Topic: Second best coin to mine? (Read 1091 times)

I think so. The mining business is very difficult for home miners now. Your new miner will only have usable life a 6 months or less.

That was extremely helpful. Thank you! I calculated that even if you did solar power FREE energy, with solar panel costs covered by business startup grants, you would still only make 1k profit per year! because the miners are so expensive.


I may possibly buy a modest amount of bitcoin and then cash in if there is a doubling in the rate, great idea It makes me wonder what else I can invest in the stock exchange.

With the exception of the early years, mining has always been like that. In fact, even in the early years it was like that as well as bitcoin was only worth a few cents. The people who made money just happened to be in the right place at the right time (they had a lot of BTC early when it shot up), because even when bitcoin started to creep up in value, so did the miners.

But for the past few years, mining is always chasing the tail end of the race. Big companies develop new hardware, mine with them a few months, then once they made profit, sell it off to consumers as the latest and greatest. Antminer S8's are probably pumping away right now in private, and in a month or two will be announced as new and sold off to the public once the S9's are working in private. Rinse, repeat, but in the end the small miner ends up getting the shaft as they barely eek out the cost of their investment. Sure, low electricity can help, but even there it is only minimal.

Larger gains could have been made by simply buying BTC last August at or slightly under $200. A $4,000 investment (@ $200/BTC) would have netted 20 BTC. Now 6 months later you would have doubled your money ($8,000). I don't think a $4,000 investment in the S7's back in August September would have made the same returns.

That can be said for any alt coin...

Try Dash mining, because after mining you can convert it to BTC and get profit. 

That's sure that the Bitcoin price will rise. A new technology will be introduced, 16 nm, and yes, they have dirt cheap electricity, like 0,03$/kWh. All this permit them to stay profitable.

I couldn't have picked a worse time to enter mining! :/
I only came across bitcoin on a youtube vid last week! I can't believe people have been earning money especially during that peak in 2014!

I mean, I've been looking at other investments too, like airport car parking, that looks cool. There's loads out there.

I've been doing the math with Bitcoin mining, and with the half reward, it doesn't seem to be profitable. Even if I invested 200,000 pounds, it would still take 2 years to break even and by then the hardware would be obsolete. So I wonder how people will even make money from Bitcoin mining after July, unless they upgrade to SP50's, find super cheap electrcity or perhaps less bitcoin will be worth more one day...

He seems to don't have any current hardware, and with the end of the mining around this summer (at the same moment as the halving, by the way), I wouldn't recommend him to buy some GPUs just to mine Ethereum, since the hashrate is also increasing.

If you have the hardware already, I agree Ethereum (ETH) is the way to go right now for home mining. A close second is Expanse (EXP), it is trading about 1/12 that of ETH, but you can mine about 15x the amount of EXP per day using the same hardware and software. However, Expanse is a lot more volatile, so you may want to trade any mined coins off right away if you are mining strictly for profit as tomorrow the price could collapse.

For the time being, Ethereum is the best coin to mine, even profitable at electricity of $0.2/kWh. But the price might drop and make it unprofitable.

Decred and Vanillacoin are altcoins that are profitable to mine currently (depending on your electricity and hardware costs obv.).

Decred: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/anndcr-decred-community-governance-bitcoin-devs-lightning-network-1290358 | https://forum.decred.org

Decred can be mined with GPUs and CPUs, I'm only mining with GPUs currently. Tools can be found on the ANN and help on the forum.

Vanillacoin: http://vanillacoin.net | https://talk.vanillacoin.net

Vanillacoin can be mined with GPUs CPUs and FPGAs, but only GPU and FPGA mining is profitable. Tools can be found on the forum in the Tools, Tutorials & Projects section.




Both coins are being actively developed, are feature rich and are traded on more exchanges.

how about you don't buy hardware... and buy the coin itself to mine.. like a proof of stake coin.. each coin itself is a miner. new paradigm way of thinking about mining.

Hi everyone,

I was hoping to mine Bitcoin, but with the reward halving and the difficulty increasing, I am not sure it is worth it.

Could anyone recommend a second best digital currency to mine? Would an Antminer S7 work for it? If not, could you recommend what hard ware is best?

Thanks

V.