Hey there,


1. OK, then we'll just get Antminer S9s, current price is $2,725 and they'll be delivered in February. Once in the EU, they'll retail for around $4,000, that's a 150% ROI just on the hardware + all what you can get mining.
2 & 3. That's my real concern, the true profits of bitcoin mining at this stage. Right now you recover the cost of the machines by mining for ~1.5 months, but it's going downhill very fast. If I receive the machines in February, will it take me 4 or 6 months to recover the cost by then, or 3 years? (I don't know how difficult will mining be in April/May/etc.). Anything less than a year it's good, since the machines can go for 1.5+ years working 24/7 afaik. That means substantial profit. Therefore, how is this not a good investment?


By joining a mining pool, mining profits are proportional to the number of machines you've got. Expenses (machine cost, energy consumption) are also proportional. If mining is still profitable for someone with 1,000 machines, it's also profitable for someone who owns just one.

And, if mining isn't going to be profitable, does this mean all these manufacturers are cashing out on these orders and then stop their business? And that all the buyers and everyone with thousands of bitcoin mining-specific equipment will have their millionaire investments rendered useless?

Cheers

Hey there,

Send me your email address or Skype and I'll contact you, because I've already spent the 2 pms I could do today.

Cheers

Hey there Entropy-uc,

Can you back your statements with data?

For a setting of 50 DragonMint 16Ts ($1,710/pc including power source) = $85,500, today's profit is 3.1 monthly BTC according to Antpool: https://www.antpool.com/support.htm?m=calculator

ROI is around 1.5 months after purchase, even considering electricity costs.

Besides, the hardware itself doubles its value nowadays when in stock, so the return on investment is 200% already since the moment you receive the miners.

What's your opinion on these numbers? Do you see any flaw in my reasoning?

The only problem I see is that the difficulty increases every day, and from yesterday to today, according to this very same calculator, profits fell by 15%. I opened a thread about this today.

Hola a todos,

Según puede leerse en las noticias, estos días el gobierno de Venezuela está realizando redadas para requisar equipamiento de minería. Esto pone en peligro el material y las personas involucradas en este proceso, que si bien no están haciendo nada malo, se ven gravemente perjudicadas por esta situación.

Al mismo tiempo, se está poniendo bastante difícil conseguir hardware a precios accesibles.

Quiero lanzar este mensaje a los venezolanos que tengan equipos en su país de los que quieran deshacerse. En estos momentos estamos planteando la instalación de una granja en un lugar seguro de Europa, sin inestabilidades políticas y con precios de electricidad accesibles.

Nos ofrecemos a la compra del material así como a la ayuda logística a las personas que puedan necesitarlo para salir del país (tenemos empresas establecidas con las que podemos realizar invitaciones para visados a la UE).

Pueden contactarme por aquí o por mensaje privado para más detalles.

Saludos

Hey there Fanatic26,

Thanks for your honest feedback, you are right, we should be prepared for the worst case scenario.

Not knowing the formula behind these calculators though makes it more difficult. Do you or does anyone have a clue of what formula does Antpool/Cryptocompare use?

And in the current uncertainty context, would you, as per your experience, consider it a wise choice to make such a bet by paying now for miners that will be delivered in April?

In these circumstances, I think it may be best to just switch to a different cryptocurrency, unless we're forecasting a massive raise of BTC value which may compensate for the insane increased difficulty (we should be forecasting a similar growth trend in the long term).

Cheers

Thanks for your quick feedback!

Actually, I've got data from the 4th of December as well, here's compared to the 17th and the 18th (today):

04/12/2017: 4.41 btc/month
17/12/2017: 3.73 btc/month
18/12/2017: 3.17 btc/month

The trend is going downwards. Do you mean the calculator is wrong, or that there will be a correction and all of a sudden we'll go above 4 btc/month again with these 800TH/s?

The only predictor I have to measure the return on investment of my operation is the Antpool's calculator, which offers the same results as Cryptocompare's: https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/

If these are wrong, then how can we evaluate the success of a potential mining enterprise?

Cheers

Hey,

I'm doing research atm to set up a farm with a similar budget:

a) Low or almost no duty & taxes on import of miners.

Import duties depend on 4 factors:
(1) country of origin,
(2) country of destination,
(3) nature of goods (generally defined by the HS code)
(4) value of the goods.

