My personal position on this is that you need to add in more than the cost of the basic hardware, you need to add in the cost of cooling. If you happen to live in a place which is below 70°F for most of the year, you have a pretty good natural thermal base to dump into – but if you live in most of the Western world, the cost of electrical power for the rig itself and the electrical power to cool it and the rest of the house nearby is probably more than you will earn at a plausible rate.
Depending on the amount that you're looking to spend on the hardware, I would definitely consider whether or not parking that money in a bond or other more traditional, more predictable financial repository wouldn't be a lot smarter.
The hardware may be re-sellable – or it may not, if bitcoin takes a serious dive or different proof of BLANK strategies become the norm, or any number of other unpredictable situations, which taken as a whole might be more likely than bitcoin continuing to go up and up and dragging the rest of the market with it.
As people have told me about both cryptocurrency and Vegas, "only take what you can afford to lose." But more than that, "only take what you can expect to lose."
I may be risk adverse, so take any financial advice I deliver with a grain of salt. And all the financial advice you find anywhere else.
Yeah it was -32c here a few days ago. Our electricity is $0.7CAD KWH, people are profiting with $0.10 USD. Hardware will be useful for my 3D/vr anyway which is why I got rx580 budget GPU. All of it has been run by the accountant so at the very least the business is buying and offsetting :)
Fair enough.
I know that people are profiting off of cryptocoin mining at relatively midpoint costs for electrical power, but their idea of "profit" for the amount of time and effort and overhead that goes into making it is very different from mine. People brag about making $7 a day on a multithousand dollar computing rig, and while that might be $7 a day of profit – it's $7 a day on a piece of machinery that certainly can break and will require maintenance, that increases the load on your air conditioning system, and that's just one more thing that you have to worry about keeping running all the time.
I'm pretty sure that I could shave $7 a day off of my personal expenses by eating slightly smaller portions.
Now, getting these toys because they're fun to play with – that is the motivation I completely embrace! Building yourself an extra box that you intend to be your tinkering system, throwing a VR headset on it and a nice graphics card, and first and foremost having it for the pleasure? Game on, I'm totally in. Occasionally running some coin mining on it because, after all, you've already got it and it's serving its purpose otherwise? Sure. That's cool.
I'm really hesitant to engage with the overall idea that "you can make money with it" is a good plan at this point, but "you can have a lot of fun with it," is a great plan at this point.
Maybe that just reflects my own particular priorities.