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by lelandriordan 4457 days ago
I am a bitcoin miner and I have made a 8 BTC profit this year taking into account electricity fees. A common misconception is that you need to actually mine bitcoins to mine bitcoins. Instead over the last few months smart miners have been ditching their Bitcoin ASICS and instead have been using old GPU rigs and new scrypt(aka Litecoin) asics to mine through auto profit switching alt-coin pools. These pools automatically mine the most profitable alt-coins like Litecoin and Dogecoin, then take the earnings and automatically trade them on exchanges for Bitcoins. While obviously profits are down compared to last fall, I am still making a nice ROI everyday, even from the very first GPU rig I ever built.

This week CEX/Ghash.io the largest bitcoin mining pool just launched their own auto-switching pool https://ghash.io/MULTI (Warning must sign up through CEX.IO). This will probably be the biggest one soon as its hashrate has tripled today already, but for the last few months the big three have been the following:

http://www.clevermining.com/ http://wafflepool.com/ https://www.scryptguild.com/

This is an always up to date profitability comparison of these pools vs. straight Litecoin mining made by Bitcointalk user Suchmoon: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VOAhFX1XRizdaTp71qnY...
2 comments
maxerickson 4457 days ago
What's the ballpark cost of the hardware that you used to get those 8 BTC?

(It's interesting information for observers, of course people are turning on hardware that will run profitably, but mild opportunities aren't going to drive a whole lot of purchases)

Edit: If you have the rough 'replacement costs' floating around in your head that's interesting too. So not your actual costs, the approximate cost of bringing equivalent power online right now.

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7Figures2Commas 4457 days ago
> These pools automatically mine the most profitable alt-coins like Litecoin and Dogecoin, then take the earnings and automatically trade them on exchanges for Bitcoins.

So these pools help you mine the most profitable alt coins and then automatically exchange them into BTC, which has lost roughly half its value since the beginning of the year and a third of its value in the past month? That makes no sense.

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