Mining BTC with GPUs died out years ago.
yup and good years they were.
i will never get rid of my 6870 and 5830, they are largely responsible for my stack as while i did sell coins through the years i kept enough to make my wife and i extremely happy.. i keep meaning to mount them in a frame and hang them on a wall as they were so good to me.
I realized BTC was worth something in October of 2013, by that time GPU mining of BTC had already died out. I got some Asicminer Block Erupters and was so impressed with BTC and mining I went all in on a Black Arrow (named after a UK rocket and "space" program) ASIC pre-order as the market on Bitfury ASICs had dried up and I missed the deadline for the KnC Jupiter (more "space"). I saw all the coins the Jupiter customers were getting and Black Arrow seemed to have a good history of delivering miners based on Bitfury chips.
Black Arrow ended up stealing my money and never shipped the miner I ordered.
When I made the pre-order I had a small amount of money left and also purchased an old used HD
6990 5790 for $250, I made ROI in about a week solo mining Nova Coin.
It finally died
in a shower of sparks about 8 or so months back of fan failure two years ago but damn that card mined a lot of coins.
, it would do 50 MH/s ETH putting my new RX 580s doing 30 MH/s to shame.
oh man black arrow.. sorry to hear you got burned on that.i almost preordered one as well as one from another company around that time (hashfast? dont recall the exact name). i figured between the two companies one would come through. riiiight. whew, dodged that bullet.
i did have a bfl FPGA that did ok, mainly because they were so slow getting their asic out it was profitable for a while. as well as a couple block erupters. but we all know where bfl went, and good riddance. think bitmain is bad? imagine if bfl became the dominant asic provider.
my only regret is that i didnt order more cards back in 2011. but btc was high risk and fairly unknown back then and no one knew where it would go. i was always into distributed computing (seti@home, F@H) so it was kinda right up my ally. and of course i got to buy shiny new cards for games
i looked at it more as a new hobby than a get rich thing, as well as wanting to be part of the "grand experiment" of decentralized money.
my 1st btc was earned on a 4850 (testing the waters) but as soon as i figured out the process of turning btc into fiat in a bank account (mtgox and dwolla) i ordered the 6870, and later the 5830. my wife was like you paid hundred of dollars for THAT?? (the 6870). of course now she doesnt even blink when i order gear for mining. she just smiles when she looks at our bank and crypto accounts.
geeze memories