
Ask HN: Have you made a profit mining Bitcoin? - cdvonstinkpot
Hi,<p>I&#x27;m interested in hearing people&#x27;s experience mining bitcoin, especially if you&#x27;ve made a profit.<p>How much do you have to spend on hardware to keep up with network difficulty these days?<p>I&#x27;m currently considering a Group Buy of 38 330 MH&#x2F;s USB ASIC Miners, and am concerned about rising network difficulty potentially preventing my recouping what I spend on the hardware: Miners, &amp; Hubs.<p>I don&#x27;t have thousands of dollars to spend on TH Miners which would seem to be able to outrun difficulty in the short term.<p>What are HN&#x27;ers experiences mining Bitcoins?<p>Thanks,<p>-C
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alexjarvis
The best advice I ever received was over 2 years ago whilst on holiday in
Canada. A dude there said that he'd spent $6000 CAD on mining equipment (GPUs)
and had made a cool $15000 - but he said that he would have made more if he'd
of just bought the coins.

Rewind to just over a year ago and I place a (pre)order for 5 ASIC miners
(from Butterfly labs) for a total of $3250. When the things arrived, a year
later, I was lucky that they were still profitable at the time (mid August) as
the price of BTC had risen but decided to sell them on eBay for ~$3000 each
because not only were they ridiculously loud and I had no where to put them
but the difficulty was ~60 million and increasing (and it's now 148).

I was lucky enough to pay off my credit card and still have some left over
with the money I made from selling the miners. Although I made a decent
profit, I would have made a lot more if I'd of just bought the coins for the
same value (as they've increased ten fold in the same period).

Now I've invested around half of my profits back into buying coins and so have
finally taken the original advice onboard. This and the current market
conditions make even the best mining options from Cointerra seem like a risky
investment at this stage.

------
lectrick
Bought 2 FPGA miner rigs from BFL. One of their first customers to take that
risk. Cost about 30 grand. Liquidated 2 of my 6 underperforming retirement
funds to pay for it as I was unemployed at the time (yes I am a little crazy
and obviously have no dependents).

I now have about 330 grand in BTC. After paying off the original investment
(and then some) by selling off 1/3 my holdings when it was $230. I also paid
off the upgrade to 3 ASIC mining rigs (4.5TH) which should ship... Imminently
actually.

I also have a 6 figure developer job but Bitcoin has made me far more money so
far (on paper) this past year.

I'm still bullish on it. Welcome to Internet Gold 2.0.

~~~
fbliss
Good for you and your brass nuts, man. However, I think what you risked
underscores the reason why small miners will never be profitable - small risk,
small reward. Big risk big reward. Those with capital to invest will leverage,
those with modest investments should not be expecting huge returns.

~~~
lectrick
Thanks. I knew it was a pretty big risk at the time but I spent about 2 weeks
obsessed with it and doing my homework. Pored over the source code, forums,
docs, concepts etc. (it probably helped that I'm a programmer). By the time I
was done with that "homework" it felt less like a risk and more like a sure
thing... although BFL at the time was also a big risk.

It took MANY emails with Sonny and Josh over there, back and forth, before I
felt comfortable forking over that amount of cash. (They ended up giving me a
discount, too.) The tone of the emails and the seriousness and some voice
calls helped reassure me a lot that they were serious. I don't think that
aspect of it can be discounted.

------
navyrain
I've mined bitcoins, and have made a reasonable profit (~20ish BTC or so?). I
mined in the GPU days, and while I currently run a small ASIC miner (BFL
Jalapeno), it will likely barely be profitable.

The considerable risks and costs of getting into modern ASIC mining make it
pretty unattractive at the moment. Until that changes, I'd advise anyone with
a profit motive against investing a lot in BTC mining.

If you're confident that Bitcoin will go much higher, and are willing to wait
a long while for it to happen, maybe it still could be worth considering. If
you just like the idea of Bitcoin, getting a little ASIC miner for fun is
entirely respectable. On the grand scale of things, bitcoin is still just a
curiousity, and it doesn't hurt to dabble.

~~~
trafficlight
With the rise of ASICs, the difficulty level is skyrocketing. I just picked up
a Sapphire to play around with, but I'm not sure it'll ever break even.

~~~
floatboth
I wonder if Litecoin mining is more profitable with GPUs?

------
drakaal
Yes. Having access to a few hundred computers that sit in computer labs all
day mostly doing nothing, I used to fold proteins or search for Yeti. Now I
mine.

But profit is kind of relative. I have made money. It is bankable, but I
probably had more time in doing the initial setup than what I would have made
if I had taken that same time and spent it doing something related to my
primary job.

There is "Profit" there is "Revenue" and there is "a smart spend of my time".
This met two of the three.

~~~
gojomo
Even if those lab computers have GPUs, at current difficulty, whoever is
paying the power bills is almost certainly paying more for the incremental
electricity-use than the value of coins you're collecting.

So if you're doing this "now", you're not really making money from 'mining',
but from theft. The mining is just obscuring the theft enough to allow it to
continue. Perhaps there's some copper wiring or tubing on premises you could
also take and resell while they're not looking?

~~~
drakaal
As it happens they are in buildings where they are the primary heat source,
and we first started protein folding to keep the CPU's over 50% so the room
wouldn't freeze in the winter.

Students Remote access the desktops so they have to be always on, and they pop
in and out at all hours of the day and night we did the math heating the room
with PC's was cheaper than keeping the boiler on for the entire building.

Believe it or not there are people in this world who aren't thieves.

~~~
lgieron
That is so cool.

Did you do any research on increased wear of the hardware under load? That
could be an additional cost that would start showing up only after a period of
time.

~~~
williadc
I work at Intel, and am involved with the "Reliability Verification" team for
some of our client products. We design our chips to last 7 years when run well
over the specced frequency on "viruses" that are much harder on the hardware
than any realistic workload. Server teams have even stricter requirements.

If any hardware is going to see increased failure, I'm guessing it's the hard
drives.

------
craigmccaskill
Add it all up (usb hubs, power bricks included too) and put the numbers into
the calculator on the genesis block.

[http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/](http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/)

The 330MH/s miners were profitable if you bought them a few months ago but
with the rising difficulty of the network, they don't seem likely to break
even.

A more likely profitable venture would be to use the same money and buy into
bitcoins. Secure your wallet and sit on it in hopes the price rises.

------
throwaway420
If this was 2010 or 2011 or so, you'd have a really good shot, but not near
the end of 2013.

It's certainly theoretically possible to make a bit of extra money, but I
think it's probably much too late in the game to make a serious go of Bitcoin
mining for the acquisition of wealth unless you somehow have a free source of
electricity and/or hardware.

I think the guys who are really going to make some money off of Bitcoin mining
going forward are the people who sell the specialized mining rigs.

------
FlyingAvatar
GH/s per watt is everything. I'm pretty sure you're looking at the Sapphire
USB miners. These are almost certainly not worth it. If you got 38 of these
for free and had free power and started mining tomorrow, you would have
perhaps $1500 worth of BTC a year from now.

Assuming you're buying and powering them yourself, you're paying around $1000
and $200 bucks in electricity. It's a fairly risky investment that will likely
net you at most $300 on a $1200 outlay.

To summarize your purchase: 132 MH/s/watt for ~$1000

If you want to make a better risky investment, you might look into pre-
ordering into one of the newer process ASICs, like Butterfly Labs' Monarch:

[http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/](http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/)

This purchase: 1.71GH/s/watt for $4680

The problem is you're pretty late in the game, so it's really hard to predict
what the difficulty rate will look like in even a few months.

It's possible that your USB miners will be worthless in a few months due to
the mass in flux of newer ASICs. It's also possible that so many people will
be purchasing newer ASIC miners that ALL mining will become entirely
unprofitable.

And all of this assumes the relative stability of the BTC/USD exchange rate.
:)

------
AdmiralBeotch
I mined in mid 2010 from my CPU. I was not a hardware guy, so I gave up in
about 6 months. I have managed to keep every bitcoin key I've ever owned, with
the exception of one small mistake that cost me 1 bitcoin. During this mining
period, they were worth $0.06 up to $1. It took me those 6 months to have my
first epiphany about the value of Bitcoin. But it was just one of several more
monumental epiphanies to come over the next 3 years.

I bought in to the BFL pre-order during the first few days of the
announcement. It took me 12 months to receive the hardware. During that time,
Avalon beat BFL to market and destroyed my expected difficulty. Fortunately,
the $1800 I spend on the hardware has paid me back over 10x in dollar amount.
It will take me about another 6-9 months to break even on the bitcoins I spend
due to the massive rise in value since I made the pre-order. Fortunately, I
bought a good number of bitcoins at the same time so I've made out on both
investments.

I have purchase a BFL Monarch during the first few days of the announcement,
but I do not expect to make the money back in any reasonable amount of time
due to the flood of new ASICs and coming changes in difficulty. Fortunately, I
do not have power costs.

~~~
continuations
> I do not have power costs.

How do you get your power?

~~~
kevinrpope
I've had leases with landlords where the rent includes all utilities. This
amount of electricity is probably not what the landlord had in mind when
writing up the lease, but could explain the lack of power costs.

------
Groxx
Since ASICs are now "out there", the overall difficulty might not jump as
quickly as when they were newer. But in general you'll be losing money
(especially if you pay when you pre-order[1]), or _possibly_ running pretty
thin margins, unless you're way ahead of the curve (then you can make a lot.
but that's unlikely to happen.).

