The BCG IPO in the stocks section got me to looking into other ways to get some crypto coolness in my portfolio. I've made a few investments on www.banktothefuture.com , but I missed out on the bit capital tranche 2 so I have no direct bitcoin exposure. Anyhow I spent the morning researching and cloud mining seems to be a good way to go. Genesis mining seemed to have the best combination of user interface as well as the price per TH/s power. They have a deal similar to others in that you buy a certain amount of processing power that they will provide for life until it no longer economically viable. You can allocate your computing power however you like, put it towards whatever coins you want and they pay out daily. I started out small-ish, with a 5% promo discount I got .25TH/s for $106.87 USD. Using a simple calculator online at the current BC value and assuming that it mines at the expected rate I should recoup my investment in approximately 6 to 7 months (closer to 7 if you include the crappy exchange rate my CC gives for USD payments), after that it's all profit. It remains to be seen how the difficulty changes, what the price of BC will be over the next few months, what the Australian exchange rate will be, what economical life of the Genesis setup is and who knows whatever else, but I basically like it. It's much more direct than BCG and you get very closely defined services for your payment. I can also switch my computing power over to a different coin if I have any need for it. As the hardware available evolves, scale improves and power costs change the price they offer might change so my plan is to just slowly add to my hash power holdings with them over time assuming it goes smoothly. Maybe add another .25TH/s every time they have a promo or the aud/usd exchange rate looks good. They also have a new x11 service and I got just a taste of it for lols just to get a little exposure to different coins. Then I went out and bought an antminer u3 on ebay, also for lols. Might start a bank to the future thread, for discussing the start ups and such on there, might be cool to have a bit of an SS team effort for analysis and research on them.
Update, more detailed calculations that include upkeep / electricity costs push return on investment out to about 16 months. However that's assuming that bitcoin doesn't increase in value and the aussie doesn't drop. Still, the thing will keep running as long as it can make 30 US cents a day to cover upkeep so we'll just have it run and see how it goes Looking into other options now that include buying into a miner with s7's which use about half the power of other rigs, decreasing upkeep costs and speeding up break even ROI. There are also a couple I've found that offer short term contacts at a cost of 1BTC per TH and pay a fixed return after 120 days. They are pretty well established so I'm looking into a couple of these (have to find a reasonable way to buy a couple BTC with fiat to fund it though).
Perhaps I'm missing something but why not just buy bitcoins now with that money, if owning bitcoins is the ultimate aim ?
I'm interested phrenzy. Don't have a lot of time this month, but I do have some crypto currency and mining research fairly high on my TO DO list for next month. Pls keep us posted.
Dozerz in the 'Bitcoin Rally" thread said he's more than happy to sell a few to new crypto members. Maybe PM him. I'll be sending him a mail to see if I can purchase a few hopefully in the net day or two.
Because ultimately they will hopefully provide more than your investment back. You're buying a piece of the mining operation and they will keep running it as long as you can cover the costs of power/rent etc. Let's say the bitcoin price doesn't move ever again and the increase in difficulty means the processing power I've bought is only economical for another couple years, I'll get back the amount I paid in Bitcoin late next year some time and then I'll be earning pure profit. By the time it winds up you would hope to get back about a 150-200% of investment over 2 or 3 years. If the price of bitcoin goes up then the value of the coins you mine goes up and ROI increases and you'll be economical longer. If you buy coins and the value doubles then you've doubled your investment, with this you've halved the time it takes to get your money back and doubled the time your virtual mining processor will be viable for. Basically the potential returns are greater but if some hot new mining tech comes out in the next 12 months it could push you out of the market (not likely at these prices, development is stifled). That's very theoretical though, if the price doubled then you'd likely see a lot of people getting into mining and that makes your slice of the pie smaller. Looking in to it more the fixed return ones are likely a better deal at these bitcoin prices because the cloud miners like genesis are taking upkeep in usd (which is fair since they have to pay cash for electricity and rent), so they are taking a larger portion of your mined coins. I'm really just doing this as a bit of an experiment into the practicalities and realities of btc mining rather than as an investment though. I think crypto and blockchain are an important part of the future but I'm less and less convinced that this has to involve bitcoin. Because of this the real investments I'm looking for are venture capital and technology innovation companies and start ups that accept micro VC or are publicly listed. I'm basically completely new to actually using any crypto though even though I've been an interested follower of the principles and news for a while. Hopefully my experiences can be a bit of a lab test for what things are like in the space right now. I'll keep my cloud mining experiences updated and I'll likely start a new thread for my experience of getting, setting up and using my mini mining rig as well as a bank to the future thread (that last one is where we should be focusing).
I saw genesis mining it looks pretty slick, I am just wary of cloud mining services as to this point 99.9% of them have been scams or not had any returns. But let me know how you go, very interesting
be wary of mining operations, i am yet to know of one that has turned a profit after bitcoin price broke $200. i have a few coins for sale to get people started, also some physical coins if people want something to hold.
