How much did he spend on the 105 GPUs?<p>From this calculator: <a href="http://dustcoin.com/" rel="nofollow">http://dustcoin.com/</a>, you need about 60,000 KH/S to make $114 a day (excluding power cost). One of the most efficient $/hashrate GPUs for litecoin mining is the ATI 7950 at about $210 a piece and ~600 KH/s. 105 * 600 KH/s = ~60000 KH/s = ~$114, so it works out. That's $20,000. So if you spend $20,000 you can buy yourself a job that pays $114 a day. It will take 6 months just to break even. Better hope the difficulty hasn't increased enough in that time to make your GPUs irrelevant (hint: it probably will).<p>Keep in mind that I was very generously excluding the very significant cost of power, the very significant cost of all the motherboards/cpu/ram/power supplies to run those GPUs, and the power and space required to cool them. Realistically we're looking at more like $50k.<p>>“Currently I’m making about 60 litecoin per day,” he said. “I’ve kept 95% of the mining profit since April and once the major exchanges start accepting LTC, others will follow, and price is expected to soar. So that 60 LTC could turn into $1,500.”<p>This is absurd. If he thinks 60 LTC will be worth $1,500, he should spend the $20,000 he spent on GPUs on LTC instead. He'd turn $20,000 into $250,000 with no work required (another hint: assuming you can turn $20k into $250k in 6 months with no work as a sure thing is also absurd).
FTA:
> Electricity in Jakarta, Indonesia costs three cents per kilowatt hour. That’s 30 cents less than power in the US and Europe.<p>Uh...Power in the US costs 30+ cents/kWh? In which part of the country??<p>In Ontario, Canada, the price is about 6.7 cents/kWh during the night and peaks at 12.4 cents/kWh in the afternoon.<p><a href="http://www.ontarioenergyboard.ca/OEB/Consumers/Electricity/Electricity+Prices" rel="nofollow">http://www.ontarioenergyboard.ca/OEB/Consumers/Electricity/E...</a>
Sounds like the only people making money off of bitcoin mining are the manufacturers of these increasingly more powerful ASIC mining hardware. Once one gets developed and released, it's only a matter of time until it costs more in electricity than it's mining. Then, lo and behold, they're ready with an even faster/more energy-efficient one.
$114/day is actually a very good income income in Indonesia. For comparison, fresh grads are paid around $200 - $1000 a month (excl. bonuses) depending on the company (better pay for established, international corp).<p>The only problem I see is the reliability of the electricity provider itself. There are frequent surges and parts of Jakarta are known to experience regular rolling blackouts.
Article title is wrong, these are Litecoins not Bitcoins.<p>This might pay off mining 60LTC per day and hoarding them. The guy who started Litecoin now works for Coinbase, which may adopt Litecoin and will no doubt start a gigantic speculation bubble this Indonesian dude can cash out with
<a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/litecoin/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/litecoin/</a>
$114 a day is equivalent of $14.25 working 8 hrs/day. I think there are many ways to make $14/hr without investing in expensive equipment (which will also need to be replaced eventually running that hot). Actually, person that is capable of building such thing and keeping it working could probably easily fetch much more than $14/hr.
Indonesia mainly runs on thermal power, it is kind of sad that those crypto currencies indirectly encourage making profits out of cheap labor and the planet itself.<p>source wikipedia: <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Indonesia" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Ind...</a>