Topic: Did you get ROI for your mining equipment? (Read 2749 times)

It really is just a tough time overall for both mining and Crypto overall with this non stop Price drop.

People say just keep holding it and never spend it, but how is that possible if you electrical bills to pay or better yet mortgage, rent, medical, food, school etc...

Anybody here that doesn't care about the fiat price of Bitcoin is delusional, as it plays an enormous factor.

The largest cloud mining Cex.IO had to shut down it's door because of the low BTC price.

Until fiat just completely up and dies off, BTC's value will be forever tied to it for both mining and practical uses.

I am certainly glad I didn't buy BTC with fiat when it was at $900-1100. But I'm ecstatic that I bought a lot of mining gear with BTC at that time! There is no guarantee of success when buying BTC with fiat and speculating on long term price increase. Recent history shows ample proof of that. There has to be a lot of victims because of the tumble from $1100 to $200 over the past year (and a couple months).

IMO, anyone using BTC to buy mining gear now with the exchange rate so low is a fool. And using fiat is just as bad if not worse. I recently bought 2 SP20s during the group buy sale. That was foolish on my part but I just had to have those cool looking Spondoolies machines. 

Can't argue with that.  Your approach profitted handsomely, and is a good method in the current climate.  Your way is the right way to profit and ROI now.  Buying any miner now with BTC, is just plain dumb, then using fiat, wire, or paypal to cover costs.  Then naturally you recoup your fiat with BTC mined and the BTC resale of the equipment.

I'm hoping (dumb me) and banking on the continued development and adoption and improvement of the ecosystem of Bitcoin  overall.  I've mined my good share, but once difficulty rose to a level I could no longer compete or cover costs, I had no choice to liquidate my hardware.

If BTC price ever rises to it's pre Gox days, then I may even indulge in a miner once again, just to get that residual income daily (buying miner in Fiat of course).

When I bought my first Antminer S1s and Dragons in early 2014, I ROI'ed in BTC for the first time after buying it in BTC.  Nowadays, it's not possible for the BTC in/BTC out method, though Fiat in/Fiat out is still doable for sure.

Agreed, profit-potential is generally greater if you purchase BTC outright as it would take an unlikely set of circumstances (especially given current ones) to generate more BTC than mining.

We both agree that we can't know future price movement.  But, let's consider the two main options we're focusing on: 1) We can buy BTC, and 2) We can buy a miner instead.

Currently, we are in a down market.  If at any point during the past year someone purchased BTC (and didn't successfully day-trade with it) and held it, they would have lost money.  Similarly, if they had purchased a miner with BTC, virtually all will have lost money.  The chance for ROI over the past year given these conditions is/was essentially 0%.

I've purchased several miners with fiat during the past year, and every single one of those achieved >200% ROI.  In other words, they were the best decisions I could have made at the time.  Pretty much anyone who has purchased a miner with fiat during the past year would have done far better than those who purchased BTC outright or bought a miner with BTC.

Basically, we agree on a lot of things, but the point I keep emphasizing is that, generally, buying a miner limits the range of potential gains but also losses, and therefore carries less risk in many ways.

Your approach to things isn't wrong, I'm not disputing the fiat approach to things.  It's the current economic world we live in.

If the approach is to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible, then it is wrong, however.

Responding sequentially:

1) First of all, when the price of btc falls, the fiat cost of miners also decreases.  Second, speculation exists to varied degree.  How much you believe in your speculation significantly determines your investment strategy and how much risk you are willing to take.  Buying a miner can be a way to carry less risk under not so uncommon conditions.

2) The cost of BTC in and of itself has absolutely no bearing on ROI. By this I mean that you can theoretically profit at any price level above $0.

3) Simple math for ROI, dude.  Fiat in <= fiat out

4) Uh, no, you're wrong. If you pay $500 for a miner and mine 1 BTC and sell the btc for $920, then your profit is $420 (excluding other expenditures).  If you buy with fiat, then profits are tracked in fiat.  If you buy with BTC, then profits are tracked in BTC.

The flaw in your reasoning is that you are making an advisement based upon the assumption that the price will *certainly* be higher in the future.  But what if the market goes down?  If you buy BTC and the price goes down, you *always* take a loss.  But with a miner it is possible to get >100% in a down market.  Also consider that you still have the value of your hardware.

5)  Sure, you could buy more than 2 BTC at these prices,  but if the price falls then you have 2 less valuable BTC.  And, if the price goes down, difficulty can go down and you mine more BTC.

6) I've owned numerous rigs and ASICs that have achieved 100% ROI *solely* due to the fact that I either paid with fiat directly, or paid wth BTC but immediately repurchased the amount I spent.  In a few cases, the difference was >300%.

So what is the point in mining ?
Surely theres a rig that can be built that could pay for itself and earn real money

Wrong.

You didn't consider the fact that you can get a miner DIRT cheap these days and if you have FREE electricity you have a higher chance of making money then buying BTC and hoping you sell it at a higher price then you bought it for.

Also the ASIC after 6 months or 12 months you can re-sell to get some % of your money back.

You don't buy miners when the price slumps, you just buy BTC, if you're speculating on a price hike.

