Bitcoin Forum

I don't speak computer, crypto currency, or mining lingo yet, even my English isn't that great.  
Anyone care to share their understanding on  where mining is going in the near future?

From what i understand so far is

1. Etherium represents a large majority of GPU mining. maybe over 50% i don't no ???
How big of a percent of GPU mining is Etherium mining?

2. Etherium is going to end it's mining ability soon. (POW to POS)
About how soon are the estimates?

3. Most all of the people mining Etherium now will be switching to mining other coins...
How much will this increase difficulties (in terms of percentage) mining our Alt coins?


I'm considering making a few more 1080ti rigs, but at $0.12 per KW i'm concerned what profit/loss may be when Etherium goes POS and or 1 year from now. I understand know one knows for sure but many here understand this market MUCH better than i do and id like to here your opinions ( preferable without too many abbreviations ;D
 
Thanks for the replies :)

Oops one more.

4. Am i correct in thinking,,, What happening with Etherium mining POW Too POS is what i should be most concerned with when it comes to mining, Or are there other things that should be more concerned with in the long term?

GPU mining is dead! BTC is dead! Ohhh no!

Okay, That's plain enough English.  :D :D :D
Care to elaborate as to why and when?

No, but there are 100 other threads you can read, if you feel like wasting your time thinking you know when GPU mining will end.

Good enough,
I've read quit a few of those threads, most of the senior guru's  reply to them using a lot of techno terms that i'm still trying to learn what they mean.
It was just today that i finally got what some of them where saying about Etherium POW to POS, that's why i'm trying to confirm that i understand them correctly. 

GPU mining is capital intensive and power hungry operations.it has a long term effect and is not desirable to environment as it generate more heat, the more the miner the warmer the environment and we didn't care about the after effects as long as there is profit from it. ehereum got a wise decision of switching from POW to POS because they knew the adverse effect of it. we can still decentralize the blockchain  and that will be the next thing to solve without the need of GPU or highly effecient power hungry super computing networks.

lmfao... dude! please take your Al Gore nonsense to a site that appreciates it... like maybe any of the global warming hype sites run by the people who benefit financially from the propagation of that lie.  btw, how many trees do i need to plant to get a carbon offset to megawatts of power my 24 470's are pushing while mining ETH?  not like Im going to do it mind you, i just want to know if you know the answer ;-)

The only thing 99.9% of the people in this forum care about are profitability ratios, and that's as it should be.  To address the OPs question... GPU mining isn't dead but it is a very tough time to get into, mainly due to the global shortage of good mining GPUs. Its true that the effective end of ETH mining I think on Nov 1st (if memory serves) is going to cause some issues, but the recent rise in price of XMR should help alleviate that at least somewhat. Nobody really knows what is going to happen but hopeully, a new couple of coins to mine will pop up soon... kind of like with ZEC last year.  That can go a long way to spreading the world-wide hashrates.

Heat's not really a problem for the environment.  Where I live I will be using excess heat from my rigs to heat my house.  If you are truly concerned about the environment don't mine anything and buy a bunch of POS coins and stake them.  No GPU involved.

1) Maybe 80%, ethereum mining is huge...over 3 million gpu mine ethereum currently.   Other coins have a decent amount minable money with the excellent market value but ethereum is just massive.

2)  That is misinformation, ethereum did plan on moving to POS but the devs have agreed that the full transition will likely take years if even completely.  When you have a 30+ billion dollar market then you do what is safe.

3)  They are not switching for the most part people have upgraded their drivers for the dag fix.

4)  POW to POS should not be your main concern.  The growth of gpus is the main threat if the crypto market experiences months of stagnant growth then your profits will continue to dwindle down.

It is more profitable for ti's to mine other coins than ETH, so you shoudnt worry about POS, check whattomine

Except with POS you will need $500,000 for etherium node and tie up a shed-load of etherium coin. I think there will be substitutes for etherium if they switch over.

Awesome reply Thanks.
1. Wow 80% is huge indeed.

2. Good to know,,, i can't imagine 3 million or 80% having to switch at once to try and find profitable coins.

3. what's a "dag fix" ?  i'm still trying to learn the lingo  :-[

4. Gotcha , sounds like very good advice :)

GPU mining is stupid. All this electricity and heat generated so a few of us can profit from a digital currency that does not exist. It's really ridiculous when you think about it. But a lot of the world is ridiculous. Central banks print money and 75% of the world lives in poverty. So as stupid as GPU mining is, it's just building on the stupidity that already exists.

With that said, the future of GPU is not going away but it should transform. GPU companies are going to cash in and they should but they can develop products that are more efficient at what they do on the consumer level. I think what the OP wants to know, is what is the future of GPU mining when Ethereum goes POS:

1. People will switch to mining another coin, since it won't be nowhere near as profitable, it won't last long and we'll get a big GPU sell off
2. The big sell off will eventually be a positive to those who hung in there. How much of a positive? Impossible to know.
3. As time passes, another (profitable) GPU mineable coin will emerge that needs people to mine and build the network.

GPU mining is building an infrastructure. Right now the majority of that infrastructure is supporting Ethereum. This will switch to something else. Crypto was just born, it's hard to know what will happen tomorrow, let alone next month.

