Topic: the how much btc/fiat have you lost mining thread! end of 2013 edition (Read 5349 times)

Thought I'd drop here my bitcoin experience thus far as that is the topic of the thread.


So far, I have "lost" nothing. I've made some mistakes and could have made much more, but hindsight is a bitch.
I started mining on my 5850 that I already had when I first heard about bitcoin (just before the big climb to 30 and the crash thereafter)
-been re-investing profits from that card into new hardware ever since. started small, first 2 6950's, then 4 7970's when they came out (I think a couple christmas' ago?) - then held in there through the $2 dollar doldrums, and sold a bunch of BTC all the way from $10 to $200

Since then I've re-invested in 4 LS from BFL, 1 batch 2 avalon, 1 Jupiter, and 4 of MrTeal's boards --- the avalon is the only one I think that will bring great profit (easily over double the 56 BTC I paid for it so far) The others will hopefully bring my total back to my desired minimum holdings of 100 BTC *(I nearly cleaned out my wallet ordering the Jupiter, back up to 44 BTC in the wallet now) so even though 3 out of the 4 ASIC bets I made will probably not make any returns, the 1 bet that panned out covered the losses of the other 3. Could I have done better by just getting the avalon? of course, but how can you know for sure unless you take a chance?

sorry, rambling  TL,DR: I started with a 5850 and no bitcoins. I put no money that was not earned with bitcoin into this, and I hope to have approximately 100 BTC by this christmas. yeah, I know, small potatoes, that's me

There must be some pretty hefty overhead for large mining operations though, isn't there? I mean, to deal with heat removal, labour costs of maintenance, security, rent or lease of the property, etc...

I don't see how they can out-compete a small-time miner like myself with approx. 75 amps of free power and a handful of miners. Obviously they blow me out of the water on volume, but I've been pretty profitable so far. Even if it gets to the point where I'm down to 1 BTC per week, (as I was on my GPU's before my batch 2 avalon arrived) it's still paying the rent.

 Not enough to recover the amount of BTC I've spent, that's for sure. I've made peace with the fact that all my ASIC expenditures will be lucky to make back 20-40% of the BTC I spent acquiring the gear.

 Either way, I'm still sitting on a respectable pile from my CPU/GPU mining salad-days, and shouldn't really complain too much as I'm still way in the black.

 What a crazy hobby this Bitcoin mining thing has turned out to be.

EDIT: Hah! Almost forgot about the ~60 some-odd BTC I spent with Steamboat for 288 chips + Assembly in K16's. Fuck me.

WTF OVER 100K!!!!!!!!!!!!! GFDMF I thought I was a fool for throwing away 130 BTC on failed investment speculations and hardware -  you sir take the cake!!!

~300 BTC wasted on 4 x BFL 60GH/s Single pre-orders. Forced refunded in fiat at substantial dollar loss vs BTC/USD exchange at time of refund.
WTF were you thinking!!!!!!!!! this must have happened sometime in Jan/Feb I imagine and you likely got refunded for your pre-price jumped price in fiat is my guess

100 BTC "invested" in 2 ASICMiner Blades
Again WTF why did you think it was a good idea to buy these at full price!!??!!

~125 BTC "invested" in ~120 ASCIMiner Erupter USB's
Ok now I'm seeing "A fool and his money are soon parted" behavior with you!

~160 BTC for purchase of 800 GHs worth of October Bitfury orders via Megabigpower
 Ok this sort of makes sense EXCEPT I paid for mine in September and paid over 100 BTC less than YOU! I literally only paid like 56 BTC with overnight shipping

~18 BTC for purchase of test batch of 20GH/s Bitfury BF1 USB miners
See comment regarding ASICMINER for the same hashpower in the same period I only paid 9.9 Bitcoins INCLUDING the additional expensive usb hubs

22 BTC for purchase of Redhash Avalon clone
That one was tempting somewhat until you see its only 105 Gigahash this device would have been killer to own in March but to buy it in OCTOBER??? You SHOULD HAVE bought in to Cex.io with that same btc at the time (opening price was .2 per GH)  you could've had 110 GH mining immediately...and could have sold back into sell orders for a tidy profit on the spread (if you would have timed it right you could have exited one week out and at .245) could have netted an ADDITIONAL 5 bitcoins off of just the spread...NOT including the mined income at pre 189MM difficulty  


Thank you sooooo much for writing this....now I will forever feel good about my hardware purchased despite the fact that the genesisblock calculator says we're all pretty much fucked come march 2014 anyway due to all the network power around.

Sorry if that came off mean...but seriously like what the fuck? that was a whole house you just threw down the blockchain for the sake of network protection.  How much bitcion have you mined with this ASIC hardware so far?



EDIT:  oh wait a second - this isnt all your money is it?....That much money and the way this is all timed, it looks as though you were running groupbuys (at least I hope you were) that makes it not soo bad...its more like you and 70ish other people aggregate lost 100 BTC each.

