Topic: USB block erupters are now useless. $5 - $7 each. - page 4. (Read 26025 times)

The other factor which affects profitability is the price of BTC, which at $140 today is 12 times the price it was in January. I personally started looking into all of this in May and saw BTC drop to $68 and then rebound. And its increasing steadily.

I've been reading other threads that are predicting the value of BTC will continue to increase at the 10x to 12x per year. I have a hard time believing that will continue much longer, but even a 5x to 6x increase next year will put the price of BTC at $700 to $800 each. If that occurs it will keep me mining even if I can only get a BTC every 3 months at my fastest mining rate.

But, that being said, I want to get as many BTC now as I can, and 10 to 20 block erupters will generate 1 to 2 BTC every month for the short term.

I agree it will begin leveling off at some point.  Thinking that this point is the 80-90M difficulty is where I thought you were bonkers.

There are a LOT of ASICs preordered that more or less will show up and begin hashing.  The 200TH (formerly 100TH) project is coming online fully, a number of other mines are coming on, and I fully expect the difficulty will shoot past 1B, which is where the early Avalon miners stop being profitable.  People will continue ordering hardware well past the point it's worth running, IMO.

So quoting from a previous post.

Math can't get the the way of common sense.  Currently, the network it at ~500 terahashes/s, with a difficulty of ~50 million.  For rough estimates, we can say that the network is 10x the difficulty.  So, if we have to hit 750 million difficulty, that is a 15x increase in difficulty, which would require a 15x increase in hashing power, raising the network to 7.5 PETAhashes/s.  There's no way any ASIC companies can deliver that much hardware that quickly. 

Obviously this was before the most recent difficulty increase.

So yes the difficulty will continue to increase, but it will begin to level off. I'm not sure where that will begin, and maybe I'm being hopefull that it will start at 85 to 90 mill. But it will level off as hardware manufacturers finally catch up with their preorders and the massive flow of new hardware slows down.

BitFury is shipping.  You're delusional.

With the increase in value for BTC, and the expected rise going forward USB Block Erupters will continue to be useful. Even when the difficulty reaches 75 mill.

I believe that the difficulty is going to start leveling off as I read in a previous post, possibly at the 85 to 90 mill level.

And if the value of BTC continues to rise, these Block erupters will continue to generate a small amount. For someone like me getting in just recently, and not having thousands to invest in mining gear this is an entry level for mining.

The USB Block Erupters are selling on Ebay for $33 to $35, which is much better than the $120 they were selling for just a month ago. And if they come down even more then I will be buying more of them since they will pay for themselves within 90 days even with the difficulty level increasing.

Once they pay for themselves, why not just keep on mining with them. They take so little power its not even funny. And if BTC reaches even close to the levels discussed on other threads they will be quite profitable.

The goal here is to do what I can, regardless of what others are doing. I don't let the actions of others discourage me from what I can do.

Yes, because 330MH is such a great defense against people with many 2TH rigs... 

I respectfully disagree that block erupter USBs are useless.

Looking at everything through the lens of ROI, is in my view a very limited, myopic view of the Bitcoin universe.

It's a fun hobby where you actually get to make at least part of your money back, while supporting the network so that evildoers do not take it over.

I am ScaryHash !!!

Defender of Bitcoin !

I just recently bought a block erupter for $48, and have it mining Zetacoins, which is barely profitable at the current exchange rate.

But, it is profitable, and will pay for itself in 45 days at current rate. Obviously there are variables that affect that, and I have to pay attention to it.

Very soon it looks like I will need to switch to mining bitcoins directly, and at the current difficulty it would take 90+ days to break even. Even this is not bad for break even time. Of course the difficulty will hit 65 mill to 75 mill around that time, maybe even higher at the rate Avalon and BFL are now shipping their asic miners.

I'm just glad I didn't spend the $3000 to $4500 to buy one of those only to see that I've missed the window of opportunity. I actually saw an auction for one of the BFL Jally's go for $2500 a few weeks ago.

My goal is to mine enough to buy a few bitcoins, maybe buy better mining hardware etc.. and just keep going with it. But, as long as it generates a profit its worth doing.

I missed out on the days of a 9 day ROI on these, and those days will never occur again.

If they do in fact drop in price, which is likely because I've seen them go from $120 each on Ebay to $48 in just a couple of months. Once they get to $30 or less I'll buy a few more because those will just hash away and eventually generate some coins.

I believe that bitcoins will rise in value, and reach $250 to $300 again. At that price then I will be able to recoup my costs, and then some. But, its a calculated risk, and with any risk, there is a chance that the price of bitcoins won't reach that value. We'll see.

Yep - I had it up for like 5 minutes and compared it to Quark - but got deluged with emails about how you can't compare the two.  Too much hassle unless someone clears the air on how to compare all the non-GPU coins

I was speaking to Zetacoin when I made those comments, and you have since added it to your list.  :-)  So allow me to 'eat my words' on that comment.

But I understand new coins popping up *constantly* - and I hadn't thought of needing an API to put it into a sensible list. 

Off topic: My other favorite that would be nice to see on Coinchoose is Primecoin.  But that is probably a can of worms.

It is more like there are 10 coins created every minute and hard to keep up (let along find a nice block explorer plus exchange for the coin).  Plus many coins don't get on an API with an exchange so I can't list them (CoinEx and PhenixEx don't have API's yet to get order data). I try to have every coin on Cryptsy, BTC-e and BTER.com with the exception of the CPU only coins (because they don't lend themselves to a good comparison between GPU mining coins).  

What coins specifically am I missing?

Too late.  
Besides, this is a dilemma. If you want a coins to succeed, you need to give it exposure, so that it gets widest possible adoption, but then it's profitability will start to converge on that of BTC. If you don't give it exposure, then you are just dooming a coin from the start: pump and dump.

If there is a good coin to mine that's profitable keep It a damn secret and keep it off coinchoose. Once its on there so many people will mine it that the profitabil ity will go to crap.

You can ask for coins to be added to Coinchoose. The guy (sal002) has his hands pretty full, so you should give him links to block explorere, icon, exchange, etc. for your favourite coin.

Coinchoose is a neat gimmick, but there are a lot of profitable coins that don't show up there.  Not sure if this is the admins preference, bullsh*t politics, lack of updates, etc.

That said, you can mine Zetacoins (SHA256) with USB erupters and turn out 3 to 5 more times profit in trade.  ;-)

Inb4: "scam coinz", "oddree sells erupterz", "coinchoose is tehbestest"

Here, let me modify your post to take into account that opinions are like arseholes and that your opinion is thankfully not the centre of the universe of human understanding:


From someone who has retired 60+gpus over the last few months, they are a godsend. Everything is relative.

Of course if you are just buying them to try to get your 90 day ROI, that boat sailed a looooooong time ago.

The CORRECT forum for that FUD would be over at 9gag.

Speculation != Fact.

Not that that seems to matter of course. :-)

Ah, But would the company even sell them that cheap is the question

with today's 30% difficulty jump, I don't see anyone would make back ROI on erupters, $10 would be okay, $20 is too much for 300MH/s of erupters

I would pay $20ish for a block erupter, Anymore than 25 and you've lost me as a buyer.

BTC Guild has merged mining if you are on PPLNS, i set my NMC payout address to my btc-e account and trade them for BTC