Topic: DO NOT BUY GPUs to mine! You will not get your money back! - page 2. (Read 21049 times)

Yes, all the present GPU miners would love to keep GPU mining relevant but that is not going to happen just because they want it. There have already been enough ASICs pre-ordered and on their way to kill GPU mining for good. I listed them in moy other thread, but you have 2 batches of Avalon miners, plus hundreds of thousands of discrete chips, all the BFL pre-orders, ASICMiner USB and Blade sales, plus the 200TH ASICMiner is adding this summer. That is ASICs that are already coming. They were ordered long ago and just beginning to ship now. Even if a single new ASIC was never sold from here on out, GPU mining would still be dead. I don't think GPU mining can survive a couple hundred million difficulty and that is what we are going to see soon.


GPU mining can only live due to litecoin. But I believe litecoin will die sooner than later because it is purely used for speculation. You can't spend it anywhere and it offers 0 advantages over bitcoin. It's going to be a market of litecoin miners selling litecoins to each other. No one else buys them.

When ASICs are cheap and easy to buy within a week they won't be profitable anymore. The margins will be so low that only people with free electricity will even bother. Competition will drive the price down so they just barely make their money back, I'm guessing in a year or two. It will be a low margin grind and won't be much fun except for those who really enjoy mining for it's own sake.

You have maybe a month left of being able to mine with GPUs. No GPU you buy today will be able to pay for itself that quickly.

Yes, people will stop buying ASICs when they realize they aren't making any money with them because difficulty is way up there (in the several hundred million range).

The problem is that enough ASICs to hit that number have already been sold (but not delivered) and people will continue to buy them until the difficulty actually gets that high.

You have to compete with:
- Avalon batch 2 (just began to ship)
- Avalon batch 3 (shipping soon)
- ASICMiner USB and blades (blades available now, USB shipping soon)
- BFL 60,000+ orders (ok they may never ship all their orders, but they will ship enough to make an impact of difficulty)
- A couple of hundreds thousand discrete Avalon chips
- ASICMiner's claimed 200 TH they are adding this summer

All of those have already been paid for and are on their way. It's too late for GPUs.

GPus do waste energy and asics saves energy by a big difference which outweighs the reusability of the gpu in my opinion not to say i dont want to mine with gpu just my opinion becasue i dont have asics i have no choice.

ThatDGuy nailed it

ASICs may be coming, but pre-ordering is stupid because you can at least begin to mine right now with a GPU instead of having to wait/pray for deliveries. I am speculating that the wave of ASICs will drive up the difficulty rather quickly and as a result drive down the demand (people will quickly learn that ASICs aren't "money-printing machines"). The lower demand along with increased competition among suppliers (companies won't be "scalping" once they can efficiently bring more ASICs to the market and the demand is lower; maybe even new companies will come up with cheaper and cheaper designs) will cause the price of  ASICs to drop drastically. At that point, I will probably buy an ASIC, only if I can get a return on my investment.

But, putting my money in the hands of someone else when there are still nice profits to be made right now with GPUs is stupid. You are paying the price in terms of lost opportunity and paying a premium for something that will probably depreciate by 10-100x once production increases. I'm waiting for the cheap knock-offs, but in the meantime I'm keeping my money in my own hands and using GPUs to mine. If I really wanted to speculate, I would probably just buy btcs.

At 600 though, today's LTC value has them at about 96% of a Bitcoin.  The difficulty spike has followed the massive spike in value.  There's no way miners wouldn't shift for the sake of arbitrage.


While I think part of this is true, I think in the short term (1-1.5 years) you are not including two major factors in ASIC mining that will contribute heavily to how the mining aspect of cryptocurrency plays out:

• Ease of Acquiring

This is a big deal right now.  If you weren't already in the game and have some BTC, you cannot currently easily buy an ASIC miner.  Up until this point, mining was driven by the ability for someone technically capable to go online and spend fiat to either buy another CPU, or buy more GPUs and have them running within a week or two.  This is no longer the case, and until ASICs are put out by a few companies, shipping within a week, and selling for fiat - there will be a significant amount of miners who have a vested interest in keeping GPU mining relevant.

• Specificity of Application

Separately, it is no longer a trivial decision for a miner to decide to start mining by using an ASIC.  This isn't buying a CPU that you can use all the time and turn on to mine when you're sleeping.  It's not a GPU you can use when not mining for awesome graphics.  You can't resell an ASIC for anything other than Bitcoin mining - and if Bitcoin goes away, it's worthless.  This shifts mining from something that can be done by anyone to now a smaller group who is buying equipment for just that purpose and likewise will need a higher ROI to break even.

These two factors above will absolutely play a big role in the mid-term while the ease of acquiring ASICS works itself out.  Scrypt and LTC could go away, but I don't think that will be the case.