~300 BTC wasted on 4 x BFL 60GH/s Single pre-orders. Forced refunded in fiat at substantial dollar loss vs BTC/USD exchange at time of refund.
100 BTC "invested" in 2 ASICMiner Blades
~125 BTC "invested" in ~120 ASCIMiner Erupter USB's
~160 BTC for purchase of 800 GHs worth of October Bitfury orders via Megabigpower
~18 BTC for purchase of test batch of 20GH/s Bitfury BF1 USB miners
22 BTC for purchase of Redhash Avalon clone

== ~725 BTC spent from my wallet.dat in 2012-2013 on mining related hobbies.

In the long run, I still think that difficulty will rise to a level that only users with free electricity can stand out. Large farms can't endure the huge electricity and cooling cost and they will all shutdown. If it costs more to mine than buy, why mining instead of buying? So, there will be lots of reserve hashing power ready to fire up when mining income rose above electricity cost, and that in turn will raise the difficulty to make mining profitability drop below that line again

Since free electricity can not be acquired at large scale (usually included in the rent, and those house have limited circuit capacity), so each miner will operate at a small scale, this will make the whole network hashing power widely distributed, which is very good for the network security

We are going to see many Chinese ASIC miners appear in the next several months and total hash rate will be magnitude higher by then

Yep, I am seeing this too.  Farms are getting larger and more centralized.

Lost >100k USD 

Looking back, I should have just kept the coins I have mined over the years and put that aside as my retirement.
I got into ASIC because of the batch 1 Avalons which were very profitable.
Many thought the same and we all got burned! Ouch!
I'm done buying hardware. Please kill me if I ever plan to buy again.

everyone should be negative now.
lucky avalon batch 1 people - the only lucky independent asic miners
and those that sold their bfl preorders on ebay for $20,000 - how do you sleep at night

That is all they read.

Bought Avalon B3 4mod 102BTC shipping included... mined about 20 and sold it for 35 took hit about 50btc
Willing get back to mining, ordered two coincrafts from bitmine. However, Im quite sceptical getting any positive roi with those, anyway this is interesting.

The point of this thread is that most miners are LOSING money, thus they won't be paying taxes on gains instead they will get to deduct their losses.  Being able to deduct the losses helps soften the sting of negative ROI hardware purchases.

IRS will be fapping over this thread. Remember to pay your taxes people!

Bingo!!  ASIC Producers selling their Chips/Miners to build themselves Huge Mining Farms!  I hate it but it's a fact now and Centralized Bitcoin network w/ 90% Business's is developing and should be stopped Now before it fully compromises the network...I just don't understand how people are Ok w/ these companies doing this.  First ASICMiner was 35% of the network when they were only ones w/ ASICs and now GHash.io (Bitfury) is up to 475TH/s, nearly 25% of Network, and this will come to a Head w/ 28nm ASICs in the next few months...I would hate to see this happening to Bitcoin but something needs to be done now!

I've done great Mining w/ GPU's and FPGA's that always paid off and made a small profit but with the BFL ASIC's i'll never make back my purchase price in BTC or Fiat.  I'm still waiting on 4 Singles even now...

When everyone could just pickup a few GPU's, and even with FPGA's, individuals mining was very relavent and could usually be profitable but with ASIC's we're making a losing bet.  The only ones profiting are the ASIC Companies and it's very unfortunate.

i'm sure people have  some new numbers

How did you do so well on your B2 Avalon?? When did you get it?

I received mine on July 9, and it's been running non-stop since then and it's only mined 60 BTC so far (getting about 82-85 GH/s maybe). Even taking into account the poor luck Ozcoin has had the past few months thats only an extra 10 coins.

If you look at it in bitcoins:

Avalon batch #2 (bought the order off someone in early May): 130 BTC, earned just about 60 BTC so far because it was 2 months later than expected!
-70 BTC

2 BFL Jalapenos, ordered last year for $150 a piece I think. BTC was at about 11 maybe so perhaps 13.5 a Jalapeno, or 27 BTC total.

So far they've mined almost 9 BTC.
-19 BTC.

But, that's $1,125 in dollars, vs $300 spend on them so that's a profit.

2 BFL Singles ordered, $1300 a piece, $2600 total, thats about 236 BTC at the time I'm estimated.
I just got them today! So 0 BTC so far .

The Avalon will be the only huge loss. About $13,000 paid for it (though I paid in BTC) and it's only made $7,500 so far (60 coins).

But... the Avalon was a hedge against ASICMiner and I made about 325 BTC on my ASICMiner shares in just 3 months (I've long since sold them).

This! ... I hate the fact this is happening and you nailed it... so many dont get this very simple fact =(

Bitfury August delivery, delivered in semptember btw, was my worst investment.

All my GPUs, FPGAs and Avalons all of them did breakeven in BTC terms (and in fiat as well since BTC is going up).

Bitfury, on the contrary, will not even reach 50% and a good chunk of my profit has already been taken by the 200 THs mine and GHash.io operations which are "stealing" the very coins we, their customers, should get back from our investment.

