Topic: DO NOT BUY GPUs to mine! You will not get your money back! - page 5. (Read 21074 times)

That's a lot of assumptions, without any actual knowledge or proof, other then speculation on hypothetical possibilities.

Thus, useless. That was the point of my prior post.

Who are you warning? Yourself? Why do you care what others do? Obviously your point of view is as limited as your knowledge, but I may just be assuming that. (Irony)

So, should we all buy "non-existent, non-shipping", ASIC's that won't be here until after Christmas?

How will a purchase NOT pay itself off? It would only take four to five months, even with some slopes. Switching to any alt-coin covers any losses here. Reselling hardware that is only 3-months old, previously new, used little, is not hard to do. Used, these cards still sell for $380-$480 each.

What, the 7990's are just a 7970! Where the hell did you learn to read?
1x 7970 = 600-750MHs @ 220-260w
1x 7990 = 1200-1400MHs @ 300-400w

Here is a math problem for you...
1 bitcoin today
+1 bitcoin tomorrow
+1 bitcoin the next day =
more than 0 bitcoins for the next five months, which is the projected arrival date of most "only 2 more months" ASIC's.

It will take them MONTHS to amass any destructive value. More than half the coins are already "valued", and only 1/4 of the remaining coins will be MINED in the next four years. Even if they released 100THs of machines, it still wouldn't be more than 50% of the GPU's power running now.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

That Peak, is about to turn into a plateau. It was just a rise for the "next gen", which is not only ASIC's, but GPU builders building ROOMS of computers, not just a single computer in a bedroom.

Income is only 4% from transactions... Who the hell told you that shit? Obviously you are being played by your Pool! Try solo mining. It wasn't profitable with CPU's or a year ago, with GPU's, but OBVIOUSLY... the growing number of solo miners is nearing a large volume for a reason. (The harder the difficulty, the more transactions are in a block, and the greater the fee-rewards are. Look at the block chart data.)

The "defense" was that alt-coins were a FAD...Yea, they WERE, so were bitcoins. Bitcoins didn't make bitcoins valuable, we did, and where we go, the value goes. With our hardware.

But anyways... Don't buy GPU's. That leaves more hashing for me, here or there... On a plane, on a train, in Spain, or in the rain. I don't give a flying f**k, as long as it turns green, and comes from my f**king machine!

Well, I needed new graphics cards anyway for gaming. 

I really don't care if the 3x7950's pay for themselves or not. It will be a killer crossfire rig anyway. 

So, if I mine some coins with them, that just means that I will be offsetting their price a little bit.

Amortize that over a period of a year, and it's not so bad.

They are called General Purpose Graphics Processing Units for a reason, to do more than one thing.

According to my simple calculations plugged into any bitcoin calculator, graphics cards will probably be good enough until the difficulty hits about 25 million, probably in about 5-6 months.

Gosh this forums is now filled with bunch of retards. It must be due to all the rick quick scheme that media hyped up over the past couple months i bet.

I'm talking about the guy that you quoted.....

Next: I read on reddit that by stretching my dick every night my dick will be huge and i'll become a chick magnet.

OP is absolutely right, you should get rid of your GPU's today.

Send me a PM and I'll give you an address to a place that recycles them for free. They'll even pay for the shipping of your old card so you don't have to worry about any costs what-so-ever of getting rid of your excess GPU's.

That statement makes no sense at all.  The Avalon ASIC is a chip designed to hash SHA-256 and only SHA-256.  It's not going to hash scrypt.

No idea what you are trying to say here.


Fees are currently ~4% of rewards. I did not include them at this time. However, since BTC block rewards will not halve for nearly 4 years, I expect fees to stay at 4%. On the flipside, I also neglect pool fees (and some pools do not even distribute fees to miners).


Please read the OP. It is NOT paid off in a few months--that's the whole point of this thread.


Umm, ok, I'm not trying to say bitcoins are going to 0 or the value will plummet, etc. All I am trying to say is that it is unwise to buy GPUs at this time to mine.


Will never happen. Way too much invested in ASICs now to change the BTC hash algorithm. That's what alt-coins are for.


Yes on the $800, no on consume less power. Same MH/J as 7970 (as it's basically same GPU)


Relevence?

You are forgetting a few major components...

