Topic: Bitmain's Released Antminer S9, World's First 16nm Miner Ready to Order - page 285. (Read 531178 times)

None of us really know what will happen. My number is very simplistic and based on the last halving event.

Phil, I think you've put more thought into the problem by trying to estimate the number of various models that will become unprofitable. That's definitely another way to look at it.

One thing I do know is that it's very tempting to be overly optimistic regarding difficulty speculation. After being burned early on, I try to be disciplined and pessimistic.

Although I too have been guilty of wiggling the difficulty down in the mining calculators, just to see if I can eke out ROI if the best case happens

Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a difficulty speculation thread though. Your difficulty guessing thread is the right place to talk about this.

I see the 1500ph becoming 1250ph.  but WTF do i really know?

My math had difficulty dropping to 77-78% of current with a slow pull up through September.

HOLD bitcoin until 800...

EASY ROI by November...

Am I wrong???

EDIT:  My electric is .058 -.096 KWH (variable spot market -- can spike higher if I'm not watching and careful)

This. Well said.

Needless to say, I'm not buying either B6 or B7 for precisely the reason that they are very unlikely to earn back the BTC put into them.

Sure the difficulty will go down after the halving (in under 17 hours at the time of this writing). But based simply on the history of the last halving, my guess is that we'll see no more than a 10% drop in difficulty over the next 30 days, then it will be back to where it is now. That won't be enough to pull in BTC ROI to the point where I'm comfortable.

I just wish that people would stop buying what is clearly an overpriced miner. Everyone who's doing that is just lining Bitmain's pockets with insane profit and delaying the inevitable price drop that the rest of us are waiting for.

Summer mining is not that bad it just takes finding out what you need in your area.  It is very location based as there are multiple way's for cooling, and different climates have best way's for them.

I sadly am not in a place where evaporation cooling works in my weather.  So I use lot's of CFM's of fan's in my mining area it took last summer to fine tune it in but this summer was easy with it all in place.   So really just takes once on setting up for summer.  And it depends on how many watt's of miners your running on how much heat you have to deal with.

If not a lot of miners much easier.  I have two big fan's and a professional gable fan that do good for my mining area.   Again goes back to fine tuning I had to get a professional gable fan as regular house one's were just not exhausting enough heat for amount of miners I run sometimes.  Here is my journey to find a good way to cool my miners - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/summer-mining-fansother-summer-equipment-1020826

Awesome setup Erumara!!!

THANKS for the IDEA!!!

Yeah -- it is EASY in the winter -- summer is when it is tough.

But, unlike those number crunchers who doom and gloom each and EVERY year -- I am just THRILLED to get the latest and greatest miners added to my hobby.  I've been mining since 2011, and although I've lost a lot of coin to Gox, Cloud Mining scam, blockchain, and others (not to be mentioned), I'm STILL way ahead.

It is a VERY PROFITABLE hobby -- unlike MOST hobbies.

If I lose THIS YEAR -- I'm STILL way ahead!!!

That is the way I look at it...

 

We actually had the venting changed in our house, with the heat from my bitcoin room in the basement being pumped into the air return of the first floor furnace and being directed into the sun-room above the bitcoin room.  Very nice in the winter, we actually had windows open almost all winter long (and we are in the mid-west, with winters around 32F and often below).  So either free heat and paid electricity for bitcoins, or expensive electrical resistance based heat and free electricity for bitcoins... lol.  Its once of the reasons I find calculating ROI tough.

Rare indeed, it's taken 4 months of running these miners before the wife even started to warm to the idea.
Of course it didn't help I had to tear open walls in the recently renovated basement to do so, but so far the tongue-lashing has been worth it.

Edit: Adding picture of "grounds for divorce" as she put it.

I've actually found myself at a different mental spot, probably delusional:  So long as my miners can produce enough BTC to buy the next round of technology (based on power consumption levels), and produces enough excess that I can cover the power used to do the first part, I'm happy.  If that excess allows me to buy a few things along the way with BTC, all the better.  So far, that has been the case for me.   Purse.io provides a convenient Amazon vector, NewEgg takes BTC directly, and so does Gary Johnson for President - good enough for me.  I do that with a power budget is about 9KW/hour, enough to roughly run (6) S7s and/or S9s plus a bit of older scrypt gear.

