Topic: Looking to get into the Mining Game this 2014? It is possible! A must read! - page 2. (Read 4032 times)

I think the retail people like you and us make up less than 5% of the total hashrate.  Those higher up in the foodchain probably get equipment more than 50% cheaper than us so they can continue to mine for awhile and the rate still goes up because there is competition between the suppliers who can make more and faster, wafers, chips, boards, kits, etc. As the margins get squeezed for even the manufacturers, those that are the slowest to develop newer and faster and cost efficient equipment will falter..............  BFL, Black Arrow  and KNC soon.

Nice post.

One thing to take in to consideration is that 3 months ago and earlier, the majority of btc miners believed they would reach a positive roi fairly easily. Now the majority is positive that no asic will return a profit. I think this could mean less money being dumped in to asics right now leading to a much lower difficulty than predicted.

Use it in your advantage. If by the end of the year you are running hardware that has already paid itself, and network difficulty freezes because returns are so low that nobody buy new miners (mining is a risky business, no person nor company buys hardware if they wont reach ROI within 12 months), then you got yourself a steady income until the next technology jump (in 2-3 years). If you multiply it by having not 1, but few miners, you got yourself a fat second salary.

There is nothing more efficient that 20nm. That is already the state of the art. Not even Intel has got smaller than that.
28/20 = 1.4. Neptunes should consume about 30%-40% less electricity than TerraminersIV/Jupiters , if both work at same clock speed. TerraMiners IV will get obsoleted long before Neptunes do.

That's at least my master plan. My Neptunes are fully paid. And I have another bit of coins waiting for buying few TH/s in KNC datacenter (coming second half 2014), however I am more confident in the Neptunes than in just buying hashing power.

Because they are blowing out Avalon clones 100000 units per month, and ASIC manufacturers are mining more for themselves before they release products to the public.

Mining will be almost impossible by the end of the year when difficulty is 100 billion.  Companies are having trouble making newer hardware to offset the fast increase in difficulty.

Lets look what a 10TH unit pulling 5000 watts by then will make $300 a month. As we know machines will make in lifetime about 2x lifetime of the first month mining.   KNC Neptunes Q2 2014 for 13,ooo.  LOL

Forgot another reason:
4) Solo mine your own coins which have no taint or history on them 

The only reasons to be mining BTC are:
1) you like mining and don't care about profit/loss
2) you want to help keep the network decentralized
3) you think you can earn more coins by purchasing a miner and running on cheap electricity than if you had just spent the miner money on an exchange and bought the coins directly.

1&2 are obvious to each individual person.  Point 3 is the one in big contention.  Numerous posts about it.  Death and Taxes with his huge calculation thread, Organofcorti with his projections, etc.  Most of the establish members agree buying a miner now doesn't make financial sense.  It may make you happy seeing 0.2BTC trickle in every day into your wallet, but if you spent 20BTC up front you're going to be waiting a long time to get that 20BTC back (because it most likely won't happen).

Those who mine are GPU are just having fun not actually earning profit from it .

I have never understood why people are gpu mining. ASIC's are more efficient and the newer ones will be able to scrypt mine also.

Furthermore when you look at the calculator you need atleast 400 gh/s to make a decent return at the early start of 2014, and now you need 1th/s if you want to make a return on anything over £2k invested this quarter. It's just not worth it.

I can understand some people who have invested a lot of money in GPU's farming alt coins but they wont make a return either. Even if they do it for the long run the scrpyt ASIC's will destroy them. All these people who intend to start farming now are wasting their money if they're looking to make a good profit.

If you're investing £15k plus on over 1TH/s then it's worth it otherwise I look forward to seeing all those expensive GPU's people shelled out for being nice and cheap on ebay.

How do you know the diff are increase slow now ?

Too long to read, anyway just buy btc instead.

Fully agree that BTC prices are so low now that it might be more profitable to buy BTC and wait for better prices, than mining yourself. I bought my Neptunes when prices were $800 - $1100, then prices were high enough to make it an easier choice than now.

Price speculation is a 100% different game than mining. In mining you dont care too much about BTC price (as long as range stays higher than $300) because BTC price and network difficulty somehow compensate each other. Buying BTC and holding depends only on BTC price. Mining depends on several factors, then it is more insulated to BTC price. If BTC price goes over $1000, there will be so many more PetaHashes mining that you will mine less BTC than if price would be $500 per BTC.
If you buy a miner now (Neptune costs right now about 20 BTC), and prices plummet to $100, that means that the plateau phase (survival profits) will arrive much faster. Buying a Neptune when BTC prices are $100, means to pay 100 BTC for 1 Neptune. Mission impossible to mine that many BTCs. Then nobody (not even corporations) will invest 100BTC to buy a Neptune that might mine only 40-80 BTC in its lifetime. Therefore the unavoidable plateau phase. But if at that time you are mining with a Neptune that cost you 20 BTC, you will have it working for long long time still, and still mine a lot more than the 20 BTC you paid for it.