1: Alt coins = FAD = SO was/is bitcoins. That point is moot. If it is "cheap" to produce bitcoins, the price will drop. Since it is harder (more overhead) to produce alt-coins, that alone is what gave coins the actual value, and will give them value when we all go there and start using them. You have to remember, there are millions of US and only a few hundred or thousand with large quantities of ASIC's that will be still in the game here. Thus, they can have all the coins. They can trade them with themselves. We will go where the actual gains are. We are the majority they stole it from. We will just up and leave.

2: You are forgetting "transaction fees", which are increasing, and will eventually be larger than any "rewards". As long as the pool-operators are not squandering them, and just feeding us "treasure-hunt coins". (That is where solo mining pays-off, and rewards for coins are just a bonus.)

3: If the hardware lasts only a few months, it has been paid off. Provided the coin value does not fall, and you didn't cash-out... or provided you did cash out now, while the value is still on the high end.

4: OMG THE SKY IS FALLING... Didn't they say all this when GPU mining became "new"... OMG the value will plummet! OMG you are going to loose everything! OMG Its going to crash! Um... No, we just buy ASIC's instead of GPU's and we retire the GPU's, or move them to a profitable alt-coin. The sky is not falling.

lol.. or... we just "change the code" to add security that asic's can't handle. It wouldn't break anything behind the scenes, but it would surely keep all the people holding coins from loosing value to the ASIC corporate-manufactures... Who will NOT be us.

Plus the 7990's will be $800 soon, and consume less power, again. For those still doing the GPU thing.

Bitcoins are the new "Linden", the new "paypal", the new "myspace", the new "facebook". People won't put-up with all the massive synchronization and oversized wallets and account theft, unless someone with real structure manages all this correctly. (With less loss, and cutting out all the childish bickering.)

Come back in six months, you should see something interesting happen to LTC price.

I already made about 3500% mining Litecoins from 2011 onwards, so I won't worry.  There's still time to be an early adopter on the Litecoin network before BTC is made totally unmineable by the presence of ASICs, though.

I agree it's not really profitable like the calculators I've found online point out that it will be. To me its more of a hobby plus I love gaming with 4 cards! Instead of selling my cards I plan to take the profits and put it towards 3 to 5 27-32" LCD's setup vertically for gaming.

 For those expecting to sell the cards for 60% profit, if you do so soon you might but once the new generation of cards releases the value will fall like GPU's have historically....like a ROCK. lol.

 
 Good luck guys, this surely isn't for everyone.

I acknowledged early on in this thread (I know, TL;DR) that they have resale value. I would argue that you still may not make a profit. You keep laughing and buying them GPUs, but don't say I didn't warn you. Do you seriously expect the hash rate to flatten out going forward after averaging a 17% increase every two weeks over the last 3 months? 

Obviously if BTC were to rise by a factor of 10 or 20 as it did over the last year, that changes the math completely, but it only prolongs the inevitable. For example, let's take our 500/200 card (7950), and assume that BTC increases a healthy 0.5% per day, making it $716 in a year. In that scenario, the card will stay viable until ~1.5 years from now when 1 BTC is $1639, and yet its total earnings will still only be $433. You're way better off just buying BTC. And this is in a scenario where BTC hits $1,000,000 in 5 years (let me just say that I'm ok with that LOL). In a more reasonable 0.15% per day BTC gain (e.g. BTC is $200 in a year), that card earns $203 total, and is only viable for about 8 months.

On the flip side, if BTC declines by 0.15% per day, our card earns $139 in 167 days and has to be resold when BTC drops to $90.

I'm assuming a 12% bi-weekly hash rate gain in these examples

LOL at OP.  I guess we are now assuming that these video cards are going to be worth $0 in 3 months?  And the 2-4 games they come with CERTAINLY can't be sold for ~$20 each.  /rolleyes.

I think the biggest thing to remember here is that right now Litecoin is dying out, just like all the other altcoins. I suppose if everyone GPU mining Bitcoin moves over to Litecoin it might pick up, or die entirely. I don't think anyone has an idea at this point. Litecoin values are so tied to Bitcoin that it's difficult to think of it as an actual currency. This whole thing is completely unknown at this point, even the financial "experts" are stumped. But your main point is valid, buying GPUs now with the idea that you can switch to Litecoin afterwards is not a safe plan.

So, newbies, don't buy a bunch of Radeons right now. ASICs will be readily available to all very soon. Avalon, ASICminer and BFL apparently all have products available or close to available. Of course those ASICs are priced crazily high, I expect that eventually prices will come down.