You DO buy miners when the BTC fiat price is high, as it's more prohibitive to buy the coin outright, then it is to generate small amounts of it daily in hopes of making your fiat investment back.

Simple math for ROI, dude.  BTC In<=BTC Out

Buying a miner now with fiat, no matter which miners, you'll net negative BTC.  If you bought a miner for $500, mine back half a Bitcoin and Bitcoin spikes to $920 a Bitcoin, you're thinking, "WOW, I made back my investment!"   WRONG!

If you had bought $500 worth of Bitcoin, you'd have over 2 Bitcoins at today's price.

It's throwing good money at bad investments.

Bad logic.  There are many reasons why buying a miner could be better than buying BTC.  If people really believe that BTC will definitively increase in value, then the best option would seem to be selling everything you own for BTC that isn't essential to your immediate survival.

Obviously, that would be an unbelievably risky move, so basically anyone will factor in at least *some* level of risk.  For those who don't mind risk, buying BTC outright may be preferable.  However, if you hate risk, buying a miner can be a much safer option, especially in a bear market.  The trade off for that extra security is decreased profit potential over the long haul.

As always, as it was in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015....if you believe the price will rise, just buy the Bitcoin.

You're throwing away money and wasting time buying miners, if you're doing it strictly on speculation.

Too many factors against mining: electrical costs, downtime, upkeep, maintenance, cooling, difficulty, pool variance

Just buy BTC at the moment, it's at a discount price!  

Bingo!  If history repeats, it's a great time to buy a miner with fiat.

The other benefit to buying a miner with fiat is that it is the *only* way to stand a chance at getting >100% ROI in a downtrend, even if it happens to require a very specific set of conditions (and it does).

It is now a good time to buy miners with fiat, if you believe than BTC price will raise. good way to get positive ROI sooner.

Its a cool website. It would of been nice if there was an option to conver the BTC to USD at the current date and then you could easily estimate how much you would of made.

offcource difficulty for bitcoin mining is dropping but price dropping also so in the terms if you bought your miners with fiat then its not profitable for mining but if you bought it with btc when price was higher then possible you are getting better return for your BTC investment

I did ROI... but only because the miner I had was offered Had a Gridseed 5-chip lying around when they were first released. Also helped setting up Gridseed rigs, and all of them had ROI, as they were set-up early in the game

Here's a good site to guesstimate(excluding electrical costs) what you put in, and what you mined back:

http://retrocalc.net/

I bombed with my first miner, the Asicminer BlockErupter Blades, back in November/December of 2013.  Sold it on eBay to minimize the loss.

The only ROI I've ever received with miners was the Antminer S1s and first Dragon 1TH/s miners back in early 2014.  Mined to about even, from February to mid summer 2014, then sold off the farm for profit.

That's about the only real way to be on the plus end, the resale of equipment.

I think hardest to ROI was A2's.  You had to rent them though a site to make it back, and also depended on how much you spent as priced dropped in big amounts.

Here, you go. Directly off my old spreadsheet.

From 5/31/2013 to 11/9/2013  

4.65404113    generated BTC with 1 Radeon 7950 ($300), a couple of other paid for graphics cards (from my gaming machine - nVidia cards actually...go figure), and 5 block erupters ($150ish each).

Total outlay - $1250 (added power supply in).

Average BTC price around that time was about 200ish ($100 to $300ish).

BTC price on 12/10/2013 was $933. (when I got rid of the BTC  )

I leave it to you to do the math for ROI.

Things since then have not been anywhere near that good, but still making ROI. Just takes longer, that's all.

I did very well on my Bitfury rigs, ASICMiner Blades, KNC Mercury (with additional modules) and early S1s.

I paid cash/credit only for the Original Neptune, the first few Bitfury cards and several ASICMiner Blades. I also had a bunch of the AM USB sticks. I put every Satoshi earned back into buying Bitfury H boards while they were shipping from stock. I also bought 3 S1s from the early batches.

I had a positive ROI within a few months and the earnings from late 2013 to mid 2014 paid for every piece of gear I've bought since then. I even had to exchange BTC to pay most of my personal bills for several months while my business was transitioning and not bringing in much revenue in the middle of 2014.

Everything peaked for me before the 2nd half of 2014. I exchanged my KNC Neptune preorder for those gawd-awful FrankenJups. But it probably worked out better for me. I was hashing much sooner than those who kept their Neptune preorders and I was sent double the amount of hashing boards because of the terrible state that the FJs arrived in after shipping. I bought two extra controllers and was hashing with about 4.5THs just from the FrankenJups alone.

I was very lucky though. I got in early before difficulty was sky-high. And I paid for most of my equipment (pre-orders and in-stock) while BTC prices were astronomical. For example, the Neptune/FrankenJups preorder only cost ~10BTC because the price for Bitcoin was ~$1000 at the time. So by today's BTC price, it only cost $2500 for 4.5THs... not bad for Q2 of 2014!  


Edit... I forgot about the BFL Little Single ($700) that I preordered with a credit card. Of course it arrived very late but I mined with it for a month and then sold it in September 2013 on eBay for $2400. That was a nice return on investment, lol.