Bitcoin Forum

Original Post : October 5 - 2018 - Mining ETH profitable, the example rig making around 80$/months
Updated on December 3 - 2018 - Mining ETH still profitable, but profit is actually 1/4 what it was 2 months ago , the example rig making around 20$/months
Updated December 12 - 2018 - ETH Mining is not profitable for me anymore with the electrical rate of 0.097$/KWh, im losing around 10$/months with that rig i used for example - but .. still all my rigs are online and mining ( ETH/USD exchange rate is 1ETH=82$ )
Updated on March 31 - 2019 - Mining ETH is profitable for me, but profit is actually 1/2 what it was 6 months ago (October 5 - 2018), but 50% more what is was 5 months ago (November 3 - 2018), and im making 48$/months more, compared to what was my earning 4 months ago (December 12 - 2018) :) with the example rig i used for this calculation, i can make around 38$/months right now

I placed my numbers into the same online calculator, what i used in the past months, to make more easy for newbies to understand my topic, all my calculations.
PLEASE UNDERSTAND : None of those calculators you are seeing on the web can tell you what's coming tomorrow , months later or 6 months later !
Those calculators telling you about today , at that moment when you typing in your information !
None of those online calculators can predict what would be the coin/$ exchanges rates a minutes later, a hour later,  tomorrow, next week,  months later, 6 months later or a year later !


Original Topic from here ;)

Nice try Vitalik .....

;D ;D ;D

I have a higher Electric rates about 0.21Kw/h

Been mining CN-H algo's with 480's, optimized doing 90-100w

and still, getting some profits, not that much

but is enough to continue mining operations

For me mining still worth it for the miners who has existing and paid off rigs with lower power rates

However, as the concept of adding new rigs, at this point I just prefer to buy coins

100% agree with this, with current prices, its just make not much sense to build new rigs right now, and i dont think in the close future its ever going to be worth it to build new GPU rigs , as asic, fpga miners are taking over on mining.

You made my day.  ;D

vitalik actually hates miners , he only cares about eth programability and pos and scaling
he literally hates pow

It is for sure still profitable but as you said if you already paid off your rigs, I am in the same boat as you and I will never shut down my miners even $1 monthly is still profit for me and I am keeping my mined Ethereum and planning to sell at hight price. But I still advice all my friends to not get in now because paying your rig in more than 6 months is not worth it for me. simply if after calculation you will get your money back in 10 months+ then do not start it, of course, this does not apply on already paid off rigs. So ya mining is not worth it for newcomers.

Vitalik constantly breaks the deadline with the introduction of new updates.
If everything will continue, then the etherium will mine in 2019.
I'm sure that the pampers of this coin are still ahead.
Before the first pamp there was a similar situation with bad news and it lasted about half a year.
It will be very fun if in March-April 2019 the situation in 2017 will be repeated

A much wiser decisions to be made rather than buying miners as of todays. Profitability would only be suited out for those who already reach their roi. Electricity does still matter if you profit out to pay up the expense then i would simply stop mining.


No, he wont post up on a Bitcoin Forum. haha

No argue with OP's post (-absolutely agree-).

Mostly I'm doing on Ethash (but not ETH), even sometimes I'm doing solo mining. Two months back I'm doing solo with a few Ethash's coins, DBIX (only for 3-4 days - when the price still at $3), UBQ (Almost two weeks), YOC (one-day solo mining),.... That gives me more than enough profit (when I get the moment).

For regular mining, mostly I mine specific coins (on the pool). My electricity cost cheaper than Leonix  :D ($0.1)

Agreed, this is one of the keys! (not only for pooled mining but also for optimization and efficiency that effect to our profits)


Be more flexible on mining if you want to survive!

---

 :D  :D  Maybe Vitalik will come here, then hard lol after reading this.

I think the ones who are still mining at break-even or at a loss are doing it because they believe in the crypto future in general.

