Bitcoin mining - free electricity?
 

Lets assume I have access to unlimited electricity (its a 3rd world country, so not 24hrs a day constant.. maybe around 12-15hrs a day)

And lets say I also have around $100,000 to invest in miners..

Which one would you recommend? Im trying to get into mining considering I have access to free electricity.. Just curious how it would work..

Im also willing to see if anyone wants to partner with me for free electricity and move their miners down here..

Just kinda curious whats out there basically..

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I think you're late in the game. Just a minor off the top reply. And why would you invest all that into something like that? Go to bitcointalk.org and read, read, read, read..... read.

Be careful with whom you invest or work with as well.

I would suggest if you have disposable income like that, you should get off this forum and invest in actual physical gold or silver.

Mining hardware becomes obsolete very quickly. You may barely break even, or make a loss, even if the electricity is free.

If you're in a "warm" third world country you'll also have to factor in the costs of cooling. All of that semi-obsolete hardware makes a lot of heat, and it's not going to work for too long if the ambient temp is high.

Got you man.. Its more of just a past time..

I figure while im here might as well do something.. I have other investments i just figured ill play around with $50-100k to see what I can do..

The part that interests me is a ton of free electricity here and dollar is worth quite a bit here as well, so i figured I can make some investments for the future to play around with..

Yup im in a warm country in Africa with AC's all over the place, but thats already set up so no extra cost..I basically have a 500 sq ft cooled room in the house and can plug in another 100+ kw for free so i figured i could make some money in the meantime :)

So its possible to lose money even though the only cost is hardware? no electricity?

Wait, the electricity is only going to be on for like half the day? That's even worse. You'll only generate half the BTC that someone with the same miner and a 24/7 supply will. You may have a slight advantage because you don't need to pay for electricity, but the lower daily revenue means it will take you even longer to break even (if ever)

good point.. some days electricity is on the whole day..

i'll say in a week maybe around 100 hours of electricity..

Even if it takes around 12 months to break even I was looking at this as a long term investment.. beats keeping your money in stocks..

For example if I invest $100,000 and make only $10,000 a month, that's actually a pretty good investment, considering after one year its all profit

Here's a quick overview using the coinwarz defaults for SHA256

Cryptocurrency Mining vs. Bitcoin Mining Profitability | CoinWarz

Now I'm assuming that the miner which does 9460GH/s at 2600W is current and typical. That makes USD $6.26 of BTC per 24 hours.

If you had 100kW of power available, you could run 38 of these units, which will make you $237 per 24 hours. [I have no idea what these brand/model units are, or how much they cost; you may not even be able to afford to buy 38 of them.]

If the electricity works 100 hours a week then revenue is just under $1k a week.

This extremely rough calc assumes none of that 100kW of power needs to be used for additional cooling, and it probably will - there's no way a standard residential A/C could handle the heat output of a farm using that much power. You'd need a semi-industrial cooling setup.

Another thing to consider is that the value of BTC is high at the moment, but historically it hasn't stayed high for long, so in the long term your revenue could be even lower. On paper it's going to take you 2 to 3 years to break even just on the cost of the miners, but over that time a newer generation of faster and more efficient miners will have been released. You will not have the same competitive power at 12 or 24 months as you did in the first month, and since you haven't yet broken even, buying newer miners to keep up would result in a net loss.

Sounds like a big headache and a waste of money to me...

Power isnt a problem.. Air conditioning might be easier to solve.. Down here they use individual AC units per room, which can take room down to about 60F.. If needed you can add more.. I think the problem is how much a rig like that would cost.. any ideas?

i agree with you on this.. this is my fear..

the more powerful units that come out, the less BTC my machine will mine..

Im worried that in 6 months i'll be making barely $1 a day. LOL

yeah sounds like a headache.. would have been worth it if i got in years ago!

Also good point, what if it drops to like $400-500 then im fucked..

Most of that 100kW electrical input ends up being converted to heat. A residential A/C cannot handle anywhere near that amount of heat (which is equivalent to about 1000 humans standing in your room). You'd probably need to budget at least 20-30% of the 100kW input for cooling, which eats into your revenue even further.

