So he would have been much better off just spending that 1,200 on Bitcoin rather than on a mining rig.
And indeed, it couldn't possibly. The EMH almost guarantees that hobby mining can't be profitable once the coin is popular enough.
TL; DR Why economists don't like deflation.
I pay my VPN using bitcoin. Also have a GPU bought with bitcoin. Just saying.
That's a real world use case.
Except for paying people for services and goods with bitcoin? There are plenty of legal venues to use bitcoin.
>It's the worst sort of gambling: you do not even know the odds.
So...like all investing? lol. Like seriously dude what the fuck do you know? Can you please take your blowhard bullshit somewhere else?
The actual problem, especially in the past, was that you could pay for the hardware but not actually obtain it for months, by which point it was no longer profitable. Presumably, the manufacturers were using the hardware themselves during that period.
It should say: hobby miners barely break even over a year after the rise in bitcoin prices if they ignore the cost of power.
However, the difficulty of mining has gone up so much that they are unlikely to recoup the power costs going forward.
Smart money right now isn't in BTC, unless you think you can predict what's going to happen in the next six months and you're willing to keep it for a longer period. And, even then, you'd be better off selling it back to USD and re-buying when it likely falls back down to sub-$2000 in a month.
Ah, so smart money is predicting what will happen with BTC in the next six months and acting accordingly.
> unless you think you can predict what's going to happen in the next six months
Ah, you can't predict what will happen in the next six months.
Where is it then ? I too would like to join the 'rich fast' bandwagon !
Trust me, these miners put off enough heat that it's not an issue.
Another way to think of it: The heat from a bitcoin rig is the same that you would get if you used an electric space heater or an electric baseboard heater. These cost about 2-3x as much to run as a gas or oil furnace. So, if you're able to turn off your heat and just heat with a bitcoin rig, your "cost" is less because you're not spending money on something else.
GPU prices: https://camelcamelcamel.com/search?sq=geforce+1060
Mining centric cards are being released as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11607/cryptocurrency-mining-ca...
If someone really knows their hardware engineering they could interface with GDDR5 memory on a custom board and mine as fast or faster than a GPU.
It's just a matter of how much money it will take to develop such a chip. I'd guess at least $2-5 million given how you'd need to fabricate it at 14nm or better to get sufficient performance, and that process can be a serious headache for smaller firms.
There's an argument that the cards will flood the market and won't have any resale value, though I'm not sure (plenty of people want the cards for gaming). In any case that's mainly applicable to AMD cards.
However, the reason I bought NVIDIA is at least I have 4x 1060's as a nice little CUDA box afterwards.
The computers were always on before we started mining so we don't consider the expense as a loss.
mining adds slightly to the decentralized nature but I am curious about comparing buy and hold vs mine.
There are other benefits as well. Buying the mining rig is a sort of hedge in that if bitcoin drops to $0, you at least have some hardware that can be re-purposed/sold.
No. You don't.
The other stuff is just confusing.
