cex.io, the largest bitcoin mining farm is now offering april/may mining future contracts. Not saying you won't lose your shirt as it is highly speculative but just fyi for anyone interested. I bought 20 bitcoin(5 TH) worth of end of may mining contracts at 0.004 btc per 1GH. I think the price is pretty good. Using 20% increase per difficulty for the next 5 increases until end of may when this starts mining, then 10% increase per thereafter for the next 12 months. This comes out about break even. But cex.io mining contracts always carry a premium over direct hardware sales in term of btc/ghs as you don't maintain anything (no different than commodity futures). So plenty of opportunity to sell after it mined some coins or even above cost basis. Speculative but risk is pretty low in my view. For april symbol is FHA, for may it is FHM ( https://cex.io/trade#FHM-BTC )
Thanks for posting (I didn't know of the Future{pre-order}-contracts). In your calculations, did you take the Maintenance-fees into account? If I understand this correctly: https://cex.io/maintenance Your hardware will not produce 5T but: (100 - 16.11%) = 83.9% which is about 4.2T (if the farm is 100% online).
yes they use a rather convoluted formula and includes electricity/hosting/hardware replacement etc.. on average it comes out about 12% but now it's at 16% due to btc/usd price drop. I subtracted 12% from daily profit in the calculator. the idea really isnt to purely calculate mining profit, mining profit is almost like intrinsic value in this case - safety, my plan is to sell those contracts at the right time. The way i look at it, at 0.004 btc/gh and 450 btc/usd, it will put a ceiling on those 1th miners at $1800, minus the $300 shipping from china for the giant box + labor/parts, we are getting close to flatline for the chinese cost basis. And there is nothing beyond 28nm that will realize further efficiency in any significant amount like we did from graphic to gen 1 asic to gen 3 28nm. Hence the hashrate at 10-20% increase per difficulty wont be sustainable much longer after this final 28nm push from the early suckers who way overpaid on the preorders. Yes all speculative, but fun nonetheless.