Bitcoin Forum

ETH is NOT PROFITABLE AT THE MOMENT, but still has 248.000 gh/s of total network hashrate at the moment.

Are people stupid or what???

Lets put numbers to the question.

2 rigs with 12 gpus well optimezed (RX 580 and RX 570) doing 31,3 average mh/s, is doing around 376 mh/s. those rigs are using around 1800w from the wall. The average price in USA is around 0,14$/kWh. In Spain, my country, is around 0.16$/kWh

With these numbers, - 1% for pool fee - 1% miner fee, you get around -10$ per month. So you lose money. But that's considering you SELL your coins to pay the electricity, which in many many cases you´ll not do. So you are paying something around from 480 to 520$ per month to hold your ETH AT A CLEAR LOSS.


Are this people doing this actually dumb??? Do they realise they are expending a lot of money on a gumble that can go terribly wrong?? do this people believe blindly on crypto sooooo much to actually invest a huge amount of money to win probably nothing??? why are this people doing this????


Or is it that that hashrate is probably 70% ASIC?? The E3 can do 190mh/s and use around 760W from the wall. at 0,14$/kWh is making just 10$ a month. Is it worth??? You are still having to sell your coins to pay the bill just to get in your pocket 10$. So E3 users still believe , LIKE GPU MINERS, that ETH is going to be pumped in price, with no reason, fact, technical analysis or whatever shitty argument you can say to belive that. Are people blindly believing in this market, burning out hundreds of millions of dollars in electricity for no instant profit??? WTF is this nonsense???



Now, if you have free electricity or solar electricity, with an E3 you are making 86$ a month per machine. if the price is actually in 1160$, that's not a good idea, because you´ll need a lot of time to even ROI, and that is considering you are selling your coins. If not, than you are investing a good amount of money on no profit but a future profit to come which is bound NOT TO HAPPEN.


I just don't understand. Numbers talk clearly. You have to have free electricity and ASICS to see green money in your pocket , which i'm sure the amount of people mining with free electricity is very small. Very very small.

So the conclusion is: how many of those 248.000Gh/s is mining ETH at a loss??? THE VAST MAJORITY OF THEM.

And that's not even considering the fork that MAY happen in october by reducing 3 ETH per block to 2.


i stopped my machines like 4 months ago. I've calculated how much money i've saved and how much money i would have won if i had been mining ETH.

Numbers show , for me, that mining was a no go since the result is terribly RED FOR ME.


I don't understand this madness. everyday , instead of having less hashrate, IT'S INCREASING!!!!!!!

What may be missing from your calculation:
1. Some pay 0.06 EUR/kWh for electricity, some maybe even less (solar power, China farms near the dams, ..). They are not that many examples, but may start to add up.
2. Some don't pay for the electricity. Their parents do (yes, this is one magnific #fail, I know), their company does (until they get kicked out), their landlord does (until he finds out) and so on.
3. Some claim to be hobby miners and don't care if they lose some bucks.
4. A lot of people don't inform themselves. They don't work on a budget. They pay for electricity from one pocket and get the coins into another. They will tell that Ethereum will rise anyway and they don't know/understand/figure out that they could just buy cheaper than they are mining.
5. Some are already on positive balance since they are mining for long and don't care if now, for a while, they mine at a loss. Here it depends how long this while will last.

OK. Now more of the gaps are filled.

6. and some had invested a lot in rigs, power supply, contracts, workshops. If they don't run it all, they loose more money.
7. winter is coming. (I run some rigs to heat the whole house)

You raise a good point, but i don't think i fully agree...
6) Even if you invested a lot, it wouldn't make sense to keep on mining if the amount of ETH you mined (converted to FIAT) is less than the power bill...
What WOULD make sense for these people is to keep on mining even if they knew they'd never ROI (get their investment back) as long as the net income of the mining operation was higher than the power bill..

7) I actually tought exactly the same way a long while ago... However, i have since changed my mind... Sure, you recuperate part of the electricity cost incurred by mining by saving some gas, petrol, wood, electricity,... you would have used to heat your house... HOWEVER, in my own country, the electricity price is currently over €0.25/Kwh. I currently heat my house with oil, and eventough the oil is much more expensive than it used to be 15 years ago, it's still a lot more efficient than heating my house with electricity.
If the mining "profit" is only marginally lower than the power bill, it might be a good idear to use a miner to heat your house, but if the "profit" is much lower than the cost, i doubt the amount of oil i saved by heating my house with an ASIC will be proportional to the loss i make by mining.
I haven't done the full calculations tough, i guess the cutoff point would be different for allmost everybody...

