If they hadn't put the S7 up so early before actually deploying it, the S4 and S5 market wouldn't be where it is right now. S5 is a good short term buy (maybe even longer term if BTC price increases), and the S4 is getting riskier, and riskier but still not that bad atm. The panic selling is real the last week.
wlefever (or anyone else who thinks the current price of the S4 or S3 is not bad) - Can you please tell me what calculation you are using that makes you say the current price of the S4 is not bad? How do you arrive at that conclusion?
If you are looking at it in terms of standard ROI the S4 at it's current price is around 246 days, and will remain profitable as long as bitcoin price is not below $184 (yes obviously the difficulty has steadily risen, but not too fast that you can't make money with S4 or S5). So why is it not a viable option until at least the S7 comes out? Does anyone really think bitcoin price is going sub $200 in the next month?
Every time I mention the S4 or S5 not being that bad I am talking in a short term window....if you want to buy and hold something on Hashnest, and not have to worry about bitcoin price fluctuations or becoming unprofitable do nothing with your coin until the S7 comes out. Obivously ROI on a cloud mining service is going to be a moving target, and IMO has to be constantly analyzed. Right now 1 TH/s of S5 still nets around .0038 and the S4 around .00176 per day at 100% luck, and will be slightly less after this adjustment. Still profitable for the next few weeks unless the market keeps selling off like it has which obviously throws off any calculation you can make.
Edit: As far as the S3 it is done on Hashnest very soon, but not a bad option for some to redeem as hardware so they still hold onto their Gh/s.
Wlefever, thank you for your response. Let me just bring up a few things about what you said:
1) The S4 is not profitable above $184. Profit is when you have been repaid back for your initial investment and you still have revenue beyond costs. If the S4 simply brings in money over $184, that doesn't mean you made a profit on it. You need to get repaid your initial investment in order to make a profit. Getting your investment repaid is all I am focusing on, as that is point of mining at HashNest.
2) Even if it brings in money above $184, after each increase in the difficulty, it will bring in less and less. If it takes 254 days for the purchase of the S4 to pay for itself, that is with 0 increase in the difficulty. Unfortunately, there is no chance of this happening. With each increase in the difficulty the point at which the miner breaks even gets pushed farther and farther away. Right now, 1 GH/s earns 0.00000848 BTC per day * (1 - .8253 (maintenance)) = 0.000001481456 BTC earned per day. If you bought it 5 days ago at 0.00046 each (before the difficulty change), you are now looking at 310 days for your investment to get paid back (0.00046 / 0.000001481456 = 310 days). In other words, in the last 5 days you are now 56 days further (310 - 254 = 56 days) away from being paid back (and this is with an increase in the price of BTC over the last 5 days). At the current price of BTC at $233, you now need BTC to be over $192.29 for it to make money. Now as soon as the difficulty has gone up 17. 47% the miner will be useless. There is no way the difficulty will stay the same for 310 days, I wish it would...
3) You said buying the S4/S5 is not bad for the short term. I think it is horrible for the short term. The problem is the miner has such little life left, the calculations are easy. There is very little guess work when the difficulty only needs to change a small amount and that puts the miner underwater. With something like the S7, who knows. With the EOL miners, there is very little guess work.
4) You say 1 TH/s mines about .00176 per day at 100% luck (actually 0.001481456 right now). You said "Still profitable for the next few weeks", the problem is you need the difficulty to stay the same for 250+ days, a couple of weeks isn't going to do it. If you are trying to hold onto the miner short term, every day it will drop much quicker in value than it will mine for you. If you can do some short term trading (holding for minutes), that would be the only thing I could see making any sense. However, I don't think there is enough liquidity to do any high frequency trading
5) As far as redeeming the S3, it looks like it will be about $115 ($50 + $65) to redeem one and that only gets you the miner delivered in China. Getting them delivered to another country gets very, very expensive.
I hope this doesn't sound argumentative. I really am genuinely trying to understand the pricing and people that see things differently helps me understand their view. Wlefever, thank you again for your response. I think getting at the mechanics of what is going on helps everybody.
