Bitcoin Forum

I understand it depends on electricity cost and other "future value" thinking but at what price point of ETH, people plan to stop rig?

Under $200 most will quit or shutoff machines.

Many already have.

Agree - probably make sense to just put daily/weekly/monthly buy orders

at 250$ you are mining at a loss if your price per KWh is around 0,15ish $ which is very common.

My machines have been off for around 10 days now, because i predicted the last 3 crashes, Specially the last two, including yesterday's.

My machines are off due to high California rates.

I've decided not to waste money on electric. I'm maxing out my 401k instead. Loading up that pre tax dirty Fiat 401k so I can borrow from it to cover crypyo trading taxes and load up more crypto in stealth phase early next year.  

It doesn't look like prices will recover some this year. 8 months deep and we still have not found the btc bottom. Still in blowoff phase and not even in accumulation yet. I'll probably do some legal wash trades in December to lower my net gains and rebuy 1 month later.

Those that are still trading/mining must think big picture and really plan far ahead. Things are getting pretty serious so don't bankrupt yourself from taxes next year or poor planning.

Better Question is what are all your ETH miners going to do when it goes POS?  Do any of you actually have enough ETH to stake?

Etherium classic.

with current supply, probably noone below 100 ETH will be allowed to enter PoS. So probably all of us will have to sell at low prices because you´ll not be able to keep them.

i've been saying this for about 4 months now. I knew this was gonna happen. hardly ever make mistakes in this things, because i analyse the info in a rational way.

BTW, i think ETH can go below 200$ and that's a Game Over because most of those 70 million coins shared at the begining had that value (200$) to begin their projects.

There is a terrible possibility that the market dies this month. a Big big one. 

Oh well. It was a good journey. Now we need to discuss how to handle the trading/mining losses for tax purposes

I guess none of you people were around in 2014-2015 when BTC went from $1100 to $150.

Everybody assumed the difficulty will drop, however if I recall it dropped maybe once and then remained stable and then started its climb once again.

And BTC back then was much less profitable than ETH is today. So it will have to hit like maybe $50 to get a large difficulty drop and maybe it would stablize a few weeks afterwards.

Well. It would be interesting to see the effect of $50 ETH.

Im gonna mine some more ETH for when the jump back up happens but I predict that I will soon be focusing atleast 1 of my 3 mining rigs on mining new coins and accumulating alot of those for the future spikes.  If ETH/BTC doesnt go up substantially in the next 90 days then I will be shutting down atleast 1 if not 2 of my rigs until they do. Im right around .1/kwh

100$/eth is zero-profit level to me with current network hashrate.

$100/eth coming right at ya

Just look at Siacoin. Difficulty is not dropping despite losing $2-3/day net. I think plenty of people (myself included) would be more than willing to mine at a loss gambling that the price will go back up... Remember, it's not a loss until you sell.

that is only true if you buy.

If you mine and pay for electricity, it may be a loss long before you sell or even have an opportunity to sell.

exactly what they don't understand and live in denial is that mining at total loss is actually a double loss whereas buying coins is only a loss if price goes down, mining at loss is paying electricity and if price goes down then is a double loss cause you could have used the electricity money to buy coins. If is a total loss then is better to turn it off if is summer now if is winter and you mine at home and you need the heat then by all means keep the miners on.

It has been pointless to mine anything for at least 5 months.

Agreed. Ive been trying to tell people don't waste after tax money on electricity. Use pre-tax money to load up on your 401k instead to borrow from 401k and buy coins at capitulation bottom prices. This type of move can bring in 6 digits in the future.

SIA is on ASICs now, so it's not example.
https://obelisk.tech/

Also SIA has infinite volume (there is no coin cap), so it is completely based on potential usability, not scarcity.

That is right. The difficulty is dropping now.

I think it really depends on your size of the farm and also your mining tactics. If you do have a large farm and dont have money on side for power payments (i mean cashed out when currency was overvalued) then it is problematic.
Also as you say depends a lot from energy price which is your biggest cost , building rent, cooling etc...
Mining is about competition , who will do it more efficient and cheap as possible will always be a winner. If people who dont switch out rigs and mining at loos will start to get more coins as people will start to switch out mining rigs.

It could be only my thoughts, but personally think mining calculators are useless, cause they cannot predict currency price. Its so volatile that even the biggest market caps can change by 30% daily. And dont think it is possible for any top currencies to go under production cost. Because most of the people wont sell at loos , and this means inflation is slowing down. ;)

If the difficulty is dropping why I don't see it in my results of Nicehash miner, I had 0.55 mBTC yesterday from a rig with 6 Rx 580 cards and I am still having the same reward daily from the same rig ?

Maybe Nicehash acts a little later and that is why I don't see an increase in rewards value from my miners.

With Nicehash you are only being paid for what buyers are willing to spend and not the true value of the hash rate as if you were to mine the coin for yourself.  So while the difficulty may be dropping, buyers are most likely lowering their bids and pocketing the difference for themselves.