Next to this, most ASIC's are loud, sometimes they're a fire hazard, they might emit toxic fumes, they emit some light (trough their control leds) and ideally they have to run 24/7 (while my heating is only on when my wife and kid are home)

I suppose some big miners signed power contracts to get best price. They must consume it or pay penalties.
Same issue with heating or hiring contracts.
Many other elements than price and rentabilty come into play

Sure, if you have a contract, you might aswell use the power you've already payed for... Altough i'd probably try to switch my mining operation to a more profitable algo within the bounds of my current contract if i was the miner.

I addressed the issue of heating in the remainder of my previous post (i was still editing it while you quoted me ;) )

As you can see by the pool stats most of miners are in EU or CN, think USA is participating less then 1/4 of total hash rate.

I have accommodated couple of clients from US in our EU data center, so don't neglect the fact that some percentage of miners migrated to more  cost effective environment.

There are people/companies out there in the wide world who really pay like 0.05usd/kWh or even get the electricity for free. You cannot really make this statement that mining isn't profitable - it still is, but the place matters where it takes place.

Or maybe... there is some kind of new tech. Out there what makes mining eth profitable. We have asic (as u know, they’re not profitable) FPGAs, maybe there’s something new. Because i was in shock to, why would someone go into mining it, if it’s not profitable, so yeah there must be some information out there what we don’t know ir it isn’t shared

Maby they belive the price will go UP and they cant buy it dirrectly with fiat - becouse they are grounded :)

As stated before, a lot of people are mining with free electricity.  They either have solar, government subsidized electricity, or they are stealing it from office buildings/schools. 

Eth has a strong community and everyone knows the price will go back up so they are willing to mine on small margins and just hold.

My rigs is making 1.2ETC a day for 2500w (around 800Mh/s) @ .1525cent/h so i'm still in the green for more than 4$...
It's definitely bad (current ROI 3 years  as i still have my current wallets in various crypto and i bought a BCU1525 with my profits) but i have still room before everything goes kaput...

Or there is secret very efficient miners being tested.

But the main point is mining is for straight up Losers!

Buy the coin if you want lambo money. Or mine it and buy a bycicle in the next 10x bull run.

Those that bought it last year for $7 dollars got lambos.and houses.  Those that spent 20gs on mining equipment mined only Enough to buy a bycicle and have AMD equipment that dropped in value by 75 percent.

you can't look at it from your stand point, lots of countries have accesses to cheap electricity and now that there's ASICS those people, in those contries are making a fortune even if the Difficulty is this high

my rigs for an example made ROI months ago, today they earn very small amount each month, but it's still higher than the Power bill, so i'll keep on mining,

You need to look at things through the eyes of a businessman and not some chump at home who bought a few rigs when prices were high and thought he was going to get rich.

NEWS FLASH: Mining is not for the home user anymore, it is the domain of commercial entities

The bull run of last year caused many people to jump into the space and start building out farms/datacenters. Just because the prices dropped back down to more realistic levels does not mean you abandon your entire business plan. You continue building and mining in hopes of surviving until the next big price run and thats where you make your fortune. You dont just cancel a project half way and lose millions of dollars because you dont think you are making 'enough' profit.

You dont need to blame secret ASICs or any other garbage like that, its just simple economics.

With Asic miners in the picture, it was only a matter of time before GPU mining was a complete loss. Ebay is overflowing with used cards now and the prices aren't getting any higher. Sell before the block reward reduction comes or you may end up with a set of GPU paperweights or door-stoppers that used to be worth something. Best route to continue mining ETH would be to purchase a large solar system (20KW+ in panels) and asics. Chris B.

Some people believe Ethereum price will rise back to late 2017 levels again and continue mining because of this belief.
So it is up to them to spend more then what they are getting now in actual amounts at current price.

It is a type of fictional euphoria to them in allowing their current mining systems to continue to run while at a loss.
It is their money not yours so they can do what they want with themselves.

I dont believe people will spend $5 dollars of electric to get $3 dollars worth of coins when you can just buy on exchange and get the the full $5 dollars worth of coins.

I think we need to stop that assumption.

You guys need to think big.