I judge my success when new technologies appear, so did so when the S7 came out, and again when the S9 came out.  This is a hobby for me, and my BTC balance is influenced by other things, like surprise profits on alt coins I created 2 years ago, but that is all part of the hobby.   e.g.  I've "wasted" a ton of money on techs that never paid out (remember Antminer U1s and GridSeeds?), won fantastically on others, and have some that only time will tell.  However, overall, both me and my spouse (who helps on the spending side) are happy.  In fact, my spouse encouraged my recent S9 B5 purchase, which I suspect is reasonably rare.

If I pay 3 BTC for the miner, the electricity cost doesn't change the original calculation.  Whatever percentage of the earnings has to be sold off along the way for fiat in order to pay for electricity doesn't change the fact that I still need to earn 3 BTC from the miner to ROI in the long term.  BTC to fiat exchange rates can complicate how much BTC has to be sold off along the way, but the long term amount of BTC that has to be accumulated remains the same. 

Otherwise we are back to another conversation that has been rehashed in this thread repeatedly which is the "buy BTC and hold" or "buy the miner" conversation.

My point is just that when someone posts some version of "these will never mine the BTC they cost, why are people buying them?" and then someone else posts about how buying the miner is gambling on BTC going up, they are having two different conversations.  Which is exactly what happened in the posts preceding this.

This sounds good and make a great deal of sense. The only flaw in the "BTC only" logic is that almost nobody has predictable operating costs (i.e. Electricty) that is priced in BTC. Hence for virtually everybody, the price of BTC impacts their profitability computations, even if you only care to use BTC as your metric.

But some of us already have BTC that we mined.  You buy these things in BTC so it makes sense to consider ROI in BTC.  If you guys are talking about buying BTC with dollars and then trying to ROI in dollars that is not the same conversation that other people are having here.

Except that we don't live in a static world.

Difficulty will decrease, price will rise, etc.

I've never regretted buying in early in the past, and expect this year to be no different.

Is investing in "penny stocks" a hobby?  Don't think so.  Mentality is likely similar.  Nobody is buying with a ROI hope at Today's prices, they are hoping the price rises.  You don't buy a $5 stock hoping it goes to $6, you hope it goes to $50.  Same thing here.

Yes, with BTC, there is the alternative of just buying the coin itself, but that is not nearly as much fun.  Its a paper transaction vs. having something you can see (and hear!).

I do not understand either. I have tried to picture multiple scenarios but none of them makes buying an S9 the wise move at these prices. They literally need to cut the price of the next batch in 1/2 for it to be at all even possible to imagine breaking even. Seeing how happy people are to be parted with their BTC in this thread it is apparent that mining is becoming a hobby and a form of nerd entertainment. It definitely is not profitable or even potentially profitable for anyone investing BTC at these prices.

LOL BTC3.2 for something that will never mine half that.

If you had %100 free electricity you could never ever ever come close to breaking even on this.

I see batches B6 and B7 are up for sale... And no decrease in price with halving 2 days away...

I think we have already seen our run up in BTC price from Sept to now from $230ish to $600ish.  Which is good money at the current reward rate on the S9, but after halving at these prices it will mean grinding it out.  ROI? I don't see any of these later batches ROI anytime soon since you didn't get the benefit of the bigger reward to recoup some of your investment.  Those that jumped on the B1 and B3 have the best shot of ROI and making some money.  The rest... Oh boy.  

If they don't drop the price there is no way the math works unless I am completely wrong about BTC price.  I guess anything is possible.    I will keep watching and see if the price of the S9 comes down to where it is realistic to think ROI in less than a year.  Just hoping maybe?  

Batch1 was 2400 USD + shippimg

https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=0002016052907243375530DcJIoK0654

B2  1985 USD
https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=000201606080945140191yC0JO150614

B3  2085 USD
https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020160615101405024dzgObks806F2

I also always bump up my transaction fee.  On my recent order, I did so until the slider indicated the transaction was likely to confirm in 3 blocks.

They are built the same, and I felt that prospective buyers should be aware.  That is why I started a separate thread on the matter, and am only answering questions regarding the situation on this thread.


You know what they say, when logic and reason fail it's best to resort to name-calling.