yeah pretty much except energy cost is relatively stable and arguably lowering with the boom of shale gas and solar panels coming from China. The machines also have become orders of magnitude more efficient over time so your conclusions apply until you "upgrade" a machine.
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I am thinking of buying a bitcoin mining machine
- Thread starter TimtheEnchanter
- Start date
returns are pretty low for me atm as I'm running 3-4 yo hardware (GPUs and FPGA). So maybe 5/day/rig. Top of the line ASICs are doing 30/day or so atm. This after subtracting pwr. I'm planning to move across the country so haven't bothered upsizing.
Time was substantial when I started as the amount of dedicated hardware and software was lower than it is now so there were uptime issues all the time. Now that there's dedicated hardware and software out, maybe an hr a day at most. Keep in mind this is as much a hobby as it is a passive income stream, so I don't stress too much if I have a rig go down. Now a days you have email notifications, remote monitoring and rebooting thru your phone, and hardware watchdogs so it's easier to keep rigs online. ASICs are pretty fool proof so manpower's negligible unless you get a lemon.
It's definitely scalable for a one man team, it's what's so great about it. The limiting factor is space, money, infrastructure (power), and know-how. From what I've learned, it takes me less than an hr to build a rig and have it up and running. ASICS, maybe 10-15 mins.
The last question's the wild card honestly and difficult to answer. It depends on how much you went in at, if you overpaid for hw, if you didn't fuck up buying the wrong hw, and obviously the price volatility.
One thing that was a common fuck up for instance was buying an ASIC and then a competitor releasing theirs w/double the hashrate making your machine a brick. It used to be also that manufacturers would have pre-sales and then not deliver on time or another comp. would release before they did making your purchase a bad one. To avoid that, you have to buy from the top dogs and reputable vendors w/a history of delivering at the promised day/week
Everything that's decent's coming out of China so there's speculation that they're always building and running something better and maybe even selling you rigs they've been running for months and giving them a shine before boxing them up. The likelier scenario is they're running upscale custom machines themselves for private farms. What I've noticed is they're building them w/razor thin specs, in essence guaranteeing you'll be back in 6 months for their shinier model. It's incredibly wasteful tbh.
What kind of FPGA/board are you using? Are folks still implementing the SHA256 algorithm in dedicated logic?
https://github.com/unixb0y/SystemVerilogSHA256
https://github.com/kramble/FPGA-Litecoin-Miner/tree/master/source
https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/tree/master/src
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm
Looks like a difficult decision on where to start. Does the OP want to test the water first or jump in?
I would stay away from FPGA's and focus on either GPU or ASIC. The GPU is more flexible. The ASIC is more specialized and efficient. There are pro's and con's to both. I would say flexibility is nice for starting out. Also, the resale value of GPU's has held up fairly well. GPU's have other use cases. The ASIC miner is a one trick pony. Once the value drops, it will drop hard. Depending on how much you spend, you could make money faster with the ASIC miner though. The choice is really up to the OP.
On the topic of FPGA miners. I noticed a lot of the popular FPGA miners and firmware are all closed source these days. Closed source FPGA is great for people developing the miners but bad for the end users. The users are at mercy of whatever the vendor provides and users can't update or upgrade the miners themselves if development support stops. This is called vendor "lock-in." You lose a lot of the beauty of the FPGA at that point.
I would stay away from FPGA's and focus on either GPU or ASIC. The GPU is more flexible. The ASIC is more specialized and efficient. There are pro's and con's to both. I would say flexibility is nice for starting out. Also, the resale value of GPU's has held up fairly well. GPU's have other use cases. The ASIC miner is a one trick pony. Once the value drops, it will drop hard. Depending on how much you spend, you could make money faster with the ASIC miner though. The choice is really up to the OP.
On the topic of FPGA miners. I noticed a lot of the popular FPGA miners and firmware are all closed source these days. Closed source FPGA is great for people developing the miners but bad for the end users. The users are at mercy of whatever the vendor provides and users can't update or upgrade the miners themselves if development support stops. This is called vendor "lock-in." You lose a lot of the beauty of the FPGA at that point.