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Old 05-28-2016, 11:24 PM  
rowan
Too lazy to set a custom title
 
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Australia
Posts: 17,393
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrMaxwell View Post
Good Lord
Anyone who spent that much on mining hardware at the $4 level should have gone back to old times to buy AT&T before they were anything
WoW
That's the whole thing right there, at the time, it was probably a wreckless/ridiculous thing to do . ..
It was a risky gamble, but not a massive one. I think the expected payback time (assuming the price stayed the same - which it didn't) was something like 6 months. One advantage of GPU based mining was that the GPUs, motherboards, RAM etc were general purpose computer parts, so they held more resale value than say a 3 month old SHA256 ASIC miner. If BTC had completely fizzled (or a fatal flaw had been found) he may have come out with a $10k net loss.

My single mid-level GPU created about 1 BTC per week so I'd say his table full of motherboards and high end GPUs would have been pushing out at least 20 BTC per week.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrMaxwell View Post
Hindsight is a bitch unless she's a naked woman
I hear ya.

1. I planned to buy $100 worth of BTC (at about $3ea) via Paypal, but decided it was late and I needed to sleep on it. When I got back up, Paypal had changed the rules. At the time sites like localbitcoins didn't exist, so it was difficult to purchase BTC. I literally just missed the boat.

2. As detailed earlier, I stopped mining too soon. I didn't consider the residual value of the equipment, nor the fact that I could write off the electricity cost, so the break even point was actually further down the track. It was just something fun at that time, nothing really too serious.

3. About 18 months later I realised the price of BTC was going up, and thought it was going to crash, so I sold off my entire balance at $44 each. If I had waited another year, I could have sold for $800 each, and if I'd sold at the top point, $1000+ each.

So if I'd been able to make that initial test investment, I had mined a couple of months longer, and had waited until the price went high, I could have realistically netted $50k+. Instead I made about $500 from selling my BTC, plus another hundred or so from selling my used GPU on ebay.
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