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Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
21–30 of 96 posts
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#22The premise of mining bitcoin is not really about being cost effective today, but taking a long position on its value, and what you perceive the value will be, for totally anonymous money at some point in the future. Because the profit earned from mining is pretty close to the definition of untrackable in a crypto.
would it be better to just buy hold and use Bitcoin? mining adds slightly to the decentralized nature but I am curious about comparing buy and hold vs mine.
I think it depends on whether you think the price will go up, or merely remain high. Mining lets you make money even if the price remains stable, as long as it's already sufficiently high. To make money with buy and hold, the price needs to increase.
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even more importantly, electricity costs weren't accounted for, while they should be pretty relevant.
Is anyone tracking the electric costs for mining? I would love to see the stats on that. What about using something like solar to power this? Then you would have your upfront costs for the solar panels, but not have recurring electric costs?
The biggest mining operations are Chinese and Russian farms getting their power through questionably legal arrangements, so those statistics probably don't exist and wouldn't have much relevance if they did.
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#24>Solis bought a Bitmain Antminer S9 on eBay for $2,400. >As of this weekend, Solis has mined 1.01 BTC, worth a little more than $2,584 in his bitcoin wallet. >Solis said: >"When I bought the miner, the price per bitcoin was around $1,200. I thought I’d break even in one year, but actually it’s been about five months." So he would have been much better off just spending that 1,200 on Bitcoin rather than on a mining ri…
This is hindsight. He would have been best off staying the fuck away . As I mentioned a billion times cryptocurrencies (which are not currencies either) have zero legal real world use cases, currently the two uses are illegal money transfers out of China and hype. It's the worst sort of gambling: you do not even know the odds.
People keep saying things like this but reality does not support this is any way. There are many thousands of places that take cryptocurrency.
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#25Bitmain is what's keeping Bitcoin from progressing right now. Stop supporting them with your money.
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#26Is it profitable because the mining is easier or because the price is rising. It's almost certainty the latter.
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#27I think this article is mistaken. People are mining Ethereum causing GPU prices to spike 2-3x. Eth is designed to use a lot of memory so GPU mining is always viable.
GPU prices: https://camelcamelcamel.com/search?sq=geforce+1060
Mining centric cards are being released as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11607/cryptocurrency-mining-ca...
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#28The premise of mining bitcoin is not really about being cost effective today, but taking a long position on its value, and what you perceive the value will be, for totally anonymous money at some point in the future. Because the profit earned from mining is pretty close to the definition of untrackable in a crypto.
would it be better to just buy hold and use Bitcoin? mining adds slightly to the decentralized nature but I am curious about comparing buy and hold vs mine.
Because it's super easy to buy and hold Bitcoin, if it becomes more popular the value of mining rigs will increase. Right now, there's probably no material difference between buying the coin itself or buying the rig and mining, but eventually, it may become more pronounced.
There are other benefits as well. Buying the mining rig is a sort of hedge in that if bitcoin drops to $0, you at least have some hardware that can be re-purposed/sold.
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#29>Solis bought a Bitmain Antminer S9 on eBay for $2,400. >As of this weekend, Solis has mined 1.01 BTC, worth a little more than $2,584 in his bitcoin wallet. >Solis said: >"When I bought the miner, the price per bitcoin was around $1,200. I thought I’d break even in one year, but actually it’s been about five months." So he would have been much better off just spending that 1,200 on Bitcoin rather than on a mining ri…
The major problem with buying mining rigs is that they may be pre-mined. Often the developers will use the rigs for mining and then when the rigs stop becoming profitable (assuming the bitcoin price is stable), sell them as 'new'.
Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again
#30Wouldn't there be a big advantage to running a bit coin miner somewhere cold with cheap electricity like Quebec?
Its not cold in the summer, and it probably too cold in winter to not have any interior climate control. With much lower cost of living and cheap electricity, China seems like a much better option, the majority of mining is actually done there.
> it's probably too cold in winter to not have any interior climate control
Trust me, these miners put off enough heat that it's not an issue.