th/s for around $5k.   No one is making equipment in that class for that price, it's about double that price at this point.

I was recently at a bitcoin conference and was talking to a guy who had built a mining farm in washington state where power is cheap. He invested about $400k in mining equipment late last year, his total farm is 11Th/s.  He realized around March this year, that he's never going to profit because he didn't really understand difficulty and for Q1 bitcoin was in the $300-$400 range.

I would expect to see more of the semi-pro miners turn off gear before the 4th quarter and look to either A) just buy bitcoin or B) launch a service or product that is bitcoin related.

If your power is free you have a better chance of getting +ROI but some miners like the SP30 will be negative even with free power - their pricing is just too high to begin with.

The difficulty doesn't need to increase at a high rate for a miner to be unprofitable.  The miner just needs to cost too much up front relative to how much it will earn.  If all the manufacturers cut their pricing in 1/2 then pretty much every miner (except BFL Mondarch) would ROI.  The problem is that as miner gets close to being a good buy tons of people jump on it and drive said difficulty higher.  Vicious circle.

It may or may not last forever, however, we are all certain that difficulty will increase very fast so that it cannot be profitable any longer for that ASIC.

Wrong, your ASIC don't mine forever, it will break one day...

I remember staying awake the whole night before they went on sale constantly refreshing, finally collapsed mid-day and took a 1 hour nap and awoke in a panic - I was able to get a pre-order in, I was about the 50th order and I paid with 210 BTC because the first day they said BTC payments took president over wires and checks. I thought if I could get my miner in a couple of months and be home to mine the second it comes I would be rich (even with $7 BTC).  13 months later the bastards delivered the useless miner. I lost sleep and 210 BTC to get back 15BTC and a bunch of lies.

I even stayed awake all night for Avalon Batch 2 but failed to get one because of the stupid errors.  FML

Can't really blame him he unlike so many others would be one of the first people to order from BFL
Before the douchbaggery when they still seemed a bit legitimate as a company lol.

I think he must have been in line for the preorder for the preorder, right?

really? 

ASIC miners inbuilt into cars, now that would be interesting. Basically a 1kW alternator that stores power into a separate ( deep cycle ) battery when a car is either braking or coasting downhill thus not incurring any extra fuel bill. 1kW inverter then turns the miner on until the battery level drops to a minimum level. All it would need is a cellphone data connection and there you go......a rapidly depreciating capital purchase item ( miner ) inside an even more rapidly depreciating capital purchase ( car ).

But the mining hardware, when it's working is pretty funny as usb antminers "when fun > ROI"

No slashka, there's nothing to think about there.  You and the person who told you that.  There's either one or two idiots there, Im not sure who it is yet.....

That sounds pretty silly.

C

About ASICs. Somenone told here in a forum that an ASIC is more profitable then a simple car. If BTC is your hobby and you can use the city transport, then you can buy ASIC instead of a car. Such a comparison I heard here... Don't know if it's a tottaly true, but there is something abount to think...

Honestly, if it wasn't for mining, I'd have ZERO interest in BTC today. After @home mining is dead, I might keep a few BTC in a wallet for shits-n-giggles. But I'm certainly never going to buy another BTC on an exchange under any circumstances.

Is the end of @home mining the end of BTC? Maybe.

Bad thinking: They weren't worth anything back then. It's the 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza argument, that's what they were worth then, this is what they are worth now.

*Exactly*! Simply mining is not going to make profits, what you need to do is have an angle that adds value.

What I did was take my little single, use my skills on SMD rework, and added 3 chips. Bingo, had a 20gh miner in November. That helped. Then I did the same thing for other people, charging them a bit but never more than what it was worth plus something. People were happy. Then others who had chips marked them way up. Bye bye business, now they are sitting on a lot of worthless chips :-)

Note: It never pays to be too greedy.

Other people brought hosted locations with extra power to the table. Some brought that cool water cooling or immersion techniques to cool the 110nm blades. Those ideas added value.

So the question is what value are you bringing to the community? Figure that out and there is your profit.

I really should work on other miners or something. Or fix more pocket watches for Bitcoin.

450 BTC?  Over $450,000 at peak price.  $280,350 at todays prices.  Damn, they gave it to you hard!  Hope they used Vaseline!  Look at those two boxes and think "$280,000 dollars, $280,000 dollars, $280,000 dollars........

Might as well turn them back on and let them run, what do you have to lose at this point?

A friend of mine wants to try mining.  I told him not to BUY an ASIC.  PM me for his address.  You pay shipping.  

Lightfoot - you've got to have an angle.  You've got to find a way to get over on the system.  If all you are going to do with BTC is accept them for purchases just like cash, then how do you get ahead of the game like that?  How do you end up with more BTC value than cash value?  Only if the BTC price spikes after you have the BTCs.

Bought 2 BFL 60GH/s ASICs on June 23 2011.  Paid 450 BTC.  They've not even generated half that, and I turned them off a month ago because they stopped making enough to cover electric costs.  1/10 would not buy again.

The problem is quite simple: Bitcoin is a perfect market for mining. Therefore it is *impossible* to make a profit in the traditional sense of the word. Yes you can make money for awhile, but true profits are not possible due to the nature of the protocol and the low cost of entry.

It is a queen's race. Provide services and use bitcoin for what it should be: transactions.

C

Then you just made the hardware manufacturer ROI 

They build a miner for $200 and sell it for $600, they just made a 3x profit (maybe more if they "test mine")

And what happens if your power isn't free?  Like for most people?

If your power is free you ROI 

You cannot be optimistic on ASICs.  There is only room for pessimism.

The ASIC makers build them and mine with them until their productivity slows down, then they announce the "new bigger better faster" ASIC model, and sell those very ASICs that they just determined were no longer profitable!

