Cryptocoin Mining?

[Silverforce11]

You are chronically misstating what other people say. I said if you wanted to make more, buy coins instead of mine, and I was right. Buying and holding has been literally an order of magnitude more profitable than mining.

Maybe I misunderstood your intention.. I got lost after the 100th time you mention how GPUs will never pay for themselves with the constant difficulty rising and current prices.

 

[blastingcap]

Maybe I misunderstood your intention.. I got lost after the 100th time you mention how GPUs will never pay for themselves with the constant difficulty rising and current prices.

Don't you ever get tired of twisting people's words? I have always agreed that sunk-cost GPUs are fine to mine with, show me any post where I don't say so. But more than that and it's not necessarily less risky to mine vs buy and hold and I backed it up with math. Every time you lose the argument and slink off in a huff without so much as an apology. Like your dogecoin profitability claim which was for people in general and not you, your own cited numbers supported my calculations but did you say "sorry you were right"? No, you angrily had to modify your statement to say it was true only of your specific situation. You accused me of not talking about mining when I was talking about altcoin mining which is 100% about mining. You slinked off when I exposed your flawed logic that you can know beforehand what is more profitable to mine. I understand you hate me for exposing your flawed logic and numbers so often, but math doesn't lie.

People who took my advice to buy and hold coins made more than 10x than people who took your advice (assuming they would otherwise pay average USA electricity prices around 12 cents/kWh). FACT.

 

[Silverforce11]

People who took my advice to buy and hold coins made more than 10x than people who took your advice (assuming they would otherwise pay average USA electricity prices around 12 cents/kWh). FACT.

SO, is it a good idea now for people to invest $ in buying LTC to hold?

Buying LTC a year ago would have made you heaps, sure. It's rosy in hindsight, there's no risk involved in hindsight.

 

[blastingcap]

SO, is it a good idea now for people to invest $ in buying LTC to hold?

Buying LTC a year ago would have made you heaps, sure. It's rosy in hindsight, there's no risk involved in hindsight.

As for your disingenuous question, you already know my answer, because you've asked before, and I've answered before.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35881113&postcount=7835

P.S. I was the one who said hindsight is 20/20 a few posts ago. And here you are saying the exact same thing. Good, we agree that a) you're a hypocrite, and b) nobody can predict the future. My menu of options, linked to above, is a guideline for what to do depending on where you think prices will go and how much stomach you have for risk.

 

[taltamir]

As for your disingenuous question, you already know my answer, because you've asked before, and I've answered before.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35881113&postcount=7835

P.S. I was the one who said hindsight is 20/20 a few posts ago. And here you are saying the exact same thing. Good, we agree that a) you're a hypocrite, and b) nobody can predict the future. My menu of options, linked to above, is a guideline for what to do depending on where you think prices will go and how much stomach you have for risk.

You didn't actually answer anything at all in that post
It is a massive essay where all you actually say is "its up to you to decide if you think it will go up, stay the same, or go down and invest appropriately, and I believe it will go up because I went up in the past" only with 50x more words

 

[blastingcap]

You didn't actually answer anything at all in that post
It is a massive essay where all you actually say is "its up to you to decide if you think it will go up, stay the same, or go down and invest appropriately, and I believe it will go up because I went up in the past" only with 50x more words

You are entitled to your own opinion.

I presented scenario analysis and justified the reasoning behind it. Do you dispute any part of it, and if so why? People need to do their own homework, especially when everyone's risk tolerance, power prices, etc. vary. Even silverforce11 has agreed that people need to do their own homework.

If you don't want to do your own homework, then I suggest that you look into buying crypto price forecast newsletters, like people do for stock market price forecast newsletters, etc.

 

[Silverforce11]

As for your disingenuous question, you already know my answer, because you've asked before, and I've answered before.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35881113&postcount=7835

P.S. I was the one who said hindsight is 20/20 a few posts ago. And here you are saying the exact same thing. Good, we agree that a) you're a hypocrite, and b) nobody can predict the future. My menu of options, linked to above, is a guideline for what to do depending on where you think prices will go and how much stomach you have for risk.

No actually, because you keep touting that several times, that if people listened to you and bought coins, they would have made 10x the profit. No shiat sherlock, NOW its obvious.

What I asked you is whether they should listen to you now and buy LTC at $26 a coin and hold it, whether they would get 10x their profit again...

Which is true, it depends a lot on what ifs, and I do agree nobody can predict the future. This is the point I've been trying to make. People who choose to mine, do so knowing full well they can earn potentially less profit than if they buy coins outright. But they mine because 1) they want to minimize risk, mine-sell to pay off for investment and make small profits, or 2) they love PC hardware.

