Bitcoin Forum

sorry for the newb question.correct me if im wrong but i believe early this year frpm jan to feb 2017 All altcoins was in  net loss until only recently its became very profitable.
Any veteran miners care to share prior to 2017 what was profitability like?
How do u deal with downturn? 1)Mine undervalued coins at loss 2)shutdown and wait 3) sell your rigs?

It was still profitable but no where near as much as it is now
But even in downtime it's still worth mining as the coin you mine can shoot back up at any point in time

Mining is rarely as profitable as it is today. Last time it was this profitable was in Fall of 2013, and only last about 5 months.

In the Fall of 2014, I think I had GPUs that made $0.25/day per GPU.

Profitability will plummet to cents per day by the end of this year.  Most probably in the next 3 months but definitely don't expect to make much in 2018

2008

Bitcoin was invented in 2009.

Exactly.

 ;D ;D ;D   good one

said everyone every week.

Like it did after litecoin, and end of last year for eth mining.

History repeats itself.

mid-to-late 2014, after Litecoin went ASIC and existing GPU rigs overloaded X11, profitability got quite low - and UNprofitable unless you had VERY CHEAP electric.
ETH showed up, got GPU mineable, and GPU mining got much more profitable again.

 More or less.


 

When the daily profits turn to daily losses, the tactic is to mine the lowest difficulty coin which holds the most market growth potential.  

The miners who jumped at the very unknown ETH one year ago with 5 GPU's, barely made any profits back then. But, if they holded all the coins they mined up until today, in retrospective their monthly profits were 6500$ per month for the last 10 months.  If they mined eth since 2015, well, they are close to being millionaires by now (or jumping off bridges if they sold at 10$).

Its luck and pure chance. But the risk is low and the potential is huge.


This only applies if you already have the rigs paid many times over. If you have to buy them now, its better to spend the money on the coins directly.

late 2014 was not very profitable, up to early 2015, when bitcoin tanked so much and everyone was scared to ivnest in bitcoin and crypto, crypto was declared dead and you were only able to mine$50 a day with a gpu, was a very bad moment for mining

December, 2017

yup but at least in winter it was free heating :-D

The December 2017 reference is to the "current" planned timeframe for ETH to *start* transitioning to PoS from PoW.

YES, if you're talking daily NET profitability after electricity and hardware cost.  HOWEVER, I'm quite jealous of those rare few who may have been mining Ethereum and other big players today from 2014 to 2017 at a net loss AT THE TIME.  If you'd mined ETH during that time, AND held the proceeds, it would have ultimately been incredibly profitable.

That said, without some sort of major market recession in the near future, we're much more likely to see a loss in profitability due to rising difficulty rather than token valuation, which will be an entirely different set of circumstances and may lead to an ongoing low level profitability but, in the end, no more golden age for mining.

I have been mining for some time and what i can tell you about mining is it's unpredictable at all , even if difficulty continue to drop down bombs on us , when it comes to profitability most newer miners will sell thier machines

It was not profitable later last year.

If you have cheap electricity then it was a bit profitable , if you don't then you shouldn't consider mining last year or now because it's going to drop again

If your electric was cheap enough, GPU mining was quite profitable all of last year - just not at the crazy-good levels of the last 2-3 months.
It was profitable enough I could afford to move TO the land of "Very Low Cost Electric" and go professional as a miner.

 If you had an electric cost above the US average, it was barely profitable if at all (which is WHY I moved, my rates in the 3 months of "summer" were 14+ cents/kwh where I was at in Iowa, despite "Time of Day" rate savings).

 I would say that last month and early this month are probably the highest-profit times for GPU mining since before the first Bitcoin ASICs arrived, somewhat more so than the peak of Litecoin profitability on a GPU - and even right now that profitability level is STILL very close to it's all-time peak.

 Even if ETH and ZEC and XMR prices stagnate for the next 6 months, profitability will remain elevated due to the inability of miners to get as many GPUs as they want which will restrict network hashrate growth quite a bit and hold profitability up into the current "insanely short ROI return" levels that have spurred massive investment into GPU farms - and for at least the next couple of those months new rigs will easily pay back their investment before profitability drops enough to bring profitability back down to the "better have fairly low cost electric if you expect to pay for this investment in less than a year" range.

 Unless there is a lot more price rise on the "big" coins, I still believe that the major shakeout will happen when ETH goes mostly PoS - but I figure there will start to be some low-level attrition before that given their plans to "gradually" move to PoS from PoW.

 IF there IS a lot more price rise, especially if the price manages to stay ahead of network hashrate growth in the non-ETH big coins, the profitability drop when millions of ETH mining cards start looking for new homes *might* not reach the level that was seen last summer - and the growth rate will slow but not die.

 I'm planning for the former scenario, but hoping for the latter.