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Comment by johnmurch | Hacker News Reader

At this point I would say you are better off just buying bitcoins rather than a rig. It's only going to get harder to mine and yes you will be more efficient/faster than most but it's a losing game. Although I do have a miner and already pre-paid for an ASIC rig - I wish I had just bought BTC with the money as there will only be 21M btc ever!

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How come it is better to buy BTC?I mean it is trading at 180 right now.If I were to buy 15 BTC for example, I would have to pay 2700 while a good ASIC would mine 15 in a couple of days with a much higher value.Then again, maybe I don't understand it but that's how some of my friends do it.

Of course it is gonna be harder but I am talking about the next 2-3 months.

The real question is can you get an ASIC miner today or in a few days? I prepaid mine back in November and still don't have it. If you can get one, do it - if you are just planning to order now - your already behind.

Over the next few months ASIC miners are going to be everywhere so the mining rates will be harder as everyone will have an ASIC miner. Just look at some of the pool rates over time - it's like when people realized you could use graphic cards rather than just a CPU.

I'm guessing you pre-ordered from BFL? They seem a little too scammy for my taste, but if you paid with CC, hopefully you at least have fraud protection. They actually just posted something the other day (https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showwiki.php?title=FAQ:Get+...) that shows a rough estimation of how much you can theoretically make with each of their rigs at different difficulty levels. I'm of the opinion that once ASICs really get going, the difficulty is going to skyrocket. It's great for the manufacturer, because they can sell more of the units because people need to keep up. I wouldn't be surprised if we hit 50x current difficulty by the end of 2013.

Now that was the answer I was expecting.I was thinking the same thing but I wasn't sure.If you can get it now, you can be profitable but later on you are better off with buying BTC.Thanks.

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