*smirk*
yup - sure are
$1750 bitfury (~17BTC) has made over 18BTC already and is still running at 260GH
any antminer bought at >3BTC has already broken even
all my other antminers will break even by mid august at the lastest
my antminer S2 should pay off no later than october
at that point, I will still have >4TH of paid-for equipment mining 'free' by the end of 2014. If bitcoin is still around (i think it will) and value goes up (it will if it stays around) then these machines could be viable to operate right into early 2015 on a profit
You really don't understand the risk. For every bitfury, there are 10x as many BFLs and Hashfasts. I know of one person on this board that paid 6800 BTC to hashfast and still doesn't have a single Gh/s to show for it. All it takes is one mistake to wipe you out. Whether it's a defective board that starts a fire, downtime you never anticipated, an exchange that goes belly up with your money there are hundreds of ways to lose as a miner. And only one mistake is needed to wipe you out.
For example, Activemining. Ken has taken 20000 BTC and turned it into less than 1 Th/s of operating gear. You invested in that right?
As I said before, it only takes one mistake to turn all your work into a loss.
But that's if you go the preorder route. Everyone knows that preorders are uncertain delivery dates if at all.
If you order in hand, or anything that ships within a week from a reputable seller like Bitmain, you have a great shot at ROI.
I think 99% of Bitmain customers can attest to the low risk involved with buying from them.
What's the warranty on Ants? I see anecdotes here that make me think failure rates are running over 20%. If your breakeven is 60 days and the hardware is a brick in 90, you aren't even covering your expenses.
Then you have the labor involved in keep acceptable uptime. How many times do you want to drive to your hosting location at 3 am? Do you like the idea of never leaving town on vacation? Or how well do you sleep with the noise and heat and fire risk in your own home?
Ants have had a good run. It's probably over now. Mining hardware buys tend to run in cycles. Early on, it's a good move. Then it rapidly swings into losses. If you are naive about what is entailed in running a profitable operation you can easily be losing money without realizing it.
Don't get me wrong, I've been mining at scales >0.5 % of the network for years now. If you made the wrong decisions in 2013, bitcoin appreciation still made you huge profits. Expecting to get bailed out that way again is naive.