Hi,

I think that the ETH price will have a come back. It could be a good opportunity to buy some. For mining, I installed https://github.com/rainbowminer/RainbowMiner for now, since it tracks the electricity cost and skips miners, that aren't profitable or idles until better times. Also, it switches between algos and pools, so that I do not have to track, which coin is good for mining.

Regards
borox

Yep, profitability on Nicehash is based on how much people are willing to pay for your miner, and profitability tends to go up slower than down, especially when difficulty changes are small like what just happened with ETH. Give it some time, it'll likely go up if difficulty doesn't continue going up.

As mentioned here, I've also seen many people turn off their machines already. I have a good friend who's seriously thinking about it. Sorry for the amateur question, but how will mining machines being turned off affect the coin? Will it affect the price? Will it affect the other people who keep mining? I guess it would increase the transaction time?

people will never stop mining.

people will reduce mining.

and eth needs to go lower then 175  for large low power eth mining farms to quit.

It's a hard time guys for mining... very hard ... I pray god for the market to grow again and miner profitability get back to an acceptable level.

Let's pray together ! What's we have to lose to test to pray together ! Let's pray

Why to mine ethereum endless? Use nicehash and get profit in bitcoins, hold it. If you think that you'll continue to mine ethereum with hope of future rise, some people can't think to do following: visit to whattomine.com and choose most profitable coin. Mine this, then exchange them to ethereum and hold.
People will stop mining when it can't even cover electricity fees and they turn into negative. Also consider that some may still mine while they have money for miners to run, there are a lot of factors. Even if mining will turn into absolutely negative balance, there will be some people who will mine still just for no reason or etc.

It depends. If you have the capital up front, shutting off your miner when it starts not covering electricity and just buying the amount of electrical costs in the coin is the most profitable way. If you don't have it up front and FIRMLY believe the coin will bounce back, leaving your miner on does make sense, as long as you can pay the electric bill eventually (think of it like how credit functions).

Also if you have use for the heat, I use an S5 in my bedroom when the weather shifts. Even though it hasn't been profitable since January, it heats the room and earns back a decent amount of what it costs to run. I have electric heating in my house, so technically in winter it's profitable for me to run unprofitable mining gear as I'd be spending that money on electricity anyway.

Even if people suddenly stop mining ETH the result won't be drastic like it would be with BTC due to the shorter block-times.

Even if 1% of the hashrate only stayed on ETH it would be secure enough as long as its decentralized.

I have been testing nicehash in past couple years ago and it didnt seem very profitable at that time, mining directly currency seemed more profitable and then if you want some bitcoin, just exchange mined coins to Bitcoin.

Im not sure maybe this is changed now? As maybe couple years ago there was no big demand for nicehash and thats why profits wasnt that big.
Have you checked which one is more profitable?

No, no, no, i don’t agree with anyone saying that there is such a limit. Sure, electricity costs, PUE, blaah. But! Look at the oscillation diagrams, look at the history, look at the volatility of fiat currencies. Do you run to the bank to take off your fiat currency from your savings accounts as soon as the exchange rates go down?? One day they are down, they next day they are up. What’s next, when you switch off your rig??
And... there are other altcoins that keep growing.

I went through the BTC crash in 2011, through the altcoin crash of 2014. This cycle will likely be shorter due to 100x increase in the number of participants but I don't see the downtrend reversing until well into 2019.

For people mining at a fiat loss - I just shake my head. Either these people have no access to exchanges (which seems almost impossible in this day and age) or they're just plain stupid. I would guess the later looking at ETH difficulty still hanging up there  ;D

In retrospect, it feels good knowing I told so many people to toss their cards earlier this year for fiat. Now they can just sit back and pick up whatever crypto they want at anywhere from 30 to 99% percent less without having to have dealt with heat and noise for 8 months lol.

You can make money in this downturn, provided you planned well when people went full on stupid during the run-up.

Eww, did I just agree with Metroid lol

Mining in negative = same as burning  cash on fire. Don't go full retard and mine in the negative. Your only wearing down your equipment lifespan and lighting your cash on fire.

Just turn off machine till next bull run. Or borrow 401k to buy solar or something if you love mining that much.

If ETH will be PoS that will make people stop of mining it.

Solar only applies for those dedicated miners considering the area of their farm.
If their location isn't so good, it won't be worth it.

I'll stop and sell my rig when 1) the net profit earned is not enough to pay for the entire rig within 1 year and 2) the value of my mined coin has slim of chance of ever rising within 1 year. When these 2 conditions are met, it makes more sense to just hardware now because depreciating costs, risks of hardware failure, and risk of market crash clearly outweigh the opportunity. At this point, selling the rig entirely would generate more revenue.

The same could be said about ETH (and not to split hairs but its infinite supply, not volume haha).  ETH though is different though in the fact that it can have many different uses.  The big problem I see with SIA is that its price is really going to be tied to the price of file hosting in the cloud, and the supply of storage space in the SIA network.  What you have to ask yourself is, do you think the price of storage will get lower as time goes on?  Can a decentralized group provide bandwidth and storage at a 1/10th of the price of Amazon (who has a massive economy of scale)?  Don't get me wrong, I think SIA is a good idea and it will fill some sort of space.  What I fail to see though is anything that will continue to drive the price upward.  It almost feels like buying and holding tokens at an arcade in hopes that somehow they will be more valuable.

