Bitcoin Forum

With Ether mining expected to change to a Proof of Stake system soon, I'm curious as to what people will mine other than Ether once this happens? I know ZCash looks good, but are there others worth looking at? Particularly for NVidia miners.

nvidia miners can always go for zcash. For AMD miners, i'd say they could mine roughly anything.

They will be hit too though. When it goes to proof of stake, it won't be about hashrate, it'll be about how much ether you hold.

You still have many months of ETH mining left. Problem is the difficulty is just getting crazy.

There are many other great coins that work equally well or better for Nvidia cars.
Zcash is better and people with Nvidia should mine that instead of ETH in the first place.

When thousands of miners stop mining eth and turn their rigs to mine other coins, the difficulty of those coins will skyrocket into the stratosphere.  It's gonna be a bloodbath...

We will probably grind out $0.50 (Rx470) - $1.50 (1080ti) per gpu per day in a few months. People with high electricity costs will quit mining, while those that remain will run at the most efficient settings possible. I expect posts like "Custom 0.65V, 50W, 20Mh/s bios" in the future.

I don't expect it to get a lot worse after the ETH PoS "bloodbath" than it was about a year back.
A lot of miners will drop out due to high electric cost, some long before the actual  "bloodbath" happens.
Some will drop out due the reward reduction from the "Ice Age" stuff causing their profitability to drop.

 I suspect a lot of miners will end up selling lots of cards and rigs once the bloodbath happens, or shortly before.

 We'll then be back to "those with low electric cost are the only ones making significant money".

If the coin prices don't rise, which is highly unlikely, this is exactly whats gonna happen.

Time to grab a beer and buy come cheap used GPU's  :D

After ETH go to POS, and coin prices fall, probably in october, november, most of the people will sell ther rigs. Only "big players" will remain. Some of them will mine with no profit, and others will shut down their rigs till next spring-summer.

There are other algos and some are close, if not more profitable than mining eth (it's not even top choice for nvidia). Equihash already boasts few well developed coins with top profitability, and afaik there are some more on the way. Then there are blake2s algos (most notably Netko), lbry, lyra2v2 coins... hell, you can mine DGB with skein and get paid rather well.

I've never mined eth and I don't see why would I do it. The only problem is people mine it so they'd want something else, leading to some brief confusion on the market.

This is what I'm waiting for as well as I'm stacking funds vs buying anything right now so I can buy when there's the proverbial blood in the streets...


anyone thinking there will be plenty of coins to mine must not realize there are MILLIONS of GPUs mining ETH right now and only a few thousand mining on these other coins...the effect of those millions of cards moving out of ETH is going to crush profits for every other coin out there with a glimpse of profit..

We will get our first taste I think in the coming weeks as the block time goes up from 15sec to 20sec around mid-July...that's going to shoot diff up quite a bit and squeeze out profits...then depending on how much hash is added between July and Sept the block time will go up to 30 seconds, further reducing profits and pushing people out of ETH into other coins...combine that with so much network congestion that exchanges like Poloniex have disabled ETH deposits & withdrawals since the 22nd doesn't look good nor boast investor confidence. Pile on the past history of ETH fixes introducing unintended bugs that require weekly patches to fix each previous release...

I'm just going to sit back with my popcorn and watch the show lol...

I agree with this 100%.  It's astounding how many people think that it's no big deal if eth becomes unprofitable, they can profitably mine other coins.  At best it's ignorant, at worst downright stupid.  When the millions of GPUs move enmasse to mine other altcoins it will have a tsunami affect on difficulty.  Only those with the lowest electric will survive.

Not trying to put anyone off mining - it's a great hobby!  But that's all you can expect of it if you starting out now.  Hobbies usually cost money and this one will likely be no different in the long run.

 Polo routinely disables wallets for a week at a time for "maintainance" - that's NOT just an ETH thing, that's a Polo thing and it's one of the MANY reasons I don't use Polo any more.


 There's a LOT more than "a few thousand" GPUs mining ZEC, my ballpark estimate came up a little over a million - but most of the smaller-market-cap coins might only have several thousand or a few tens of thousands of GPUs working them.
 ETH has something in excess of 2 million GPUs working it by my same ballpark estimate.
 When THOSE move, it's going to be a noticeable hammer on the profitability pretty much all other GPU-mineable coins - even the NVidia ones as it's now obvious that a lot of NVidia 1070 and 1060 rigs are getting built by ETH mining farms due to the lack of high-end RX cards to buy, and some Nvidia-using ZEC miners will move out of ZEC when it's profitability gets hammered by the AMD influx.

