andres17

This won't work. Back in March I considered the idea of buying miners and retire rich in a year or two. Luckily, I ran the numbers on a spreadsheet and saw that this was just a scheme destined to make me lose money.

First off, the cost of the equipment is just too high. $2685 for a Hashlet Genesis running at 3,000 GH/s is too expensive. When I considered this idea back on March, I was looking at equipment running at 3.5 TH/s (Tera = 1000 Giga), for a cost of about $12,000. Assuming I got the equipment fast (a week or so), I could generate about $6,000 in profit on the first month (based on my estimates and the assumption that BTC price didn't tank). But the monthly profit quickly deteriorated the following month, and the next, and the next, thanks to the increase in Bitcoin "difficulty". Basically, I needed to get the equipment fast in order to make a small profit. If I didn't get the equipment shipped to my house in 6 weeks, I would barely break even. And I got the equipment after 6 weeks, I was destined to lose money. That doesn't take into account any down time after having the equipment. Basically, this computation assumes 24hr, 7 days a week continuous running of the machines. What if I lost power (which has happened a lot lately)?

So basically what it boils down to: the cost of the equipment is very high, and you will make a small profit if you get the equipment fast. After about 7 months, your ASIC equipment will be making you less than the cost of electricity of running it! And you can't sell it to anyone since this machine doesn't do anything else but mine Bitcoins, and at a very low rate 7 months into its life (unless you scam someone with the BTC dream that is). The people making the money are the ones manufacturing the machines and selling them at near "breakeven" price (breakeven to the ppl buying the equipment). Basically the demand of BTC miners drive the price up to that almost breakeven price. You do make money if you get the equipment running very quickly after buying it.

P.S. I just compared my Difficulty predictions to the current actual Difficulty. Back then, my spreadsheet had a Difficulty of 55,000,000,000 for October 15, 2014. The prediction was off by a lot actually. The current Difficulty is 35,000,000,000. What that means is that you could get the equipment later than what my above post suggests, and still make money. But still, you are at the mercy of the price of BTC vs USD. The BTC price went up on the spring, but has been coming down. There are two many uncontrolled variables in this game, so it is way more risky than MS. And as opposed to MS, there's no guarantee of making money.

Kudos to OP for thinking outside the box, and linking 2 completely different money making schemes together. I still think it is better to just do both separately (mine BTC with the best equipment on the market, and MS like we've been doing).