Topic: discouraging small miners only to quell compition? (Read 1357 times)

At the risk of splitting hairs, you labeled this thread in terms of the "competitive sort", inquiring if there was some concerted effort to discourage said competition.  I have no problem with that or indeed, anything you've said, but I can certainly see how someone reading it could misunderstand the question.

Anyway, good luck in your endeavors!   

Thanks cyberpinoy, I was beginning to think no one understood my question. I've managed to get my little USB stick up and mining, even making some fractional coin, so I think it's about time to just let it churn away in the basement and leave the competitive sort around here alone for awhile.

I think the disconnect is "small" vice "hobby." 

I am a total noob, learning as I go, with the goal of turning this into a "small" mining operation one day: something from which I can draw a modest income.  I care a great deal about Hashing power per KW, ROI at price per hash per difficulty, etc.  As a "hobby" this doesn't apply IMO, because you don't care if your cash flow ever exceeds your operational costs, nevermind your cost of living.

Now when someone posts a question like "How can I get my 700MHHz Radeon GPU to kick out X KH/s for solo mining," it doesn't sound like they're asking from the perspective of a hobbyist: they want hashing power, as much as they can, presumably to maximize yield.

You really can't fault experienced miners who, when reading stuff like this, feel compelled to offer a dose of reality with thier advice.

yes winning a block with solo mining using a 2gh stick would take about 711 years with the current difficulty rate and average luck.  but cost would be very small to try.

 and if the op wanted to spend a few hundred bucks  they could buy 2 of these


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/asicpuppynet-terminus-moonlander-2-2pacs-in-stock-btcltcethbch-612390

point one at a pool and one at solo mining  one of these with standard luck would win a block in 20 years or so.

but these are a bit messy to set up.  I am going to get 2 of them and try to do a post with a half dozen photos and shots of setup. 

Also realize solo mining BTC would be like winning the lotto don't count on it happening on a usb stick to often....
 
I do agree a lot of people will try to scare you off from mining.  Personally I enjoy mining.  It's a fun hobby, one hopefully make cash on.  But always do ROI on equipment.  If you have cheap electricity it helps a lot.  If not there are hosting also hosting you dont have the noise.   

As far as easy profit buying BTC and a few altcoin's if you are feeling like gambling are the easiest way.  But many like myself enjoy the mining.   

The instructions to solo mine are very simple and included in the readme. I can only direct people to the readme but I can't force them to read it.

you are completely correct.    all you need is 2 usb sticks to learn btc mining.

use one at a friendly easy pool like bitminter.com

 and here is a little secret use to second usb stick to solo mine.

  solo mining is hard to do   .  and solo mining is hard to win.

but 1 usb stick is 10-14 dollars it spends 2 watts of power and if you set it up correctly   each and every block could be won by you.   every 7 minutes give or take a minute a new block pops up.  about 216 a day.

a block is 25 coins  at todays price   that is more then 15k usd.

I encourage you to get 2 usb sticks and mine.. the one on bit minter  will earn under 10-20 bucks .  the solo mining stick most likely will never win a block but you could.  if you stay at the level I mention it would work.  you spend under 30 bucks maybe earn 10 bucks with the one on bit minter.(maybe only 5 dollars) .  or maybe hit a block.  and laugh all the way to the bank.


ckolivas   wrote cgminer and his program would allow you to mine solo.   All new people that want to join in.  and not spend a lot of money should do this buy 2  usb stick for about 30 bucks  and spend 4 watts a day in power.  (not counting the pc you keep turned on)   In fact you can only mine when the pc is turned on.

It is harmless fun if you stay at the levels I mention.

I try to promote the mining game at  the low level .  small amount of money put in.

 100 maybe 200 usd tops. I do some mining sell a little gear on this site and sell some on ebay. I think I got about 100 people started in mining.

    right now solo mining is really hard to win a block with 1 usb stick.  but what the heck you could maybe 1 time in 50 years.  your cost to have that small chance would be low.

Cholivas  I have been lazy teaching myself to mine solo.  you could really do some good with a real easy way to do it.  I need to play more with the software you wrote.  As I think my 2 usb small price entry to mining idea is good for new people.