I have tried buying/selling BTC a year ago (in MtGox and then in Bitstamp), but I only lost money. Then I dont advice or comment on whether it is good or bad to buy bitcoins. Current prices of $600 looks cheap, but what if you buy and those prices go to $300 (eg. as a result of Mt Gox going bankrupt and stealing their customers funds).
Because I have got profits by mining for many months straight, then I sometimes allow myself to advice people who are thinking about mining. So far, $500 BTC prices and current mining landscape points to a still profitable 2014 (barely profitable as I tried to explain in my first post), but still allowing to recover the investment. It might be more profitable to just buy the bitcoins and wait for a year. But that is a different game than mining which was my only scope in this post.

No one is questioning whether mining with an ASIC is profitable.  Hell, my SC Single can still make me $ if I had them sitting in my house even though my power is $0.35/KWH.

The thing people debate is whether paying a company to purchase a miner and then mining using your own electricity will put you ahead of flat out buying the coins.  No miner currently available for pre-order seems to be able to recoup BTC opportunity cost.  With BTC prices down to sub $600 now it's pretty much a no-brainer that buying mining hardware does not make sense (unless you get a deal not available to the public).

I do mine myself, and my logic above is sound enough so that I have bought few Neptunes for mining this 2014 (Although I expect my Jupiters to still being marginally profitable this year, I wanted to step up my mining gear). The reseller's thing is just an extra hobby to make mining more fun, however it is more of a joke than a real income.

US electricity costs for businesses: "The national average was 10.19 cents per kwh."
US electricity costs for households: "The national average was 12.20 cents per kwh."

Datacenters electricity costs are only marginally lower than what households pay. Households have cheap electricity because it is meant for warming up the house, etc. Businesses are, on the other hand, an income for the government.

Mining farms require the exactly same infrastructure than current datacenters. Therefore their running costs are much alike.
There are tens of datacenters in every city, competing in prices to host your miners (or any server).

While running a miner at your own home (Finland) costs you about 0.08 KWH, running it in a datacenter (the cheapest I found in Helsinki) costs you $0.3 KWH + fixed monthly fees ($200 - $1000 for renting the space in the datacenter's rack).
That is because overall datacenter costs are higher than you running a miner at home. Then even though datacenters compete among themselves to try to offer cheaper prices to gain customers, the final price they offer for collocating a miner at their datacenter is still several times higher the costs of running that miner at home. Even though those marginal savings in electricity costs that datacenters achieve due to their volume.

So in summary, mining is still profitable in 2014. You are not going to make 50x electricity costs as last year, but from 10x(right now) to a stable 2x-3x at the end of the year. (with x being the electricity cost).

Your logic is completely flawed, but thats only because you are not attempting logic, but just trying to spam your affiliate link.

In reality, if mining is profitable with typical consumer electricity prices, then it will be far more profitable for large mining enterprises that only pay a fraction of our electricity cost, as low as $0.01 per KwH. The logical conclusion from that is that such entities will continue piling on the hashrate until its no longer lucrative for them, and as a result completely pointless for anyone paying "normal" electricity rates.

The only thing what i'm missing is the cooling.

In warm countries or in the summer you need to cool down the place where you mine.

If you mine with 20 kW, you will need 20kW cooling power. It's costs a lot.

I don't know why anyone gets hung up on difficulty, difficulty doesn't drive anything, it's just the brakes applied to the hashing rate to keep the mining rate semi-consistent.  The only thing that matters is your percentage of the total hashing power in use.

That said, yes it is still profitable to mine now, but any significant profit really has to come by scale these days.  Margins are squeezed, so you need a lot more hashing power to make worth your time.  Anyone trying to dive in with one rig to be delivered in April, however, is definitely gambling, especially with the current market price volatility.  The hash rate will probably continue to increase by 19% roughly every 11 days with the influx of new gear magnitudes more powerful than the current gear.  And keep in mind that a good chunk of that new gear was bought by selling the current gear to suckers on ebay that have no clue just how massively outgunned they're going to be.  The point being is that a lot of the existing hashing power is still going be in the pool, with all of the big iron just being piled on top of that.

Check your profitability numbers by what the hash rate will be when the rig gets delivered.  I'll bet that there's going to be a lot of newbs that will be underwater come April.

Quite frankly, these new rigs are already overpriced.  They make perfect sense to someone already mining at scale as part of a tech refresh, and one whose capital is defrayed by selling the old gear at a premium, but not for a new fish that has to get the entire capital cost factored in.

100% agree!

I have been reading for so long time about why people should never get into mining that I thought to open a different thread for expressing my opinion, a completely opposite opinion.

Summary
Mining this 2014 will be profitable. The mining game will change, because the mining environment is changing.
In 2013, mining profits went from huge to very little in just few months. With ROI reached in weeks (if you bought your miner before october) or in 1 month (if you bought your miner last december).
In 2014, mining profits will go from low to lower and stay like that during years. ROI will be reached within 6-12 months, and profitability will be about 2x the electricity costs of running your hardware.
If you buy a KNC Neptune (see here a review), for which you pay $500 in electricity per month, when difficulty stabilizes, you will be getting a profit of about $1000 per month (after paying electricity).

