Topic: Hobbyist miners forced out today? (Read 7414 times)

well said, i bought two small setups to run until one or both of the games i want come out, so any money recouped until then is just a bonus, but not why i am doing it. the project looked fun and exciting and i was gonna build two machines to play games on, just did it earlier than anticipated. will i get all my money back, no, do i really care, no. would have spent it anyway when my games arrive.

Yup.  People don't really understand what "hobbyist" means, or they are deliberately misusing it.  

Anyone who claims "hobbyist" means making a big investment in hardware, building out a farm of mining machines, worrying about the relationship between electricity costs and BTC earned, and generally hoping to consistently make a lot of money needs to reexamine his assumptions.

If the income matters to you, you aren't a hobbyist.

It's always going to be on the side of hobbyist miners over more serious operations: in most cases the hardware is paid for, in many the electricity cost is a low concern. Hobbyists would mine, even at a loss.

Ding.  We have a winner.

Either that, or you could just solo mine and hope to get lucky and score $400 block (at current prices).  $5 worth of electricity isn't going to kill anyone.  It's a perfectly reasonable way to play the lottery (way better odds than state lotteries in fact).

Don't know about power and business and all that jazz, but as a hobby miner with 67Mh/s, im still in the game. It's all about the pool.
Anyone who's complaining about people with nGh/s killing their profits, and the profitability vs electricity costs and all that other jazz aren't really "hobby" miners anyways.
With my 5570 and 67Mh/s my electricity bill has gone up somewhere like $5 over my normal PC usage, and even i can manage to make 4-5btc a month, even at the current difficulty level in a decent pool.

Long story short, anyone who got forced out was either too serious about bitcoins and too broke to do anything about it, or, well, thats all i can i think of, because as a hobbyist, nothing has hurt me really, and the guys with the capitol to invest in larger mining operations, well they arent complaining either.

yeah, sure... & 'in soviet russia bitcoins calculating you!'
how exactly your bitcoins are better than artforz's (or anyone's else, including me)?


there is no FAIR in bitcoins, it is HARD & UNCHANGEABLE


we paid for those tickets, just FYI, some rich people have their own cinemas and they don't allow other people to use it, bastards!
don't be mad just because you can't afford more miners


says who?

After investing in 600 Mhash/s, water cooling would be a comparatively small extra investment which enable you to silence the miner and run it 24/7.  A cooler miner also means better stability, longer life and lower power cost (colder silicon leaks less power).

You don't have to by an expensive water cooling kit.  The expensive part is the GPU water block.  Everything else is cheap.  A cheap low powered aquarium pump, a radiator from an old car, cheap plastic hose, etc.

It's an estimate, not a prediction.

it's inefficient.  and dangerous.

look into the Seebeck effect...

Everyone's laughing at HorkaBork's post... but I'm actually considering how the methanol-containing-heat-turbine-electric-generator idea could work....


...........................


He may just be a crazy genius!

It would be more efficient for them if they just gave you an allowance...

No you actually just skipped the part where I said margin. Margin being value made or lost after cost => obviously factoring in the price for the kwh. What else is there other than material degradation for cost?

As for who is spitting in the soup: the exploitative bungholios who build whole GPU farms and stuff their housrs full of PCs dedicated to mining are. If I in order to refinance my idle GPU cycles want to mine BTC with my 180 mhash and they run around 2ghash for a single person, who is the one greedily and grossly out of scale?

From a "just" / "fair" standpoint, it's like them taking up 10 seats in the cinema and everyone else being confined to the bad seats..there is no entitlement to getting rich off of BTC for anyone, hobby or "pro".


As for whether to do it or not - as long as I come out even +0 profit, but am fully paid for my power useage, I'll do it. Simply because this is my work PC which is used for actual real world stuff and it will mean "free" work hours for one half of the day, "free" watching of movies, listening to music, etc for the rest.
The mining is just the icing on the cake to make it a "free" PC to run.

Staking my livelyhood on something like this would be fairly stupid in my eyes(people are "investing" 10s of thousands of real world currency, going into debt to build "rigs" etc..good god).  

Anyway.
On topic: I would actually like to flip the argument.
Due to the "pros" staking their real food/rent/etc income on this fun game, THEY are the ones who will be in debt, evicted and unable to pay for food first when the margin drops to 10-50 cent a day profit per machine total, instead of anyone who only does this on the side for a hobby.
As they need to rely on the income.

And ironically they are the ones causing the huge difficulty bumps in the first place(because of taking up 10+ spaces instead of 1 etc, buying tons of 6990s and so on).
So they may regulate themselves out once the "run" gets frothy / peaky, then the people that still think it makes sense after that trickle back in and we may get an equilibrium around the point where a balance between some money made to live on and not enough made happens.
Theoretically.

Then people find out about margin trading and blow up the whole pricing mechanism thanks to leverage fun and games.


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I also approve of Horkabork.

I'm guessing the jump won't be so bad next time, as this will scare off a lot of the people who just jumped on the bandwagon and are mining with their everyday gaming card.

Would you say investing in 2 5830s for $230 is a bad idea now though?

Well, might be true, but price could just as easily rise to match.

I use current numbers projected out because I really have no idea whether difficulty will continue increasing more quickly than price.  In the past, there have been times when difficulty outpaced price, and there have been times when price has outpaced difficulty.  Who am I to say which one will happen?

I wouldn't count on $171, but that's the best prediction I can make, without knowing whether price will outpace difficulty.

The silver lining is that some ambitious people are going to rightly and successfully fork this project.

v0.3 is can be the right idea but it is rarely the right implementation.

The genie is out of bottle.

The current explosion in difficulty was expected after the exchange rate rocketed up to 8.9$, when projections (back then) showed that you could recoup your hardware investment in about 2-2.5 weeks for cost effective rigs you knew something was going to happen >_>

Hopefully most of the addition of new hardware has slowed a little bit. Right now the projection shows a 23% increase it may end up being 30-40%. I don't think it's going to be 50+% this round.

I like how you are able to predict both difficulty and price so accurately.

I estimate to be unprofitable for my single 6950 system in 40 days at a 4.6M difficulty rating (assuming no change in value of bitcoin) with a net income of $558, by the last 10 days though profit is only $3 though, so I'll quit at day 30.

Math is hard.