Is it cost-effective to purchase an expensive card?

I was considering purchasing the Monarch BPU 300 C or the 600 C. However, neither of them are expected to ship before February of 2014 or later.

If this calculator is to be trusted, it doesn't seem like one could ever earn back the cost of either of these units, especially if this difficulty graph is accurate.

According to said calculator, the 600 model would leave you $2000 short after 6 months at a purchase price of $4680. Also, the cheaper 300 model would leave you about $1450 short after 6 months after a purchase price of $2800. And those figures are assuming you start using the product in mid-February. If Butterfly labs are late on shipping the cards, and you start in March... forget about it.

I'm fairly new to the Bitcoin game, so can someone tell me if I'm wrong about this? Is it actually wise to purchase either of these cards?

Edit - The short answer is NO, especially for SHA-256 currencies. I spent about $1000 on a 50 GH/s miner. It generated about $30 per week in gross profit, but the net profit was less due to pool fees. Also, my electric bill rose by $100 per month. Luckily, I was able to find someone to buy the miner from me on ebay for CLOSE to what I paid for it.

WEFX

Posted 2013-12-20T16:35:51.617

Reputation: 161

Answers

Right now, it's not profitable to mine Bitcoins on anything that isn't an ASIC. GPUs still pay off if you mine Litecoins, but then the mining scene over there is getting crowded as well - so you may end up just recovering your costs.

There are plenty other crypto-coins, some of which are much more profitable to be mined with a graphics card than others. At sites such as dustcoin.com or coinwarz.com you can put the power consumption of your hardware, the rate it gives you (scrypt-based coins get more or less same rate than SHA256-based coins, but divided by 1000) and it will show you the difficulty level of a lot of crypto-coins and their value in the exchanges, and which one would be the most profitable for you to mine.

I used to mine Litecoin, moved to Dogecoin a week ago (when it caused an Internet frenzy) and am getting now aprox. double income from the same graphics card and same power consumption. If you think Dogecoin/Galaxycoin/CHNcoin/etc. are here to stay you can just keep them. Else, you can sell them as fast as you earn them and you'll make more money than mining "the classics" (i.e. bitcoin, litecoin, namecoin).

Or you can simply use the services of "Multipool", a pool which automatically jumps from one cryptocurrency to the other based on which is the most profitable at the moment. They then sell them immediately and pay you in bitcoins.

Joe Pineda

Posted 2013-12-20T16:35:51.617

Reputation: 2 040

Thanks Joe. Out of curiosity, what hardware do you use? Also, can you recommend a good Multipool? – WEFX – 2013-12-24T14:51:46.360

Radeon 7750. Had I had more money I would've bought the 7950, but this card ain't bad at all - just a bit less effective. And after late yesterday's new increase in Dogecoin's price, I'm extracting now 4x-7x than what I was getting mining Litecoin. You may still join the party, try your luck with Galacticoin et al., or simply use multipool and their kin to avoid tracking prices and difficulties of alt-coins :) – Joe Pineda – 2013-12-24T18:16:39.620

Forgot the part of the multipools. I've tried this one, seems to work fine: http://middlecoin2.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/

– Joe Pineda – 2013-12-25T00:33:02.530

How many Gigs on the 7750? (there are three variations) 1, 2, or 4? – WEFX – 2013-12-27T17:47:25.163

Don't know the exact sub-model, but it gives aprox. 122 Mh/sec for SHA-256, and about 147 KH/sec for scrypt, fairly typical values according to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison#Graphics_cards

– Joe Pineda – 2013-12-27T21:12:51.017

For $2800 (the price of Monarch 500GH/s, as of 23 Dec 2013), and $4680 (the price of Monarch 600GH/s, same date), you might as well purchase a 1TH/s mining hardware, such as from VMC, or CoinTerra.

The other alternative is to use these mining hardware to mine some other altcoin, instead of Bitcoin, and hope that the other altcoin would come to prominence one day, instead of bitcoin.

The answer to your question is that unless the difficulty drops, it is no longer cost effective to purchase mining hardware.

chuacw

Posted 2013-12-20T16:35:51.617

Reputation: 156

The CoinTerra product (TerraMiner IV) will not ship until mid April, so the same problem exists; the $6000 purchase price can never be recouped.

– WEFX – 2013-12-23T17:11:40.777

caveat at the current price....... – Mark S. – 2013-12-23T17:43:21.180