I'd also be worried about what happens when the power fails, because even with air conditioning or an exhaust system there's going to be a lot of residual heat contained within the mining equipment, and no power to continue removing that heat...

income goes down by about 10% each month, because "difficulty" keeps going up:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small-lin.png

so if first month you make $10k, it will play out like this:

Month / Income
1 $10,000.00
2 $9,000.00
3 $8,100.00
4 $7,290.00
5 $6,561.00
6 $5,904.90
7 $5,314.41
8 $4,782.97
9 $4,304.67
10 $3,874.20
11 $3,486.78
12 $3,138.11
13 $2,824.30
14 $2,541.87
15 $2,287.68
16 $2,058.91
17 $1,853.02
18 $1,667.72
19 $1,500.95
20 $1,350.85
21 $1,215.77
22 $1,094.19
23 $984.77
24 $886.29
25 $797.66
26 $717.90
27 $646.11
28 $581.50
29 $523.35
30 $471.01
31 $423.91
32 $381.52
33 $343.37
34 $309.03
35 $278.13
36 $250.32
TOTAL $97,747.16


obviously the $10k/month with a $100k investment were just made up numbers, but as you can see it's not as easy as you think.... and this whole calculation omits few critical details... it assumes the equipment doesn't break, doesn't account for your time to deal with it, possibility of someone finding out and cutting you off from the "free" electricity source, etc...

so long story short, unless you know what you are doing I wouldn't get into it...

Thanks Woj.. Makes perfect sense actually.. I think i'm gonna let it pass for now..

Are there other coins i can mine? I really figure i can do something with all that electricity. lol

Good point rowan.. Thanks a lot for your insight.. Thats why i love this forum.. lots of you smart people on here..

I think i'll pass for now :1orglaugh

Let me watch and see how the market is in another year..

The feedback is impressive. I used to be in the market of mining and trying to do what you're doing but without the initial investment. I just wanted to make some
extra dough to pay for domains and phone bill etc. After reading and studying, I wasn't going to make crap with my knowledge and skills.

Look on Vice News Motherboard and their Bitcoin mining video they did. Once you see that you'll understand why I just gave up and said adios.

What is the cheapest/reliable way to fund bitcoin that will accept intl bank wire?

I want to actually buy some bitcoin..

With that 3rd world power, don't forget to set up a line conditioner system with automatic voltage regulation that corrects brownouts and over voltages. Maybe a battery back up too.

dont do it, its not worth it even with 24/7 free electricity.

mining hardwares are expensive and difficulty keeps increasing.

for now it looks like its not worth it, but if you think that btc price will go high as 10k/btc.
then you can generate btc and hold on to them.

but ill say, dont do it.

what you can do is, wait for btc to goes down like 300-400/btc and then buy btc worth 100k. and then wait. later sell and profit.

This would be a fun project to do.

Find a way to build a bare-bones machine that is a super-fast multi-core CPU + GPU, Flash Drive, Linux and Ethernet port. Liquid cooling might be more effecient and use less power than fans. Power it all by solar power. Profitable? No, but fun? Yes!

Agreed, come in on the low end and see what conversions you get. Remember the complexity of mining a bitcoin drastically changes over time as well as the value of the bitcoin. Maybe try other cryptocurrencies or join a few mining pools with a solid setup and see if its worth it. Do not dump your cash into the unknown, not cool, everrrrrr.

Some useful GUI programs to test and get your feet wet and test things out with profits - for free:
MinerGate or NiceHash

If you're using ASIC miners you don't need a beefy machine at all. I run cgminer on a little Raspberry Pi B+, the ASICs do all the hard work. :)

If you're mining a coin that needs a CPU (no ASIC yet) you'd be better off spending more money on a gruntier CPU rather than worrying about l33t stuff like gigs of RAM, high end GPUs, and fast SSDs.

From what I read only way to profit is if you have free electricity. Solar panels don't work.

in the middle of Africa ? with free electricity of 100 kw ?
with permanent temporary blackouts ?
500 sq feet room ? with free AC ?

damn, this forum never ceases to amaze me
:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I had it and trust me it's not worth to mine btc...
Better with some other coins but this is full time job to watch, change, buy/sell etc...

it would be easier to make money buying/selling coins (brokering) than actually mining...

Are you UN or military?