If you want to get 1M ether, what is the cheapest way? Mining or buying?

If you want to be sure network will not be compromised? And you are loaded with cash after selling at the top?

Just some food for thought.

https://preview.ibb.co/h5e39K/ethersupply.png (https://ibb.co/daaMwz)

very nice opinions, thanks for all.

just to be clear. I bought my cards at 50% off "retail inflated prices". I got most of them at 220€ or 250$, so i was not rekt by the hype, and did not buy my cards at any costs. I did manage to buy only at prices i was ready to buy, and not obviously retail prices, that were much higher. In Spain most Sapphire RX 580 nitro+ 8gb were around 459€ or 528$ from the biggest retailer here in Spain, called PCCOMPONENTES.

the idea of heating my house is not an option, i mean, i live in Valencia, i see the sea through the window, so i hardly see 0ºC anytime. Last year, with higher prices, i used this system for heating. Nowadays is just not profitable anymore. it doesn't make sense.


What it's very obvious for me, is that no matter if you pay 0,05cnt/kWh or less. You are at a loss right now. You need ASIC + totally free electricity to get green money on your pocket. If that's not the case, you are losing money.

What is obvious for me, and many of you have said it, is that there is ACTUALLY NO FACT, REASON, ARGUMENT, TECHNICAL ANALYSIS OR WHATEVER to see ETH pumping in price. Noone has a clue, but we've had 9 months of a total crash, and the coins are at lows, but noone is buying. bulls are hardly able to hold small values for the coins. There is a huge resistance to pump the coins and i don't think it's reasonable to pump money on mining right now.

It makes no sense.  

what ?! even at 7 cents mining eth and xmr is profitable, yeah its not 3x profit like it was last two years its still profit. EU vat really inflates the price of gear so you will have a longer roi but that’s just one part of the world

to answer your question, we have to stablish a base line. What's the meaning of PROFIT, for you? is winning 40$ a month what you would call profit???

Because that's the most you will get right now with an E3 paying 7 cents (suppose taxes included).

Its mean your miners are not even close to optimized , your power draw at the wall should be under 1600 watts :) with a "optimized" 12x RX580 rig :)

5 of my cards are doing 32,4 mh/s at 1240/2250 868mv. Are you sure what you are saying? i don't think so.

It's widely proved, that the best ratio performance - power consumption is 1240/2250 at something around 850 to 878mv depending on how good your card is.

i don't think it's wise for you to talk about "optimization" without actually pulling out numbers to discuss.

only fools buy asics , i have 30 rigs so thats like having 30 E3’s. all the miners still in the game have either cheap power or thier rigs are paid off... or both. 30*40 is $1200 for basically just running ny rigs.

again $1200 only if i sell when the market is down x4 which to me is dumb in instelf so in reality when I do decide to sell i wil be selling at at least 3x which is closer to 4k or higher.

the problem is there are too many ppl like you who jumped on the bandwagon last year and are super shortsighted thinking about only the present.  even if i was braking even only i would still mine and so i could hold some cryto and pay part of thr power with my paycheck.

three years from now more newbs will post how are you guys able to mine with these expensive new fangeled gpus , not understanding that we have been through the head fake cycles already and made a kiling holding what we mined back in 2018’s bear market.

the fact that you even mention the E3 shows how little you know, anyone who really is into mining gpu style and speculating on different algos and coins would never buy something as one dimensional as the E3.  maybe batch one for $800 but these current batches? fuck no when I could build a rx 570 rig for only $400 more and mine like 20 other algos.

Some miners actually may not pay a dime on electricity bills as someone else pays for it or at significantly lower price than you indicated. There are also those take it as a hobby and hope someday the coins mined and hodl will someday be worth the effort. I cant help but wonder also what will happen when ethereum changes its consensus to POS

Duh kyc stops many from buying coins.

Many want clean hidden coins and will mine at a loss to get them.

I am giving you this example.  Drug dealer in South America makes 100,000 usd a day.

Money is not very clean.  He sets up a mine in the state of Washington USA .

It generates 50000 in coin a day but costs 55000 to do so.
So he loses 5000 a day. The reality is. For 5000 a day he turns 50000 in drug money to 50000 in mining money.

No more complicated then this.

Myself I have 4 x Vega 56s
I have 12x 1080ti
I have  1 x 2080
I have 2x 1050ti
I have 1x rx 560

I mine them at close to breakeven + 5% to a core wallet which means they are private for now.

