Topic: Does mining still make sense for GPU's? (Read 926 times)

The point has been raised that GPU mining will take a very long time to gain you 1BTC. While this is true, there is some flawed reasoning here. First of all BTC can be traded up to 8 decimal places, which of course today isn't worth much. Next year or the year after 0.1BTC could be 90$ or 9000$, we just have no way of knowing. When making an investment of any kind you need to consider both appreciation and depreciation, not just todays numbers.


Pros to Buying BTC
That being said if you are counting on BTC to rise in value then financially it makes more sense to just buy it with $ and hold it. If you mine it your just going to be waiting longer and paying the same amount in electricity bills. So for speed and convenience it probably makes sense buy it with cash right away.

Pros to mining BTC
The main advantage to mining is that it is 100% anonymous income that can never be tracked back to an exchange from cash. So long as you don't sell it. Even though it will be worth very little today it could be worth much more tomorrow. The benefit of course is that there will be no paper trail to acquiring BTC especially if it becomes illegal.



Either way there is still value in mining, and there probably will be even after ASICS go live. So long as you are expecting the value to appreciate.

Plus mining is probably a cool experiment to try anyway.

I think mining with what you got (GPU or what erver) it is just fun anyways I keep thinking even 1 BTS maybe worth a lot in future...
It is  a lot like gambling at this point - see how lucky you are!

No future with the numbers we know now yes but.....

Well maybe if you look back in ten years to this post and 1btc is $50.000 you wished u were still collecting titbits of btc with your gpu farm in april 2013 hihi ...GL

It al about the future just get in your Delorean and go "back to the future" and then tell me if i was wrong....

You might just only need 1btc some time.. so at least buy one or mine one

Its like buying 1 kg of gold for under $100,-

I use home desktop computer to run cgmine software in http://btcmine.com/.
The result is not very good.  It may take months for me to get 1.0 BTC.

When ASICs hit the market, GPU's are doomed.

It's profitable to use GPU while the BTC price is this high but it may not last.

In that case you switch to mining LiteCoins which is designed in such a way as to stop FPGA/ASICs

Ati 5830's give a fast ROI at 260-300MH/s and only £60/$90 outlay.

Yeah, I was surprised by your estimate
Might as well get a couple of GPUs now before most of ASICs hit. Then might consider switching to LiteCoins when BTC diff skyrockets.

Quick Googling found me this: http://shop.ztex.de/index.php?language=en at 995 euro for the ZTEX USB-FPGA Module 1.15y

The mining hardware comparison page ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison#FPGA ) shows it to reach 860 Mhash/s. Going back to the ROI calculator gives a 205 day for hardware break even, everything remaining the same (difficulty, block reward and electricity price.

My previous calculation for the Radeon 5970 were wrong, apologies if I scared anyone ... an ATI Radeon 5970 has a hardware break even of only 43 days at the moment.

It seems that GPUs and FPGAs have no future in bitcoin. So better drop it or do something with alternative coins. There are coins where you will not see very soon ASICs having most of the hashing power.

If you live in a household where the increse in power cost from running the GPU at 100% will not affect you.
GO FOR IT!
Couple of things if your gonna GPU mine
1.Use CGminer
2.GET GOOD AIRFLOW
3.Get a good card https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
4.Really makesure you've got good airflow
5.Mine in a pool
6.Profit!

1gh will earn you about .08btc/24hr

Anyone can suggest some fpga deals in the EU?

BTW: I am still vga-mining, but I started 2 years ago+

That's awesome. I happen to have a RaspPI lying around unused. What FPGA's etc. are you able to install/use on it?

But calculating the ROI on http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/, even with a Radeon 5970 running at full speed, it will take 1 year, 73 days to recoup the money. And this is assuming difficulty and bitcoins per block remain the same, which is not realistic.

Running two cards at the same time does not really change the calculation.

[edit]
My previous calculation for the Radeon 5970 were wrong, apologies if I scared anyone ... an ATI Radeon 5970 has a hardware break even of only 43 days at the moment.
[/edit]

Mining with GPU's now is not to cost effective, however ASICs are just showiing up and not many are being shipped yet (to my knowledge) if i had some spare money right now i would invest in fpga miners, they're cheaper than ASICs and you can get a raspberry PI to run the mining software on which is an extremely power efficient solution (at least in my opinion) and fairly cost effective.

if you have multiple gpu's
i would say mining with only one or a very basic setup at this time is not worth the total effort.

Hi All,

I am new to the bitcoin community. I have known about it for years, but never got involved, until now that it's getting more press, I finally dug in and I am really excited.

I have been trying to do some mining at home, but with very little results. My old GPU rig is ancient is getting very low MHash/s.

Does it make any sense, at this point in time, to get into the mining game without an ASIC?

Thanks.