After further research I can safely bump that offer up to 5 BTC. I will pay you 5 BTC if you prove your claim. Historical exchange rate data shows end of April at ~$1 USD to 1 BTC and first week of May up to ~$3 USD. I noted on another post you reported getting ~335 Mh/s out of that XFX 5850. At a difficulty of even 100k and 335 Mh/s you would at best recover $75 USD in one week and $150 in two weeks, well under your stated recovery claim of $268.
I'll give you some benefit of doubt, let's say you are a GPU God and somehow you manage to drag 500 Mh/s out of your 5850. Let's also assume that the difficulty was only 50k at the last week of April and that the exchange rate last week of April was $3.00 USD per 1 BTC. With those numbers you are still shy of recovering your hardware expenditures in a week at ~$220 USD recovered. A little over a week and you are getting close to your $268 number.
Your claim is entirely false, period, end of story. Prove otherwise and you can add 5 BTC to your end of April wallet balance of ~20 BTC.
CPU: $43
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116039Mobo: $44
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157173Video Card: $130 after rebate - $20 for reselling the shogun 2 game = $110
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=365429&csid=_21(It was $130 after Mail-in Rebate, I then sold the shogun 2 game for $20, I'm sure everyone knew about this deal when it was still up)
PSU: $45 after rebate
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207012&cm_re=xfx_psu-_-17-207-012-_-Product(This had free shipping when I bought it)
RAM: $20
ram was bought from a member on overclock.net for $20. I don't know how to prove that to you.
I already had a spare case (not that you even need one) and HDD.
= $262 total
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On average the amount I sold for was about $8. I sold my bitcoins two times back then. The second time I sold was during the spike in price leading up to $9.33 (although I did not sell for that high, I sold mine for $8.71 the second time IIRC), but yeah, about $8 average between the two sales. If you can show me how to get the mtgox chart from back then, I will show you at what point in the chart I sold my coins.
My 5850 was (and still is) mining at about 345,000 khash/s. In that difficulty I was getting about 3.5 BTC / day. So it would have taken me about 9 days to get the money back.
btw, my bitcoin address is 1Cz5hcRr2du74AF5MCvy8zKRFd4AyMBZjJ
although of course I do not expect to get anything from you, other than more excuses for how I'm lying.
When you say "a matter of days" do you mean a matter of months? When I see the phrase "a matter of days" I think of a few days, maybe a week at the most. Mining hardware will not pay back that fast.
i got all my money back in about just over a week. (XFX 5850 + XFX 650W PSU + 2GB RAM + Gigabyte mATX board + intel Celeron dual core CPU, already had a case in my garage)
this was in late april
I would suggest you re-evaluate your return by calculating your revenue as if you sold every bitcoin you mined as soon as you mined it, because that is your true revenue from mining. Any bitcoins that you keep, the profit you experience from appreciation is from your speculation in bitcoins, not mining (because you could have bought those bitcoins on the open market instead of from a mining operation). If you're not doing the accounting for your mining business this way, I'd say you're not doing it correctly. I've been mining since early March and have around 20x the mining power you do. My hardware is not yet fully covered (though if I account for the resale value of my hardware I am profitable)...I have generated around a 20% profit from mining in that time frame, but my bitcoin speculation (bitcoins I either buy or keep from my mining output) has returned about 450% in that same time frame.
I'm not mining as part time job or as some stable source of income. I just did it for fun and to make a few hundred dollars. I don't expect to continue mining for more than another couple of months at the rate difficulty is increasing, nor am I planning on buying more hardware... this mining PC is like the fifth PC i've built, I don't intend to fill up my basement with any more outdated computers.