Topic: Bitcoin Arms Race Anxiety... - page 2. (Read 1528 times)

poor must not mine (i'm poor).
they must buy the final product (bitcoins).

simple.






















and wait the halving ...

Thing is, my electricity is already pretty cheap at 6 cents per kilwatt hour. But I know some people have access to electricity that is several cents cheaper... Yeah, maybe I should just get rid of it all and buy some BTC directly. :/

Op, so long story short, basically you are frustrated you you can't mine effectively and you can't earn 100BTC with your mining equipment in a fast and easy way? It is not easy anymore, solo mining is not profitable as it used to be. If I don't have access to cheap electricity and high end mining equipment I wouldn't bother to mine at all. You will better sell your mining gear and try to trade your btc.

You might have preferred it, but that doesn't mean that it made good sense financially if you had bothered to take the time to do the math.

How much did you spend buying hardware?  How much did you (or your mom) spend on electricity each month? How much time did you spend maintaining it all, how much heat in the summer, and how much is that time and comfort worth to you?

If you took all that money and spent it on purchasing bitcoins directly each month, how much bitcoins would you have today?  Sure, you acquired some bitcoins, but did you come out ahead by mining or would you have a lot more bitcoins if you hadn't bothered with the mining in the first place?

Bitcoin mining is a highly competitive business.  Unless you have access to very inexpensive resources (large amounts of highly efficient hardware, very low electricity costs, and very cheap cooling), you are typically going to end up with less bitcoins from mining than if you take the same amount of money each month and just buy the bitcoins directly.  Others that have access to those inexpensive resources can afford to run MUCH more mining power than you, and therefore can acquire a much larger percentage of the 3,600 new bitcoins that are created each day.  Since their costs are so low, they can turn around and sell those bitcoins at a profit where you'd be just barely breaking even (or even taking a slight loss).  They can turn those profits around and use them to increase their mining power even more, increasing difficulty and taking an even larger percentage of the daily bitcoins until there's nothing but dust left for you.

Over time, profitable mining will migrate to geographical areas with the lowest costs of electricity and cooling.  This is a simple fact of finance and mathematics. Some people will continue to mine at a loss as a hobby, but for most people that want to maximize the amount of bitcoins they can hold for a given amount of capital, the answer will typically be a bitcoin exchange.

Yeah, I do suppose that's true... For some reason, I guess I preferred the trickle of BTC income over getting them at once... On the other hand, I only made a larger investment now because I figured that BTC could only go up and that if it skyrocketed, I'd continue to mine anyway, but in the end, it'd probably just even out. On the other hand, I could always sell off my current units and then I'm well ahead since I've mined a bunch. :/

The thing is, you should have bought Bitcoins directly. I mean think of it this way. You bought miners to get the same amount of BTC you'd get if you had just simply spent the money on buying them.

Oh and P.S., I kind of want an Antminer S7 because the added power efficiency is going to pay for itself vs a bunch of S3's, and it'll be able to mine for far longer and still be profitable... But as always, no money to upgrade my arsenal.

Like I said, you guys know how it is.

So for the last few months... Hell, for the last year and a half, I've been trying to get as many bitcoins as I possibly can. Problem is, money is limited. Still, I'm in Bitcoin for the long haul, and hopefully, it'll be as big as some of us think.

I've never spend any money I didn't have on hardware, but had it not been for future investment, I would've spent that same money on a number of other things...

A few months ago, my goal was to eventually amass 100BTC. I only started in mid-2014 with a single S1 unit. Over time, I've gotten a bunch of S3's. But this whole thing has given me a whole lot of anxiety, to be perfectly honest. I'll only just about get to 10, let alone 100BTC...

Now I realize that rewards will halve in less than a year... And to meet my quota, I'd have to spend about 10k USD in hardware to ever hope to get to that level. I wouldn't mind it, but as a dude with a part time job who is going to college and living at home, this provokes a lot of anxiety. My mom hates the electric bill, which I can already barely keep up with, regarding my current setup because I compensate for it... And the heat... And there's no AC in our current place, so the summer is brutal. And there's only so many outlets I can use... You get the idea. A setup powerful enough to meet my goals is not possible in this location...

And on top of it, I have several units I just got in that I can't even get working because they're corrupted, or something... You can see my other thread for that, but some have said to reinstall firmware using the Serial port on these S3's, not that I know how. So if you know anything about doing that, it would be much appreciated...

But yeah, overall this is not looking good. 'Cause being relatively poor, I guess I have this grand expectation of hopefully riding this BTC thing far enough to be well-off one day... But not being an early adopter in this revolution, is nothing short of disappointing. And anxiety-provoking, especially with all the other stuff that I've gotta' juggle every day. I know a lot of you can relate... Just a rant, I guess...