Yesterday I got one more call from from my pal #456560 And he really surprised me when he started conversation. He said: "Soon I'll be able to buy low cost electricity and I have an idea to buy ASIC and start to mine. Will you help me with it?"
That was a short conversation, I told him about noise, heat, how people use ASICs as "free" heaters, etc. He additionally asked about wallets, how ASICs work, how to sell what he'll get as a reward.
I'm really exited he changed his mind about Bitcoin from sceptical to what he is today.
p.s. here's lots of used ASICs: s9 ~60 bucks (90k sats), s17 ~500 bucks (750k sats). Here comes the question, whoud you buy as beginner ASIC or spot buy sats?
Let's discuss it in the comments section
It's gonna be his own exps
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I think the same
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The same thing happened to me with fiber internet. The minute I had a reliable, fast, symmetrical internet connection, I built a server and started running a bunch of services for myself and my friends.
Having more access to more good stuff opens you up to a world of possibilities
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In my opinion, one of the biggest question is minimum withdraw amount from the pools.
Depending on your personal hashrate it could take a long time to get to the withdraw threshold of a pool. A smaller miner may never earn enough sats to actually withdraw.
Mining pools enabling lightning withdraws will be a huge breakthrough in prompting decentralization of mining.
Ocean pool has mention wanting to do this in the future and Braiins pool did a small beta trial. But at the moment I don't know of any pool that has lightning payout enabled.
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I thought about Nicehash. They added lightning network lately. Miners can send sats directly to binance with low fees
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I think both NiceHash and Binance require KYC which is why didn't mention them.
Giving up personal information for 1000 sats seems like a bad trade.
Risk of a data breach would far out way what a small miner could earn.
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Xactly. However he already has binance account and only one ASIC won't provide lots sats
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If you already have an account, then I can see it making sense.
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Anyway start with one s9 ASIC can be a great educational process and as beginner I'd start with ASIC too (if I can handle noise). From the top of my experience I'd aquire sats
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Braiins pool did a small beta trial
Did? It isn't supported anymore?
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They closed the Beta.
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Multiple mining pools are either doing lightning trials or have it in the works. Some are doing it in public some are not. I suspect in 6 months several pools will support lightning withdrawals. Now, in this person's situation I'd say buy an S9 and connect it to a pool to learn how it works. Lincoin supports paynyms so that's a good privacy option. Their min withdrawal is low. Then once the person is ready grab some serious hash rate machines and the minimum will not be a problem. The question to me is what is low? Its all just math. Its really hard to say do this or don't do this without more information.
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One fourth from average price - the low I'm talking about
The harder to mine the lover will be rewards the closer will be lightning withdrawals, imo
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Want to maximize fiat > sats? Buy sats. May never get ROI unless electricity is ~free.
But I would suggest getting a s9 and playing around with it first. s17 puts ROI even further away (especially at 110v) at 8x the cost. I run both around 1000W and the s17 is about 2.5x the hash rate of the s9.
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There another drawbacks. S9s are 7+ years old and who knows how they will be alive. This factor can kill ROI at all
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Here's a great share about the pros and cons of mining
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Thanks in advance
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To me its all about their goals.
  • Do they want to stack as many sats as possible? Don't mine first. Buy or earn bitcoin
  • Is privacy a primary goal? Mining may be a great option, but they need to understand bitcoin privacy first in order to do it.
  • Is learning the goal? Mining is a great learning experience. You can scoop up S9's for cheap and they are simple to work on. They aren't efficient but they should start with one of these because they are cheap and great for learning.
On a strictly economic level mining is all about the cost of energy. Its really a question of math. If I had access to cheap power I'd be mining as much as I could. But I'm not your pal. Hope that helps.
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As you can understand from my post, yesterday he thought Bitcoin is scum, today he thinks Bitcoin isn't scum however he doesn't know anything about Bitcoin. He is at the beginning of long road of study
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I think jumping into mining at that stage would be a mistake. Robosats or Bisq would be better uses of time.
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This is my way, thats why I DCA daily
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Here comes the question, whoud you buy as beginner ASIC or spot buy sats?
Depends on what you want to accomplish. Do you want to learn more about bitcoin by learning hands-on? Or do you just want to stockpile sats. Either is OK, it just depends on the person
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I'm curious will he ever cover today's price in sats? Will average man be able to buy 90k sats in one year...
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Nobody knows what the fiat valuation will be in a year 🤷‍♂️
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True As Steve Jobs said: we can connect dots if we look in the past not if we look in the future.
Our today's decisions determine our future
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The biggest of all questions is 'how will he be buying low cost electricity'? I want to know and I assume everyone wants to know. What's the trick bro? Please tell us.
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Government subsidies. Don't know about limits. I think with one ASIC he won't go behind his limits
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