Topic: If Bitcoins Go Up Will USB Bitcoin Miners Be Profitable? (Read 12538 times)

Why still bother with Bitcoin when Betacoin exists?

The point is that you won't see a profit in BTC at all.
The price you pay for them in BTC is less than the BTC they will earn PPS mining.

If you can't buy bitcoins via the standad exchanges the profit calculations would be:

- +

Lets say you need 0.1 bitcoin, pay the equivalent of 0.15BTC in fiat for the miners and get your 0.1 BTC of them, but otherwise would have had to bank wire the money to some scetchy exchange with prices 10% over market, for 15% fee and a risk of 30% of getting scammed buying the miner gives a profit 0f ~0.03 btc

Yeah I could see that being a problem if you were doing something illegal ... gotta keep that paper trail clean.

Lucky credit cards hide your identity ...

I suppose if you refuse to use the more normal channels, then you could overpay for coins through unprofitable mining.While people in some areas of the world may have trouble buying coins, generally it is better to buy x coins now then receive < x coins in the future.

Consider the case where buying bitcoins directly is problematic. Let's say you don't want to link in a bank account, prove your identity to an exchange, meet with a stranger from localbitcoins, etc.

You can go buy a block erupter via credit card for $19 + shipping from Amazon, get it in 3-4 days, and start hashing. If the bitcoins you mine are eventually worth more than $19 + shipping, your purchase was profitable. And you've still got the miner. Personally I think that even the lowly block erupter, if bought with fiat currency, will eventually be profitable.

Buying bitcoin directly will most likely be more profitable, but that option may not be available to everyone.

Your reply is a non-reply. If the metric to decide profitability isn't Mh/$, then what is? There is none?

Perhaps what you have in mind is that most or all vendors sell ASIC devices at inflated prices for the current and future difficulty. They are too expensive. That means too many $ for a particular hashing power, ergo too low Mh/$

Of course there is the operating environment to take into account, power usage, cooling, but that tends to scale proportionally with the operation. Nobody is talking about purchasing 2kW units with low hash rate or leaving an high-end PC on 24/7 just to control a block erupter.   let's be serious and have common sense.

If there are such devices, they are exactly the ones that provide the highest Mh/$

Profitability depends on what you do first, then the process.

There are many options which can be tricky to follow up. If There are many Big arrays (For example, 256Gh/s by 4 with Cooking Oil cooling at least, which represents 1,300W) poured into, then The Smallest USB miners will be broken unless you have thousands of to follow up.

P.S The case is from PRC, 300Mh/s by 1000 can be impressive number but the wattage can be problem as each 30Gh/s (100 x 300Mh/s) represents as 250W, You can count on it.

Before January 2014. if you have these trustful miners, then you have little chance to get profit due to low power cost. I have purchased six with the necessary via ebay for pressure test, I have bidded it for USD 210 instead of spending USD 330 for six.

Then you will lose out.
Funny how so many people don't even understand that.
At the moment there are few if any ASIC devices you can buy that will not lose you BTC.

The metric that matters is Mh/$, regardless of the device. Block erupters at 0.17BTC or ~$23 are as good or as bad as a Japaleno.

If I were to buy today, I wouldn't go below ~30 Mh/$ and even then it had to be "in hand", not scammy pre-orders.

Of course there will be speculation involved in you are mining or holding bitcoins. Mining and speculation are two different activities. To find out if your mining operation is profitable, you should really try to separate it from the speculation.

... you could solo mine with a BE and find a block ...

I'm not sure which is more likely ...

(yeah that's what I do with 2 of my 3 coz there no f'ing way they are useful doing anything else ... when I have 144GH/s of mining hardware)

I will answer both quotes at the same time.

Yes! That is all I was trying to say, you completely misunderstood me. Of course there will be a loss because you will never fully get back what you paid for the miner, and it would make more sense to just buy bitcoins. Then you will have an extra 35$ to speculate with. The only point I was trying to make was that there is some "profitability" if you account for successful speculation with mined coins, but definitely not as much as just flat out speculation profit. And of course my argument is flawed because I can't predict the future, I am not sure if btc prices will ever rise, but your argument and every other argument is flawed as well because everyone is making their own assumptions. That is why I am ignoring the irrelevant people in this thread and I am just debating with you. We have the same train of thought, you just think it's more profitable to speculate, which I agree with. For the last time I was trying to point out that a profit is possible, no matter how minute. Please admit that so we can spend our time more wisely

Then to follow your approach by combining the apples and pears:
The amount of profit you accumulate overall by speculation and mining will be - in case of rising Bitcoin prices - always lower then the possible profit made by pure speculation without any mining. So your maximal profit that you can achieve with a given amount of money will be diminished by mining, leading to the conclusion that mining generates a loss.

Yes, I traded a MMOG-Account with a friend for his USB-Miners. He was eager to get rid of them, I didn't play anymore, so it was a quite reasonable trade.
(Ah, but to follow my argumentations: Of course I made a huge loss in this trade. Because I have to calculate the money that I could have gained by selling this account for money, then buy Bitcoins with this money. That would be the 100% that I could have made by selling this account. By trading it for USB-Miners I lost roughly 70%-80% of this value. This already includes an assumed scam-rate of 20% during the selling process of online-gaming-accounts.)

If the miner generates more bitcoins than it took to buy, it generated a positive profit. But it won't.
By using the numbers of the mining-speed-delivery-thread in this forum, my calculations show that the current Hardware won't make even half the amount of Bitcoins that it takes to buy those things. Even if i assume a complete stagnation after the delivery of the current preordered Hashrate, it wont return the investment in a 20 year timeframe. After that I stopped calculations.
It takes several - and at this point in time very unlikely - assumptions to get to a positive ROI. And those have to factored into your profitability-calculations as a risk-factor.

The other problem in your logic is still, that you assume the hardware investment as only parameter in calculating the overall profit. To say your miner generated more money including speculation than it's initial cost in Dollar is profit - is flawed. It only works if the Bitcoin prices are rising. And when the Bitcoin prices are rising, the maximum amount of profit you can make is by buying Bitcoins without mining. Again, this value is 100%. Everything less is a loss, because you did not get as much money as you could have gained.

Once BFL ships /irony they are just expensive souvenirs anyway.

Your use of his gold example makes no sense. There are companies that have the money to start mining gold, because chances are, they WILL BE PROFITABLE at MINING it. And if Gold value happens to rise, that will further increase profit margins.

People keep buying the USB miners that are already in "not profitable stages" and never will be, and they make retarded examples to justify the purchase when it is just as easy to buy BTC over the course of a 30 second span of signing up at coinbase and actually have the chance of making a profit.

Not to mention I currently buy BTC, have already made profit by trading and "betting" btc to increase my holdings.

Way better than buying a miner, losing the BTC I had/could have had, and sit waiting months on a miner that will never make it back for me.

Yup. Its fun watching new ways an examples they post to try and justify it.

It really is a simple argument to say that you shouldn't buy AsicMiner USBs

It doesn't matter that some very small % of buyers are able to predict the future and use speculation to return a greater number of $ than they put into buying them, since, firstly, that is indeed some very small % of buyers and, secondly, if you rephrase it into 'gold' it is quite clear that it's a bad idea.

Now lets try a 'gold' example:
I have a device that can create 9oz of gold, and take many months, using only electricity.
I'll sell it to you for 10oz of gold.
Once it has made 9oz of gold, the value of the device is effectively zero but may be more if you can fool someone into buying it - or find a fool who doesn't realise that it has no value

This sound like a good deal to anyone?

Now just to avoid the speculation argument that may come up as a reply.

With the same input fiat, would I be better to speculate on the price of 10oz of gold or 9oz of gold?

Indeed. The specific bias in question has a well defined name too: Post purchase rationalisation.

Util all of the world takes BTC, at the end of the day you will be converting to fiat (i.e. USD) and so you generally can't mine without some speculation being involved. 

That is unless you spend in BTC strictly which of course you can't do because you had to either buy BTC (which was started by fiat) or buy mining equipment to mine with (which would again require fiat or BTC purchased with fiat).

The exception here is if someone gives you a miner - then you have virtually no capital expenditure just operating costs.

So who wants to send me a USB unit?