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Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

coindesk.com

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Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#61

Post by simias »

mparr4 wrote: post #55
flashdance wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to track where large bitcoin mines were. Mostly they're concentrated around cheap hydroelectricity, with major mines in Labrador (2c/kwh), Central China (varies, but Solar panels are not effective for bitcoin mining, because hardware needs to run 24/7 (a shitload of batteries are needed) and the upfront cost is high.

> hardware needs to run 24/7 Why?

It doesn't need to but given that the difficulty is ever increasing if you only mine, say, 1/3rd of the time you're at a disadvantage compared to 24/7 miners.

Now if the price of solar electricity is completely free and bitcoin doesn't crash then mathematically there'll come a point when you'll break even but it might take a long while as the mining rewards keep dwindling as difficulty increases while you spend most of your time not mining. Eventually your miner hardware or solar panels will need maintenance and that will increase your costs.

You'd have to do the math to see how long it'll take you to break even, but something tells me that it won't be nearly as competitive as those server farms using cheap hydroelectricity.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#62

Post by mabbo »

bigtunacan wrote: post #50
mabbo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source of the power is irrelevant: you could be selling that electricity to the grid, or offsetting the cost of your home's usage. Buying a solar panel may eliminate the middle man, but there's still lost opportunity cost.

The source of power may be irrelevant to you, but not to me. Where I live net metering is capped at 30% of my utility costs. So if I produce more than 30% of what I use the utility company sucks up the excess that I produce and keeps it for free.

Valid point!

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#63

Post by hanklazard »

Nursie wrote: post #40
Analemma_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to its Amazon listing, the Antminer S9 consumes 1247 watts at the wall. Assuming he ran it 24/7, over a year he would consume about 11,000 kWh, or about $1,300 at the average U.S. electricity price of $0.12/kWh. Without knowing how much he was paying for power of course we can't know exactly how much he spent, but this certainly doesn't seem like a slam-dunk win, compared to just buying Bitcoins outright. A…

Incidentally, 11K kWh is roughly the average energy consumption of a US household. So given his current return, of 1.01 bitcoins, that means each 2.4 bitcoins mined use around the electricity that a US household does annually. And people wonder why there are those of us who are concerned about the environmental impact...

Good point. This sort of waste is one of the big reasons for the (hopefully soon) shift to PoS rather than the current PoW.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#64

Post by Cerium »

tertius wrote: post #52
delegate wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smart money right now isn't in BTC, Where is it then ? I too would like to join the 'rich fast' bandwagon !

Shorting SBUX since June 4th? Where have you been?

Better off with ISRG since January.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#65

Post by joshvm »

kartD wrote: post #27

I 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...

There is also a minor advantage mining ETH in that your hardware is kinda resellable afterwards. The motherboards maybe not, but the power supplies will be. Sooner or later when PoS comes in, GPU mining ETH is going to stop.

There's an argument that the cards will flood the market and won't have any resale value, though I'm not sure (plenty of people want the cards for gaming). In any case that's mainly applicable to AMD cards.

However, the reason I bought NVIDIA is at least I have 4x 1060's as a nice little CUDA box afterwards.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#67

Post by moretai »

tertius wrote: post #49
thaumaturgy wrote: post #34

For those thinking, "now's a great time to join the party!", the price surge happened from about March to about May of this year, with BTC more than doubling in USD price. However, it's been completely flat for over a month now -- longer than any other point in recent history -- and there are currently some big questions about the future of BTC that are being addressed next month and may result in a loss of value for…

> Smart money right now isn't in BTC Ah, so smart money is predicting what will happen with BTC in the next six months and acting accordingly. > unless you think you can predict what's going to happen in the next six months Ah, you can't predict what will happen in the next six months.

Ah, it's almost like no one knows what the fuck is actually going on.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#68

Post by projectramo »

bigtunacan wrote: post #18
danmaz74 wrote: post #15

Earlier 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?

This is the #1 factor that pro miners look at. They pay between 0-3 c/kwh

The problem is that you have the difficulty going up, and the capital costs.

Track those three curves and you have a good sense of the window for profit.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#69

Post by projectramo »

This headline is simply not accurate.

It should say: hobby miners barely break even over a year after the rise in bitcoin prices if they ignore the cost of power.

However, the difficulty of mining has gone up so much that they are unlikely to recoup the power costs going forward.

Re: Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

#70

Post by acjohnson55 »

francisofascii wrote: post #39
bigtunacan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is very cost effective by those who don't pay for electricity directly. Plenty of older condo and apartment complexes do not meter individual customers. The electricity costs are a component of the condo fees. University housing is an example.

Externalize the costs; internalize the profits. That's the name of the game!
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