calculations

When you played around with CPU mining, you shouldn’t too much anyway as it is not worth it anymore, and you are still interested in mining digital coins, then it is time to invest in some mining hardware: Either GPU based or ASIC device based. Which one you choose, is up to you. There are a few things to consider when evaluating the appropriate device(s).

Here are a few bullet points to consider to pick the best device at this point in time:

Timing is everything
The most important is to get the right miner at the right time: fast hashrate processing using as less power as possible. This is important to get back your invested money as soon as possible. When I was reading though forums and tutorials and did some calculations it took most miners about 4-6 months to get back their investment before earning money.

Availability
Make sure, the device is available when you order a product. There are many ASIC producing companies promising the latest and greatest mining rig soon. This ‘soon’ can be in a few days or in a few months. It does not help, if the rig got can process the ideal hashrate as per today if they deliver it finally in a few months when the mining difficulty increased and the rig it is outdated, it will take ages to get even the investments costs back (if at all). To be fair, many companies offer then better hashrate processing, but do not take that as a given.

Profitability calculation
There are many sites offering some calculations based on the currency you are mining. Here are a few to do your first calculations. There are many more site around, just use your favorite search engine to find more if you like.

• http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
• http://www.vnbitcoin.org/bitcoincalculator.php
• http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/bitcoin-mining-calculator
• http://blockchained.com/profit/
• http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php

All of these profitability calculators take different parameters, so pick the one which suits your needs best.

Example
Lets do an example here: Lets assume we buy a miner today having the following specs:

• Miner costs: 3’199 USD
• Hashrate: 320GH/s
• Power usage: 320W/h

The electricity costs here are around 0.13 USD/kWh. You will find these numbers probably on your providers or community/city’s homepage. So if we do the calculations for 90 days we would get the following:

• Income for 3 months: 1281.22 USD
• Daily income: 7.57 USD
• Bitcoin per day: 0.01 BTC

After around 3 months we would have our investment back and then can really start earning money. Sounds like a good deal.