Topic: Is rig building still profitable? - page 5. (Read 41318 times)

Two long days to set up a rig?  Good lord, I don't think it's ever taken me that long.  My first build took all of 3 hours to put together, and the most recent ones have been done in under an hour.  Install OS, install drivers, ready to go in under 2.

Anyone who takes two long days to put together a computer really shouldn't be putting them together to start with.

you are missing the time you put into setting up and watching the rig. that is gonna be a couple of long days work depending on your experience. if you would work for money and buy bitcoins you would be much better off. so the question is: how much fun is it for you to play with the rig?

you can get 5850 for less than $150, and they hash at 250-300 MH/s, even 400MH/s if it's overclocked (convery did it).

Yes.  But everyone thinks that means it will go up, but in reality it has gone down. 

Estimate difficulty is around 326,000 right now only because:

Average network hashrate on last difficulty level: 1.8 Thash/s
Average network hashrate on last difficulty level: 2.1 THash/s
But, hashrate at end of last 'jump' : 2.1 Thash/s
Means that difficulty is based on average performance on network, so even if performance is not changing, next jump can be huge.

That isn't a safe assumption at all.  The next difficulty level is going to be a doozy.  If the difficulty level were to increase today it would already be at 330,000.  And it just increased to 244,139, what, two days ago?  When the time for the next difficulty level increase comes you are going to be shocked by how much it has risen.  It's effectively already gone up 35% just in the past few days.

yeah, it has always been that way
and you always tell people, they shouldn't invest into new rigs,
yet those that do made profit and probably already paid off their new rigs.

very strange that mining for me has always been like "assuming difficulty rises, but price doesnt, it might become non-profitable in about 3months",
it was like that in october, when i bought my first ATI card, it was exactly the same when i bought the second card in december,
it was still the same when i bought 2 other cards in february and again 2 cards about 2-3weeks ago, everytime i had at least 3month in profit assuming the price doesnt rise at all.

and guess what?
today that same (pessimistic) calculation tells me, that mining might become non-profitable around september,
so the risk to take isn't any bigger than it was half a year ago.

but we all know why you tell everyone not to invest in rigs.  

Keywords: at current difficulty rates.

The OP admitted that the rig won't be up and running for another 1.5 weeks, at which point the bitcoin system will already be into the next difficulty. Therefore, none of your numbers apply to anything the OP will see.

Some times I can't tell if people forget about the rising difficulty, or just choose to ignore it because the numbers are so much better if you do. Thanks to the members here who keep pointing this out. Note that most of the projections here that take rising difficulty into account have the OP breaking even at some time in the future (2-3 months), at which point the difficulty will be so high that income will be a trickle. The only profit you're likely to see is from selling your hardware after the fact, but remember that plenty of other people will be eager to unload their ATI cards by then. That's a far cry from all of the claims that mining is 'very profitable' still.

why do you predict the difficulty to continually rise, if the price doesnt change at all?
the price will change.

i won't and can't predict the future,
i just don't know, what the difficulty will be in 10, or 20, or 30 days
and i also don't know, what the price will be in 10, or 20, or 30 days, maybe it's more, maybe less than today.

it is profitable now and the last year has shown, that price and difficulty will catch up on eachother,
right now, the price leads the way, and difficulty follows, it might be the other way around in 2weeks.

it's always the same with every single difficulty jump,
everytime people start complaining that mining isnt profitable anymore,
fact is, it's more profitable today (at a higher difficulty), than it was a few weeks ago (at lower difficulty) due to the fact, that the price is so incredible high.

let it be a bit less profitable next week, or next month,
i won't care, less profit is still profit.

Ha, best description ever. All the replies post this were just people talking to hear themselves.
Though I disagree with the buying coins bit, excepting that it helps grow the bitcoin pool o' cash which will help keep it alive.

Nope. Stop building rigs!

