You would have to define success. You can solo mine with any amount really and you will most likely eventually find a block. I would think that anything above 5ghash/s would be pretty fun to use for solo mining. I am gonna solo mine for a week or so after I quit pooled mining with my 655Mhash/s, just for the off chance that I hit a block and get 50BTC. Its like the lottery.
Mt. Gox is holding at 17 because their market is frozen. It opens tomorrow around 11am EST I think. I expect and hope it tanks HUGELY, so that I can buy up some bitcoins before it makes a recovery.
You will be very disappointed if you try to solo mine with that many hashes.
Could someone explain to me like I am an utter retard (because I am) step by step how to set up for mining solo? I use GUIminer. I saw a guide and tried to follow it but it didnt work, it never connected.
I'll probably trade for a Newegg gift card (I think those are/were available) and finally get an SSD. But to answer your question, well, I can't. I have not yet traded in my bitcoins.
Which place are you planning on using to get your gift card? After all of the crap with Mt. Gox, there is no way in hell I've giving these exchange places any bank account information.
This **** is rather addicting. But I cant help but be a little pessimistic about the future of btc when the difficulty is rising but the value isn't... =\.
Well not really the future of bitcoin, but more the future profitability of mining.
wow, it really isnt the time to jump into mining if you havent already.
I crunched the numbers for a barebones 3 card mining rig, and if difficulty only nominally increases over the following weeks/months it would take roughly 3 months before you start seeing any real profit. over 2 months just to cover the cost of the parts and electricity. selling the rig parts later helps a bit, but the return on investment is so much less attractive than a month ago.
bitcoins need to start nearing $30+ for it to make any short term sense.
Looking at bitcoincharts, it doesn't look at this point like the difficulty is going to be jumping 50% anymore. They are estimating like a 3% rise in difficulty at the current total hashing rate. As it is now I am currently mining about half a bitcoin a day, which is right on the borderline of me wanting to stop. If the estimated difficulty is true though, it looks like for the next month or so I will be able to mine .5BTC a day, which isn't bad.
Also, the price of a bitcoin should be rising over the next week as everyone gets their accounts back at Mt.Gox and normal trading resumes. It has stayed amazingly stable today.
Do you realize that 2 months to pay off the entire capital investment is actually a really great level of return? Investors in other fields would go crazy if those levels of profit were possible.
Also, you really start to profit around the 50% mark, since it's not too hard to sell your used hardware for 50% cost on craigslist or ebay.
That said, the biggest risk is that bitcoins fail somehow, and lose basically all value. If this happens at just the wrong time you may suffer a big loss. I try to minimize this by buying hardware I'd use or be able to sell outside of the bitcoin market. For example, instead of getting a cheap $37 sempron, I pay an extra $40 and get a decent athlon X2- it might not mine bitcoins any better, but worst case scenario I can sell the system later as a halfway decent gaming/productivity computer.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. Not gonna bother with the wear & tear on my hardware for .37 bitcoins/day at current price levels.
Still, my hardware is now paid for and I got a huge amount of entertainment out of this whole fad over the past month or so. I'm keeping a couple of BTCs just in case there's a huge run-up and those coins buy me the kind of hardware it takes to keep in the game, but at this point I'm out as well.
we need more ppl to get out of it so difficulty won't increase : )
I don't think it would make sense for you to get out of mining... not with as much gear you have.. 0_0