Quote from: Hermonminer on April 12, 2014, 04:00:27 PM

Things I've discovered about bitcoin mining: a noobs perspective

1. Many (not all) BTC miners are liars hahaha
2. You can make money mining BTC. This is abso#uckinglutely true.
3. Many BTC miners will say that is not true, but...see #1.
4. ROI is not the gold standard for for determining if you actually make money at mining! Caring about or thinking about ROI is just one way of thinking about mining. It is not the only legitimate way. I do not give a ratsa$$ about ROI. That money is gone, gone, gone. It is the cost of doing business. (Except for tax purposes and since many miners are liars, they will not be reporting their earnings to the IRS, so that is moot).
5. The only factors that matter to mining are difficulty as it relates to the amount of time a round MAY take, electricity costs versus BTC reward, BTC/$ exchange rate, and luck.
6. To make real money, go big or don't go at all. Unless you are hobby mining start with at least 1-2 TH/s or have as your goal to build toward this as fast as you can. Go up from there.
7. Read the damn forum posts noobs. Most of the info you need is already there.
8. BTC miners will generally not encourage new miners coming on to a pool because you dilute our rewards to some extent.
9. Mining at other pools will generally not earn you more rewards no matter what their payout formula is (PPlns, pps, dgm, etc.) but please go try them so I can earn more rewards on Slush's when you leave.
10. The BTC mining calculators are all based on certain assumptions that may or may not be true especially the more complex ones. I generally ignore them except to see if my actual earnings match what they say I should be earning (but only as a snapshot of today).
11. I am a BTC miner so I may be lying about all this.

Let me share my perspective on that :

1. I'm a miner and honest to the core
2. Hardly at this time, unless you absolutely project a rising BTC valuation to make up for the last months (or somehow managed to build your own highend hardware and operate it at low power costs)
3. Many say that because - it is true (and try to give newbies better options and prevent them to burn money - we've been there ourselves, no need to watch other do the same)
4. ROI is only irrelevant if you don't care about losing money OR are absolutely sure BTC valuation will rise significantly again (most people do and they have little reason not to - only the timeframe remains unknown, could be a long time).
5. the factors that matter to mining are difficulty, efficiency of hardware, cost of aquiring, operating and maintaining hardware and optimum resale time/price, plus how well your hardware regeneration cycle will work out for you....and last but not least BTC valuation itself (little point in mining power-hungry gear, should BTC fall and spend an extended time sub-1$ again, now would it?)
6. to make real money - go for a realistic ROI. Then it doesn't matter if you snatched a small miner for a good price or went for highend gear (all stock gear has about the same overprice level with the smaller ones naturally ending up on the worse end of the scale... in the end that will require resale value to make up for the missing 100% ROI from mining - unless you maybe have free/lowcost electricity, that can make a big difference especially on bigger gear)
7. Yep, often spread across hundreds of posts but within a few weeks it should work. Most important it is to ensure this happens before money is tossed at anything.
8. Miners don't care about new individual miners entering the show - we all know they're raindrops into the ocean. The big guns driving the global hashrate are more of an issue and that's a battle that cannot be won - it's the hardware manufacturers themselves that openly act colluded to drive prices/diff increases at a certain pace. They set the prices to gain maximum profit, mine with their own gear before it's delivered and only deliver limited batches - often with massive delays - in order not to create unwanted mining competition.
9. True, slush is pretty good in terms of rewards and minimum payout, good for small and bigger miners.
10. For as long as the calculators transparently include the empirically most probable diff increases and correctly perform the dynamic calculation, they're ideal. "non complex" calculators that ignore or simplify these variables cannot yield realistic results.
11. I'm a BTC miner, yet I am honest about all this... Won't mine much longer though, my experiment basically is concluded (purchasing directly immediately gave me more BTC than I could have ever mined - at a far lower cost than mining and free of the associated hassles/risks).