Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies

Scoresby

Scoresby

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Cad said:
Just seems like a fairly irrelevant amount of money and the number of GPU's I'd need mining to make it worth my time turns it into a very large operation.
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I guess the way I was looking at it is you can do this with what can double as your gaming rig and dip your toes into "hobby" mining, which I feel was the original inquest. I've currently piggybacked a newer RX Vega 56 onto the existing R9 290s in the wife and my PC. Pulling about $7 a day between the two rigs in Monero (1700 H/S total) before, for $1200 (and a decent GPU upgrade) each PC can now pull ~2600 H/S netting around $20 a day.

3 month ROI for the cards themselves and the added value of them upgrading our gaming PCs. Power is running about $100 a month extra, YMMV.
 
Ameraves

Ameraves

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Litecoin continued to climb at a crazy rate through the night, and has settled around $370 now. However, all LTC purchases are now on hold in Coinbase. Not sure if you are able to sell or not.
 
Cad

Cad

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Khane said:
Just keep in mind that people have been saying this pretty much since the inception of Bitcoin (myself included). Getting 1 bitcoin per month 3-4 years ago on a gaming rig hardly seemed worthwhile but today that 1 bitcoin is worth thousands. ~16k isn't a bad monthly haul for doing absolutely nothing.

The real winners are the merchants/people who started accepting BTC years ago. The amount of overnight millionaires due to this is going to make the tech boom look like child's play.
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Well no fucking shit but comparing hindsight investing to buying something today with a speculative but sound business plan at todays prices aren't comparable. Just saying "sure its worthless now but what if it totally takes off!" is not a plan.
 
Khane

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I'm not sure what you're trying to say. It's apples to apples, it's not "hindsight investment". You could apply the same logic to the mining hardware and thought process 5 years ago. It's an investment for the future if you believe BTC will continue to grow and continue to become harder to mine.

"Sure it's worthless now but what if it totally takes off!" is essentially investment at it's core. I mean what the fuck else is there? You invest in something because you believe it will grow and provide gains in the future.
 
Cad

Cad

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Khane said:
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. It's apples to apples, it's not "hindsight investment". You could apply the same logic to the mining hardware and thought process 5 years ago. It's an investment for the future if you believe BTC will continue to grow and continue to become harder to mine.

"Sure it's worthless now but what if it totally takes off!" is essentially investment at it's core. I mean what the fuck else is there? You invest in something because you believe it will grow and provide gains in the future.
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I'd differentiate doing something worthless on the off chance that it's valuable later from investing in something with a planned, realistic ROI at current prices.
 
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Siliconemelons

Siliconemelons

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Ameraves said:
Litecoin continued to climb at a crazy rate through the night, and has settled around $370 now. However, all LTC purchases are now on hold in Coinbase. Not sure if you are able to sell or not.
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logged into coinbase to check on my 50$ of BTC, 50$ of LTC and 50$ of Etherium - everything has gained up and the LTC is worth 160 lol... coinbase mentioned eth transactions are halted, did not see anything about ltc
 
A

a_skeleton_03

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Cad said:
I'd differentiate doing something worthless on the off chance that it's valuable later from investing in something with a planned, realistic ROI at current prices.
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You are expending real money for hardware that cannot be used for anything else that I know of. It's a sunk cost that you have to pay back to yourself before you get a single benefit from it. You also have almost no resale value at all.

That is why I suggested Monero because the hardware can be sold tomorrow if you pull out for very little loss.
 
Cad

Cad

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a_skeleton_03 said:
You are expending real money for hardware that cannot be used for anything else that I know of. It's a sunk cost that you have to pay back to yourself before you get a single benefit from it. You also have almost no resale value at all.

That is why I suggested Monero because the hardware can be sold tomorrow if you pull out for very little loss.
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The ROI on the miners is like 3-4 months though, so unless bitcoin explodes in that time (which is a risk) then at least some profit will be made.

Also have you checked the resale on even the old antminer D5's and S7's? They're still $1000+ ... primarily because bitmain are slow ass pieces of shit on actually getting shit out there, but still.

It's a risk for sure but wtf would I do with 50 graphics cards if I went that way, and it'd take that many to equal the profit potential of a couple of these miners.
 
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a_skeleton_03

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Cad said:
The ROI on the miners is like 3-4 months though, so unless bitcoin explodes in that time (which is a risk) then at least some profit will be made.

Also have you checked the resale on even the old antminer D5's and S7's? They're still $1000+ ... primarily because bitmain are slow ass pieces of shit on actually getting shit out there, but still.

