Quote from: Za1n on February 17, 2016, 12:16:26 AM

Quote from: Vociferous on February 15, 2016, 09:29:59 PM

Quote from: sakinaka on February 15, 2016, 08:27:31 PM

Quote from: Sitkack on February 15, 2016, 07:42:37 PM

For the time being, Ethereum is the best coin to mine, even profitable at electricity of $0.2/kWh. But the price might drop and make it unprofitable.

He seems to don't have any current hardware, and with the end of the mining around this summer (at the same moment as the halving, by the way), I wouldn't recommend him to buy some GPUs just to mine Ethereum, since the hashrate is also increasing.

I couldn't have picked a worse time to enter mining! :/
I only came across bitcoin on a youtube vid last week! I can't believe people have been earning money especially during that peak in 2014!

I mean, I've been looking at other investments too, like airport car parking, that looks cool. There's loads out there.

I've been doing the math with Bitcoin mining, and with the half reward, it doesn't seem to be profitable. Even if I invested 200,000 pounds, it would still take 2 years to break even and by then the hardware would be obsolete. So I wonder how people will even make money from Bitcoin mining after July, unless they upgrade to SP50's, find super cheap electrcity or perhaps less bitcoin will be worth more one day...

With the exception of the early years, mining has always been like that. In fact, even in the early years it was like that as well as bitcoin was only worth a few cents. The people who made money just happened to be in the right place at the right time (they had a lot of BTC early when it shot up), because even when bitcoin started to creep up in value, so did the miners.

But for the past few years, mining is always chasing the tail end of the race. Big companies develop new hardware, mine with them a few months, then once they made profit, sell it off to consumers as the latest and greatest. Antminer S8's are probably pumping away right now in private, and in a month or two will be announced as new and sold off to the public once the S9's are working in private. Rinse, repeat, but in the end the small miner ends up getting the shaft as they barely eek out the cost of their investment. Sure, low electricity can help, but even there it is only minimal.

Larger gains could have been made by simply buying BTC last August at or slightly under $200. A $4,000 investment (@ $200/BTC) would have netted 20 BTC. Now 6 months later you would have doubled your money ($8,000). I don't think a $4,000 investment in the S7's back in ~~August~~ September would have made the same returns.

That was extremely helpful. Thank you! I calculated that even if you did solar power FREE energy, with solar panel costs covered by business startup grants, you would still only make 1k profit per year! because the miners are so expensive.

I may possibly buy a modest amount of bitcoin and then cash in if there is a doubling in the rate, great idea It makes me wonder what else I can invest in the stock exchange.