Originally Posted by Colmike7 (Post 20925284)

Back in the day, you could modify a NES to make money slowly with ASIC mining, but the blocks are so big now that you'll just be wasting electricity to make a few dollars if anything per month using good hardware unless you really know what you're doing and grind hard..

Originally Posted by MrMaxwell (Post 20925287)

Damn
That really sucks
It would be so interesting to be hiding in some warehouse setting up mining machine things

Originally Posted by seXXXhub (Post 20925296)

free electricity is the key

Originally Posted by MrMaxwell (Post 20925287)

Damn
That really sucks
It would be so interesting to be hiding in some warehouse setting up mining machine things

Originally Posted by rowan (Post 20925335)

Many people did the "amateur farm" thing back in the early days. I remember a guy maxing out his credit card to buy $35k worth of GPUs and associated computer parts. People thought he was crazy, but I'm sure he had the last laugh, because that was when BTC was worth about $4.

I stopped GPU mining in about 2011 when the cost of electricity was roughly equal to the value in BTC I was mining. I should have kept going; at the time I was mining around 1BTC per week; I can still see those transactions in my wallet.

With regards to current profitability, even if you had free power it would be difficult to break even. The combination of consistently rising difficulty, and the upcoming block reward halving will mean it's difficult to make back the cost of your mining hardware before it becomes obsolete. Then again, the reward halving could push the value of BTC up, so people could be mining at a loss - like I should have done in 2011...

Originally Posted by MrMaxwell (Post 20925389)

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 . ..

Hindsight is a bitch unless she's a naked woman :(

Originally Posted by MrMaxwell (Post 20925389)

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 . ..

Originally Posted by MrMaxwell (Post 20925389)

Hindsight is a bitch unless she's a naked woman :(

Originally Posted by rowan (Post 20925431)

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.



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. :)

Originally Posted by rowan (Post 20925431)

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.



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. :)