That's true, but trains can get expensive as well, but its a hobby that has been long established i mean years and years compared to mining, I think some are in it for the money, and with more people getting involved the difficulty increases meaning for some people they have spend more to make more. For that reason I can see why they may be some. But I think the majority are concerned that people are letting themselves in for more than they bargained for. However I feel that perhaps if every one was just mining purely for hobby and not for profit, I think that some of the bigger machines would not be needed and the difficulty would decrease but such is the way of the world   

I've never been much for trains, but train people do seem to be more willing to help/encourage folks new to the hobby. And there's a ton more manuals for trains.

I'm not sure I agree that there's an effort to "scare" anyone; rather, I think, people on this forum who've "been there, done that" are trying to pass along some hard earned wisdom. 

I started mining in about nov/december last year,
All I had was a laptop and bought a usb block erruptor of e-bay, then my hobby slightly became an obsession from that I now have an S1 a block erruptor blade, about 5 U1 4 U2 (Purchased with mined BTC) 3 Bitfury and 1 Bi*fury. I started small but slowly getting bigger. I look at it its better then a train set. So in that regard if its something you want to do then do it, just be aware that you may put more money into it than get back. 

I was never planning a "viable business", just a little hobby. Those figures don't apply to me, they just reinforce my impression that profit-driven folks seem to be trying to scare the hobbyist out.

I have three S1's running 24/7, with a combined work factor of 540 GH/s.  Exclusive of power my 24 hr ROI from pool mining is approx 0.003 BTC.  Not bad for a 1,300 USD investment, but not likely to make me a viable business entity any time soon.


A viable micro business plan would look something like this:

At current difficulty you need at least 20 TH/s to average 1 BTC per day.  Assuming you pick up used Antminer S1's off EBay and over clock them to 200 GH/s, that hash rate will cost you 300 USD X 100 = 30,000.00 USD.  You will also need power supplies, switches, cables, etc to get everything up and running; again going to EBay, that's 300 USD X 50 = 15,000 USD for 800W power supplies and another 1,000 USD for switches, PCI and Cat5 cables.

Ok, you've spent 46k on hardware, now you need a place to put it  Retail space in a scary part of town will cost you maybe $5/SF/Year where I live, 4,000 USD per year for an 800 sqft storefront.  The commercial rate for power is $0.07/KWh here, so your 40KW mining array will cost you 24,500 USD per Year.  Then there's the difficulty factor increase: plan on adding a TH/s of capacity every quarter to stay in the game, an annual cost escalator of around 14,000 USD.


Bottom Line:
46,000.00 USD initial investment + 42,500.00 USD recurring costs;
est. annual income of 209,656.00 USD at current exchange rate (574.00 USD per BTC);
minimum exchange rate for positive cashflow = 129.00 USD per BTC (at 10 yr amortization of initial investment).

The simple fact is that there are only 2 sensible reasons to mine Bitcoin -- to secure the blockchain and to make a profit. If you are dead set on mining Bitcoin regardless of its profitability and/or are willing to purchase at least 250 Ghs of SHA256 mining power in order to make an acceptable RoI, then you are correct that mining Bitcoin with whatever hardware that you have available on-hand is a first step that you would have to get through. However, if you are simply trying to learn about mining in general, then no, you don't "start somewhere" by mining Bitcoin.

No, they're honestly trying to protect new people who come here thinking they're going to make money. Mining is not a profitable business, but as a hobby, where else can you buy computer hardware for a hobby that partially pays itself off? Most people think however they're going to magically recoup the costs of the hardware and then make bucketloads more when it's not remotely like that. I've been trying to warn people of it for ... well years now since I maintain mining software but people stopped listening a long time ago, convinced through some magic of the value of BTC rising that they'll make money.

There is one indisputable fact that people spend far too much energy trying to disprove by explaining it through value of exchange changing.

FACT: You cannot buy any bitcoin mining hardware that mines more bitcoin in the future than the amount of bitcoin you would have by simply converting dollars into bitcoin now.

The only way you can make a profit with mining hardware is to buy it, mine with it for a bit, and then sell it.

I've been reading a ton of stuff online (here and elsewhere) with the goal of learning to mine bitcoin, on a small scale. It seems the only advice out there for a "small scale" miner is "DON'T DO IT!" Are all these people just trying to stop competition? I understand that running just one little ASIC isn't going to make me rich, and probably wont earn enough to cover electricity, but a person's gotta start somewhere.