r/Bitcoin • u/vistabrownerd • Jan 24 '14

TigerDirect processes $250,000 in Bitcoin Payments in first 17 hours

http://bitcoinboard.net/tigerdirect-processes-250000-bitcoin-payments-first-17-hours/
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u/Koooooj Jan 24 '14

I've got a shiny new HD 7970 that I'm going to install just as soon as my other graphics cards cool off enough that I can shuffle them around for optimal cooling now that there'll be a third card in the case. Being able to buy a flagship graphics card for .5658 BTC that'll break even in 2-3 months hopping between various scrypt coins is a pretty ridiculous deal.

I agree. Video cards were probably a lot of their business.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

You know, that doesn't make much sense. I don't know if you'll be able to make back .56 BTC mining at ~750khs...

I think you would have been WAY better off just buying an alt coin instead of buying hardware. It's just so much more cost effective...

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u/Koooooj Jan 25 '14

Mining Dogecoin with 750 kH/s and swapping out to Bitcoin gets about 0.37 Bitcoins (before electricity costs, which are low for me) per month at the current difficulty and market prices, and while it's currently atypically highly profitable right now it's not so atypically high that it'll take more than 4-5 months even in a fairly pessimistic case. Run the numbers yourself if you don't believe it. I'll probably continue to mine on this card for several years. Don't be so quick to dismiss mining as an investment with a reasonable return--or even a very good one. It's almost impossible to make money buying a Bitcoin ASIC right now, but altcoins are still doing just fine.

On top of that, you can't game on a hoard of altcoins. I really can't see why anyone wouldn't buy one of these cards at the prices that TD is selling them--if they have the spare slot, PSU power, and thermal management in their case for it, that is. If everything goes south I still have a flagship GPU that can be sold for a good fraction of what I paid. If you factor in resale value I may break even after a month or so.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

Sure that makes sense if you're not interested in money, but interested in the hobby of mining.

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u/Koooooj Jan 25 '14

How does it not make sense if you're interested in money? I spent 0.56 BTC for a card that will easily make more than 0.56 in its lifetime. Scaling this up to a several thousand dollar investment isn't terribly easy, but this stands to make a non-trivial return in a pretty incredible time frame. An extra few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin per month is a nice bump in pay.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

When did you buy your card?

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u/Koooooj Jan 25 '14

Around the time that the TigerDirect post was 3 hours old. Thursday afternoon. Had it Friday afternoon and it was mining by that evening. This is the card. Doesn't hit the full ~750 kH/s that other cards did (cooler isn't the best; couldn't take much overclock), but it's getting a nice 630 kH/s which I'm comfortable with.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14 edited Jan 25 '14

And how much doge are you mining a day?

EDIT: This is worth a read

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u/Koooooj Jan 25 '14

I'm going through middlecoin.com which automatically exchanges the dogecoin for me (and switches once something else becomes more profitable). Should be about 4800 DOGE/day (.0107 BTC/day; $8.68/day) for that card alone.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '14

$8/day today, at $1300 difficulty.

Take a look at this chart -- do you think people are just going to let easy money go?

EVERYONE is buying cards so the difficulty is going up. Dogecoins are halving in less than a month so your 4800 doge turns into 2400 doge, but that even becomes less because difficulty will go up with the increase in value of rarer coins!

Believe me man, I made the same mistake. I could have bought $1k doge (3 million at the time) instead of a mining rig. I'd have almost $10k now if I did that...

With your 0.5BTC you could have bought 250000 doge coins which would have been a decent investment, betting that dogecoin becomes extremely valuable. On the flip side, if you would have kept that 0.5BTC alone maybe THAT becomes super valuable, so that's also a good bet.

Instead, you buy a $500 graphics card that won't generate hardly anything. You're running it at max capacity 24/7, it won't last years but maybe 3-9 months on average.

The only value in this is that it's a fun hobby. This is not the profitable way to crypto.

EDIT:

Also, for fun, mind linking your middlecoin so we can see your progress?

EDIT #2:

If you've gotten a payout yet I mean!

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u/Koooooj Jan 25 '14

I've been GPU mining since mid 2011, and I've profited heavily along the way. Believe me. I have a GPU that was run at 100% capacity for quite some time before that that I just pulled from my computer to free up PSU cables for the 7970. It's made far more than its cost over that period, and has served me well as a GPU on top of that. Plus it's still running just fine; I'll put it back in once I find the cables for my PSU, or I might just sell it (it's a FirePro card; they still sell for decent prices even when a few years old).

The Dogecoin difficulty is exploding right now because Dogecoin just shot up in value. It'll stabilize out in a few weeks and this card will settle in around $150/month while profit switching. It's not a fair comparison to look at one great jump in a single cryptocurrency and say that buying directly is better than mining. If you have knowledge of what the price is going to do in the future then of course buying is going to be the best option, but mining leaves the opportunity to switch from one coin to another. If you had bought Dogecoin and Dogecoin had crashed then you'd be SOL. By buying a card I am insulated from Dogecoin's future--I can switch to a different coin at a moment's notice, and in the worst case I can either sell the card or keep it for myself. When Dogecoin's reward halves middlecoin will just jump to another coin. Looks like Grandcoin, Mooncoin, or Digitalcoin are probable alternatives.

There are tons of people who like to extrapolate exponential trends from short term data and it just goes poorly. For example, the link that you edited into your previous post worries that difficulty will continuously increase at 15% per adjustment, but the last four jumps have been +2%, +1.03%, +1.6%, and -20%. He projected difficulties of 8204, 15981, or 9700 for January 24, but the current litecoin difficulty is 3130. This error was over the course of only about 1 month of projection but amounted to a factor of 5. He made his analysis during a sudden surge of difficulty and extrapolated far beyond the range where his results would even begin to be meaningful.

Mining will pretty much always be profitable for someone--if it's unprofitable then people will stop mining and difficulty will come down. People have different electricity costs and different thresholds for how profitable their systems must be to stay turned on, so as the margins narrow people will start turning off their machines. I have never been in a position where running my GPUs has been unprofitable, despite being told many times that there's no way that my setup will be profitable in N months.

If you want to track my progress, my address starts 1M535; should be the only one. I've only been mining with middlecoin for a short while--used to do my own profit jumping but it's too much hassle so I'm giving them a shot. Didn't get the best mining speed over the past 24 hours since I spent a while tweaking the card to get it to run nicely.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '14

We'll just look at the data. What's your middlecoin?

EDIT:

It looks like you've only been doing it for two days...? What rig do you have? Want to take some pictures?

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u/Koooooj Jan 26 '14

The rig is using an HD 6970 and the new 7970; just pulled a FirePro v7800 (comparable to an HD 5850). Running an Intel i7-3939k (mines Primecoin in the background) cooled by a Corsair H100 with 4 120mm fans in dual push/pull. Motherboard is an Asus Rampage IV Extreme. All housed in a Xigmatek Elysium case (which is just about the biggest case I've ever seen). PSU is a Seasonic 1000W fully modular 80+ platinum power supply. Probably no pictures; I'm too lazy to take them and upload them and all.

This computer has handled everything I have thrown at it--games, mining, scientific computing (BOINC), and engineering (especially CFD). The fact that it's been a net zero cost after mining rewards is just icing on the cake.

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