the value of the coin may look high on paper but that is because to mine costs a lot of money and time.

the mining ship for bitcoins has sailed really you are too late to the game.

think of it this way you need to have the hardware to mine which is not cheap and then you leave system on 24/7 for years running at 100% dedicated to mining only if you work out the cost you do not gain you lose.

(VPN) - [Link]
(Alt VPN) - [Link]

Without getting too technical:

Bitcoin is one of many cryptocurrencies. You "mine" it by performing calculations and synchronising your results in a "cloud". You receive a "reward" (the coins) for this work.

Problem is, the calculations are very complex, and computationally intensive. The calculations also increase in complexity with time ("difficulty"), so that it takes longer to get results as time advances. You can no longer perform these calculations (for Bitcoin, anyway) on your CPUs, it has to be on GPUs (ie, graphics cards). The higher the processing power of your graphics card, the faster you can do the calculations, and the more coins you receive.

Your main outgoings are:

1. A computer, with a decent PSU for...
2. ...A top-end GPU (1080 Ti, 1070, Vega 56, RX580)
3. Very high electricity bills

(2) is the initial outlay. There is a real scarcity in GPUs that are well-suited to mining. This is because mining farms bulk-buy. There's also a DDR5 RAM shortage, which means production at the moment is reduced. For specifically bitcoin, GPUs are now pointless - big mining conglomerates are now using super-fast ASICs. You would need to mine something else (ZCASH, Ethereum or Monero for example). In any respect, it's not "a couple of weeks and here's a 10-grand coin. You're more looking like "a couple of weeks, here's 0.00000001 of a 10-grand coin".

(3) is a significant consideration for your Return On Investment (ROI). The machine will be on 24/7. It will be hot. It will be noisy. You can't really use it for anything else (except maybe to cook an egg on).

Here's an example ROI calculation for Monero using an NVIDIA 1080Ti (this has a hashing power of approx 830H/s, 140W consumption (that's just the card, not the whole PC), and a typical UK electricity cost of 2.8p per kWhr:

[Link]

Monthly gain (after electricity bill): £40
Cost of 1080Ti card: approx £700-£900 for a decent one.

Serious miners are running 3-6 of these cards at the same time. Mining farms are running 100-1000+ of these cards.

Long and short of it: approx 18 months before you pay off the graphics card (assuming the value of Monero doesn't dive). You might also be able to mine other altcoins at the same time.

Your other option is to find one of the myriad altcoins that are just starting out. If they are worthwhile, and the difficulty level is low enough, you can accumulate quite a lot as an early-adopter. You then hold potentially 5,000 coins of something that could have the value of Bitcoin. But probably wont ;-)

If you've got £700-£900 to blow on something like that now, you're probably better off just outright buying the currency. You're hedging the value will increase. The other downside (particularly with Bitcoin) is that the "mining fees" are so high, that moving the currency around (eg into your own personal wallet, rather than an exchange) is now pointless for values under £100 (think of it as a transfer fee).

There's plenty of info at that link I provided about. A caution: don't get sucked into "cloud mining" (Hashflare and those types). They are basically a pyramid / scam. Avoid

Edited by davenotamonkey (12 Jan 2018 4.35pm)

Edited by davenotamonkey (12 Jan 2018 4.38pm)