Is it even worth mining?

[ShinraCorp]

Well thanks to retailers spiking the prices of AMD cards, the ultimate question now is. Is it worth mining?

I try imaging the costs of running a mining rig, the reasoning behind it and everything. I'm guessing it's because I do not see a return investment if someone does it.

• over 1000$ (R9 290 with custom coolers run at 550$ around) for a CrossFire X GPU setup.
• The Electricity Bill itself
• The time it takes to get a coin (Whenever it's Litecoin or Bitcoin)
• How little time it'll take before the value of the coin crashes since there's no central bank or security.

• Trying to do a crypto currency for what? Worthless data? The data cannot be used for anything, compare to F@H which at least can contribute the data mined for research purposes.
• It's a space heater, good for winter, horrible for summer.
• I imagine there will be so many used R9 XXX cards on sale once the coins are worthless, that there's no reason to buy any of the cards right now.
• They're are literally data centers mining this stuff right now. So it's like an arms race...

Those are basically the things that I'm thinking right now as to why I don't see the reason behind mining. I'm sure someone here will give out a good reason and I can't wait to see that.

 

[sf101]

sounds like your trying to talk yourself out of it.
the data being mined is from my understanding security algorithms.
Mining doesnt have to run your cards super hot if you can find efficiency at lower clocks.
no worse than folding or seti or roseta really for heat/power use but you can get $ / profit out of it.
mining is probably not the get rich quick thing most think it is. earning 20$ over the course of 2-3 days is rather nothing compaired to just going to work and mining farms to increase these profits are quite expensive and a large leap of faith investment that most wont take.
the market can crash right now its nearly half of what it was start of december.
but their is still some profits to be made even though much less.

arms race maybe but their is alt coins such as ltc and ftc that are much easier to mine atm and still churn profits.

no ones holding guns to anyones head to mine . i had a extra rig with a 7970 so i set it mining at work because i leave my work pc on anyways to remote into it. and its earned me a fair bit of coins now. i will hold them and wait for the market to come back up to closer to 40$ per ltc before i think of selling and then buy myself something nice with the free $.

I think if someone was thinking about quitting their day job for mining unless you had a ton of $ to invest without consequence its not worth going into hard but a pc here and there if you have the setups to spare is not a bad idea.

the problem atm is you cant find good deals on any of the gfx cards needed to mine half decently everyones jumped on the waggon and either that will be a good thing or it will be the downfall of mining as the market will get flooded with coins and difficulty will go up for everyone meaning less coins mined per difficulty level.

 

[SugarJ]

Your chart cuts off in July. BTC are currently trading about $800 US on Mt. Gox.

Is it worth mining BTC on GPU's? No, not any more. Is it worthwhile mining Litecoin, Dogecoin or other alternates? Use the calculator here: Cryptocoin Mining Information, Profitability and Calculators

It says to me that 2 x 290's running at 830 kH/s each on scrypt will make you $11-18 per day right now depending on which alt-coin you are mining. But changes in the rates and difficulty are the risks you run.

 

[ShinraCorp]

sorry the chart I provided came from the official bitcoin site I should of checked the month. At least there's a site to check it out.

But I guess mining isn't for me and I just fell bad that I can't get the video cards I want to buy because they increased it dramatically in terms of price.

 

[draemn]

Why wouldn't you want a better graphics card and get something from Nvidia? Yeah it sucks that the prices are all going up so high because of mining but it is AWESOME that these companies are seeing some great profits as they can turn around and use that to innovate and make better products in the future.

 

[clshades]

the big mining sell off is coming don't you worry.

 

[YukonTrooper]

Digital currency is like the stock market. The question you're asking is unknowable.

 

[Shadowmeph]

personally if I had any virtual coin I would trade ( I think it is called shorrt trading) spend a day watching the market and learn the signs you possibly could make allot of virtual coin that way but then again you could lose allot if you don't know how to read the virtual coin market which I do not know.

I was playing a yahoo game which lket you trade it used the real market just not real money or funds. buy the end of the time period I made around 5k which i thought was great uintil I seen the other guys that gmade myt 5k look like pocket change found on the street.

 

[Dragonstongue]

LOL better graphics card and buy Nvidia, go away no one needs that BS spewing forth, Nvidia is a choice not a guarantee period, and mining on Nvidia is a joke they are terrible at any kind of crunching something Radeon is good at and equally good at gaming.

Anyways as far as mining via a gpu, it is not worthwhile to directly mine BTC via GPU anymore difficulty is way to high, however, it still is worthwhile to mine other coins particularly alt coins via scrypt
to give you an idea of how many different coins there are good/bad depends really some are far more worth it then others.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

What I have been doing is mining and selling said coins directly to BTC as I have sold BTC for $ with no issues, however my brother has been bouncing trades as in he gets coin x sells it for coin y uses coin y to transfer to cash too buy btc (as cash $ does not bounce around in value nearly as much) so to get the most out of it it is beneficial to have a graph of some kind to see the average selling price on which day it goes up on average, use the coins mined (multi-pool is a great one as you can mine the generally most profitable coins) to sell to cash, use this cash to buy other coins, so you could double your daily take.

There are some folks that do this with 10s of thousands of coins(10s to millions of $ per trade 24/7) cause they are smart, wealthy, to much free time etc.

So long story short, some cards are better then others(7950 is a great card for this) clock tuning and optimizing the "flags" helps to mind power/temps and maximize profits or at least coins mined, and folding at home only benefits those who have the data crunched for them (medicine companies, government etc as do you honestly 100% think they will market something that makes them broke, hell no) at least mining coins and then trading them has worth in the $ aspect.