Topic: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. - page 3. (Read 10296 times)

i thought it would be fun to write a calculator for this. i know people have been trying to do it with excel spreadsheets, but honestly they suck and usually don't work with openoffice.

here's my calculator's result for mining in germany and within the US. it's funny. this example shows buying a 6950 at 200€
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[edit] "in the minus" sounds very german. oh dear. i hate myself. and changed the picture. because 200 eur is not 200 usd.

0.34 pence per kwh

8x 5870 gfx cards (410 - 420 Mhash/s each) ... 600 watt PSU .... 50 pence per day per box, max

Mining NMC, not BTC

That was based on NMC = 0.06, but that has now changed

NMC price is dropping faster than a whore's knickers in brothel... currently 0.03 BTC per NMC

Now it is definitely more profitable to mine BTC...

Make way, I am coming back to the BTC miner's way...

You can mine and hoard all the bitcoins you like, they will be worthless unless the Bitcoin community gets more involved in setting up shops and businesses, most people are not interested in trading, they just want to know if they can buy a pair of shoes with bitcoin, and if they can't, or it's difficult with few options, they won't buy in.

These people invariably have their own mining rigs: they don't follow their own advice. They're trying to avoid further difficulty increases, which may make them lose money.

Ok if the miners are trying to avoid further difficulty increases which will make them loss... What stop the new miners that you say for them that minning is profit to losss??
You contradict yourself

Mining is profitable right now if you have the initial investment paid. But if you expect to get the initial investment back that is another issue.

Mining is profitable, right now, but will not be profitable for anyone if people mindlessly pile in with thousands of dollars in additional hardware without taking into account the regular 50% difficulty increases every 10 days or so.

There's also nothing like trying to bring people over to your side of thinking and convince them by calling them names.

Can you tell us your rig and your Kwh rate?

to generate 4 btc / day you must be doing 4000 mh/s? 

That's 10x 6970's...

So your running 5 boxes for $4 a day?   

I'm still making $60 on average per day (with 1 BTC = $15), and at max my electricity usage for my rigs is $4 per day, therefore mining is very fine

it all sounds so good except that one or a group of people have to come up with millions of dollars to do this. And i have a feeling
2 million is just enough to go bankrupt trying without producing a single thing.

sure.. if you get lucky and manage to rope in a few experts in the area you have a greater chance of success.. and if they donate their
time for basically a shot at making bitcoins... and if several stars align just so... maybe someone will make a package that can do this.

i am not an expert in the field. i am known to be wrong and probably am. this is just a gut feeling that if people guess that it will take
1 million dollars to do the job.. i normally multiply that in my head by a factor of 5 to really make it happen.

edited to add:

10:31    TD   so it's $1000 per gigahash?
10:32    ArtForz   well, if support components, PCBs, cases, ... grow on trees, yes

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but he wins on the power side of things for sure.

By every coin you mean the 2 weeks you would have to pull this off before you set off the biggest difficulty increase ever seen?  Highly doubt you could mine fast enough to generate 1,500,000 worth of coins before the difficulty increase...

I have been trying to decide if its worth it to go big right now..

In 2 months the difficulty will most likely be in the 2 million range.  If coins don't increase by then, and you are someone who pays for power, you sir will most likely be priced out of the mining market. 

Currently if you pay .10 / kwh and your machine takes 5 amps of power ( i measured it with a power meter today dell with 1000 w power supply and 2 6970's) then your coins are cosing you ~$13.08 each to generate..  Thats not taking into account any 3% or 2.5% that your mining pool is taking.  Since coins are in the 15-20 range.. people are still making money.


Difficulty                    Electricity Cost per bitcoin
877226.66666667       $13.082351858737873   <----------current
1877226.66666667     $27.9956603066546       <--------- projected 1 or 2 months
2877226.66666667     $42.908968754571305   <---------- projected 3 or 4 months

If the market price of bitcoins does not exceed the power cost, then you sir are assed out...

There are a lot of people who don't pay for power and a lot who do. 

My prediction is there is going to be a huge run up, then an over correction down or a leveling out when only the people not paying for power are left in the game.

I would say if your in it for at least a year, then you might be ok, anything less and if your paying for power get ready for the blood bath that is about to happen.