You may want to look at a way to avoid import duties, VAT and other taxes, not from the point of view of where you are importing the goods to, but from where are you importing them from. For instance, shipping the goods to a third country before importing them to their final destination can help save you a lot of cash.

This is one example, there are other ways to optimize freight costs, import duties and other taxes.

b) Economical electricity cost.
c) preferably cold weather
d) of if hot weather country, i don't mind if electricity fees are cheap enough to cool down miners or collocate in a data center.

For all these, Andorra is a good and very safe place with a VAT of 4.5%, cold weather and affordable electricity. We can exchange information by pm if you wish, I'm currently looking into this and other possibilities within Europe.

Cheers

Hey there,

Thanks for your replies!

- About the hardware, I own a sourcing company with staff on the ground in China and the EU. I've considered the following miners:

• Bitmain Antminer S9, 14Th/s, earliest delivery uncertain;
• Ebang's Ebit miner E9, 9Th/s, earliest delivery on Jan. 2018;
• Canaan AvalonMiner 741, 7.3TH/s, earliest delivery on Jan. 2018;
• Canaan AvalonMiner 821, XXTH/s, earliest delivery on Feb. 2018;
• Halong DragonMint 16T, 16TH/s, earliest delivery on Apr. 2018.

I got different quotations with varying prices & delivery times for each model, from different actors, including:

• The 4 original manufacturers;
• Their official distributors, and;
• Trading companies (random resellers).

I haven't taken the necessary steps in order to formalize any purchase yet, but for the moment, their feedback has been positive and I have no reason to believe any of them isn't real.

I'll be glad to update you once we go ahead with the process, but what machine we use is irrelevant to the question I outlined in my post.

- So, about the network difficulty, I understand it's a gradual thing, but 15% in 24h, does this mean in one week it won't be profitable anymore?

To give you an idea of the situation in USD, yesterday my forecasted monthly profit with 800TH/s was 71.5k$, today it's 60.7k$. And that's considering Bitcoin at 19.15k$ (it has actually gone down 1k$).

If network difficulty keeps going up at this rate or BTC goes slightly down, I won't even be able to recover the investment in months.

Cheers

Hello everyone!

I'm considering setting up a Bitcoin farm in Europe.

I've done an extensive supplier research and I'm considering DragonMint 16Ts for my setting.

I've used this calculator to make my numbers: https://www.antpool.com/support.htm?m=calculator

The problem is that as network difficulty increases, profits decrease radically. Here are 2 tests I ran for 50 of such miners yesterday and today:

Dec. 17, 2017:

• Hash power: 800TH/s
• Network difficulty: 1,590,896,927,258
• Mining pool fee: 1.50%
• Gross profit: 3.73653713125166 BTC

Dec. 18, 2017:

• Hash power: 800TH/s
• Network difficulty: 1,873,105,475,221
• Mining pool fee: 1.50%
• Gross profit: 3.17357750705357 BTC

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but considering next available batch of DragonMints will be delivered in April, I probably won't be mining a single monthly Bitcoin by then.

Looking at the formula, it seems to work like this: X * NETDIFF * POOLFEE * HASH = BTC

I understand the difficulty has gone up, but X has gone down (from 1.9572487E-13 to 1.4119055E-13), and I don't know how are they coming up wth that coefficient or if that can change for the better over time.

Could anyone point out what I'm doing wrong, or if that's how things are going be?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers

Hey mate,

I'm sorry to hear this happened to you. These days I've been doing a lot of research on Alibaba, as well as on other websites, to find legitimate ASIC manufacturers to mine Bitcoin.

There's only a handful of them who actually make the machines (Canaan, Bitmain, Halong, Ebang, etc.) and they are large companies; everyone else is either a trader or a scammer.

I came across this very same company you mentioned, and they offered me Antminer S9s for a very cheap price. After I asked a couple of questions, they stoped replying.

You have to be a little bit inquisitive on Alibaba, ask them for their company registration certificates, pictures from their factory, have a phone conversation if needed, etc. If you do it, most scammers and even traders will just leave you alone and go for their next victim.

It may help that I've lived in China for many years and run a small sourcing company with offices there and overseas. If you need help sourcing the hardware, you can get in touch with me via pm.

Cheers and good luck