Topic: people buying used miners - page 3. (Read 4803 times)

My experience is that the ebay buyers are looking to "try out" mining and don't mind paying what we see as a "premium". It's kinda sad though that there are people who take advantage of this, charge overly outrageous prices, and then brag about it.

There are actually a couple of reasons...

1) As stated above, people want to try bitcoin out.  They heard about it and instead of dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars, this is the alternative approach.

2) People will pay a premium in USD for these devices.  This could be because they do not know how to buy bitcoin or for the convenience of being able to pay in bitcoin.  Either way, there has always been a premium when paying in USD over Btc.

3) People are ignorant.  They hear about bitcoin and immediately jump in without doing their due diligence.  I have been selling the USB eruptors (among other things) on amazon for $50 to $60 a piece! (a few unfortunate souls bough new ones priced over $110) when they would make maybe .01 btc a piece in their lives.  And it wasn't like one would sell every couple of days, I was dropping off 10 to 20 packages a day at the post office.  (and since amazon doesn't let me change the shipping costs, I usually make more off of shipping costs ~$5 per device, then I do off of actually buying and selling the eruptors)

Funny story, one guy once bought 18 off of me from amazon.  He paid almost $100 for shipping that cost me under $6 to send to him.

People are just ignorant and do not do research is my thinking.  I understand it may be kind of hard to just buy bitcoin in the U.S., but with a little work and research it is not impossible.  Maybe they do not want to submit bank info, or maybe they do not want to meet someone in person?  These are both viable points, but I keep coming back to, people do not research enough before jumping in.

People could mine altcoins with sha-256 equipment, just for fun.
People may not be ready to spend few K dollars for 1TH machines but $500 is ok to loose. My 2 cents.

Are you kidding!? Those things saved me hours of clicking on faucets for a slightly better return. They are a great investment!

So we basically have, a lack of knowledge and people that are just into the mining process.
Oh well.  Nothing we can really do about it.
I guess no used bargain deals until people wise up.     

If you want to dip your toes in, you might as well buy BTC for $15 rather than a BE. A BE will mine a couple mBTC at best.

That said, I can imagine the price for BEs to be relatively high because of the gadget factor. Many people buy one or two just for fun, realizing that they will never get anything close to their moneys worth of coins out of it.

 lol its all noobies that are being introduced to mining. Some People I know buy them for fun, though just 1-2 for entertainment

You're right, but keep in mind that there are a lot of people who only want to "dip their toes" in Bitcoin at first. So, buying a $15 BE off ebay is actually a sane way to do that.

Now, continuing to do that once they're ready to swim out in the deep end is wasteful.

Yeah, it's crazy. I watched 38Gh/s miners go for $500+ on ebay. That's more than $12 per Gh. People buying like that are what's making the price go up. A Gh is not worth more than $3.

I don't get it.
Perfect example is the 336 mhs usb one.  It is not worth more than $2 under the most ideal circumstance (free power.)
Yet they sell for anywhere from 5-15 and actually move. 
Wtf   
Are the parts valuable or something? 
At the rate these used mienrs move, they are going to rip more people off than mt gox  (ok exaggeration.)