Topic: What's your shutdown point? - page 3. (Read 11449 times)

You can not define a shutdown point as BTC/$ and ignore difficulty.

Difficulty is of course indirectly related to BTC/$ but its effect is that long term profitability is not dependent on BTC/$ but only on your MH/$ compared to the rest of the world. As such that FPGA will likely be profitable for the foreseeable future no matter BTC price, and EU or other GPU miners with high electricity costs will never be profitable for sustained periods of time. At most during short windows of opportunity when the network hash rate and difficulty havent caught up with a higher price yet.

  That is the hottest thing I've seen so far this morning!! (wife still sleeping  )

my shutdown point is $15. just wanted to say hi again from europe, where electricity actually costs money.

Now that this is sitting on my desk, I need to recalculate: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.584606

It's mining right now at 250 MH/s and consuming exactly 17 W (measured at the board). Using DeathAndTaxes' terminology and $0.149/kWh, that's like buying a block for $17.75, or $0.35/BTC!

I guess that's my new shutdown point!

Yes, I just bot them from newegg at 399 each.   getting 2908 Mhsh at 1190 watts at the wall.   

here is a couple of pics.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/112408294399222065988/albums/5658727447810944545

3x 5970 is an unbeatable efficiency engine.

No need for extender cables, dual power supplies, or high end board.  Find a AMD board w/ triple spaced PCIEx16 slots (1,4,7).  Add 3x 5970, sempron CPU, 2GB of ram, USB drive running copy of linux & cgminer and a nice 88%+ effecient 1200W powersupply and you have about as efficient of a setup that you can get without going to FPGA.

Tonight I had a 5 min power outage so I was able to plug two of my 3x5970 rigs into kill-a-watts before powering them up.  ~870W, ~2150MH =  2.47 MH/W from the wall.

To those who believe sub $2/BTC energy cost is impossible even w/ cheap electricity .... check your efficiency (at the wall).  If you are not getting >2MH/W you need to adapt or power down.

When BTC was $30USD anyone could grab any random junk and be profitable even w/ $0.30/kWh power costs.  Those days are gone and likely never coming back.  If someday (a decade from now) BTC is $30USD it will be because we are at 10 million difficulty. 

Today you need to be lean & mean and that means 6+ GPU per rig. 

hmmm 5970?

pls dont tell me you just bought them

I might reduce my mining power but for as long as I take part in the the bitcoin community / economy I'll at least keep one miner active. I ran SETI@Home for  a long time and got nothing for it. No reason not to run a bitcoin miner if I believe in bitcoin.

its getting close!!

4 of my rigs get more then 2.5 M/h  / watt, so I will leave those running .  but it is def getting close for the older rigs.

The botminers may end up maintaining the network. Hopefully they won't kill the potential value of their own investment.

I'm speculating on a Namecoin hype short to midterm but I don't really employ and rig, just my desktop with a 5770 and a Llano APU. If the price trend continues I think people like me (lots) will be the major contributor to the hashrate in opposed to a few big miners.
And wo knows maybe some people will give up on bitcoin completely, as they should if they aren't into it's real adaptation as a replacement for fiat currencies.

Most miners who actually pay for electricity should shut down their rigs at this price point. It makes no sense to run them unless you expect the price to rise in the short / mid term (which is questionable). What is likely is difficulty dropping, so then just turn the rigs back on if diff drops enough.

I'm in the fortunate situation of paying a fixed fee for electricity but even in my situation I'm actually close to quitting because the value of the hardware goes down as time goes on. But the small profit I get right now compensates for that, barely.

I'm not expecting the price to go up in the near future but I'm expecting the difficulty to go down quite a bit, so I'm still hanging in there. For now.

And mining is indeed only one part of Bitcoin. My interest in Bitcoin is not going anywhere even if I have to quit my mining operations.

Sure, but shutting down your miners will do nothing to prevent achieving those goals. You are not even helping secure the network as one might think, because by keeping unprofitable miners running "for the cause", you are just driving up difficulty and driving out other, rational miners with higher efficiency or cheaper electricity.

If that's the case, he's not mining, he's speculating.

On BTC-E chat I saw someone talking to a guy with 10 6950s that's been mining since the peak and not selling.  He's holding 150 BTC.  For those playing the home game, that's a minimum of $250 in power and $3500 in video cards.  And a current market value of $390 for his output.  IMO this is the norm.  Lots of miners are in this boat, and they will keep on mining until they simply can't deny they've lost money.  Might take hardware failure for that to sink in.

The high hash rates on deepbit confirm it.

Your results are not typical though as your setup is... unique. I think you're going to have some delusional people here who will find reasons to keep mining a positive venture in their mind (yet not their wallet), but I agree with your pragmatic approach.

I'm at ~1.5MH/W efficiency (2x 5830's, 2x 6870's) and my money losing point is $2.46/BTC with my current electricity rate of $0.091/kwh. Luckily, my only money 'invested' was my first video card months ago, since that point, I've only used cashed out BTC/USD to finance my hardware, so at least it's all paid for.

Everything being equal, I think it's very safe to say that if someone hasn't made their money back on their initial investment in hardware, now might be the time to sell your equipment and break even/positive if you can. Depending on your efficiency/power cost, there's a good chance people are only making pennies per day.

No it doesn't I posted a long post outlining my exact electrical costs.  My electrical costs at current difficulty are $1.59 per BTC.  Today BTC is selling higher than that for any miner w/ electrical costs equal to me or less it is profitable to mine.

Another way to look at it is

Current difficulty: 1,486,600
MH/Watt: 2.00 (efficiency)

MHashes per Block =  (2^32)(1,586,00)/1000/1000
MHashes per Block = 6382321402

MH per kWh = 2.0 * 60 * 60 * 1000
MH per kWh = 7200000

kWh per block = (MH/block) / (MH/kWh)
kWh per block = 6382321402 / 7200000
kWh per block = 886.43

Break even electrical cost = (block reward) * (market price) / (kWh per block)
Break even electrical cost  = 50 * $2.40 / 886.43
Break even electrical cost  = $0.139

If your energy cost is $0.139 you are mining break even (@ 2 MH/W efficiency).
If your energy cost is > $0.139 you are losing money mining (@ MH/W efficiency) and likely should simply buy coins from more efficient providers.
If your energy costs is < $0.139 you are making money mining (@ MH/W efficiency) and likely should continue to mine and sell coins to less efficient users.

Obviously this doesn't include hardware costs.  Also miners with less efficient have lower break even electrical cost and those with high efficiency (FPGA) have higher break even electrical costs.

Actually people with free electricity is what's keeping bitcoin alive. Otherwise, bitcoin network would be too expensive to keep running. Each block cost a ton of money in electricity to produce if someone had to pay for the electricity.

  The other variable is whether or not a person is mining solely for the purpose of bitcoin acquisition.  Some of us, believe it or not do so solely for supporting the network and view any coins we receive as a 'bonus' for doing so. I have personally sold 0 coins out of several hundred mined and have found ways to use/spend the ones I have gotten rid of.


  On the point of cheaper to mine or cheaper to buy. For anyone that had that mindset for the sole purpose of acquiring bitcoins. I would pray that they atleast know basic 6th grade algebra, as it is not exactly rocket science to formulate what it cost to buy equip, elec cost, etc verse what one could buy bitcoin for.

Well my shutdown point... who am i kidding? I mine cause i have a decent gpu, i don't really have a shutdown point