I think you missed my point. I do not mine ETH. My concern had to do with the possibility of a massive flood of miners looking for a alternative to mining ETH when POS hits, and causing the difficulty level to skyrocket,causing and possibly drastically lowering profitability across the all GPU mine-able coins.
 
TMDZ seem to address most of my concerns.
Now if i could find a crystal ball to see what China was going to do next... :D :D :D

It is a file that gets generated in the gpu's ram, because of the growing size it caused a slowing effect on amd cards.  Amd released a one time driver update that fixes the slow down issue, though there can be other pitfalls such as under volting compatibility with the update.

Transition to the POS will not pass quickly, only the estimated time from one and a half years, and at first they said that the transition is planned this year.
Perhaps all this will also be delayed for some time. Planning for this activity is something for the years ahead, when things change very quickly, this seems to make little sense.

If 75% of the world lives in poverty, i think our definition of poverty is off.
  Maybe it's more accurate to say 25% of the world lives in luxury.

When i was a kid living in Haiti our household income may have been about $8,000-$10,000 a year. We lived in a small but nice house had a car a full time Maid, and a house Guy, who lived on the property. Funny thing is even our maid had a house keeper.  Buy our local standards our maid was not considered to be in poverty. But by other 's standard we were poor as dirt.
Anyway i do get your point, but i wonder if  mining doesn't help in some way with overall with opportunity and income in some underdeveloped country's... :-\  I guess this is Off topic but your perspective is Interesting.

 1) It's probably a little worse than that - my best estimate is that Etherium has about 60% of the GPUs currently used for GPU mining, and might be as high as 70%.

 2) "Soon" is actually sometime next year, *IF* they actually hold to their current roadmap. They're not even planning to START experimental work with PoS prior to about December, and THAT is going to be a "1% POS 99% POW" split for likely quite a few months as they test and debug the POS implimentation.

3) Based on my estimate from 1) it will likely more-or-less triple difficulties over the first month after Ethereum goes to a full POS model on all other GPU mineable cryptocoins (except XMR which still has a substantial CPU mining presence).

 These estimates are based on current pricing staying fairly stable (give or take 20%), a major price move WILL change things dramatically.

"just building on the stupidity that already exists"

LOL

Could be a slogan for a company or politician...maybe President Camacho

I have to commend you on the President Camacho reference -- two thumbs up!

-----

I have gotten heavy into GPU mining (around $60k in hardware)... but I do very little Etherium (Dagger). I sold 75% of my AMD cards on e-bay for 50-100% premiums after using them for 30-60 days and bought a bunch of GTX-1060s & 1080s.

I feel like they have enough time left in them mining *something* to pay themselves off and then some. I'm already to 50% of my hardware paid off so, frankly, I'm not sweating much.

As far as the OP... yes when Etherium mining ends it will hit other Alts pretty hard... but I get the feeling we still have a fair amount of time and if you mine / hold a bit with coin appreciation you will come out good (that's my bet anyway).

PS: With the cost premium of the 1080Ti I've been sticking to 1060s... I have a single 1080Ti and it doesn't really blow me away by any means for the cost. I can get almost four 1060s for the same price.

You will have a lot of other choices, I think. ETH is not the only choice for GPU mining, even not the best one.

If you don't want to mine ETH, you can still mine ETC.

If ETC is not so profitable, you can mine Zcash, XMR, SIGT.

Nowadays, new coins trend to design ASIC-resistant POW algorithm, if POW is still popular, or it's dominant in coin distribution, there are still other choice for GPU mining.

What I really care about is the trend of POS and POW, or the hybrid of both, which will be popular or may affect GPU minng

I don't really think mining is going to die anytime soon, but it'll get a hell of a lot tougher when eth goes PoS, Eth is currently not the most profitable for a lot of cards but A LOT of gpus are still on eth, once eth goes pos they are going to flood every other coin and there things could get a little bumby

I'm going to say it here...it might not even happen...etherium moving to proof of stake. If they get the inflation rate under control and they improve proof of work algorithm why do they need proof of stake? Proof of stake will be centralized in a few powerful hands and it will require a huge reserve of coins being tied up in someones wallet. Bitcoin, litecoin, bitcoin cash, monero, zcash, zencash, ubiq, eth classic etc. will still continue to be proof of work. etherium will be truly living in its own bubble if it migrates to proof of stake...

Agreeing to what other mentioned in this thread, mining calls in for good amount of investment, maintenance and other things to make sure that you still have working rigs/cards or whatever. POS works out lot better and is more efficient way of generating coins. With mining, you need to keep switching gears to find the right coin to get good returns or else you won't even be able to cover the electricity cost.

Most of my pals who mine ETH, do not know what's the next coin they will mine when ETH hits POS. They say they will think about it when time comes, for now they continue to mine ETH.

Proof of stake is not as secure as proof of work. there are a lot of negatives with proof of stake and it ties up a ton of coins. does anybody have an estimate on how many coins are going to be tied up with pos?

The idea of mining is sound, so I can't imagine it'll ever truly become impossible to profit. We'll just be moving to new currencies, or the next valuable distributed farm technology will come up. I find it hard to believe we won't find another use for the massive number of calculations the world can put out at the moment.

golem is another option as well. thats another distributed mining option where you get paid to let others process images and such...if etherium goes proof of stake well have 1000  million dollar corporate nodes instead of individual miners...is it a good or bad thing? who knows...