Is bitcoin mining just completely not profitable for retail?
Is bitcoin mining just completely not profitable for retail?
Bitmain Antminer KS5 Pro. The state of the art mining rig today, pumps out 21TH of hashrate. You can buy one to receive this month for 30k, or wait until august and get it for a cheap 11k$.
21TH, will make you 1$/day.
That’s 27 years for ROI (obviously not because of difficulty and price changes, but let’s assume.)
Say you buy 20 of these bad boys.
This is going to set you back 220,000$. For a hashrate of 420 THs.
It will take you 500 days, to be able to accumulate 11k, to add one more miner to your farm.
Remember I am completely disregarding any electricity costs here, just to realize how absurd it all is.
Is there any conceivable scenario, where buying a bitcoin miner today, is more financially profitable than just buying bitcoin?
It more profitable to just buy bitcoin whenever the prices go down instead of buying ASICs to mine bitcoin. As you have correctly pointed out, the chance of getting the money back of what you put in to get the farm set up and the breaking even point are going to be far off. Till then you would have to sustain the costs and hope that additional costs dont come up.
If you observe the mining channels on youtube, they promote a certain altcoin for sometime and then move to another one. This is in sync with the coins that are having the best profit for that period. ASICs built for that algorithm might be a complete waste for you in case the price drops and you have just started mining it.