Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Can you even make money with those (the USB ones) now? Assuming $30 each, get 10 of them for $300, at the current rate you'd make $40/month or so not counting electricity cost. 7.5 months to break even, but difficulty goes up, so even if you assumed a 25% per month increase in difficulty you wouldn't even break even after a year, if ever.
|
If you reinvest all the coins you get, you pretty much keep ahead of the current rate of increase. Which means you likely won't make large amounts of money in the long term with these particular units, when you factor in the cost of USB hubs.
The real money is in custom hardware, where people have designed boards to work with these same (or similar) chips, so you get a lot more power for your money invested, but it is more complex to evaluate and you need to buy the parts, and either flow the board yourself or send it to someone else to setup, which is why I wasn't going to recommend it for someone who was a beginner.
You can make money playing the market as well, and if you sign up to a pool where you get NameCoins (another crtypo currency that you essentially get for free as a byproduct of BTC mining) as well, it helps a little.