Basically many friends I had in 2015 or so they were all mining with their Antminer S1/S2/S3 all at a loss or break-even. They believed that BTC would hit $10K one day and they weren't risking too much by just paying a little for their electricity.

They mined I think every 2 months or so about a BTC and kept all of it till 2017 and the pay off was huge for them.

So the reason why the difficulty hasn't come down sharply is because of this reason. Seems like a low-risk trade to just mine at break-even or at a loss and hold the coin for the futures.

Really just depends on the true reason you mine.  If you are mining and selling immediately then you are most likely not making money.  I have been mining for about a year and still do it because I believe in crypto and mine coins with solid fundamentals that I believe will go up in value and then I will take my profits.

Mining at a small loss also works.

I do everything with reporting of taxes.

I was able to legally carry 2017 gains into 2018.

I can offset the gains if I have a small loss this year.


Say you made 10000 in 2017 and purchase gear late in the year.

The entire gain of 10000 can be sunk into inventory if you resell used gear.
You then sell the gpus at peak prices in Jan of 2018.  The gain is this year and you can offset with a mining loss.

Yeah, you were right. But I'm not doing this, Q1 2018 is a pretty good moment for mining (at least for me), so I don't even think to sell my gear. Maybe I'll do this next time (I Just need to know the moment). Good idea!


For some miners maybe yes (most miners do that), but I've never held the coins, I need to pay all the bill (at least once a month) but I still get some profit after bill payment.

There are many angles to mining at a loss.

I have 12x 1080ti's
I have  4x  56 vegas
I have  2x  1050ti
I have  1x  2080
I have  1x  rx560

I have a threadripper 1920x
I have a ryzen 2700x
I have a ryzen 1800x

This is paid off gear.

All still have 2 or more years warranty

I would say  together they burn 3600 watts

They are earning about 13 a day  before power

about 2600 kwatts.  my winter rates kicked in oct 1st  so they cost me about 260 usd  and pull in 300 -390 =  a 40 to 130 a month profit

Even if they were negative I would mine as I can spend 260 x 7 = 1820 in power from now to May 1.  So I will mine away  with those gpus  until May 1st.

$ 0.1 per kilowatt is a very high cost.
Do you have a chance to look for better deals on the cost of electricity?
What is your situation with sales in the secondary market?

I have 6 rigs still on ETH.

it gives me about 1.5 ETH/month.

Im just waiting for the coins to increase their prices!!

Im not investing in new equipments. You should think about getting Asics...

the profits are quite same as it was couple years ago
even with 0.01$ per kwh as you say
and for me and my clients starting with 0.0037$ per kwh it is sure profitable and will be in the nearest future

Why not sell your rigs and invest that money in eth instead,this way you are injecting fresh money in crypto instead leaching it out eventualy(just using you for example)Also you will probably earn more with swing trading eth then mining(especialy after block reduction at the end of the month)You could use them as a heating system in your house to further negate the cost of runing them,my ti rigs are using arround the same amount of money for electricity that i would give for gas  heating(and are doing better job of warming up the place) :D

this is stupid advice, the market for used gpus is at an all time low, Wtf would he sell his gpus NOW  when gpus are selling used forc half what they went for in december last year.

Idiot.. , thr time to sell cards was back in january now if you already have gear either hold it or mine with it

shame on you for such bullshit advice when you know its the WRONG advice

Yes, It's still profitable.

PoW won't ever become unprofitable*. If that ever happens then people would stop mining. This would lead to difficulty decrease which would make mining profitable again!

Asics and FPGAs are not a big problem as developers are making new mining algorithms every day! It's good to have a versatile hardware for new coins.

*However you'll have to update your hardware as hardware is always improving...