I am not sure since I never mined any coin yet however isn't it works like this - when more people are mining the difficulty is higher when less people the difficulty is lower.


How much is the current realistic average mining cost for ETH now?

if you look at the fact that people don't always understand what you are doing, maybe not the price of production of a thing))) joke

Already stop mining since beginning of summer. Not worth the extra heat.

Only doing BTG atm, ETH and ETC barely break even at this price.

A lot of coins are supported just with "home" miners power and that`s why this business will never end. Cryptocurrency idea from the start was about "mining" with your processor or GPU, so if the home mining will stop then whole idea of decentralized money may crash.

If your electricity price is over $0.15/kWh, it is better to leave the miners idle.

We would really like to blame but people do have different mindsets when it comes to the reason why they didnt stop mining since the starting month of this year and maybe
for some miners they do already accept such advice or do made on their own decision. Comparing buying altcoins on cheaper price to mining wayback on 8 months time i do really see the difference
and you will able to know which one is worth it.

I am continuing because I hope history will repeat itself. Last year the price of a bitcoin in August was 3000 bitcoin and the mining rewards were really low but from end of September up to December the price of a bitcoin spiked up to the 20000 bitcoin point and everybody was happy.

I am only still mining hoping that history will repeat itself but this time from 6500 dollars which actually is a bitcoin , I hope it goes up to 45000 dollars for a bitcoin.

Everyone knows btc will go up with time.
Question is why miners are so stupid to mine in negative and wear down hardware ? Difficulty slows down in bear marker but still increases.

Cash can bring in more coin and also raise up your  average cost basis for trading to pay less taxes, even help to recover faster from bear market if more people buy in directly

oh very hard question, some miner believe to tomorow days and can mine in non profitable points when electricity cost higher then income

Tomorrow days? You mean a brighter future? Yeah that's fine, I think most crypto enthusiasts do expect a resurgence.

The thing that is idiotic - why would you spend $5 of electricity mining to effectively buy $3 of coin everyday with a mining rig.  Stop the miner and spend the $5 to buy $5 of coin on an exchange.

The only reason to mine at a loss are:
-lack of access to exchange
-privacy (if you're mining your own blocks they are harder to trace)
-support the network through decentralization

That's the point :) When you don't have any "cash in" transactions to centralized exchanges which usually want documents from you then you can easy cash out money without your name too.

Cashing out without name is difficult. Gota use localbitcoin and do all that leg work. As a miner probably best to go by the book, maximize your equipment deduction.

In my country there are companies what work like currency exchanges, they take your btc without any names for cash.

For the past few months it was agreed that Obelisk SC1 had completely missed the mark after BMs realease of the A3.

Ive been following the Obelisk forums and the Dev team recently announced that they intend to fork SC to invalidate 3rd party miners on the network and help compensate Obelisk investors for the late shipping date.

If the SC1 is all of sudden the only hardware that can mine Siacoin then it will probably be one of the most valuable miners on market until competitors find a way to catch up.

Ive decided to pull the trigger on a few SC1s and well see how the next few weeks shake out. Happy mining!

Because difficulty will only to increase.  You might be able to mine 2 coins with your hashing power today, but six months from now, it could be reduced to 1 coin with the same hashing power.  If you look at the late 2017 mining craze, you can see that those high daily profits didn't last long.  Your hardware is also going to decrease in value over time.  I think that if you're going to shut down mining rigs, because you're operating at a loss, the hardware needs to be sold off.

The answer is different for everyone depending on electricity cost, if the hardware has already paid for itself, if you actually believe that the price of the coin you're mining today will increase in value in the future.

Because you've already invested money in hardware and don't want to sell it at a loss.  Why not do both?  Not having all of your eggs in one basket is nice.

Ive put my gpus on Craigslist at lowest price listed on their but not much interest. Seems like everyone waiting to hear about rtx2080

I also talked with hosting facility that will mine my gpus if I ship them their. About 12 cents electric rate,

I'll probably not capitulate and ship to hosting facility.

I don’t think that big miners will stop mining. They have to sell their equipment with no profit or they have to continue mining for long term investment. Small miners with few cards will stop mining when profit will be around zero.

Mathematically that doesn't make sense. If the coin never rebounds, you're just losing money.

I shut mine off when it's been in the negative for more than a couple days. In winter, though, totally different story, as I heat my house with them.

Sure, you have to believe that the coin will rebound.  Or just trade it for bitcoin now and wait several years (hoping that the value of btc will be much much higher).

Totally agree , there is no point shunting down the miners till the coin doesn't go to zero, which dont think is going to happen if you are mining top 10 coins by market cap. They will be trade and manipulated as they reached some very oversold values. Only if they doesnt get hacked or something.

Well, no, again mathematically it makes a bunch of sense. If you are willing to buy coins daily, it is absolutely more profitable to turn off your miner when it costs more to run than it earns and to spend that money on the coin (or whatever coin you trade for). If you have free electricity, then yeah, zero is the only point where it makes no sense to run, but for the rest of us...

