Topic: Hardware with reasonable ROI? (Read 3250 times)

On 28 Nov. 2013 the exchange rate of LTC on BTC-e nearly did reach $50, peaking at more than $48.

15000 Gh/s ?? Sure ??

Great idea.  I have 15 TH/s miners in testing, would you like a preorder?  Early adopters get a special price of 30 BTC per miner, just send it to the address in my sig.

No. The first gen ASICs for scrypt have only one benefit thus far - lower power consumption... no increase in hashrate density (at all) and they are priced to compete ONLY as a lower power replacement for GPUs - meaning their $/MH is almost double what a GPU runs even at inflated prices we have today for GPUs. It'll take at least another year and a lot of work to increase the hashrate density of scrypt ASICs to the point where they are competitive in the $/MH area with GPUs... so if you are inclined to mine your way to crypto, it's going to be viable via GPU for quite a bit longer than most people are claiming. There is still a very good argument to be used in the mining versus buying controversy:

If you are mining, you are 'buying' crypto in small increments - buying as price rises, buying as prices fall - mining is a price-neutral way of acquiring crypto which makes it very valuable to those of us who look at prices and are caught like a deer in the headlights about what price to buy at. Further, when you buy crypto, you establish a 'position' from which you are either losing or making money on your investment - and that can also drive folks crazy and cause overreaction to price deltas - panic selling being one such reaction.

So, depending on your investment profile or personality, mining may, indeed, make a lot of sense. Ultimately, if your goal is to acquire crypto for the long term, an investment in some equipment can make a lot of sense. Set up the rig, point it at a pool, and enjoy the ride not worried about trading differentials or prices and know that you are investing every single minute in your financial future...

This is how I look at it anyway, YMMV.

r00tdude

Never.

I don't think there is a product on the market that will make you a reasonable ROI softworkz

That's one way, or find a silicon team to manufacture the chips. Launch an early pre-order, build the chips, say you're "testing" and smile.

How do you build your own miner?  Just order a bunch of individual chips?

Honestly the best way to make BTC with ASIC miners is the following:

1) Pre-order a miner early, as soon as launched. Once received mine a bit, then sell for BTC profit over price (I've made +50% BTC doing this)

2) Order a bunch of cheap miners, like the USB mining sticks. Sell them as "fashion" accessories to the mining masses on Amazon or other sites. +25%

3) Build your own miner. As the silicon comes in mine the heck out of it. Over 12 months make 1000%+ profit. Sell silicon late, but recoup original HW cost. Smile all the way to the bank. Some believe BFL did this.

I have purchased Antminers from both sushi group buy and Bitmain. Both shipped promptly and the units run like snot. I am selling my BFL units that I bought at a good price and buying antminers as they are a smaller footprint and pretty darn effecient. Antmining may RIO more than people expect as the power efficiency claims of the lower nm stuff is not as good as advertised so far. The big question is KNC tehy under promised and over delivered before. I personally just hope they are late. Good thing it's just a hobby.

Doing go chasing it sucks...

"Hardware with reasonable ROI?"
There's no more such a thing.

Hey,

thanks for all comments and confirming my assessments. I haven't seen any post before that made things so clear for me (and others hopefully).

As to my other suspicion: I am now even more convinced that at least some of the non-scam mining device manufacturers already got their products ready and are running them on their own for a while. Honestly: Who wouldn't be tempted to do just that? The devices are already funded through pre-orders, so why ship too early when you can run them on your own creating additional value?
Some of the manufacturers are even showing pictures of their data centers pretending to offer "hosted mining" (e.g. Butterfly, Bitwin).
The existence of those data centers is one of the things I tend to believe.

I am really curious about what might happen later this year. Without an exponential growth of the Bitcoin exchange rate, none of the announced devices will be profitable within just a few months, taking into account the exponential growth in difficulty.

Again, thanks for your help and thanks for keeping me off buying some useless hardware...

softworkz

maybe not rapid increasing as btc diff but it sure will send gpu mining out of the game much sooner than they last in btc mining. btc value was 4-5 times higher when asic-s arrived last year, even more later on. that's why gpu-s are lasted till summer in btc mining.
that will not be a case this time even if diff will not increase as fast as btc diff.
ltc value depends of btc value and it is always around 2.5.3% from btc value so for LTC to be worth $100, btc need's to be at least $3000-$3500 worth.
anyhow, even if we don't see exponentially increasing difficulty just as bitcoin gpu-s will soon be out of the game because value of ltc or other scrypt coins isn't going anywhere. at least not dramatically to save gpu-s.

With scrypt ASIC starting to come out, are we going to have a exponenitally increasing difficulty just as bitcoin?

You know, 48 is considered as "almost 50".
45 is considered as "almost 50".
But not 35 and $35 is highest value that ltc ever reached!
Now that scrypt/sha256 combo asic are jumping in the scene diff is rising again.
Alpha-t is shipping by the middle of July and I don't see reason why not to believe them.
What are the chances that another "BFL fail" will happen again.

Yes.

That's suggests "certainty" in pre-orders. The only question  that can asked is "when do they claim they will ship"

When are they shipping?

Which makes it very risky IMO. You don't know delivery date, LTC price when it arrives, if it will ever arrive, whether it will have any privately-funded ASIC competition when it does arrive etc.

We all know what the first bitcoin ASIC manufacturer was like with their pre-ordering delivery dates