Does no one see this but me?  This is exactly what I would do if I owned an ASIC company!  It is all about making money, and if I could mine with ASICs until their rate of return dropped off and then sell my now-obsolete miners to a bunch of dumbasses and claim it was the newest fastest model, I certainly would!

The math does not lie, you cannot ROI with any new ASIC!  And what if BTC price drops?  Then where does that leave you?

STOP BUYING ASICS!!!!!  You are throwing your money away!

Throw some BTC to ME if you must!  I need it to help pay for my wedding in October!

My BTC address --->  12eBRzZ37XaWZsetusHtbcRrUS3rRDGyUJ

Yes, if the difficulty increment slow down like this time..

Difficulty slowing down is close to impossible though, most ASIC companies are developing better and better ASICs and big miners with super low electricity cost is coming in the game.

Agree, but lets be alittle optimistic and hope that the difficulty slow down which the ASIC companies didn't expect. Then there might be a profit.

ASIC companies wouldn't sell their ASICs if it was more profitable for them to mine with them, lol.

The sole exceptions being the very first startups that needed funding to begin R&D and manufacturing of ASICs (i.e. Avalon batch 1, somewhat for batch 2, then batch 3 was nonsense, like all the rest)

ASIC manufacters will always have profits and ROI from the asicminers.

"People" mining isn't the real problem. It's people buying miners from corporations who then use the profits to fund massive mining operations.

The home/hobbyist miner is nearly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We simply do not have the economies of scale and the access to cheap mining gear that large-scale mining operations have. We are all doomed to obscurity in just a few short months.

And, people keep thinking that if they buy the bigger better faster ASIC, they will make money or even get their ROI back.

When in reality, all they are doing is making the difficulty rise even faster, thus reducing the rate of ROI for them and everyone else trying to mine BTC.

People need to just STOP buying ASICs altogether!

If you are that dead set on throwing your money away, just send it to me.

My BTC address --->  12eBRzZ37XaWZsetusHtbcRrUS3rRDGyUJ

Impossible, better and better ASICS are coming out now. The difficulty wouldn't stop increasing.

Agree, but assuming the revenue is getting closer and closer to electricity bills makes me wonder if the difficulty might halt for awhile.

Difficulty increases about 10% every 10 days. You have to take that into account. You most probably didn't take that into account. After punching that into the calculator, it is never expected to ROI.

I found the calculator and found out  i can actually gain with a hash rate of 180 GH
Power cost per time frame    65.75 USD
Revenue per time frame    292.05 USD
Less power costs    226.31 USD

Nope.
You should check a mining profitability calculator before buying any ASIC.

How fast do you want to make the profit?

I would recommend you to check my sig, but I am sure there will be some trolls that will bully me for that so I won't.

I think this post really underlines that in today's environment mining is simply buying bitcoins a different way.  It was one thing a couple of years ago when you could just point your gaming GPU at bitcoins and make some extra money.  But with the rise of ASICS those days are all gone.  By mining I guess your coins are also a bit more anonymous but you are still basically relying on a price move up to make it profitable.

I wonder what the very long term effect this has on the health of this ecosystem, once the shortsightedness wears off from any block rewards that is and only transaction fees are processed.

Seems like the terms used came from a slick marketing campaign, very ingenious I would have to say.

Bitcoin/bitcoin to me is not a store of value but a means to transmit/move value around.

The ASICs I bought will never ROI, I knew that when I bought them. I wanted to learn how this all worked at a very deep level. The only thing I see distributed about this whole process is the Ledger, all other aspects are centralizing.

I got in when BTC was in the cents range with FRN/USD and know what a debt based monetary system is.

Will I buy more ASICs? Sure since this is a hobby to me, more blinking lights! I combine this hobby with experimentation with apparatus you can find on PESWiki and at local Maker meetups. On that site you will find a startup venture with a process for making gold, was only a mater of time since we can already make just about anything else.

8 )

enhu - If you are really that stupid that you would even think to ask this question, then yes, you should go ahead and buy ten antminers.

Ordered 4 Jally's in June 2013 totalling 1096 USD. Could 've bought 8 BTC for that, which would now be worth over 5000 USD.

Think the little shits have mined maybe 0.5 BTC (bad power supplies, cubes going 'dead' or 'sick' all the time)...not sure exactly, as some of it was other SHA coins. So unless BTC suddenly becomes 15x more valuable, no. I will not buy ASICs again and wish I never had.

Sure I'm not one of them but I'm about to buy an antminer in hopes to gain. should i buy or not?

I have been watching people throw money down a bottomless pit for a year now, by continuing to buy ASICs.  

Through greed, inability to math, and just plain believing the hype, ASIC makers are making a fortune, and people are setting up ASIC miners at home, and hoping for an ROI that never happens, much less a profit.

Are any ASIC miners making a profit these days?  I am willing to bet the answer is no.  And if any are making a profit, I am sure it is nowhere near what you hoped for.

So tell me, if you knew then what you know now, and after comparing the amount of mining money you have now to what you had before you placed your ASIC order, would you still buy it?

I'll bet most of you would not have bought the ASICs, and would have either stuck to GPU mining BTC or Scrypt coins.

With your greed and mindless buying of SHA-256 ASICs, look at what you have done to Bitcoin mining.  You have utterly destroyed it.  The difficulty has gone so high that you have to invest thousands of dollars to even have a slim chance at ROI, and as more greedy miners come after you and buy more ASICs and drive the difficulty higher and higher, now by BILLIONS every 12 days or so, your chance for ROI is eliminated.

BTC price has been fairly stable in the $400-$650 range for most of this year.  I know, you are saying it could go up, but it can also go down just as easily.  Even if BTC went to $2000, how many of you would make enough of a profit that all the expense and hassle and waiting and hoping was worth it?