I posted my numbers for you earlier , as a example how ETH mining is still profitable for me :) Thats a 12x RX 580/8GB cards  :) In my example it was ETH11 rigs :)
To refresh your not super strong memory read this  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5044285.msg46548545#msg46548545)
Numbers, Pictures included :)
Oh BTW your math is awful on your calculation about E3 and a 0.07$ electricity price  ;D  

You calling members , ppl stupid bc they still mining , but you can not calculate how much income one E3 can generating for someone who is paying 0.07$/kWh :) Should i call you stupid ? no im not calling you stupid just saying ...

Your 12x RX580 rig optimized and still pulling 1800 watts ? work on that optimization a little bit more and get some real time knowledge about how to mod your bios with hex editing :) not just paste and copy mem straps :) you going to be surprised how much extra watts you can save , but you need a real bios mod :)
Posting pictures again for you , just for you :) I hope its helping you to understand some ppl more lucky , or more ? knowledgeable ? about "optimization" :) Just bc you are not capable to do something its doesn't mean its impossible ;)

http://beszeljukmeg.com/ETH02/12rx580.PNG
http://beszeljukmeg.com/ETH/001.PNG
http://beszeljukmeg.com/ETH/0004.PNG
http://beszeljukmeg.com/ETH/000.PNG

This is actually a really good take on it hehe

Which cards to you prefer the most out of the ones you've got ?

i'm running RX 480 8GB at the moment, which are making a profit.
my Favorit  was always the R9 290, i got 5 rigs with 4 R9 290x still in use, however i've actually rented out the rigs (for free) to some local garages as "heaters" :) THEY get the heat and i get the eth :)
i miss the old R9 290x, they were so powerful and could mange almost anything

Some have free or cheap electricity, some are mining on speculation, some might be mining on equipment they don't own (like a school computer lab) and some just don't care.  My guess is that most people that are mining at a loss are hoarding ETH until it goes up again.

I would say around that and most of them at the end of 2017 and the new ones doing 2.5ghs right now with gddr6, yes, gddr6, prototypes for a mass murder gpu miners.

no dude is right ur not very optimized
ive been running 470s since they came out and i run 28Mh@95-100watts
my 480s i run about 29Mh@110watts
im well into the green at $0.115 kwh
havent tested since phoenix miners new green kernels
tho im assuming its lower considering the cards are running quite a bit cooler
ur basically using an extra 50 watts per GPU for 1-2Mh boost above the typical 1075-1100 core settings that run around 29-30Mh
but really if ur anywhere near 1200 on the core ur wasting electricity for very small gains

also if "1240/2250 at something around 850 to 878mv" is correct im not sure how ur running at 1800watts
ur running a -200mv+ offset of those core settings stock voltages
maybe even up to -300mv which means u got phenomenal cards

well if the gear is paid off which mine are.  1080ti's with eth pill are good  the evga hybrid's  do 50 mh on eth  run quiet and have 2 years left on 3 year warranties.

Still profitable for me I pay $0.049 for power and my rigs are two years old.   But I don’t mine ether better options right now.   No idea who will mine eth when the block reward drops by 1/3.

The price will have to rise 1/3.  ;D

I doubt it will rise that much , right at the fork but look at btc , its gone way way up since its last fork, from like $1200 to 6500

We have -28ºC soon coming. Yay! THE WINTER is coming. Not in Spain... but north Europe. Government will approve income tax deductions of all your costs related to mining if you declare your earnings taxes from mining, you may deduct your costs. So even if we pay 0.08€ from electricity government allows you to declare that cost as income tax deductions as like it being business. Private person may deducts direct costs related to mining including hardware costs 100% and proven power costs 100% related to mining. So in the end you may deduct enough taxes for it to be wayyyyyyy profitable to mine rigs of already paid 1070 TI at 110w power. Lesson learned world is not fair where you may consider it to be unfair and unprofitable there will be places with subsidies to make it profitable. In the world of total freedom like crypto currencies things like *China* effect of not paying the fair share of costs will happen and inevitably you cannot compete with total freedom. You will lose.

Making statement mining is dying is not true. It's just mining farms with absurd level of profits will make it trough hard times. It's free economy.. it's Internet.

A spaceheater that also generates eth isn't so bad, y'know. Why is eth mining so incomprehensible? Could also be that somebody has access to a faster ethminer.