Ninjastic
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Board Mining speculation
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USB ASIC Miners will never ROI at 1 BTC/device
by
Bastet
on 26/06/2013, 03:17:51 UTC
If you're thinking about getting one of those USB ASIC miners that do about 330 MH/s for 1 BTC, then forget about it.

With all the ASICs coming online, and ASIC production scaling up, and new ASICs in the works, the network hash rate is about to SKYROCKET for the next seeable future.

Just look at the past 3 months of difficulty increases as an indicator on how much it's going to explode.  I expect with the next 6-12 months we are going see triple digit percent increases in difficulty over it's previous difficulty.

That means your little USB miner is going to earn SIGNIFICANTLY less every difficulty change.  So much so that these little devices will never return on investment (ROI.)

I ran a some numbers in Excel and these miners have a plateau on how much BTC they can earn/mine... and it's way less than they cost to obtained.

For example, at 1 BTC to obtain one, expected to get a max ROI of 0.8 BTC IF the average network hashrate increases by 15% per difficulty change (every two weeks or so) over the next 6-12 months.  That 15% is really conservative.  I'd expect your 1 BTC investment to recover less than half of that in mining.

And that's if you got the little miners within the week you paid for them.  Every week that goes by without a delivered miner reduces the max ROI, so obviously, pre-orders are a joke...

AT THE CURRENT PRICE OF ~ 1 BTC per device.

However, what I say goes out the window if you paid USD for it, but I would never pay BTC for them at this time.  There is no ROI on them, unless the prices significantly dropped to about 0.1 BTC, then maybe you could make a few times your initial investment before they become useless by earning too little.

Remember, this is not valid if you can pay USD for them because BTC is expected to increase in value, and BTC mined will be worth something down the road.  Can't say the same for USD.

Spending 1 BTC to get 0.8 BTC, maybe even less?  It's a no-brainer.  Don't do it, unless you want to look cool and hip to your friends, but don't expect a ROI if you're paying in BTC.

Update: