Can I Make a Living Off Bitcoin Mining? Probably Not

Important note: this is not current information. Bitcoin and Litecoin mining have both changed a lot in the last few months, and this post is from April.<p>I spent some time looking into mining about three weeks ago - with the proviso that my hardware would be free, since I run a 3D animation company that&#x27;s in the process of transitioning to GPU-based rendering - and came to the conclusion that right now, it <i></i>still<i></i> ain&#x27;t worth it.

The story ultimately ends when Anthony decides to switch to Litecoin mining, and gets rather burnt by the whole experience.<p><a href="http://reckoner.com.au/2013/07/my-three-months-as-a-litecoin-farmer/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reckoner.com.au&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;my-three-months-as-a-litecoin...</a>

Mining was profitable to average users (i.e. not sitting on huge piles of cash) in 2011 and early 2012 probably (source: I owned two 5970s and some 5870s at mined quite a few coins with them). Right now you have to invest much money in ASICs (GPU mining isn&#x27;t worth anything at this moment) which may also be never delivered or delivered so late that you&#x27;re out of game by then.<p>Most people agree that if you believe in Bitcoin, the best way to invest is just to buy some coins and leave them in a safe place for a year or more. The economy is deflationary so if whole Bitcoin doesn&#x27;t fail in near future, the price will eventually rise above the price at the moment you invested.

GPUs? It&#x27;s ASICs or not at all these days. Start with an FPGA prototype that can be used to create an ASIC, like an Altera. If you want to muck around with this stuff for fun you can buy a Cyclone or Stratix for relatively low cost.

It starts looking like the best way to profit of coin mining is to start your own bitcoin alternative and be the only guy mining for a while...

The environmental ethics of this activity are horrible. Buy hardware that consumes lots of power and will soon be useless, and run it 24&#x2F;7. I guess many of mans enterprises are just as unfriendly to the Earth but this one makes it particularly vivid.

I have a noob bitcoin question. Even after all the bitcoins are mined there will still be a need for &quot;mining&quot; for all the active transactions, correct? How does that work?

Obviously the amount a bitcoin is worth is exactly the amount of money the average person spent to generate it, so you can&#x27;t profit from it.

&gt; The increase in difficulty isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the more difficult it gets to mine the blocks, the more people are willing to pay cash for bitcoins<p>That&#x27;s the problem with his logic. Bitcoin&#x27;s exchange rate has remained pretty much constant while the difficulty rate has increased 10x in the last 6 months.

Which is funny, even after all the math and concluding that, no, you can&#x27;t turn a big profit, people still do it.<p>I mean, ok, you benefit the bitcoin community with it, still...<p>Not to mention the maintenance costs (assembling the rigs, wiring, parts that stop working, etc)

tl;dr: not with GPU but possible with ASIC

What does doing it &quot;full time&quot; mean? Is he sitting there watching the machines?

Only if you&#x27;re butterfly labs.