 ;D ;D ;D One of the best advice i ever read on bitcointalk  ;D ;D ;D

So sell my rigs basically for nothing right ? Then invest that nothing into something what maybe going to crash maybe not . Thats a stupidest advice i ever heard  ;D
"Swing tradings" have fees also its not free :) More trading platforms are using " getting to know your customers " rules , so you also have to pay taxes after your " swing tradings " sooner or later ....
Im living on the south , so no heating is need it here, maybe a few days a year in January

Why not just keep mining and making a few 100 or 1000$ a months without any future investment ?
Dont forget with GPU rigs you can switch algo within a few minutes , and actually a few coins already out there, which is more profitable than ETH ;)

The biggest questions is always how much you paying for electricity with all the taxes, fees :) and you get your ROI on your investments or not :)

If you get your ROI and paying 0.1$ or less / kWh including all taxes/fees, your rigs are really optimized for power usage/best hashrate ratio, you have nothing to lose :-) And you definitely can make a few extra $ / months :) I would call this a free, easy money :)

Most of you who is complaining about mining profitability, never going to get my ROI,  probably jumped into mining in the last quarter of 2017 or first quarter of  2018 or later and paid a hefty price for your gpus ... I paid for almost all of my RX480/8GB cards under 200$ with shipping/taxes in 2016 summer ...

lol exactly, just give your rigs away so you can invest those peanuts in crypto that drops like every week this is exactly why this forum has gone to dogshit between the bitmain asic shills and the wolves in sheeps clothing trying to trick the newbs into giving thier gear again for dirt prices... then the fake hardware and fpga sellers , Im glad like you i bought all my gear in 2015 and 2016. 

everything paid for so i have no reason to decive others snd even back then i would rather keep my trap shut than straight up tell people to do what i knew to be dumb

OP what would you say to people who haven't got ROI? Do they have to still mine ethereum despite the fact that it's not so profitable? GPUs matters here too of course.
By the way I can't understand one thing: You aren't someone who affects network a lot, so why do you still mine ethereum while you can mine more profitable coin and exchange it for ethereum?
For example this user khufuking posted in this threas that he will mine ethereum even if it brings 1$ profit in month and wait for time when ethereum will rise. You can mine more profitable coin, exchange it on ethereum and hold this way, you will get absolutely more ethereum compared to eth mining.

My original post updated today, with today calculation, so anyone can see with numbers, what happened in the past 2 months.

I really can not give you or to anyone else any advice :( Im writing about my own experience, and try to prove my words with numbers.


I have many rigs, hosted different places around the us, i have around 100 gpu hosted in my own " mining cave ", i dont want to deal to changing algos.
All of my rig vga bioses are specially tuned to mine ETH by me, they are very stable.
If you fine tune your bios to mine ETH , then its probably going to be unstable on other algos.
So by the time im switching all my cards bioses , fine tune them to a perfect hash/power ratio for other algo, fine tune then for stability, paying the exchange fees , paying to send exchanged coins to my wallet from exchanges, dealing with possible instability, i decided just stuck to  mine ETH :)

This is how I bios modded my cards , fine tuned them one by one to mine primary ETH (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2238455.msg22584160#msg22584160)
My goal when im "fine tuning" cards, hex editing bios is always highest efficiency / less power usage ( low as much as possible) with the highest MH/s and best stability

i have 300 gpus all tuned for eth and i still rather mine xmr, they are lower hash than untuned cards but xmr uses far less power than eth so its still a better bet to get off eth at these basement prices

Yes its too bad that the RX gpus didn't come with dual bios like some of the older Radeon GPUs before it.

I am having the same issue, usually one algo is stable but without playing around with the memory straps, core clock, memory clock, voltages, it won't be stable with another algo.

If they had a dual bios switch and you are phyiscally present you can flip the switch and on the fly switch to a different algo.

I think Sapphire may have actually had a RX GPU which did come with a dual bios however the other manufacteurs did not.

You are right sapphire rx cards do have dual bios

People always say this. It may well be true, but make sure you account for initial pool fees, transfer from more profitable shitcoinX wallet to exchange fees, exchange commission and withdraw fees.

