Bitcoin Forum

After the bomb fix is in or with it slow? OR, will POS be implemented first?

It will only get worse from here.

Would a strategy of mining ETH until it's not viable and then switching to another easier mined and more profitable coin be a good strategy?

Yes, I believe that's what 99% of eth miners (including me) are planning to do!

And as a rough estimate...how long does the hardware remain usable for mining alt coins in general...I'd assume 18 months or so?

I'm counting on all of you to do that.  eheh

Just depends, I still have 290X's I bought years ago that are viable

~75% of all gpu mining profits currently come from ETH. It is by far the biggest gpu mineable altcoin and the only reason why other gpu algorithms have such high rates as well (otherwise there would be nobody mining them). When ETH goes tits up everybody will be left with the remaining 25%. If your strategy can withstand that hit within the next half a year then its a brilliant one.

You can see how much the difficulty has risen over the past month or so here (https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart).

Look at the last month and its gone from 370 to 656 (as of the time of this writing) thats a change of 286.

One of my rigs which gets around 171 MH/s generates about .2 ETH every 38-45 hours give or take.  At the current price of $279 is about $55.80 for every .2 ETH I'm generating now minus power, this also doesn't include Decred which is rising in price and helps pay any power.

When ETH changes to POS and makes mining for ETC obsolete you can always go to other coins.  I believe we will see the price of ETH sink, as to how far who knows.  

You also have the option to mine ETC which current difficulty (https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-classic-difficulty-chart) on another rig doing around my same hash rate as my ETH (171) I'm pulling in 1 - 2 coins a dayish.  However ETC has been stuck at the price of $17 for some time now and who knows if we will see it go up. Difficulty change in the last month for ETC has only increased by 15.

I'm sure we can do the math if you mine ETC, lets say 1.5 coins a day running at around 170MH/s at the price of $17 would be around $765 plus any bonus money from Decred after power is paid, which then you could by some ETH if you wanted to with it, or hope that ETC's adoption and price goes up.

Its all a game you need to figure out yourself.  

However if your thinking ETH difficulty will go down, I have to say its only going to get higher as people can get their hands on more GPU's (prob another big wave of them in July) until you cant mine ETH anymore due to switch to POS.

Enjoy it while it lasts!

Most likely the price will go down far enough to make it very unprofitable rather than POS finally going live.

That and the huge linear difficulty increase we get everyday.

POS is the least of our worries.

I think POS may just kill ETH.. but who knows..

What do you think is going to happen to the other coins when the 19 million cards mining ETH all of a sudden need to find something new to mine?

Um thats kinda obvious, every that can be gpu mined will have an increase in difficulty.  ;D

Hence why I have 2 rigs one mining ETH and one doing ETC which has a super low difficulty right now.

 One reason I've not been building AMD-based rigs - the options for NVidia include several where AMD is not competative.

 Then the massive RX 470/480/570/580 shortage hit, and the price gouging got crazy, which seems to be having somewhat of a negative impact on my planning.....

 8-(

Then people will mine those Nvidia optimized coins with their unoptimized AMD GPUs and it will make the difficulty rise either way and cut into your profits.

Your Nvidia aren't protected against market value either since I am pretty sure a 2 x 480 8GB crossfire setup equals GTX 1080 in gaming and if 480 are stupid cheap, then nobody will buy any GTX 1080's.

Nobody knows when bubble will burst. Just don't buy your GPUs using credit cards and you should be fine.

I am pretty sure most newbies here have bought their rigs with their 20% APR credit cards max out at $20K. Like during the Litecoin days.

Hi guys,

I have been lurking for a while now and thought I would make an account! I just got a mining rig, 7 GTX 1070's and am planning to mine ETH and see how it goes for a month. I have been concerned with the mining difficulty and feel like I can always switch to ZEC if ETH's difficulty goes up to a level that is unsustainable. I was thinking about just mining ZEC and buying another rig for ETH but hell it is so hard to get GPU's nowadays.

But my CC has 3% cash back ignore the 25% interest it carries!!! THREE PERCENT CASH BACK!!! free money.

 My primary option isn't a case of "AMD is unoptimised", it's a case of "AMD isn't even close to being competative on ANY basis".

 However, the apparent supply shortage that has started the last couple days of the GTX 1070 IS a bit worrying....

 Check profitability on whattomine or some such - ZEC has been more profitable for 1070 cards most of the last 2-3 months than ETH has been, though it's been close some of that time.

This is the major hurdle everyone is facing,now with home based mining everyone is investing their time and money in purchasing the hardware and it is really difficult to find a decent graphic card in stores and it has being an issue for some time now,either the companies have to multiply their production to keep up with the demand and for the OP mining difficulty will keep on increasing and it wont come down and that is how things work.

4 months later, still profitable lol

4 months later... The mining difficulty is finally coming down  ;D

https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart (https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart)

Nice chart. Come back to this post again 4 months later. You will be saying the exact same thing, again.

That difficulty will go down even more so within this October. AFAIK, ETH will be launching the metropolis-byzantium update which will reduce difficulty back to where it was last August 2017. Hopefully of course with this comes a lot of protocol updates that increases ETH value. #ETHminingisnotdead

If you dual mine, it might be more profitable to do ETH.