It's a risk for sure but wtf would I do with 50 graphics cards if I went that way, and it'd take that many to equal the profit potential of a couple of these miners.
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Sell them all? They are insanely popular for machine learning and other mathy things.

I am not saying don't go with an ASIC miner, I am just saying what I would do if I was going to mine instead of just buy into the market.
 
Enzee

Enzee

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You only mine if you believe the coin will raise in value. A lot of the smart, smaller miners aren't even doing bitcoin anymore, they've moved on to smaller coins like zcoin, ripple, einsteinium, etc.. or maybe Eth/Litecoin.

If bitcoin and eth switch to Proof of Stake, the more btc/eth you are holding the better. If someone is interested in being a staker in those (the new miner after the swap) then they need a lot. They mine smaller coins for extra profit, then swap that profit into btc/eth.
 
wormie

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As long as Chinese are printing money and some of their citizens need to hide it, at least some crypto currency will be in demand. No chance it will go away in 3-4 months so losses, if any, would be minimum.
 
Cad

Cad

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Enzee said:
You only mine if you believe the coin will raise in value.
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I don't see how this is true. If the miner costs $X, and will generate $Y in income at current prices/difficulty, and $Y will pay for the miner in 4 months, after that you're running pure profit minus electricity costs, why do you need the coin to raise in value to make money doing that? It helps if it raises in value, sure. The difficulty will increase over time decreasing the productivity of your miner, but unless you hit the "not worth the electricity" point before the miner pays for itself, how are you not making profit?

At that point it's just a matter of, how much do I want to invest at the start (how many miners to buy), what kind of space to house them, how much risk (and reward) am I willing to take, etc...

I get it thats different that hobby mining, but thats the point I was making earlier. I'm talking a business plan to make money here over the next year or so.
 
General Antony

General Antony

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Unless you're going into industrial scale mining I think it's far better to just buy the currency. You gain an immediate 100% of the price appreciation rather than waiting for your holdings to ramp up, and there is zero risk of underestimating how quickly the decay in your mining rate will occur.

It's a speculative position either way - take the purer speculative position and just scale the amount back to a risk level you're comfortable with. These type of asymmetric opportunities don't come along too often.
 
Khane

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It's hard to imagine a scenario where crypto-currencies are just gone and done one day. Not with the momentum and popularity they've gained now. They are tax free assets (right now) anyone, in any country, can use to "hide" their money. They are way too useful, especially for the criminal element. The fact that even the US government is eyeing ways to tax them now is proof enough for me that they aren't going to just fold. Governments beginning to try to regulate BTC and Wall Street now playing ball lends credence to crypto-currencies as a whole.

What's interesting to me is how crypto price points would be affected by a market crash. It seems they would be insulated from such things which would make them even more attractive during times of recession
 
wormie

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Its also possible that crypto currencies will be a store of value during a crash. Decent chance they actually gain a lot of value during crashes.
 
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General Antony

General Antony

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The current crypto market will get crushed in a recession. That may change if they begin being used as currencies but right now people will flee risky assets in that situation and an asset with bitcoin volatility is the apex of risky.
 
Enzee

Enzee

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Cad said:
I don't see how this is true. If the miner costs $X, and will generate $Y in income at current prices/difficulty, and $Y will pay for the miner in 4 months, after that you're running pure profit minus electricity costs, why do you need the coin to raise in value to make money doing that?
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For one, there's a thousand other ways to make money more efficiently if you have the capital to do them. This is in the hypothetical situation where the coin will stay flat forever.
Also, you can't figure out what Y is if the coin is going to drop. So, right in your base valuation you are assuming a steady and/or increasing value of the coin you are mining.
Invest all of the money you are using to buy the machines into an index fund, and you will have a much more guaranteed passive revenue stream. UNLESS, you think the coin is going to keep increasing in value higher then the annual 7-10% you get from good index funds.

That's what I mean by no one mines a coin unless they think it will increase in value.
 
Khane

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General Antony said:
The current crypto market will get crushed in a recession. That may change if they begin being used as currencies but right now people will flee risky assets in that situation and an asset with bitcoin volatility is the apex of risky.
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It theoretically shouldn't because it's decentralized and not tied to any market. But you're probably right. Panic would set in and many, many people would sell off driving the price down. Which would then make it as attractive as ever as an investment opportunity.
 
gshurik

gshurik

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What wallets do you all use? I've been using Armory to hold my BitCoins, but I've got other BitCoins in a different wallet and I don't want to deal with trying to merge shit. I've got 6 in the spare wallet and I'd rather that get merged into my primary one, but Armory is kinda janky.
 
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