So update time. The credit card processing company genesis use require a picture of your credit card along with your face, something they only told me after they had initially processed my order. It's not really genesis's fault and their help desk was very quick to respond and helpful. So I had that reversed and the orders canceled. Anyhow I was still very taken with genesis so I got some bitcoin from a forum member (thanks again!) and bought a 20mg/s 1 year x11 contract. I've gone this rout after doing some number crunching, the deciding factor being that this is a flat rate contract that's all inclusive (no upkeep or power costs). I've been using this power to move start coin which I think has a good future with such a large dedicated community and ongoing projects, it's also profitable to mine at current levels (appx 4c aud a coin) and would be extremely profitable if it went back to it's recent 10c+ price and it's recovering nicely. My 20mh/s contract cost $400usd and at current difficulty is yielding about 50 start every 24 hours at a value of between 2.75 and 3.75 cents usd each. I think there's a fairly strong possibility of a rally in start but even if it stays sideways or the price moves inversely to difficulty wich it should, I should make about $550usd in start at the end of the 365 days. That's certainly not garunteed, I'm not looking at it as locked in profit, but it does look pretty good to me Given that I've actually gone and bought another 20mh/s. I've chosen start because it's currently the most profitable and also because I can spend it at bank to future on VC shares in things I like the look of. However genesis allow you to switch the coins you mine at any time so I'm not locked in if there's a problem with the stc ecosystem down the line. They even offer a smart btc option that will automatically monitor the prices of all x11 coins and mine the most profitable and convert it to btc for you. Because of those flexibility I'm looking at getting an even larger 100mh/s contract which is the next price break they give you ($19usd per mh/s or 5% less than the price at 20mh/s). Worst case scenario I'll just switch to smart btc mining. Like precious metals theres a currency hedge element as well since any trading to cash will likely be usd denominated. I'm also looking into funding my cryptsy account and trying my hand at trading a few alt-coins. I'll keep everyone updated periodically, so far though I'm pretty happy with what I've got. If anyone is thinking of signing up I think they have a small referral program that gives both you a small discount as well as one for me on my next purchase so let me know if you're planning on doing that. There's also an additional promo code CryptoMiningBlog5 that will get you 3% off your first purchase. I'd recommend making a small purchase with those promo codes first since existing customers get an automatic 5% loyalty discount on any subsequent purchases. I've also recieved my little antminer u3 which won't make me a profit with Australian electricity prices (certainly so since I have to run my windows tablet full time to get it to work). It's really more of a fun little project than anything. I'm thinking about getting a couple more, a usb hub and a little 7" low power windows tablet to control them or even a raspberry pie controller for each. Because I've been having a little trouble with my uptime on the tablet I've only gotten about 30k satoshi of btc with it from about 55gh/s of hashing power but that should go to about 42.5k every 24 hours if it's left running. Still won't pay for itself but it's a neat little project. In the vein of cool little projects I'm looking at getting one of those little usb powered erupters that run like 3.5gh/s and running it off my battery packs and solar chargers, it will only make a cent a day or less and I can't run it full time on my little solar charger but I'll be turning sunlight into money, that's pretty cool, photons go in and bitcoin comes out haha.
Any updates? Was thinking of doing a similar thing myself. Also how difficult is it to set up the ant miner? I'm not super tech savvy but I'm not horrible either.
Any update on this? I am finally getting around to having another look at this. I checked out Genesis and HashCoins but thought I'd dip my toe in the water by hiring a mining rig at miningrigrentals.com and then signing up at a mining pool to try and get a taste for mining various coins.... ....so far it has been a bit of an epic fail. Some of the mining pools look a bit dodgy and I haven't been able to connect my rented rig up to a pool properly to be able to earn any BTC. Having difficulty troubleshooting the issues. I am tempted to take on a contract with Genesis, but if I can't get my test rental working then maybe I'm just getting in over my head. Would be very interested to hear how phrenzy has found the whole experience now that he's had a year and a half in the game.
No word from phrenzy, which is a shame. I got my mining rig working and have spent the bulk of this week researching into the current state of crypto and mining. I've bought 500MH/s of X11 hash power in a 2 year contract to mine Dash with Genesis. I'll post more about it once I have the time.
It's about a month after I bought this DASH contract. Earnings look to be pretty consistent and if they stay at this rate it'll ROI in about 7-8 months. That should then give me 16-17 months profit. In my email this morning Genesis advised that :- If anyone is interested let me know and I'll be happy to share more details. They also have a referral program with bonuses to both referer and referee that is worth a look before signing up.
This is my (much smaller) DASH mining contract with Hashflare which I set up at the same time for comparison to Genesis. It is only for 1 year and at this rate it will ROI in about 9-10 months, which would leave me only 2-3 months of profit.