But everytime I see someone come here asking about setting up a mining rig, in you come, with your 4% difficulty rising and your calculator showing them zero chance of ROI. Is that a positive encouragement for their mining or a negative one? Thus, you cannot blame me for thinking you are trying to discourage mining.

ps. Last month we had this discussion, you base your ROI on LTC. I base it on more profitable altcoins. It still remains the case, there are many altcoins that are more profitable than LTC. Discounting Doge even, there are others.

 

[taltamir]

No actually, because you keep touting that several times, that if people listened to you and bought coins, they would have made 10x the profit. No shiat sherlock, NOW its obvious.

What I asked you is whether they should listen to you now and buy LTC at $26 a coin and hold it, whether they would get 10x their profit again...

Which is true, it depends a lot on what ifs, and I do agree nobody can predict the future.

Exactly

But they mine because 1) they want to minimize risk, mine-sell to pay off for investment and make small profits, or 2) they love PC hardware.

Also worth nothing that mining and speculating are not mutually exclusive or in any way related.

You can mine with your home rig for a +2$/day
And at the same time invest 10,000 dollars into a crypto of your choice.

Or you can put those 10,000$ into real estate and convert your 2$/day mining income into dollars right away.

Or mine doge and convert it to BTC, or whatever else you want

 

[blastingcap]

No actually, because you keep touting that several times, that if people listened to you and bought coins, they would have made 10x the profit. No shiat sherlock, NOW its obvious.

What I asked you is whether they should listen to you now and buy LTC at $26 a coin and hold it, whether they would get 10x their profit again...

Which is true, it depends a lot on what ifs, and I do agree nobody can predict the future. This is the point I've been trying to make. People who choose to mine, do so knowing full well they can earn potentially less profit than if they buy coins outright. But they mine because 1) they want to minimize risk, mine-sell to pay off for investment and make small profits, or 2) they love PC hardware.

But everytime I see someone come here asking about setting up a mining rig, in you come, with your 4% difficulty rising and your calculator showing them zero chance of ROI. Is that a positive encouragement for their mining or a negative one? Thus, you cannot blame me for thinking you are trying to discourage mining.

In other words you're a hypocrite because no shiat sherlock of course mining back then would be profitable knowing what we know today. So why then did you attempt to tweak me several posts ago by specifically calling me out when I had nothing to do with it? You brought this upon yourself by trying to pick a fight with me.

Your argument in the past has hinged on how mining is allegedly less risky than buying and holding, and as I have repeatedly shown, that has not been true historically.

Btw, every year since bitcoin started, people have been very nervous about its future price. 4 years ago, people had so little confidence in it that it wasn't even worth a cent. Even a year ago, bitcoin was ~$20 with an all-time-high of $32 and almost nobody forecasted $1200. In 2014 bitcoin is currently worth $800 and $10k seems unthinkable. Yet bitcoin's total market cap is still a paltry $10 billion. Why do you think bitcoin won't go much higher than it is now? Why are you such a pessimist on bitcoin prices? The only way mining makes sense is if coin prices remains in a certain range: high enough to be profitable given difficulty, yet low enough that it is a little more profitable to mine than buy-and-hold. What makes you think coin prices are going to stay in that range?

I also think it's inconsistent for you in some posts to say that mine-and-hold is best because you forecast coin prices going up, and yet whenever you try to attack me, you claim mining is less risky. But mining is only less risky if you sell as you mine or if you think prices are rangebound. Under your own advice, mine-and-hold, mining *is* risky and is potentially even riskier than buy-and-hold, for any given level of profit expectation, because if coins go to zero you wind up with depreciate hardware and tons of power bills.

In my menu of options post, I have made it crystal clear that I'm not talking about sunk-cost video cards, i.e., cards you were gonna buy even if coins were worth zero, so my menu already takes that into consideration.

Difficulty rising is one of the things you can be reasonably certain about because AMD GPUs give more hash per dollar and per watt with each cycle. It's the same reason why you can get the performance of a GTX 570 for $100-150 today, whereas it used to cost what, $350-400? So you can't really say that difficulty going up is uncertain. Some things are less certain than others. That's not even getting into Scrypt ASICs btw, as those are already in development with engineering samples out in no later than early December 2013 judging by the GridSeed photos. The last two months have seen difficulty changes of more than 60% and 80% (Nov and Dec 2013) and January difficulty is already up over 20%.