For those like me which cannot make their own chips mining is dead and until difficulty levels off (maybe next summer) I won't buy any more hardware.

All of the hardware available (for preorders) now is priced like it has no competition AND all ASIC designers/producers are going to use proceeds from selling of their chips (at inflated prices) to build huge mining farms which will make breakeven impossibile for their customers.

Mining is becoming more centralized each and every day, long gone the days when one could buy commodity hardware and mine with it without having to fight with the hardware producers for the same coins!

spiccioli

I don't see how this is remotely possible. I am expecting to lose 20-50% in BTC on my bitfury machines. Even if difficulty levels off....it will level off too far in the future (spring) for the machines to be generating meaningful BTC. I'm even adding 40-50% additional hash rate (from OC and "bonus" boards). What was the price of BTC when you bought your August kits?

EDIT: I fuzzed some of my numbers and the best I could come up with is around break-even with 50% extra hashing power. Hope there will be additional software improvements to increase hash rate without overpowering the on board regulators.

Simplified answer:

5k out into miners.

theoretical pay back 2k at today’s exchange rate (not real haven’t converted to USD yet.)

3K still to come back.  


Running on free to me power.

Until converted back to the original form of payment which I am not intending to do. I am down 5k.


edit: typo 2000k and 3000k corrected to 2K and 3K 

bitfury: Starter kits will BTC break-even maybe because they included 2 h-cards. Else there would be NO chance for break even. I also planned to buy some more h-cards later but not at these prices. I don't see any reasonable hardware at the moment. There are only two groups gaining profit: resellers, manufactors

 2x Batch #3 orders:   Great machine, very very pricey and Yifu delivered extremely late.   The machine has paid about 50% back in FIAT value of BTC since getting it August 7th.

I think it will ROI in FIAT, however its gonna take 2-3 more months easily.  The Avalon is fairly stable, however I do have to manually reset the Motherboard ATX power connector.  Something with the capacitors causes it to stop mining about every ~ 2 weeks.


Icarus Trade-ins:   $2000 loss.   Avalon has still not honored my trade-ins.  I think I'm screwed here.


Bitfury:  5 x August starter kits   $6420
4 x h-boards  October $2200  
I plan to buy 10-16 more h-cards or a kit.  so $5000-$8000
ROI for bitfury in FIAT is projected to be 2.5-12 months.
ROI for bitfury will be 100-300% (I estimate)



These miners will have to be moved to a free power place probably within a year or two.   All in all I think I will break even and turn some profit.
I have to say though that this game is very competitive and the biggest factors are :  delivery of goods, reliability of hardware, and how efficient your hardware is.

Its literally a part-time job running 6 miners.  Fun and also stressful when they go down.

cool, thanks - you did really well for yourself! i'd stop mining for the time being or you'll start to lose while you're nicely well ahead. i'm a bit surprised avalon batch 2 did so well

Overall I've done fairly well mining.  Maybe just through luck.

B1 Avalon did extremely well.  Paid 114 BTC, mined 452 BTC to date.

B2 Avalon also did pretty well.  Paid 75 BTC, mined 160 BTC by the time I sold it a couple weeks ago.

The BFL products will surely be a large loss.  I paid maybe 50 BTC for 2 Jalapenos and a Little Single.  So far I only have the Jallys and have mined about 1.3 BTC.

I've purchased various FPGA boards, some of which I'm sure have paid for themselves, and some never will.  I doubt any of the USB BEs ever will.

I have some Klondike K16s in limbo with unfinished firmware, made with chips I bought in Zefir's batch 1.  They surely won't even come close to breaking even now.

Supposedly I'll be receiving my Metabank Bitfury miner soon that I paid 30 BTC for.  I expect I may break even on it, but not much more.

I'm thinking that at some point I should logically stop reinvesting in new miners and just keep the proceeds, but boy I sure do love mining.

can you please indulge me on what reasonably priced and promptly delivered product you have that's given you a positive return on investment? i can't think of too many and i'd be interested to know if any besides avalon batch 1 or bfl products for journalists worked out for you

I haven't lost anything yet. All my coins have remained secure in my wallet aside from the ones that I have spent on reasonably priced and promptly delivered goods and services from reliable businesses and individuals.

well, i think everyone realizes now that everyone is after only so many bitcoins. the pie doesn't get bigger.
so in the end everyone is after those damn coins but that piece of the pie is going to shrink no matter what you do.
honestly, end of year very few miners will actually be positive on their investment.
keeping exchange rates current i'm pretty sure that everyone who will get any sort of asic miner this year will be negative in btc or fiat.

so this thread is just to get an idea of people's return on investment.
post your miner - when you got it/how much you paid (btc or fiat)/how much you currently mined (till date of post)/estimate based on current mining how much you think you'll get

this should help everyone assess the quite strange situation this community is in.
without exchange rates going up - most people are likely in the red