Overall, I think this is the most sound plan - one that I intend to follow, but only once I can sell my GPUs and have that sale money turned around to buy an ASIC in the same week.  Buying GPUs now is a riskier investment, but hardly a guarantee to be a failure either - it's impossible to say what a brand new fresh batch of speculators would do when LTC pops up on a big exchange and they want to diversify some of their investment in a coin that they can buy a large quantity of for cheap on a psychological level.[/list]

newer technology always declines in value faster

if the next series comes out, then the effect would be even more pronounced

right now you can buy a 7850 or 7870 and if you do the rebate and sell the games, then you could already sell the card used and make a profit on it (actually, i suppose the card would still be "new")

I think I side with the pessimists on this one.

I only started mining in March (besides a brief stint in 2010). Seeing the LTC difficulty go from about 60 to about 600 in less than 2 months was a depressing surprise. I knew difficulty went up quickly, but I didn't really get just how fast it went up until seeing it myself.

I don't think that BFL will ship in bulk, or over 5% of their orders. I think they'll run out of, or away with, the money (just my opinion.) But even with BFL out of the picture GPU mining is just about done.

There'll be more ASIC companies coming out. I think some of ya'll are in denial that we are at the start of the ASIC wave in earnest. As no one mines on CPUs hardly, no one will be mining in GPUs by the end of this year, I don't think...

Anyways I'm currently planning to sell my 5 video cards around mid-June, and put that money towards other Bitcoin  investments. I'm in Avalon batch 3 and plan to get into the next generation of ASICs whenever they become available.

Buying any new GPUs from this point forward, for mining, is not a good way to spend money IMHO.

Peer is an entity which participates in mining. Number of peers is a criteria that plays a role in support price level analysis. I thought as well that the ASIC will render GPU obsolete, but it didn't. Diff went up 5X during last couple of months.

It's almost paradoxical, number of peers rise, yet supply drops.

Technically, they're 1.9BTC, but I just rounded up to 2BTC, figuring in shipping. Shipping is probably actually more than that, so you're probably right.

what? It's all about the ghashes. What do you mean by "peers"? That has nothing to do with mining profitability. ASICs are already cheaper than GPUs when you look at from ghash/$. And it doesn't matter about the price anyways. Enough ASICs have already been sold to make GPU mining dead forever. Even if BFL never ships, the ASICs from ASICMiner and Avalon have already killed GPU mining. It's too late to upgrade to ASICs if you haven't already. Just sit back and watch the difficulty rise. You have maybe 2 months left of profitable GPU mining tops. Maybe only 1.

ROI on GPU is about 2-8 months for the last 3 years and it'll stay that way, it's not only the ghashes that counts in this game, but also a number of peers as a relevant factor... asics will never be as cheap as gpu and therefore percentage wise number of peers criteria will always be on gpu side... I agree that the buzz about subcoins is just buzz, it's best to mine bitcoin, not subcoins...

currently they are priced 2btc plus shipping, this is even worse

I misread the stat. In the article, it says "Fees are up to 4%..." Looking at the actual numbers, fees are closer to 1% on average.

LMAO! Agreed! Those devices are 2BTC each, and will NEVER break even. There are a few group buys that have been put together to order 100 at a time, and it's all novelty buyers, or complete idiots who cannot do math.

Luckily, most of the imbeciles and novelty buyers trying to organize group buys on these things are about 200 units shy of a 300 unit minimum order. Good luck with that, ASICMINER. 

You think GPUs are a bad investment? The ASIC USB sticks are 1000 times worse. Not only will they never break even, they also have ZERO resale value/utility outside of Bitcoin mining. The only way they're gonna sell many unless they drop the price to .25BTC or less.

Are you jusy saying that because of the 8*** series cards coming out or?

Thanks for the discussion, everyone. This has been an interesting thread. While we're talking about profitability, I will use this soapbox to try to dissuade people from buying the ASICMINER USB miners. If you think you are going to make a profit with those, I believe you are sadly mistaken. I think they will make about 1 BTC over their useful life. Granted, there may be other reasons to buy them (they're cute). ASICMINER blades are also questionable due to their high prices, but at least you can get them NOW while difficulty is still relatively low. Those have a much better chance of breaking even than the USB devices.

Disclaimer: I own ASICMINER shares LOL

7970's would be one of the worst cards to buy purely for mining as well... if you're going to game with it also, sure.

Otherwise you're purchasing a card that's going to decline in value (absolute $) more than any other card out there over the next few months

I don't sell on ebay, I sell locally.  I honestly can't see that many people being into mining in my city, LOL. Especially since I ask most of my friends and they've never even heard of it.

Yes but you've never had to deal with thousands of others all selling the same GPU on ebay before.

If you already have the GPUs, well then by all means, keep on mining. You should be able to cover the cost of your electricity for some more time and you'll get free heat in the winter. If you don't already own the GPUs though, don't buy them, you'll never recover their cost.

Avalon batch 2 started shipping today if you haven't heard.