Re: Bitcoin mining
Most of that is true. I was under the impression that the hashrate of your miner stays constant and only your pool and the total network hashrate goes up, so you just mine a little less over time unless the price of coin 10Xes like it did this year. So even though you're only mining 1/5th the rate of bitcoins as at the beginning of the year, the price is up 9x, so you're still doing ok. The reason you want to buy a new miner is the price is going up so much that you don't care about your ROI as long as you've already mined enough btc to get back your ROI. As long as the equipment has been out for a month, there should be resellers in the US selling at about a $500 premium, which is worth it to get started mining right away. Just make sure their listings don't say backordered or ships in 1-2 weeks or more.
For instance, off a $4k investment for an antminer S9, you've mined .25btc in 4 months. If the price is at $14k, you've only made back $3500 but you can sell it for around $2500 and have actually made $2k profit. If you had invested the $4k into btc at $8k, you'd have .5btc or $7k, giving you a $3k profit. This is why most people prefer to buy and hold.
Now you go ahead and buy the newest Antminer for $8k to get a whopping .1btc a month. After another 4 months, the price is now at $20k and you've mined around .35btc due to the increased difficulty. That's $7k in btc revenue minus the $8k but then you sell it for $5k putting you up another $4k. If you had just bought .55btc at $8k, you would have $11k now or $3k in profit. This is why it's extremely important to estimate the difficulty increases accurately or just use a mixed strategy. It sounds like it's better just to keep your Antminer S9 or buy and hold, but you would have to do the proper difficulty adjustment calculations.
|