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I was strongly considering buying one of the 25 GHash/s miners and hooking it up to my laptop or desktop when not using them, as in, leave the miner running overnight or while I'm at work.

The mining profitability calculators confuse me. If I join a pool and mine the way described above, would it be profitable?

How long would it take to earn that c. $800 back?

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You can run the miner all the time, not just overnight or while you're at work. It doesn't use hardly any resources on the laptop... all the heavy lifting is done on the miner.

It's very risky to buy a miner. The miner manufacturers often take a long time (i.e. several months) to deliver your order. While you are waiting the mining difficulty is going up and the manufacturers move on to new more powerful models. As a result, by the time you get your hardware it could be well on its way to becoming obsolete. Keep in mind that a mining rig is not useful for any other purpose.

It is a very real possibility that you will never make back your investment unless the bitcoin price goes up a lot. And if you want to bet on the bitcoin price going up, you can simply buy bitcoin and save yourself the whole mining hassle.

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25 GH miner is old technology. I have a 30 GH miner (2 miners 25GH + 5GH) running on the eglius pool. At the current network rate I will earn 0.00859212 BTC per day, which means IF THE NETWORK difficultly stayed constant, then I would earn 1 BTC in 116 days. But the 28 nm machines are coming online so my 0.008 will soon drop to 0.001 or worse.

You could drop 800 and get 25 GH

$800 on 25 GH   ($32 per GH)

or you could drop 2100 and get 600 GH

$2100 on 600 GH (pre-order)  ($3.5 per GH)
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  • Thanks for the info. Yes, I've been reading up on the difficulties going up very quickly. The Monarch card plugs into usb, the same as the smaller peripherals, but it looks like it's meant to be mounted next two a dozen other miners. =) $2200 is a much bigger investment over $800. Electricity costs aren't an issues where I am, but running this thing day any night, how long would it take to earn that back? Can this be configured to mine other coin or not? (probably not, with the different coding, right?)
    – brianb
    Jan 22, 2014 at 21:28
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You could mine altcoins that are easier to get (like PrimeCoins), and then exchange those for bitcoins on an exchange.

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  • -1 Doesn't answer either of the two questions "Will it be profitable, How long will it take to earn that c. $800 back?".
    – Murch ♦
    Jan 20, 2014 at 16:58

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