Are there any cheap miners on Ebay that are still worth it?

I knew in the past a person could jump on Ebay and buy up a few cheap Antminers or something and still make a tiny profit. Is there anything small, cheap, but still somewhat powerful enough to make a couple of BTC before they become completely obsolete? Even .1BTC a week would be cool. Like what about a couple used Antminer S3's or something?

This is mainly just "thinking out loud" at this point... I'm not looking to bank a lot of BTC or anything at this point. I thought I could use a BTC miner to help subsidize my current gaming kick... a few places accept BTC in payment for Steam games, so if I could pick up a used miner (or two) on the cheap to help keep the BTC coming in for at least a short while, it would at least take some of the pressure off my credit card.

I dont think any of the strait up btc miners are profitable. I dont know how much of the market fell out of the scrypt coin market but i have a zeus miner that does 1.3 MH/s about what a 280x does... i bought it for 60 on amazon and was able to make my money back just in time to buy a 280x with btc before the market fell...

that miner does a decent job and provided you dont have a bum wireless adaptor like i do you can hook them to a raspberry pi and have that run the miner for about 3 watts for the rpi and 7 watts for the miner... that might still be profitable and i was making .017 btc per day on it using the coin switching pools i got paid in btc but hashed in scrypt for what ever made the most profit on the exchange... even now i have about .7btc left.

Depending on electric, S3's or Cointerra IV's seem fitting.

Hmmm..... looking at things, an Antminer S3 might cost about CDN$200 but is only about 440GH/s @ 350W or something. A new S5 might run CDN$600 but gets 1.15 TH/s at 590W.... slightly more efficient there.

But according to one calculator, the thing would be obsolete and actually losing money in 90 days (due to difficulty increases).... not sure how accurate that is, but I'm starting to think twice about this plan... lol. Does the difficulty still increase in huge amounts like it used to?

It surely is too late for a mining plan.
Even if difficulty was not rising the chances are your power bill would top your yield quickly.
The BTC price has mostly just been falling, steadily, with the occasional bump up and fall back.
And with summer months fast approaching your AC bill will push the electric cost higher than any profit.
Free electricity is the only way at this point to make it profit.
And believe me I tried, accumulating upwards of 4TH/s last fall. I made more selling off that hash power then than I could have made mining since (and paying for power).

Well, the good and bad news is we don't have A/C, so no extra power overhead for cooling. It made it quite awful in the summer when I was doing GPU mining on 20+ GPUs (mostly 280X's). But here in Canada, well... we don't get very many long stretches of really hot weather where I live.

But oh well... as for my idea, I guess it wouldn't work as I hoped... no biggie.

Thanks guys.

With no AC required I would look for a used KNC Titan (scrypt), like mentioned previously.
That might still make ROI + if you can luck up on someone desperate enough to get rid of one for a song.
There aren't many of those for sale that I see, so those owners may still have some hopes of a BTC surge.

Am I seeing right? KnC Titans are still going for $6800 new?! Are they really still THAT viable?

I don't think KNC ever charged a fair price for anything.
If they are that much now, imagine what the early waiting list folks paid and screamed about for months.
And that being said, KNC was actually one of the better "buys" for HW.

Core32 said:

I don't think KNC ever charged a fair price for anything.
If they are that much now, imagine what the early waiting list folks paid and screamed about for months.
And that being said, KNC was actually one of the better "buys" for HW.

Click to expand...

Yeah, pretty sure it was close to $10k for their original scrypt unit. No way anyone ROI'd on those if you paid electric.

I keep being really tempted to do it but everything I read seems to say there's no ROI anymore or it's ridiculously long. It would be kinda neat to have a heat source that pays for itself, but guess that's wishful thinking. Probably better to put that money towards new windows and spray foaming the basement.

i was just looking at bitcoin charts and while the price of bitcoin is really low compared to times past, the difficulty is 5x higher then it was a year ago. Those "cheap" miners are cheap because something new came out that made them obsolete.

I miss the days when it was computer hardware because you could always sell the card off to a different market for good value but with bitcoin miners they go obsolete every year and by the time it pays itself off its no longer useful (unless you have free power)