The problem is that an ASIC can be custom designed to go orders of magnitude faster than a GPU for a specific task.  As just a very rough estimate, one SHA256 engine with bitcoin hash difficulty detection would take something like 1 million transistors.  The latest ASIC technology allows 2 billion transistors.  So that would allow 2,000 of these engines per chip.  If you layed them out by hand, you could probably get them up to 4 GHz.  Assuming one hash per clock, this ends up being 8 TH/S per chip.  In other words, this one chip could outperform the entire current BitCoin network.  And once the multi-million up front tooling costs are covered, you can make each chip for $50 each.  So for another $10,000 you could make a system with 200 chips that would be able to dominate the entire network at 200 times its current capacity.  It would pay for itself in about 20 days, because you would get every bitcoin made in that period.

If the exchange rates hold, you could multiply your earnings and buy thousands more chips for a low incremental cost to maintain your dominance.  I don't see how GPUs could begin to compete with this.

The point of the ASIC's is lower consumption. How can a 7XXX compete with a device that consumes 10 times less energy for the same bitcoins? ASIC's will make GPU mining obsolete.

Even a ASICs design will have a hard time vs a few million gamers worldwide who consider their graphics cards free and GPU shrinks that happen every 18-24 months on average. Any ASIC design brought out today will have to compete with the radeon 7xxx series and not current hardware.

That is because everyone knows that ASICs are the inevitable end game.  Whoever has those wins.

Nobody has mentioned yet the risk of the ASIC that different groups have announced for the end of this year begginning of the next one. When that hardware is ready your GPU wont be able to compete and will be an obsolte investment. And the prodcution is halving every 18 days because of the increase of difficulty. If you are not able to break even under those conditions by the end of the year, you should think very carefully what you are doing, otherwise you are going to loose money since you wont be able to keep your GPU generating (profitably).

There is only two things that can change to make mining profitable. 1) The difficulty stops growing so much giving miners some room to get more bitcoins. 2) The price rises consierably, to $30 and beyond.

(This part is speculation obviuosly) Regarding 2) I dont see that happening for a long time, probably until 2012 because the initial rush because of the press has happened and there is a lot of people looking to unload in the $20 range and beyond. It will take time and a lot of demand to break that resistance. Also, the kind of people the rush has attracted to Bitcoin is not people looking to improve the Bitcoin economy, but a lot of those are looking for a quick and easy way of making money, so when the price rises to those levels they will sell.

Regarding 1) is the part that I see more posible to change. I still dont understand how anyone can be buying dedicated miners at this point, so it makes sense to me that at some point not so much capacity will be added to the network and the difficulty will stop growing so much. I really dont understand some people that are buying and buying GPU's right now. What are they going to do with their 50+ gpu farms when the ASIC chips make their hardware obsolete? The second hand market wont be abel to absord so many gpu's going on sale all together. But again, its not guranateed that the difficulty will grow slower, for all we know it could grow even faster. But I think its more probable that we see the difficluty slowing than the price rising a lot in the rest of 2011.

But anyone has to keep in mind that if there is not a big change in the difficulty trend or in the price, buying a dedicated miner right now is NOT profitable, you wont break even. Anyone can do the math. Mining is not fine. We are in a very delicate moment.

I don't think there will be any bitcoin doom.  I think it is the future.  And I think there is still a lot of money to be made with it.  If it becomes the world reserve currency, watch it go up another 10,000 times over.

My only small issue is dedicated mining rigs at the current network growth.  And right now, the numbers have been pretty consistent.

It's nice to see a new 35 post count user that wasn't created just to post about the doom of bitcoin. I don't want to call him an anti-troll because it still seems to have created a lot of friction, but this is as close as it gets. I'm not a fan of the topic title, but my favorite part is what I've been trying to tell people


Yes. A million times yes. We obviously make our little personal models and try to fit them as well as we think we can so that they'll be useful, but who the crap knows what will happen. A huge solar flare might erupt sending an EMP down that surges the power grid, blowing up tens of thousands of mining rigs. Or a news report might come out on CNN saying "bitcoin is a way to make free money forever! Roll over to cnn.com/bitcoin_moniez to see how!"

Or something more reasonable in between those extremes. Bitcoin is small enough that external events can have a huge huge huge impact on it. For good or ill.