Yes, but mining LTC vs. mining BTC is currently a wash. There is no advantage to LTC mining. I believe it will stay that way--as soon as LTC becomes attractive, GPUs get moved over from BTC mining, and the advantage disappears. This will happen until ALL GPUs are mining LTC...at which point there may be some time where LTC has an advantage, as the hash rate will likely stop increasing, or greatly slow down. This is months down the road, and does not violate my premise that one should not buy NOW to mine. There are already scrypt FPGA designs in the works which may change this equation (for the worse) at some point as well--it's too soon to tell.

In addition, the LTC/BTC price has been quite stable and I don't see much reason for that to change (however I agree that Gox may give it a short boost).


All true. However, that doesn't mean I'm not right this time ;-)


Right. But that does not conflict with my premise that one should not buy NOW.


Of course, if you got 'em, smoke 'em...and I agree that ASIC pricing (especially ASICMINER) is exorbitant.


Like a car, GPUs lose value the minute you crack the box open--at this point, breaking even is questionable over any time frame. I'm just trying to sound the alarm that GPU mining is essentially over. I don't believe this is bad advice--after looking at the recent rate of increase of hashrate, I'm being conservative. And a few more GPUs doesn't do much to the network has rate when ASICMINER is measuring its increases in TH and overall network %.

I have exactly one GPU mining (a 7970). I have made back nearly 100% of the cost over the last 6 weeks or so. Going forward, I will only see another 2.5 BTC or so out of it ever.

last year, bitcoins were at around $5-$8 most of the summer.  even with current difficulties, the profit margin is higher right now than it was then.  so scrypt does alright, as the bots do their thing.   did litecoin drop in value about 10-15% since last difficulty change a day or so ago?   nobody wants litecoin, except to exchange it for bitcoins or some other currency

anyway, i said buying a GPU farm was dumb in early feb, when those first avalon asics shipped.. i was wrong.   if you bought w/ any clue as to what you were doing, you'll have a very good profit.  esp if you find the right time to sell those 5830's, 5870's, and 5970's that were selling used back then for about 50% of the value they do now

i also said it was foolish to pre-order this BFL crap last year, when bitcoins were at $7 or $8 and that you'd be better off just buying the currency itself (you wouldn't be pre-ordering if you didn't think the price was going up)

Even if you add 400TH/s to the network right now and keep the price like right now, these people WILL make their money back. Unless you decide to enter a huge number of 500GH/s miners, they will.

Do the damn calculations, guys.

Put 50 million, which is adding 4 times the whole network strength, put the timeframe in and see what happens.

Arguing that GPU mining is dead is also arguing that scrypt mining is dead since GPUs are the best available option for mining scrypt coins, and I happen to disagree with that sentiment. LTC happens to be doing very well at the moment and is valued at over $3 per coin, so we'll see who's right if and when LTC hits Mt Gox...

Various folks have been making similar statements about GPU mining going all the way back to 2011, and while they may eventually be correct if you wait long enough, timing is everything and everyone up until this point has had the timing wrong. I believe the first few months of 2013 were some of the most profitable ever for GPU miners, and my electricity costs are pretty low (~$0.065/KWh).

ATI will also release their 8000 series of video cards later this year which should be more powerful and use less power, which will change the GPU mining equation yet again.

ASIC supply is currently very limited, and they are going for exorbitant prices (~5BTC per GHs). I refuse to pay that price and will happily stick to GPU mining until the price of ASICs comes down to a reasonable level.

If the price of LTC and/or BTC goes up, I may even purchase more GPUs if the ROI looks reasonable at that time. Right now, the ROI for GPUs honestly isn't that much worse than the estimated ROI of an ASIC device selling that ~5BTC per GHs if one has low electricity costs! I can build a 2.5 GHs GPU mining rig for ~$1600, and if BTC or LTC is worth zero tomorrow because of a cryptocoin hack, I can always sell the GPUs on Ebay.

I believe some miners purposely give out bad advice on forums like this one to discourage new folks from mining because it will chip away at their own personal profits. How many GPUs do you own, FloridaBear?  

Hey, it's your money. We'll see in a month or so who is right. Just don't say we didn't warn you.

Heard it all b4.... lol

I 100% agree with the original poster.

But people seem to want to buy GPUs anyways, so good luck.


I think there is kind of a gold rush mentality presently.

Like the people who are spending $30k+ on pre-order Avalon ASICs. Or block eruptor USBs.

They will never make their money back. Yet they still buy.