Can man survive off Bitcoin mining alone?

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burning-money

blog Over the years we have come to be huge fans of MacTalk founder and all-round good guy Anthony Agius, who’s always up to one interesting project or another. In April 2010 it was flying to the US to buy 19 iPads in one massive haul when the Apple tablet was first released, in August 2012 it was setting up his house perfectly for his imminent NBN connection, and in December it was using the new 802.11ac standard to wire up his garage datacentre. Agius just has a penchant for doing interesting stuff. Hell, we even handed over control of Delimiter to him at one point, which turned out pretty well.

Agius’ newest venture is attempting to ascertain whether he can make enough money from mining the Bitcoin virtual currency to keep himself in new servers and fast broadband in the style to which he has become accustomed. He writes on his blog:

“Bitcoin is in the news again, so I thought I’d revisit if investing in some Bitcoin mining boxes is worth it. I investigated this a few months ago and came to the conclusion that unless your electricity is free, it’s not worth the time. But the price of Bitcoins has increased significantly since then, so I’m looking into it again … So this blog post isn’t really about Bitcoin, but rather, how I can make money off Bitcoin, because I don’t like working for the man. Plus, I kinda like the idea of a bunch of computers in my house, doing stuff. That’s always been cool to me!”

I’m with Agius — as a former systems administrator, I like the idea of having a bunch of servers sitting around in a disused part of my house processing stuff as well. There’s nothing that warms my heart more than to check in on my video processing progress when I’m encoding one of my DVDs into a MP4 for digital storage, and it’s even fun to tinker with the best possible encoding settings to make sure file size is minimal but quality maximal. These are the kinds of things which keep geeks entertained during their lives, and they represent viable lifestyle options. We hear Agius may have some results to share with us soon, so stay tuned to see how his financial experiment is going :)

8 COMMENTS

  1. Im dubious. The whole idea of the bitcoin system is the difficulty goes up with demand. At the moment heaps and heaps of people are mining as the price is skyrocketing.

    Theoretically mining should be a 0 sum game, but interested to see if someone can work a way around it.

  2. Price goes up with demand

    Difficulty goes up with network processing power (hash rate).

    It took me about 4 months to mine 32btc between Feb – June Last year, Using 2 x 5870’s running 24/7 & added approx $120 to my quarterly bill.

    Price has sky rocketed atm because another ASIC seller is selling devices only in bit coins. Give it 3 months will most likely level out, unless the Silk Road market is driving the price rise…

  3. I remember the 1998 and 2001-2002 adadvantage which required you to install adware or a banner. I think thats the same thing over time the ad system devalued itself when more people joined meaning you got less return

  4. Shrug, this bubble is 6 times higher than the last so far, still thinking ill hold on to my 8 coins from the last bubble. (And kick myself that I didn’t get more when I first heard about them years ago).

  5. Text book pyramid scheme, the price of bitcoins increases as new people are lured in by media exposure, as exposure dries up and less new people are attracted to bitcoins, the value of bitcoins decreases. Instead of bitcoin they may just as well have called it the Madoff.

  6. Can a man surivive on mining? Yes, if he has an Avalon ASIC miner and bitcoins don’t crash in price.

    Pretty weak excuse ‘story’ to throw some clicks to your mate’s blog.

  7. You could technically get “free” electricity from the sun by solar panels although there is a big outlay for the solar panels and equipment at the start

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