Should I Buy Antminers S5 If I Have Free Electric

[Chris]

Hi, I have free electric as part of my tenancy agreement, I was wondering should I buy an Antminer S5 ASIC miner 1155GH/s, I seen one on ebay for £125 GBP + 25 postage so all in £150 GBP or about $215 USD
I was wondering roughly how many coins would it on its own mine per week if i were to get it and have it up and running in about a week, Most calculators are asking to input electric costs etc but as i have it free any coins mined are purely profit so I am just wondering would it get anything on its own or are we talking pennies now thanks to all these big mining farms?

 

[Chris]

Anyone any ideas??

 

[Peter R]

Sure, I'll help.

The current network hash rate is about 1.4 billion GH/s. If your Antminer hashes at 1,155 GH/s like you said, then you would control:

1.115 x 10^3 / (1.4 x 10^9) = 0.00008% of the global hash rate

Every day, there are about 3600 BTC mined (soon drops to 1800 BTC), of which 0.00008% would go to you:

Coins per day = 3600 BTC * 0.0000008 = 0.0029 BTC

At $450 per coin, that's 0.0029 x 450 = $1.30 per day, or $9 per week.

If you purchased the miner for $215 and had free electricity, it would take about $215/$9/wk = 24 weeks to recoup your investment if the return per hash stays constant. In reality, the halving will drop the number of coins mined per day in half (the total pie measured in BTC will get smaller) and the total hash rate tends to increase with time (your slice of the pie gets smaller). However, many speculate that the price will rise after the halving to counterbalance.

So, I don't know. It certainly won't make you rich but under favorable conditions you might make a profit.

 

[Chris]

Thanks for your help Peter, You make it all sound so simple to work out.. ;-)
I know this isn't a get rich quick scheme but i was expecting numbers a bit bigger than that with free electric.
Would I be better off buying a decent GPUs like AMD 7970 or R9 280x and mining other cryptocurrency like ethereum or something, Most posts I have been reading on Ethereum is from 2015 so im not even sure if its still worth doing, I guess my question is which crypto currency is best to mine for a beginner with not too much of an initial cash input to get going, Say a $300 limit but if successful I could buy more in a couple of months,