Well, people don't apply mathematics before making such decision.
From their perspective - Why to leave the hardware unused. Unless someone's electricity cost is over hundreds of dollars, it can be seen as just a monthly expense and the mining rewards seen as income. That can be the only reason why people will continue mining rather than applying common sense and buy coins worth their average mining electricity expense daily.

Yes and specially if you dont own big mining farm and dont have high power costs. Like most of the miners who mine from home, doesnt exchange their coins for years. And are gambling and waiting for those big gains.

I have a lot of photovoltaic panels. So for me it's all profit. I will never stop mining. Actually I am adding more FPGAs and more GPUs and also more ASICS and also more PV panels to mine more and more :)

Sure to both. But I wasn't talking about how people rationalize things, I was merely stating a fact.

I shut down my GPU's now, i have around 50 but my electricity is somewhere in the range of 0.1-0.12.
Now i am looking to relocate somewhere to find cheaper power..around 6-7 cents. From what i hear, we might go so low that even that won;t be profitable anymore. I can just hope the market to recover because i don;t want to sell them.

I won't stop mining, i love it, it's fun all ways has been. it's a hobby i don't all ways turn on all my stuff, some days i don't run any thing.

it gives me some thing to do that pays something,I'm not in it for the money or ROI . I do hold most coins i mine because maybe one day, I'll need it, other wise it's all fun . I'm also retired with a disability, so i need some thing to do besides play wow and take care of mom who has dementia.


I keep adding to my GPU rigs,an buy old ASIC like D3 etc use them up,despite the down time we see now in coin prices,plus I'm on solar .

I think there's like 200 people on here who would sell you old ASICs. I have a few I was about to list on ebay, actually. Start a "wanted" thread in the marketplace if you're looking, you'll get tons of bites...

(or PM me if you want a list, it's rather short ;) )

I've got my stuff listed in the marketplace. 50 1080ti's 1070's 1070ti's and 1080 along with all the rigs if you want them hit me up. :)

Depends on the costs.

See, you just can't fix stupid when people are so greedy they can't even think straight. If your only goal is to make money (assuming fiat conversion is endpoint) then getting as much coin as possible is the method. If you're mining at a loss then you are actually losing coins.

If you spent $5 on electricity but only get $3 of XMR you're losing $2 of XMR you could have bought on an exchange. That's is completely irrespective of owning a miner or not.

People - sit down with an actual piece of paper and draw it out with pictures if you have to.

Now, if the sheer joy of watching a miner spin fans and make noise excites you more than the mining loss then by all means mine away.

If your goal is to make fiat money from crypto conversion, then it never makes sense to mine at a loss. NEVER.

well, it`s really simple - hack the shit out of nicehash, bring them down completely and you could mine with nice profit eth, raven or whatever that is on their algo list.

Yeah remember when nicehash was hacked, mining profit rise 50% in one day :D

I wounder how many people actually do exchange their coins as they have mined ? ???

I've mined for years and exchange my coins all the time. Sometimes after I sell I put in a buy order for the same coin at a lower price and play the market. Some coins I just hodl, really depends on how that coin is doing and what the future might look like. There have been coins I mined simply to sell and use to buy other coins...Im sure there are many out there who do the same thing, not everyone hodls.

mining ETH is just unprofitable right now. Most of the people are actually mining at a loss, and have been doing it for quite a long time now.

Reality is people are blind, deaf , stupid , greedy and with plenty of FAITH with no reason.

Many people are still mining because THEY THINK this situation will not last longer. Reality is this situation is going to extend probably months and the market will never ever recover, specially if , as it has been said , SEC will Deny the activity of ETF

Not only this. Even if this situation is being UNPROFITABLE, it's still doable if you mine with ASIC and that shit, because even at current prices, Network hashrate is increasing. I don't see people investing thousands of dollars on mining ETH just for 10-15$ per month of profit. it makes no fucking sense at all.

So, low prices + market destroyed + increase in hashrate, this can be only due to ASICS, that they can get more profit due to more hashrate at more electricity efficiency.

The more the hashrate goes Up, the less profit you get. I will not tell you what to do, but to continue mining is just a very bad decision, and you´ll be penalized for it. Hope so. Some people deserve to learn it the hardest way possible.

I think now it's better to shut down the rigs and the money you would pay your electricity bills invest in some coins.
That way you don't have to monitor your mining rigs and you have lower electricity bills.
If mining stays low profitable/unprofitable, there will be lots of used GPUs for sale, and it will be hard to sell them to anyone.

If you don't believe in cryptocurrency, why are you still here? Lol.  Go play water polo or something.  I think this situation will last longer.  I think it's very possible for us to continue moving sideways into next summer.  I also think there is a possibility that we could reach a bottom in Oct/Nov and begin to consolidate.

A bitcoin etf in the usa will eventually happen.  I don't see it happening this year, but I believe it will happen.  Better question is will a physical backed bitcoin etf get pushed though?  Just an FYI, the SEC never said they plan to deny any and all crypto etf proposals.  I know you don't understand how this process works, but stop spreading mis-information.