IMHO Listening to you is like listening to an extremist news channel. For instance, every time someone asks about mining you NEVER talk about difficulty despite its being reasonably certain to keep going up (for reasons I stated above) and make it sound like it's risk-free so they can go ahead and buy overpriced cards, we're gonna be riiiich. Since *you* won't bring up difficulty changes, *I* will. I can't let that stuff slide without saying something.

As some people on this thread have stated in posts and PMs, they appreciate my posts in this thread and have learned from them. If you do not enjoy my posts, please skip over them or put me on Ignore.

P.S. You edited your post to talk about altcoins. We've already had this discussion which ended with you slinking off after I exposed the logical fallacy in your posts. The implicit assumption in your arguments is that you know the profitability of any given day of mining BEFORE the end of the day. This implies you can predict the future. In some cases the arbitrage opportunity is so huge, like dogecoin was for a while, that it is indeed a no-brainer to mine dogecoin for that day. However, the last couple of months is anomalous due to the flood of new speculators that the bitcoin bubble unleashed. I've already addressed this too. http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35930802&postcount=8535 Also http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35934311&postcount=8599

Also worth nothing that mining and speculating are not mutually exclusive or in any way related.

No. They are indeed related. Just ask anyone who buys gold and/or gold mining stocks. You can speculate on the gold directly or on gold mining companies via the stock market, and gold mining company inputs vary on price. You can also buy derivatives such as futures, options, etc. Furthermore, prices drive difficulty which affects mining. If it weren't for the spike in bitcoin prices do you think we'd have seen difficulty rise so far so fast late last year? Of course not. They are indeed related. (Analogy in the real world: for a while you could make over $200k per year doing gold mining in Australia, because miners knew companies were keen to cash in and could pay it. This is because gold prices were high. High gold prices drove miner wages up; high crypto prices drive difficulty up. Price IS related to mining profitability and thus price IS related to mining. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204621904577016172350869312)

What I would agree with though is that you can do a mix--buy coins and mine at the same time, or mine and hedge by shorting coins, etc. But it is simply incorrect to say that prices and mining are "in now way related."

 

[geokilla]

I like how this bickering has been going on for the past 2 weeks. Now I remember why I stopped visiting AnandTech for such a long time.

 

[blastingcap]

I like how this bickering has been going on for the past 2 weeks. Now I remember why I stopped visiting AnandTech for such a long time.

You can thank Silverforce11 for instigating it. I had nothing to do with the post he was responding too, but he chose to specifically call me out by completely mischaracterizing what I wrote, like he was looking for a fight or something.

 

[Attic]

It's a worthwhile debate and I'm glad to hear opposing sides of it.

There's some moving parts.
Sunk cost of GPU's vs new cost of GPU's
Electricity rates
Price of BTC/LTC/Alt
Difficulty rates of each coin
other

Where I feel there is some liberty for each miner is where they think prices are going, this is impossible to predict. It's hard for me to imagine prices going up 10 fold again.

If you buy and hold 100coins of LTC at 26ea it may be at 26 in a year.
If you spend money to mine on new as opposed to sunk costs of computer equipment then you pretty much need LTC prices to rise to offset guarunteed difficulty increases. I pay .31kwh (Tier 4 starts at 540kwh and up in so cal for me.... yay for thieves at Edison) so if prices stay the same and difficulty roughly doubles then i'm done making money mining and i'm out equipment costs. This assumes 2.8Kh/s per watt.

Mining, especially LTC is not that attractive any more for a lot of folks I guess would be the bottom line. The difficulty spike and price range will probably squeeze out the folks who don't have cheap or subsizdized electricty. Though some may mine at a loss. If price appreciation is whats needed to make mining worthwhile (which it is due to difficulty increases) then buying and holding coins makes more sense in many cases compared to plunking down a few K on rigs.

But, for those who find mining fun, good luck convincing them to stop tinkering!

 

[chimaxi83]

I like how this bickering has been going on for the past 2 weeks. Now I remember why I stopped visiting AnandTech for such a long time.

Learn to ignore the repetitious, know it all drones ^^^^

 

[slashbinslashbash]

You can thank Silverforce11 for instigating it. I had nothing to do with the post he was responding too, but he chose to specifically call me out by completely mischaracterizing what I wrote, like he was looking for a fight or something.

