Damn, love the rack setups.
My question for everyone with these huge amounts of equipment, how do you afford it?
My financial situation isn't one where I can plop down over $2k on an S2, let alone racks full of them.
I think I've almost broken even on my S1 and no idea if I've come close to breaking even on my stickminers (haven't calculated that cost out).
Early adopters I guess.
Mining is all about grinding it out day in and day out. No-one is going to get rich overnight by mining, and most folks will do better by just buying BTC directly and holding it.
I started mining in March 2013, and eventually put ~10k in fiat into GPU rigs. I ran those for a few months until GPUs were no longer profitable, and then sold them all and started switching over to ASIC rigs at the end of 2013.
I have invested a substantial amount of the BTC I mined into more hardware, but it also helped to hold a good amount of BTC when the price spiked at the end of 2013. I mined a good amount of coins when they were in the $100 range.
There is also a lot of overpriced hardware available to buy, so it pays to be patient and only buy when the price of hardware is right in BTC terms. Even the best rigs on the market can be poor buys if they are overpriced. For example, I bought some S2s at $1.65/GH, and some SP10s at $2/GH. The SP10 is a better mining rig overall, but the S2 was a better buy that is more likely to ROI due to the lower cost even after taking the difference in power consumption into account.
My worst hardware purchase by far was on some ASICMiner block erupters back in 2013. Almost immediately after I bought them, BTC difficulty spiked and it became very obvious that they would only mine back a small fraction of what they cost, so I immediately sold them to cut my losses. My best hardware buy was on 3 KncMiner Jupiters that have mined back at least a couple times what they cost (in BTC terms).
Each BTC price spike makes it more and more expensive in fiat terms for new folks to get into mining. If the price of BTC spikes again, folks that don't either own BTC or mining rigs are going to find it very expensive to get into the mining game. What do you think will happen to the price of mining hardware in fiat terms if the price of BTC spikes to 1-2k over the Summer?
If you want to play this game, I recommend buying hardware now if you think it will ROI in BTC terms in 3-4 months (be sure to include power costs). If you don't think it will ROI in 3-4 months, buy BTC and hold it until you think hardware is available that will ROI in 3-4 months. If the price of BTC spikes and you own BTC, hardware suddenly becomes much more affordable in BTC terms...