Quote from: kano on Today at 01:05:27 PM

Quote from: Tsub on Today at 12:07:20 PM

...

Quote from: Kano

A miner at any time, will usually cost you more in BTC than the BTC it will make mining.
At the moment that is definitely true, miners are being sold for WAY more $->BTC than the miner will ever mine.

Add on top of that the cost of running it (time and electricity)
Also, the BTC will arrive slowly over the following year or more and thus if there is a peak at any point where you want to sell the generated BTC, it will of course not be the total BTC.

If instead you just buy BTC, you will get more BTC, you will get it up front, and also be able to decide when to sell that BTC at a profit.

Kano,

Not to debate too much, but I am finding your point about miners costing more BTC than they will ever mine a bit of a challenge.
...
Since miners hosted under adverse conditions last about 2-3 years, that is still 3X over time, even with pool and electricity.
...

That $6,500 100TH/s miner costs (current BTC price) 0.2 BTC

PPS per day of 100TH/s is ... 0.00063075
(and it's quite reasonable to say PPS, not higher, since you will have some combination of pool/miner/txn fees)
19.9T diff gives: 0.2 / 0.00063075 = 317 days.
Now that 317 days is FAR from realistic since difficulty usually rises, it's a major under estimate.
To assume that difficulty wont rise over the next 10 months would be foolish.

Difficulty today is 19.9T, difficulty 10 months ago was 17.6T so that's a 13% rise ignoring why it's dropped over the last 2 diff changes.
The 19.9T is due to miners being switched off in the last 6 weeks, that will mostly be on again well before 10 months from now.
The highest recent diff value is 25T only 6 weeks ago, so it would certainly be higher than that in 10 months with miners coming back online and new miners coming online.
But just using 25T, that puts the last 10 months rise at 42% ...

So if instead we used 25T (ignoring any rise) as the PPS value, that gets 0.0005019730957 per day or 0.2 / 0.0005019730957 gives 398 days.

The sites you are using completely (and incorrectly) ignore changes in difficulty for 2 reasons:
1) No one knows what the difficulty will be
2) They don't give you an option to guess or estimate it (like my page does Tongue

)

That also ignores all the time and cost of running the miner for 10-13 months, so that extends it out longer also.
Then if you have 100 miners, what % of them are actually going to run 24/7 for even 13 months?
Certainly not 100% so another extension to how long it will take.
... to just break even ...

Now if you are gonna make the even worse assumption that you can multiply that 3X for 3 years (as you've stated) ...
What was difficulty 3 years ago (even using the current 19.9T) ... 5.1T or a 290% increase in the last 3 years.
So that completely blows the 3X number out of the water.

So diff increase, power and paying someone for the 1 year+ of time looking after the miner, is expected to be more than 13 months, and ever so likely to be a lot more.
Maybe 2 years is a reasonable guess? But then you have consider how high the difficulty might rise in 2 years and that could extend it out even further.
... again ... to just break even ...

Or simply just buy BTC, as I mentioned in my quote above, and ignore these running costs and difficulty changes.

Edit: and in case you didn't realise, the last 8 diff values have been:
21.4T 21.9T 23.1T 23.6T 20.6T 25.0T 21.0T 19.9T
(the next one could be as low as 14.9T ?)

Now you are just taking the fun out of it...

But your points are extremely insightful and valid. Want to buy some ASIC mining rigs (so I can go buy BTC?)