Actually, I did calculations too and:
Today Im earning 23$ per day (after paying bills) then +35% difficulty
In 10 days - 16,1 $ then +30% difficulty
In 20 days - 11,5 $ then +25% difficulty
In 30 days - 8,3 $
After 40 days  ~600$
After 60 days ~713$ (few more difficulty rises)
I just assume that price wont change and Im good in predicting difficulty rise.

To get 23$ per day with current difficulty you need to have around 3.8 BTC per day, which gives 920Mhash/s (3x 5850)

If the price stays at 6.8$ most prolly u wont get back your cash, so your investment is risky.

This was my initial thinking, but then I started accounting for predicted difficulty increases and it looked less hopeful; clearly I'm new here, so feel free to point out any foolish mistakes, but here's how I was looking at it:
The $16/day figure applies at current difficulty, which should last for another 10 days or so (probably less, looking at the figures on blockexplorer.com), so that nets you $160 total. A guesstimate based on the previous data would optimistically suggest a difficulty jump of 40% (again, quite possibly more), reducing the daily income to (18.72/1.4)-2.7=$10.67. Say the difficulty levels off somewhat, you might make a further $130 or so at that price, followed by another 20% jump, giving a subsequent daily income of (18.72/(1.4*1.2))-2.7=$8.44. Your daily revenue has halved in less than a month, and break-even might take three months total. Investing in more hardware can't help with break-even time, since Mhash/$ remains largely the same, although it will make the absolute potential profits higher once you do pay off the investment (at the price of a higher risk if the investment is not paid off for any reason).

Of course, the key point left out here is the changing value of the bitcoins themselves - the overall trend seems to be that value very approximately tracks difficulty, so if you're confident that the increases will continue to more or less offset the difficulty increases then my 'diminishing returns' theory is totally irrelevant. It also doesn't account for the resale value of the rig, which diminishes, but may be enough to generate an overall profit once mining itself becomes unprofitable.

Basically, I'm not saying that mining is a bad idea, just that it's a moderately high-risk investment which is inextricably linked to the assumption that the bitcoins themselves will continue to increase in value faster than the increase in mining difficulty.

I'm hoping im profitable enough to pay off my rig.  I just spent around 800 on a rig that includes 3 Sapphire Xtreme 5850's (which are on backorder for another 2 weeks GAH!)

I plan on using the rig at my office in my test lab (since I work in IS/IT) so, i wont have to pay for power

Is it possible this rig will be profitable when the cards come in in two weeks, if I am not paying for the electricity?

to answer the initial question: yes, it is.

let's say you only get 2x5850 (not 5870s) for $800,
2 5850s get around 700MHash/s and the rig will need ~375W (probably less, but let's just be sure),
at (very expensive) $0.3 per kW/h you'll pay $2.7 per day
at current difficulty the expected average output is 2.88BTC per day,
at current market rates (of roughly $6.5) that's $18.72 per day.

$18.72 - $2.7 == $16.02 per day
16 / 800 == 2% ROI per day

show me an investment opportunity that pays you 2% per day and i'll join it.

i tell short story then.
one of my friends, on my answer "why you do that, cuz its under $xx income in best case?", answer "im got four kids, so even extra-$20/month matter". he usually put his PC[one 5870 GPU if am not forgot soemthing] into mining mode, only when he out[and his PC unused].
for similar purposes its ok: to extract some extra-income from already bought and underutilised hardware.
but build specifically form mining... keeping in mind relatively near complexity skyrocketing... not matter.

Ah, got it now.

I'm still a bit new to the game, so all the terms/jargon is getting mixed up in my head between blocks/shares/transactions/ etc., etc.,

Thank you very much

Transactions is mining. It's extra bitcoins you get above the 50.00 per block (that will diminish).

I'm starting to see about 0.03 worth of TX fees in each block: it's definitely already making a small impact...

Don't users have to voluntarily provide a transaction fee though?  We're not getting paid right now for any transaction fees are we?

Mining is how transactions get processed.  Every 4 years or so, the fixed part of the blockfinding reward halves.  The theory is that the transaction fee will gradually increase as that happens to ensure that miners keep getting rewarded.