But you do seem to be overly discounting the idea that coin mining is essentially a hobby for many people; hardware enthusiasts who are in it for the enjoyment as much as for the profit. If they weren't mining for coins, they might very well be running Folding@Home or whatever. The cost of electricity (and possibly even the cost of hardware) doesn't really enter into their equation. It's a fun thing, which could possibly end up making money. It's a learning experience, and an intellectual endeavor. It's not an investment scheme. In my case, yes I think I do get $1.06/day worth of enjoyment out of having my 7790 mining altcoins, which is roughly how much the electricity is costing me. If DOGE hits 1/$ in a few years, then I'll make a ton of money. If not, oh well; it's fun to mine and own a bunch of DOGE. It is not as much fun to just buy it in an exchange or whatever.

Now if you had people coming in here saying "I want to spend $10000 on scrypt mining rigs, help me figure it out" then your style of analysis would certainly need to be pushed. But instead, it is more like "I just bought a 280X, help me figure out how to mine with it".

 

[JBT]

If I hadn't of listened to the people who said mining was not worth doing I would be 10's of thousands of dollars richer, who knows maybe even 6 figures? I was told its not economical to keep mining YEARS ago. Wups

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. I get it, we don't know what the future holds. I could "lose" all the value of my coin in a few days. I'm OK with that. Its risk vs return. In this case its the cost of electricity and at least in winter, a nice cosy unheated office is nice and warm. Of course Difficulty is increasing, but that means the inflation is lowering. But it doesn't mean the value of the coin is lowering by any means. It CONTINUES to go up. Its got its hiccups, but its GAINING media attention, its showing up on hit TV shows like the Black list and in the news daily. Retailers are considering allowing it as a means of payment. If the WHOLE thing vanishes at least I've got a few gaming cards that I can use.

 

[taltamir]

No. They are indeed related. Just ask anyone who buys gold and/or gold mining stocks.

Bad analogy, buying stock in a gold mine is like buying stock in one of those
http://www.geek.com/games/incredibl...puter-is-submerged-in-liquid-cooling-1578367/

Home mining is like picking up a pick and going to work in the mine yourself

We have a gold rush going on and lots of small time operations instead of a few centralized megamines which people buy into.

Certainly there is large scale commercial mining going on, which is akin to operating a gold mine. But I was talking about the small time home miners

 

[blastingcap]

double post

 

[blastingcap]

fun

If you're doing it for fun, prove it and Fold@Home instead. Else it's a disingenuous argument. If you are truly doing it for fun then feel free to skip over my posts which are not intended for you.

Bad analogy

It's not a perfect analogy but it doesn't matter because you wrote that buying coins and mining have nothing to do with each other in any way whatsoever, which is easily disproven. For example, you didn't quote the part of my post talking about how price drives mining difficulty which is obvious when you look at price charts and overlay it on mining difficulty. (Mining difficulty does not drive price, it is a lagging indicator at best.)

 

[IEC]

If you're doing it for fun, prove it and Fold@Home instead. Else it's a disingenuous argument. If you are truly doing it for fun then feel free to skip over my posts which are not intended for you.

It's not a perfect analogy but it doesn't matter because you wrote that buying coins and mining have nothing to do with each other in any way whatsoever, which is easily disproven. For example, you didn't quote the part of my post talking about how price drives mining difficulty which is obvious when you look at price charts and overlay it on mining difficulty. (Mining difficulty does not drive price, it is a lagging indicator at best.)

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc
Argument from fallacy
Argumentum verbosium

 

[nwo]

In other news, doge is still rising steadily :awe:

My 200k stash is now past the 3LTC mark!

Once it gets to the moon, I mean 5 LTC, time to sell!

 

[thilanliyan]

In other news, doge is still rising steadily :awe:

My 200k stash is now past the 3LTC mark!

Once it gets to the moon, I mean 5 LTC, time to sell!

Damn...I sold mine yesterday...

 

[nwo]

Someone just undercut me on XPM/BTC on coinedup... Looks like it will be a while before I sell mine at current price... Anyone know a good place to trade XPM for BTC or LTC? I have about 30 XPM.

 

[Freaksterz]

Its foolish to sell doges before the block reward halving tbh.

 

[holden j caufield]

btc-e is a good place to trade xpm for btc. Some news or something happen with xpm lately? It seems to have jumped up quite a bit last nite. Maybe it's the pump and dumpers or maybe hold on to it as the xpm/btc price is going to the moon.

 

[bob32768]

The top user on Middlecoin is creeping up to 1 GH/s of scrypt mining (moving average is still around 850 MH/s).

http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/1M3jtksp1upR33SX1VzeCfH5x9fc6zKykR.html

Just bouncing the currency around, but mined over 100 BTC since December 31st.
https://blockexplorer.com/address/1M3jtksp1upR33SX1VzeCfH5x9fc6zKykR