You're pretty salty today.  How much $ have you lost?

@gotminer, i bet he still is very new into mining and have bought the hardware at January at premium and panicking now. I do prefer the value of coins would stay down, so i can accumulate more of them :) Im mining since early 2016 and have been trough 3 such cycles when mining isnt profitable. Lower the price will be less the coins will be sold in market, smaller the inflation. Eventually it will bounce back, we are still very new, there is only about 30milj bitcoin wallets created + maybe about another 10milj who uses excahnges. This still looks very small for 7bilj people.

p.s even some of them has 2 or 3 or 10 wallets

I see your point and it is logically valid. Howerver, mining is almost never irrespective of owning a miner or not. It does make sense to simply buy from an exchange, but you may not be considering the factor that people who already have a miner, are already too invested to accept that they have lost. People who are mining at a loss are probably still in denial or are too lazy or passive to realize that they need to sell their equipment.

My colleagues with the electricity cost now are only making about 30-40 dollars profit from a rig and they almost want to sell because they are were expecting big profits like anybody else. I told them to wait and to consider these money as a lost investment while they are still running and still bringing little profits.

They are very grumpy now at the office to each other and blaming a bit me ,which I am only their IT and I take care of their miners, I didn't convince them to buy rigs, so this shows that maybe the end of Gpu mining is really near.

Yes I think it's logical to stop mining at losss.  But selling the rig or not is another question.  

Eth difficult is near all time high today

I don't understand miners. Dumbest group of people. They are burning out their hardware just to chase pennys. I won't be buying anymore mining equipment. Not as lucrative as trading is.

Mining now feels like their are 100 guys with 1 women in the room. I'm the only one walking out that door. Wait till they find out that women was really a dude with a wig

That's actually kind of funny, because they probably did very little research and thought they were going to make 10usd/day with a 1080ti forever and ever.

Everyone didn't expect to make huge profits.  If you're mining now, you better be thinking long-term.  If you don't believe in crypto on that level, get out.  That or just continue to be grumpy ... Lol.

My thought is sell now, if you're shutting off your rigs.  Why let them lose value while mining difficulty continues to rise while they are sitting there doing nothing and you are gaining nothing?

I made a long post in another thread somewhere a year ago about how mining only pays off in the long run (ie 2-5 year span) if the coin is expected to be a failure. If you expect the coin to succeed - you should always buy the coin outright at the start. Buying the coin gives you the opportunity to sell in the event that you need the money (like lots of noobs panicking here because they put liens on their cars or houses to pay for mining equipment). You also tend to get more coins that had you mined.

People who already have a miner - well owning a miner doesn't mean you should compound your mistake by mining at a loss.  Again these idiots lack critical thinking skills. They think by not using the miner they're letting the miner go to waste. But again, refer the the example I gave - why only get $3 of coin with $5 of electricity. Only reason would be to support the coin or for people who can't buy off an exchange or people who want to hide their coins.

People sitting on underwater hardware need to decide whether to sell or hold onto the hardware. If they sell they can buy the coins with the proceeds. If they sit on the hardware maybe they can use it again later when mining is profitable. That's the only choice.

It never makes sense to mine at a loss to fiat.

But people chasing money out of greed (instead of a desire to improve themselves through learning and the experience of mining) will do what all the other sheep do and keep on mining. I am a physician and I see everyday the stupid stuff humans do to their body after being told repeatedly not to do destructive behavior.

I sold my Antminer S3s a few years back after I actually made more in BTC than the miners costs at the time of purchase (yeah Bitmain doesn't do that anymore - that's why they are pretty much crooks in my book). I might have only got a hundred for each one, but I bought BTC with those proceeds and got more BTC than the person mining it could ever mine to this day. Sure the person who bought them saw BTC rise to $22k from the $150 or so BTC was back then and he did well - but I did much better by putting my money into the coins.

If you have a decent job I would just try to focus on selling all unnecessary "junk" or working overtime and just buying the coin you want. I think prices will continue to go down or sideways for another year - this is 2014 all over again. But you can't time the market unless you make the market like Roger Ver.

Lol honestly your colleagues can only blame themselves for being greedy a$$holes. I hope you learned your lesson though, I would never (and never have) talk about mining with my regular user base, that's just asking for trouble.

If everyone is telling that mining is not profitable then who is getting profit from the high transaction fees that they are charging, Because miners are the only who are getting the gas price to confirm the transaction so in that means then they are getting still profit as they are now charging high transaction fees. Can anyone correct me where am i wrong.

It is all about making the right decisions. I did a detail calculation few comments ago that it was actually more profitable to buy mining rig year ago then buy eth and hodl , you would mined 10 eth in one year with one mining rig 3k worth, where is you have bought it at this stage you would actually lost.

