Topic: I wanted to buy one of the new ASIC miners (Read 573 times)

The downside to ASIC mining is that outside of BTC and similar coins, the ASICs are pretty much worthless. You can spend $5000 on an ASIC and if difficulty rises to a point where you never recoup your initial investment, you're screwed. The only aftermarket is foolhardy buyers who have done even less homework than the initial purchaser of an ASIC who didn't accurately account for diminishing returns. Worse yet, everyone in that situation will be looking to unload their ASICs upon a very narrow pool of willing buyers. That will drive down significantly any aftermarket value of an ASIC.

With GPU mining you can hit a wall too. That wall is where electricity costs and maintenance, etc., exceed the gains made from mining. However, there is still an aftermarket for GPU's outside of cryptocurrency. Lot's of gamers who have no interest in cryptocurrencies would love to buy a used 7970 at a great price. This means a larger market. If you are also a gamer or otherwise have a need for a powerful GPU outside of mining, you can convert your GPUs to other uses. Basically, you could possibly buy a high-end GPU for $1,000, mine with it for awhile and sell it for $750. That makes your equipment cost lower. Just figure your purchase price and subtract your anticipated selling price and then figure out your breakeven point on equipment.

If you bought a AMD 7990 for $1000 and sold it later for $750, your equipment cost would be $250, making your breakeven point about a month out and then you are making money. With an ASIC, you would be waiting until probably April to get up and running and it isn't even known if you will breakeven. I imagine the difficulty mining BTC in April might be so high that breakeven might be several months out on ASIC miners, if ever. You want to break even in February or May and beyond?

You might not make as much money buying (10) 7990's as you would 1 neptune, but at least with resale prices on them being near retail, your risk of loss is lower.

I've got my GPUs mining other coins and I'm exchanging half for BTC. I'm not mining for BTC despite wanting to build a BTC rig years ago and never bothering (dur!) and considering the entry level cost now, I'm not too bothered. I truly believe that another coin or currency thats still to come will overtake BTCs marketcap. The concept has proven to work but it has many flaws, so its just a case of an innovative team to put together a real contender. If crypto is here to stay, then something serious is to come. Theres a lot money to be made.


I've got the money for one of these new scrypt machines and I'm in the same boat. Do I sign up without seeing real pictures and figures, and without knowing what the difficulty is going to be in 6 months? Or do I build another couple of GPU rigs now and mine all the new alts coming out atm, and still be left with some resalable equipment in-case it all goes to sht?

I'm going with the GPUs, the outlay and the increase in electricity costs can be offset later by mining all the new alts with low difficulty and selling some when it hits the exchanges. Theres a lot of opportunity right now. It might not be there in 6 months. Who knows whats going to happen with all these currencies? Some regulations could see a lot of them disappear, and laying out 10k for a couple of fancy machines seems a risk without knowing whats around the corner.

If BTC rises to $1500 and stabilizes at that price as a minimum, then it would be worthwhile investment kind of. With the electrical cost, hardware cost, it would make $6100 for me (With BTC being at $1500 minimum, higher then there would be more profit in the conversion from digital currency to fiat dollar money). If major places accepted BTC as payment, then I would be all in and drop the $.

From what I've noticed, Difficulty has jumped up more then 41% in December alone. which is astonishing compared to how the difficulty used to rise early this year. The rise of ASIC in the market is pushing out the home made, gpu rigs that we have. We can of course mine other crypto currencies with those setups.


I'm all for our home made rigs, and thought maybe an investment into the ASIC rigs would hit ROI and make some money since it seems that is the next wave of mining to be done. But by the time we can actually get them, they will never hit ROI and cost us money.

To reserve an ASIC today you have to be a true believer in bitcoin continuous price rise and pay in FIAT (or at least buy BTC with FIAT and pay the ASIC)
I think it's better to buy coins today and speculate on the price rise.

I don't think hobbyist miners with CPUs/GPUs is the perfect solution to sustain bitcoin tho

This seems to be the norm regarding ASICs. The increase in difficulty by the time of delivery seems to make ROI pretty hard, not to mention that by the time V1 is shipped, V2 has been designed and rendered V1 yesterdays news. Not sure what the solution is apart from creating a core that fights ASICs, like Scrypt was supposed to be. But with 2 or 3 projects on the horizon even that looks like becoming more centralized. I'm all for home machines that we've built ourselves than these specialist machines with high prices and no resale value.

Im also interessted in either 1 of these, probably the cointerra more so. I understand your assumption of profitability by march. How does one figure/guestimate expected difficulty at that point in time?

Thanks,

But looking at http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/fb4d2a2d82 for both the KNCMiner Neptune and Cointerra IV, they would not be profitable mining bitcoins by the time I would be able to get one, which both seems to be around april. If I had one this month of December, it would be very profitable to have.


what are your opinions on this matter. What would you guys do? I cannot post in the custom hardware section so I must ask this here.