You'll need to research your new coin and algo, find the best wallet option (balancing risk of webwallets vs downloading an entire blockchain to your desktop), and then spend hours on several exchanges working out which pairs offer the optimum volume and yield.

Also you'll potentially need to tweak the bios mods you've done for the new algo, as well as experiment with driver/miner/bios combos to find the most stable setup.

In short, once you've done the maths you'll find only a few pennies a week difference, and that's only before every other **** does the same thing and shitcoinX difficulty rockets.

I know what difficulties it has to move from one coin mining on another coin mining when you have modified everything on that one coin but I would say again that it worths when mining of another coin is for example 20% more profitable. Of course you have to consider pool, withdraw and exchange fees but finally they aren't that much. Well, to sum up move must be profitable.
OP wish you success in anyway. Do you plan to hold ethereum now? Since you mine currently more eth?

Nice try, but you are cherry picking your numbers to try and make your case.

What-to-mine for instance, uses a block reward figure of 2.91 to account for the fact that a pool will hit uncles once in awhile and not always get the full 3.0 block reward. Coinwarz, the site you used, estimates the full 3.0 reward so it will of course give you a higher result, but it is not a realistic number.

The second issue I see is you also cherry picked near the high price of the day for your Bitcoin value. Try using the low of the day and see what you get, or at least the average.

I used your other figures and adjusted the values in Coinwarz using 2.91 block reward and $3700 BTC price and your income drops to $2.67 per month.

Finally for the $3 or so you might really make per month, you are not taking into account the depreciation of your rigs. You proudly claim my "rigs are paid off" then go on to tell us how clever you are with making a few bucks a month with that equipment. What you fail to account for is that your rigs have value on the resale market and this value goes down each day.

So while today you could maybe sell your stripped down rigs for say $2,000 (just guessing as you didn't provide any details of what your equipment consists of but will work for an example) and you continue to mine for 2 more months (60 days) eking out a measly $2-3 per month, you would earn $6 extra. However in that same time your equipment value falls say $100, now it is worth only $1900, you effectively lost $94.

Even using your optimistic (but incorrect) $20/month estimate, you would still be losing $60 over the time period.

No, mining is not worth it, and only those who either truly have free or next to free (2 cent) power are making it and everyone else is using fuzzy math to delude themselves into thinking they are still making money.

If you want to continue mining, that is fine and you don't need to try and justify yourself to anyone else, but at a minimum at least be truthful to yourself and know exactly what the real costs are. Also do not try to peddle this false pretense to others just because you choose to continue to speculative mine in the hopes that coins go up in the near future.

My electricity rate is 0.097 $/Kwh , not 0.1$, but in that mining calculator have no option to put that number in :) so that 3 cents different covering your make no sense calculation differences :).
90% of the time , that rig generating more income than any mining calculator predict :) the coins got into my wallet  worth more than 20$ a months right now. Yeah for some ppl its hard to understand and beilive, but thats true ...

Lot of ppl talking about oh my cards are fine tuned , just bc they used a one click bios mod... Thats not fine tuning a card , your cards pulling probably more electricity than before... learn more about hex editing the bios file , change the values to get the max out from your cards with the lowest power consumption possible , there is where you can save 10's, 100's,  1000's,  of dollars depends on how many rigs you have...

Im not planning and never going to sell my rigs , one day i might going to donate to a charity or selling some parts and donating vga cards to charity, not sure yet , so i dont care your calculation about re sale value, i got my money back by that time probably when you jumped into the crazyness and started to buy or build your rigs :)
Every penny im making with ETH mining, in my case is a clear profit. If its 20$ then its 20$ if 1 dollar then its one dollar , if 100$ then its 100$ clear profit.