Ofcourse if you keep mining and crypto never recovers you would be in loos, same as if you buy coin now every day if your rig is switched off. So think there is no point  of switching off if you want to accumulate more coins. Because if you have electricity at decent price under 10c per KWH , coin cannot go much under production cost, none wants to sell their coins at loos. Only bunch of scared noobs. If no miner sells coins there is no inflation.
Its simple ecanomics , now there is demand less then there is supply. If the supply decreases , price starts to grow.

I read that post that you're referring to. The problem is that you are either denying or not acknowledging the lost of opportunity. Mining is a hedge against a coin failing. Essentially you can say that can sell the equipment (well GPUs anyway) for nearly purchase price in the event of a coin failing. On the contrarian position - somebody who buys the coin doesn't have to sit there everyday to make sure stupid Win 10 update hasn't taken a miner offline or that the pool you're mining at is skimming of the top or even worse running away with your crypto. The person who bought it can spend the time saved earning more money to pay for the gamble or has the chance to exit quickly if they need to.

Once you have coins in hand you know exactly what your break even point is - the price at which you bought in at plus exchange fees. People who bought ETH last year at $300 should have sensibly sold some (if not all) at $1200 to $1500. Once simple click would have resulted in 5x fiat profit, and should they like - they could always rebuy the ETH now and get 5x as much.

Of course this is all hindsight - but it does show the dichotomy - the strengths and weaknesses of both. If you had lots of capitol and were willing to take 100% loss people should have bought coins and not mining eq. If they wanted to just put 1 foot in the crypto ocean - they build rigs.

Here's hindsight - ETH had fallen all the way to $10, even $7 during last January when DASH starting during it's insane rise. Nobody wanted ETH (well except the believers - Polo trollbox chat showed this). If you bought then you would be up 30x from just holding 6 months longer than somebody buying in July. That's why it makes sense to look at the big picture.

ETH is the perfect of example of a coin that you shouldn't have mined (even though I did). If you bought the coin at launch is was sub 1 penny. You could never mine as much ETH with a single RX 480 going full tilt to today as if you had spent all the money on the coin at ICO.

So - if you expect the coin to fail mine it. If you expect it to succeed buy it (at least well timed buys - doesn't take a genius to not buy ETH at 1500 or BTC at 20K+).

Miners really should spend time reading the speculation and investing parts of this forum. Sticking your head into the mining forums 12 hours a day seeing if they can eek out 1 more sol out of 1060 by changing drivers or tweaking with settings are missing the forest through the trees.

Bitcoin sat dead after hitting $1200 for 4 years with most of the world saying it was dead. It dropped from $1200 to $100. With all that idiotic ICO money thrown at scams last year, the ETH demand is just going to keep going down - it's a race to the bottom.... until some major trigger.

Buying coins vs buying hardware is a debate as old as the moon. I have never bought a single coin with my money. I only bought hardware. Sure, would I have bought ETH at 20$ instead of an entire rig that, before the ice-age, would have brought in like 0.5 ETH a day, I'd still be up 1000% today.

But what you are forgetting in you analysis, is that in contrary to coins/tokens, hardware like GPU is something tangible. People are much more likely to be ok to fork out 300$ for a GPU they can hold in their hands than some coins they can never actually touch or hold. you can't deny that cryptos, all of them, are still a very risky venture. Even ETH at 200$ is still risky. Hardware on the other hand has a value depreciation you can estimate pretty easily over a period of time. Hell I'm sure I could sell mine easily for a 100$ today while they will have paid for themselves numerous times.

Also not everyone is a trader and not everyone has a capacity to evaluate a good entry position (or exit position). Trading is not idiot-proof, far from that.

Unfortunately too many people start mining with the, "Jump before you look mindset". 
They don't consider increasing difficulty, depreciation of hardware ( especially with ASIC ), or even energy costs.

To give you an idea of how dumb a lot of miners are,  People are still selling those old USB block erupters on ebay.  and people are actually buying them.

I shut all my 1080s off once profits went under $1 per card after electricity.  Z9 minis are still doing nicely though.  Hopefully a big pump after a Bittrex listing for the ZCL/ANON fork makes the minis really profitable.  Kids (4) are all happy to have a nice gaming rig on every TV in the house though after re-purposing some of the mining cards.  No more fighting about playing PUBG, Fortnite and Minecraft now. :)

I will only stop mining if difficulty goes too high. Fluctuating price of  ETH does not deter me from stop mining. Why stop even if price to energy ratio goes negative. Even if difficulty mining ETH goes very high, I won't switch off my mining rig. I'd rather switch to other coins or algo.

yes, people "who might mine Ethereum will continue to do, for example they still have capital for electricity costs, and even though Ethereum prices are currently down and for example the results do not match the costs incurred, but a miner has thoughts and hopes that Ethereum prices will rise even higher.

Have you seen the tweet yet? 

That just doesn't make sense, if you mining and plan to hodl ETH you must think positive about its future price right?  Then why not buy with fiat and get more ETH out of it.

because they are stupid, same can be said about farmers, who are farming something and spending 25% or more instead of buying the thing they are farming. I myself have never seen a farmer farming something that cost more to produce than to buy. Farmers only farm things which are profitable around where i live.