 That's the primary reason I don't talk about what I'm mining at this time - I've got 18 GPUs pointed at it right now, and I'm doing about 2% of the coin earning.
 It would take a MAJOR profitability hit if 1000 modern GPUs suddenly switched to it.

Eth is going hybrid and htey aren't ready yet...

People getting out of alt coin mining* now have no balls if they can get their hands on hardware at a good price. The numbers are clear

Risk is low and rewards are high.

The "numbers" as you say, are indeed clear but your conclusion is not.

Risk is high and getting higher, rewards are low and dropping daily.

Think of it as a hobby and you won't get burnt.

The risk really is high,
the rewards are still ok i guess,
but are droping fast,
and it will probably be down to 1$/day per RX card
in about 2 months time or even sooner.

Kindda late to start mining atm, not only because of the difficulty rising and coin value droping, but also because hardware is just too expensive.
We used to buy RX470/570 cards for 200$, 1070 cost 380$ back then, now its like 30% up or even more. 

After the end of Ethereum mining, I will I think equally split my rigs between Ethereum Classic and ZCash. That is what most people will do I think

And thats the problem :D

After ETH ends, everything will end with it, there is no other altcoin that could support that much hashing power without killing profits in the process.

You know, we are definitely in a golden age, because back at the beggining of the year, mining was ten times less profitable, but yet still profitable ! So I believe we will simply get back to the mean. Also, AMD cards are bad at ZCash mining, so this will be left only for Nvidia cards, which are a lot less numerous.

 If you compare vs MSRP, AMD cards are pretty close to NVidia on hash/$ for ZEC - and they're a tossup on hash/watt at any price.
 They just don't ramp quite as high - yet - since AMD hasn't released new-gen "enthusiast" level cards yet, just mainstream ones.



 Risk is growing pretty fast, with prices dropping on most or all of the "big cap" coins AND total hashrate still growing fast, while reward has dropped quite a bit just in the last week.
 It's starting to look a bit iffy again on "will one achieve ROI if I build a new rig TODAY" for a lot of options - though if your electric cost is low, you should still manage ROI at some point.

 If profitability drops back to where it was 6 months ago, I personally will be fine - I was plenty profitable THEN - but it would drive quite a few folks out of the mining business like the last "bust" did, at least for a while.

 On the other hand, we might see another "price jump" stage too - no way to know for sure.

Kind of agree with this, except for the zcash part. Back when I started mid-last year, ETH wasn't worth much yet people were mining it like crazy. I also don't believe that after ETH goes to POS everything else will end. Sure some people will stop mining, maybe profits will drop, but isn't this kind what happened in 2016? Things weren't looking great last year.

I might be wrong or blind about this, but I don't believe that 2017 will be the end of mining. ETH going to POS might actually be a good thing for the crypto world. There are so many posts and videos everywhere about "what cards to mine eth" and other noob posts (not judging, I was a noob once too, but come on, just do your research like I did when I started...!) that makes you realise many people are in for the quick buck but don't know much about the technical aspects of it all. This ETH craze isn't necessarily the best thing for the crypto world.

A smart miner today doesn't put all his rigs on ETH anyway...personally, I never have! Diversity means survival.

Myself, I'm only investing what I can afford to lose. I ROIed my hardware a while back already. We'll see what happens within the next months.

There is no bottoming out, teh risk are very small with mining...Not speculation

Your hedge is your hardware

Assuming you paid a reasonable price for your hardware anyway.

If you have something better to be investing in with similar risks, I'm all ears.

But from where I'm sitting worst case is I lose half my investment trying to re sell it all second hand the day after I can't return anything. That's not huge risk considering the rewards, this is like investing in penny stocks with no way to bottom out

 VERY bad assumption on Polaris-based cards the last month, and turning into a VERY bad assumption as well on the GTX 1060 and 1070 this past week or so.

 On the other hand, profitability RIGHT NOW is still very high compared to 3+ months ago, even with the major slide this week - but there is no certainty that it will STAY high or for how long if it DOES do so.

As long as you didn't pay more than a gamer would have for it new...You'll be able to dump it if you want.

If you payed 400+ for a 1070, you better pray

Risk reward ratio is excellent.

 400 actually is quite good for a 1070 - it's folks paying 400+ for any RX series card or 600+ for a 1070 that are at some serious risk.

 Even BEFORE the price jump, you pretty much had to get "sales" to get under 400 on the 1070 - and a lot of them were normally 430-480 range.

To a miner who's making profit right now, sure

I"m not saying don't buy them at that price. Just saying if you want out and to sell it, a gamer isn't gonna pay you 200 for it used if margins are crashing in mining.

I paid 450 for a g1 1080 I use to in a personal use rig not 2 months ago...a 1070 is worth 300 new to a gamer with sense. (again not in this market)