The logic of the Plateau phase
It is true the main argument of naysayers: Difficulty has been increasing 20% every 2 weeks. Every time it gets harder to reach ROI. Conglomerates have mining farms of thousands of Terahashes. Etc.

However, there is a HUGE flaw in the logic of people thinking that mining will not be profitable because difficulty will increase so much that it will eventually become more expensive to mine than to shut down your miners (because electricity costs will be higher than the income in BTC from mining). WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!!!!!!

Today (20.02.2014) there is around 27 PH mining bitcoins. That is 27 000 000 GH hashing power. That equipment is built out of 28nm - 150nm ASICs, with electricity consumption from 1 - 6 Watts/GH. People mining on their homes, or in a conglomerate's mining farm, all are using the same ASICs, with the same power consumption.
If difficulty increases 20 times from right now, then electricity costs would be higher than the BTC you can get by mining. That means that all those 27 PH in the network will be shut down, as people want to make money, not to burn it.

Even if you have a free miner, if you need to pay $100 electricity for mining and get $80 in mined bitcoins, you are better off turning your mining gear off and using those $100 per month for buying BTC.
If miners are shut down, network difficulty lowers, making your miners profitable again. Then you turn on your miner again (because it is now profitable again), until a stability phase is reached. A plateau period that will last for years, where mining is still barely profitable.

Business Case for purchasing mining equipment in 2014
Small miners have an advantage that mining farms (conglomerates) dont have. If you mine from home, you pay electricity and that is your only cost. If you mine in a datacenter, you pay electricity, cooling, personnel (upgrading firmware, configurations, etc.), rent for the space, taxes, etc.
Companies that mine, have costs that are 2x-3x the electricity costs.

On top of that, buying new hardware is a business decision, which is approved or rejected by the investors according to the expected profits. A conglomerate will put millions in hardware only if ROI is reached within 6-12 months, and expected profits are good enough that investors will risk their money for the hardware. Then the limit for network difficulty is given by the minimum return that conglomerates expect from their investment. Income - Costs (electricity + other costs + hardware depreciation) > Minimum Profit.

That points to when we will reach the Plateau phase. Now here goes the only speculation (intelligent guess): The Plateau phase will be reached when the income in BTC equals 3x the electricity costs.
X for electricity and 2X that pays for all other costs, and minimum profit expected by owners of mining farms.
If you buy a KNC Neptune (see my signature below), for which you pay X ($500) in electricity per month, when difficulty stabilizes, you will be getting a profit of about 2X ($1000) per month (after paying electricity).

Bitcoin Mining Calculators are useless
Bitcoin mining calculators only assume that difficulty will keep increasing indefinitely. PAST EVENTS NOT ALWAYS REPEAT IN THE FUTURE. And in this case, basic logic tells that it is simply impossible for difficulty to keep increasing indefinitely.

Currently (I mine with few  28nm KNC Jupiters ), I get in BTC the equivalent of 10X-15X what I pay for electricity. That number still leaves so much profit, that big money is still flowing into mining gear.
We still have space for more than 10 (5 months) increases of 20% until the Plateau phase, when Business Plans reach their lowest limit of profitability.
Most likely we will see the difficulty to keep this same pace until May, and then slowly stabilize by the end of 2014.

Which mining calculator keeps that into account? None. Then dont use them. Those are good only for seing the next 3 months and no futher than that. Buying Mining Gear is not a 3 months decision. Calculators will not be of any help.


Guidelines for a future proof Mining Gear
- If you decide to get into mining, dont jump into any second hand mining gear (unless those have 28nm asics and price is no more than 60X the return of 1 day at current difficulty).
- Dont preorder from unknown vendors.
- Get a miner that consumes no more than 1.2 Watts / GH.

Personally, I have ordered few KNC Neptune (see my signature below if you want further details), which to my understanding, are the most future proof. The reason is that Neptunes are 20nm asics, which is the current state of the art of asic technology. There is no next generation asics (14nm) for at least 2 more years.

Another common argument marketed a lot in internet (which newbies accept without reasoning), is that some 40nm, 55nm, 130nm ASICs can be specced so that they are more efficient in electricity than 28nm ASICS, then 20nm, 28nm, 40nm, 55nm, 100nm, 150nm are useless. Those are merely tricks. If you underclock an asic 4 times, you consume 6 times less electricity. Then you can make your old tech asics to perform better in electricity consumption than a 28nm asic. Then the volume starts playing a role. Because right now mining bitcoins is over 10X electricity costs, to downclock an ASIC is crazy, and it is only done as a marketing tool (the efficiency thing). Once electricity costs is 2X-3X the bitcoin income, all asics will be used with the clock speeds that hits the point of maximum efficiency (ratio btc income - electricity costs).

And to finalize this post, if you are planning to order a KNC Neptune (KNC is selling those right now , probably until beginning of March), take a look at my signature. Besides mining myself, because I have been mining with KNC gear for so long time, I give small rebates to fellow bitcoin miners. All details in my signature link.

Cheers and happy mining!

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