Buying eth at ICO is the best case scenario. But if you missed the ICO? what then? A 200 $ rx480 bought in the summer of 2016 has mined a shitload of eth and on top of that it gives you other opportunities. In the end it comes down to individual preferences, some people mine other people trade.

Don't farmers in the United States get govt subsidies that more than cover their loses?

only if they can prove their harvests are mainly for the internal market.

Wait, you forgot hehe.

I'm not forgetting it in my analysis. Read the previous post I made. I said if a person enjoys watching the fans spin and is genuinely entertained by mining well then more power to him/her. You can't buy happiness, but you can buy enjoyment by subsidizing bad mining practices  ;D I'm not here to take away anybody's enjoyment, but if you are in mining to make money it does not make sense to mine during a loss period.

Again please refer to my previous post where I said mining equipment is used a hedge against a coin's failure. You should mine coins that you think will fail. The ones you genuinely believe in you should buy because you're not going to let some market manipulation dissuade you from being part of it.

I've been mining since 2011. I'm old as dirt compared to most of you. I once had a farm that approached 0.5% of the BTC network when BTC was "dying". I know how much fun and headache mining can be. BUT... almost every mistake I've made so far can be attributed to emotional reactions and deviating from my plan I set forth. Crypto miners need to think with their heads and not their hearts for maximal profits.

absolutely agree with Metroid and DrG

my 12 cards (around 376.8mh/s ETH) would be giving me now about 14$ per month profit after electricity costs. And this is only after having changed my price x KWh to the slowest in my hole country for my purpose.

Is it worth to continue mining for 14$??. This is not the question. the question is "DO I BELIEVE THAT ETH WILL RECOVER??". the answer for me is NO.

If you think ETH will increase in price overtime, you´ll probably recover your bills (payed from your packet). So, that's why even this situation recommends TO STOP MINING RIGHT NOW, the network hashrate is still increasing.

People believe in ETH and that it's price will pump. There is NO ACTUAL REASON TO BELIEVE THAT, rather than "yolo". BTW yolo, is a part of a Spanish phrase: Porque "yo lo" valgo (which means, because i deserve it).


are we debating if you have to stop mining and buy the coins, or just mine?? Well, Mining i get around 0.75 ETH per month, with a cost of around 150$ per month in electricity. So, even investing 150$ to buy ETH, i would still not be getting the same amount as mining. If i want the coins, i'm better off mining than buying.

But my problem is that I DON'T BELIEVE IN ETH ANYMORE. Specially having known that yesterday the DEVS, talked about future difficulty bomb, and profit reduction per block from 3 to probably 2 or even 1. EIP-858 would reduce block rewards to 1 ETH per block, EIP-1234 would reduce block rewards to 2 ETH, while EIP-1295 would keep rewards to 3 ETH.

Constantinople Hard-fork will be launched in october (so every 8 months a fork, devs have said). It's not officially announced, but it's almost done that with this latest fork, they will apply EIP 1234, so 2ETH per block instead of 3. If there is no pump in price, ETH will definetely be a NO GO FOR MINERS AT THAT POINT.

ohh, btw, some stupid people said that i had lost money because i bought cards at high prices. Well, in fact, all of my RX 570 and 580 were bought at 200 to 250€ brand new, so way lower than highest prices, and even below msrp prices at launch.  


My main idea of mining was to get a monthly profit of about 300€ (even if you don't believe me, i was certain ETH would not be able to keep it's prices, and predicted a drop of around 25% to 35% in the price and i accepted that situation). i never thought it was going to be an 80% as it is now. Noone expected that. Not to that extent. The idea was to sell coins after having mined them, pay electricity and enjoy the bonus.

The drop in prices has forced all of us to pay our bills from our pocket, and get nothing monthly, and just hope for a day to come that the situation gets better. That is not happening and the future is very black for crypto. i decided not to invest more money, because i have terrible doubts to get the money back.

If you want to burn your money on a camp fire, you are entitled to do it. But don't tell the others what to do, specially if the situation is the worst ever lived by crypto and you have no clue of what will happen the next year. I bet this will crash. i will hold my ETH already mined and go till the end with it with loses. But i will not put more money in this shitty and manipulated market .

OK, forget ICO. Let's pick Jan 1st 2017. You could have bought about 30 ETH for the price of a RX 480. Even with cheap 0.05cent power you still come out ahead by buying because ETH was successful. Its fiat price accelerated faster than miner could accumulate it.

You would need to look at a coin like LTC which mooned in 2014, crashed severely, then mooned again, then crashed again - there the fiat gains are less than what would one would have accrued from mining. But the whole ASIC thing throws monkey wrenches into the prediction.

Basically you would need to mine a coin that other people have given up on or had not taken interest in for you to come out ahead in the long run. In narrow windows like 3 months or 6 months it can go either way.

Well just chalk it up as a learning experience. But I will tell you this. I have been there. I watched BTC go from $33 down to $2 and proudhon kept spouting off everyday that BTC was going to die. When BTC recovered to $5 I sold off a lot thinking wow, I just saw a 2.5x increase from $2 - biggest mistake ever.  Just sit on your holdings. Enjoy your life. Try not to struggle with bills (hopefully you didn't go into debt to pay for the miners which everybody was warned not to do). If you can mine at a profit and don't mind the heat/noise go ahead.