It's a gamble, and it's a gamble Bitcoin is _designed_ to prevent being too
profitable. To be frank, I wouldn't suggest it.

To answer the title, I made about a quarter of a coin back when GPU miners
were relatively new, on Slush's pool. And about 0.1 coin with my CPU prior to
that. Otherwise nope :)

[1]: assuming the relatively-stable constant increase in bitcoin price keeps
going, you'll very likely make way more just by buying the bitcoins then.
_that_ growth has survived every boom and bust thus far, completely unscathed,
so it seems pretty likely to continue.

------
teraflop
I have about 4.5 BTC that I mined in mid-to-late 2011, using an nVidia GPU
whenever my PC happened to be on and idle. At the time, I was just about
breaking even compared to the extra cost of power; since then, the exchange
rate has increased enough that if I were to sell, it would end up having been
nicely profitable.

Unfortunately, the time when you could pull that off without a large up-front
investment seems to be long past. Personally, there's no way I'd consider
sinking a large amount of money into mining hardware at this point. If you
believe BTC has a promising future, it's much safer to just buy coins. (EDIT:
but of course, given the volatility, that only makes sense as a long-term
plan.)

------
Hortinstein
I read about Bitcoin in June 2011 and built a miner using two ATI 5830s
shortly after. It ran at ~550 megahashes and cost a total of $450.00 to build
using newegg.

I live in an area with free power in Tokyo and let the machine run for ~2
years. During some of this time Bitcoin was hovering around $2.00. I was
mining as a hobby since it cost no money and I believed in Bitcoin's
potential.

In the second half of 2012 the price started jumping and I netted a very very
nice return. I would not mine now as any real investment. I would like to
believe Bitcoin's adoption will increase and the price will continue rising,
but short term I think it's still quite the gamble.

------
fnordfnordfnord
Mining? No. I have lost a small amount. Had a little fun. You might make a
mint, but it is the wild west. You need to be able to spend a fair amount of
time fussing with the things. My USB ASIC Miners would overheat and reset a
lot until I put some heat sinks on.

>and am concerned about rising network difficulty potentially preventing my
recoup...

Yup. You are wise to be concerned. If you want a nice boring low-risk
investment, umm some ICA mutual fund maybe? But that's no fun.

Speculating, I'm a little bit ahead, and I have a lot more fun doing that.

------
VLM
"How much do you have to spend on hardware to keep up with network difficulty
these days?"

Financing will be your problem. Anyone else can buy that hardware and your
profit (if any) is baked into the cake when you set the cost of renting that
money and/or however you want to account for opportunity costs.

Or another way to put it is it's highly unlikely your financing cost (cost of
the money traded to get the miners) is precisely zero, and when you factor it
in, things get sketchier.

------
bitcad
I received 2 of the AVALON ASIC Batch 2 orders in July. They cost about 55 BTC
(~$1500USD) each in February and now I have mined about 94 BTC ($13000) on
each (running at about 83GH/s).

The daily mine total has decreased about 10fold, each making about 0.25BTC per
day with the latest diff increase.

The cost per day in electricity is $1.50-2 so with current exchange rates and
diff increases they should be 'profitable' until Feb-Mar next year (not even a
full year).

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jzig
I took a page from the "selling pickaxes" manufacturers themselves. I
purchased a Jalapeno in Aug 2012, then upgraded right before they doubled
prices of the miners. Then I auctioned the preorder for 30BTC . Retail for the
device was $1500 even though I paid $700. Sadly the coins were worth $6K while
being held in escrow, and only worth $3K by the time I converted to fiat.

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syzo
I got in on it back when bitcoins were around $1 each. I sold 10btc at the
first $30 bubble, and made enough to buy a new video card, and I still have
somewhere between 60 and 70 btc left. Haven't touched it or payed attention to
it much after that, besides checking the price every once in a while.

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dsirijus
I guess the "picks and shovels" rule holds for this gold rush too.

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xekul
Back in 2011, I mined enough BTC on my $1000 mining rig to eventually make a
5x profit, but there's no way I'd be able to make a profit today at the
current difficulty/prices.

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solac3
From what I understand the USB type hardware isn't profitable.

You could see much better financial gains buying coins and hoping for the best
or investing is something else.

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debacle
It seems like, due to the deflationary nature of bitcoin, it would be more
cost effective to just buy bitcoin outright now, instead of buying mining
hardware.

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maaku
> I'm currently considering a Group Buy of 38 330 MH/s USB ASIC Miners

You will lose money. Don't do it. You will be better off just buying coins.

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nwh
Nope. Made a tonne selling mining devices though. Paid my rent for a few
months.

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jafaku
[http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-
margin](http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin)

~~~
wmf
That chart is for GPUs; it doesn't apply to ASICs.

------
nighthawk24
No

