If you're wanting to build your own miners for BTC, you're either gonna have to go to an existing manufacturer like Bitfury with at least $1M for an order of their ASICs, or come to an existing IC developer with about $10M (and around six months) to run you out your own custom design. Unfortunately the only "realistic" course - unless you have a whole lot of money you're willing to risk losing entirely - is to buy existing miners from someone else.
Interesting, ok great feedback thank you.
I'm not opposed to these options so long as profitability looks reasonably positive. I would prefer though to star with a smaller operation to test things out first, which leads to the "buy existing miners" option, however each time I do profit/loss analysis I seem to come up negative due to the reasons I listed above for this topic.
Have you purchased some existing miners before and came out profitable despite the list of expense items I listed above?
No matter what coin you are mining it all boils down to just 3 things:
1.Cost of your electricity.
2 & 3.Cost of what it takes to deal with the heat and noise.
As long as income exceeds cost of those 3 things - mine on.
Thank you for helping, I'm grateful to be chatting with people actually doing mining
Have you found that you were able to remain profitable regardless of mining difficulty increases?
yes but I sell and upgrade
How long have you found your rigs remain profitable before they are surpassed by superior technology? 6mths? 12mths? More? Less?
with asics 6months was true then 9 months was true. now the s-9 which is state of the art for power efficiency it has been out since June of 2016 so that is 16 months with no better gear available. if it did not break a lot I would have made 25% more profit over the last 16 months but I did make profit and continue to make profit with it.
I have a mix of:
avalon 721
avalon 741
bitmain s-9's
I also have quite a few gpu rigs.
Have you factored in labour time requirements for this or has this not been physically included in the expenses section of COGS?
I am retired I have about 30k in gear it takes up time but I have time so I do not factor in my time costs.