Having been in this circus for 7 years and seen multiple boom/bust cycles - I knew I had to dump most of my hardware earlier this year. I still have a few (70 card farm) but I will use my assets to buy back coins I like once I feel most of the dumping cycle is completed. I think those ICOs are still dumping their ETH looking at the wallet movements.

Remember, don't get emotional with this. Pretend it's like buying Walmart or Revlon stock - can't really get too excited doing that lol.

Get excited about what crypto can do to make this world better.

not only that, my two rigs are using an ASUS P5QC (so socket 775 platform) with a Xeon x5460 undervolted and modded with 6 gpus in a splitter (since the mobo only has 4 pcie slots) and the other one is an ASUS P5KC with a E6750 dual core also undervolted also with pcie slot splitter. I mean, i looked at the money for the investment to everysingle penny. I even built my two mining frames to save like 20$ from both.

I also agree with you in that ICOS are overselling ETH as technical analysis suggests. and if this situation stays flat for about 24 hours more, it's possible that we see a dump in price to around 200$ ETH.


Someone said it before. many people are ignoring FACTS and believing on FAITH. I've already used all my faith, and look where we are. Now i will stick to reality and facts. I will not put more money on this market unless situation gives me real profit.

I agree with most of your points, and even the buying coins not mining coins part - to some extent.  Mining is more like financial planners tell you to do, dollar averaging in your investment.  You never know what will happen to the market, and at what point in a cycle we currently at.  What if the market is slowly dropping for 2-3 more years, and after that back to bull market.  You will be hodling a large bag if you sell your equipment now and buy coin directly, you would be better off to buy it next year, or 2020?  This is how dollar averaging works better for market fluctuation.    But of course if you see the market recovering very shortly you should sell all your rigs and buy coins right now. 

Anyhow mining with loss is always a dumb choice, unless the guy enjoy happiness from it like you said.

Simply once profits are no longer there or people lose interest in mining. If there is no value any longer than rigs will get turned off. There will always be a contingent that will mine speculatively in the hope a coin does really take off

Mining is built in such way that if you do have one of the cheapest power and equipment prices, you'll always be winner. Cause if like you referring to switch off mining rigs network difficulty drops and you get more coins. Of course if you like mining shitcoins, they could never recover.

The same thing are for the miners if you have bought miners year ago you could sell your profit at 1200-1500 . It all about making right decisions in right time.
Look at for example ethereum network hashrate, it hast dropped even the coin has dropted even more then 5x , so many people are mining still at loos.

There is plenty of reasons why we could debate about what people calls mining at loss , same for traders can make a bad deal. Buying coin at 300 selling at 500 , then pannicing seeing the price at 800 and buying back in and then price drops back to 300 in you are in loos now.

this happened to many and whoever hedged the risk must conform they dont win all the time, that is life and if they decide to sell now then they are really losing it, so need to be strong and wait for a reversal and be positive about it.

Eth bottomed at 6 $ in jan'17, then an RX card made a bit over 1$ if I remember correctly, good times in hindsight.

Having gpus also gives some opportunities straight buying coins doesn't. Anyone who mined Ravencoin when it launched with the buggy gpu miner (network hashrate was around 600Mh-1.5Ghs) ROI'd their rigs in a few days. Those opportunities are few and extinct in this bearmarket now.

I also crypto has a bit of an identity crisis right now. Tons of people got in in december, but for all the wrong reasons, now their main incentive(when moon?) is gone.

I still belive eth will make a rebound some time.At the current price most miners have to sell a large chunk of their eth to pay for expenses, this only sends the eth supply in the hands of the few who are buying..
Who is buying?

There is no doubt that mining is much more profitable then buying crypto. Well at least  these 3 years since im mining. Sure it is slower process then buying , also you have to look after your farm and spend time on it. Im just saying this cause i actually have mined more coins then i actually would buy them in last 3 years with my farm.

Only smart investors buys at these prices, "dumb" investors waits, and when they will see crypto pumping they will buy. Its human nature Greed $$$ :D

You are a wise person DrG!  :)

I like your thinking.

Haven't been in crypto as long as you, but I have learned the lesson of selling ETH when it was 10$ thinking the fun was over, better cut my losses...shoulda woulda coulda hodled, but hey, lesson learned.

People forget that crypto is just another asset that reacts to human emotions. Cryptos are not dead. The boom we saw end of 2017 was just due to common greed and the hope to get rich quick scheme that worked for a few yet failed for many. This bearish period is just a natural correction. It happens for every type of market. Just look at the stocks early 2000 with the internet bubble.

Take the chart of any crypto that is older than 2 years and you'll see it is still in an upwards movement once you cancel out all the noise.

Been hodling since the bubble pop, no doubt in my mind that cryptos will pick up again. It might take a little while, but the revolution they bring can't be stopped now (you can make a parallel with Google, Amazon etc...).