Im not cherry pickED numbers , i used online that online calculator to show numbers for easier understanding and for visually see those numbers Im talking about , i did not changed bitcoin price or exchage rate in that calculator , as you did :)

You the smart guy who cherry picking the lowest number from the past year :) and you the one who probably panicked and sold all you coins when the btc price went down to 3700$, so you memorized that number where you give up mining :)

You the one who keep saying over and over again "No, mining is not worth it, and only those who either truly have free or next to free (2 cent) power are making it and everyone else is using fuzzy math to delude themselves into thinking they are still making money."
Im making money just like that another 100000's of miner who providing that 2500T hashrate for ETH network .
If mining not worth it , then why this forum is still alive ???

- THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I JUST SAID, TALKED ABOUT  ;)


IM NOT DOING SPECULATIVE MINING, AND NOT TRYING TO PEDDLE ANY FALSE PRETENSE TO OTHERS
I write down my own experience,  proved some numbers, used one online calculator screenshots for much easier understanding for newbies, or to anyone else who want to see an example.
im not the only one , there is 2500T hashrate on ETH network...
Bitcoin network hashrate is also crazy high , yes its went down in the past weeks, but why ? bc the BCH fork and miners started to mine forked coin ? or everyone just turned off they mining rig ? All those miners are offline ? or they providing they hashrate to othet coins networks ? ( Bitcoin ABC (Adjustable Blocksize Cap) , Bitcoin ABC (Adjustable Blocksize Cap) ) ???

So one more time :
IM NOT DOING SPECULATIVE MINING, AND NOT TRYING TO PEDDLE ANY FALSE PRETENSE TO OTHERS
actually im the one who always warned ppl about the risk with mining investment , way before all the craziness get the highest level last year december :)
Lot off members paid 500-800$ for a single RX 480 cards in those times... yes they are here now and crying for they money ... and spreading the word mining is not worth it ...

READ IT HERE MY FRIEND HOW IM TRYING TO PEDDLE FALSE PRETENSE TO OTHERS (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2208927.msg22248565#msg22248565)

It is a pitty, that the whole altcoin mining theme has recently turned into a pessimistic - “I switched off my rigs, mining is dead and selling hardware “ pool. Mining is not dead. And you are right, might be difficult for the first time miners to see the perspective for ROI. And you are right, there are still ways to make profit. We have all been spoiled and used to a quick alternative to make a good profit. Times have changed and we have to adopt. The ones who have lost hope, start rendering,  AI and other ways of using supercomputer powers and one day, you will eventually come back to mining.

I don't agree with this at the current moment. Basically we pretty much had a crypto crash and many are dumping their GPUs all over eBay and on Craigslist. The prices for mining equipment at the moment is very low. He is basically better off selling the equipment in 6-12 months or so when the supply has been absorbed or "maybe" mining is a little more profitable again.

An RX 470 4GB is going for maybe $70 today, in 6 months it'll maybe go for $100 and maybe in 1 year start depreciating again down to $70. In other words you are better off not selling anything and also not mining either.

I add my two cents, I don't think people will want those old of a GPU in 6-12 months time, at least not for that price. By that time the newer cards will probably be cheaper as well and there might even be a new generation out. From my perspective if I am a second hand gamer I don't buy used just to save a few dollars off retail, I want at least 50% savings.

!Remindme 1 Year

Pretty much this, better turn it off, wait for better times and then sell it, RX 300 series were sold for a lot when cryptos were high and they are 28nm, might even sell your rx 470 for $200/$300 again in 2020/2021.

This is true. Look at the price dump the 1080Ti experienced. Market overreacted and they went back to $5xx area for a few days, then the shitty 2080 results came out and the 1080Ti prices went up again. But flagship level cards are always deviants.

There are 2 advantages to be considered selling now though. The demand is there from Christmas shoppers so it's a lot easier to sell. The second, and probably more important point, is that selling now will free up funds should crypto go on a firesale. I always like having a standing buy order just in case somebody Fat Fingers a massive sell - it paid off well when BTC got fat fingered to $104 (I think that's the price it hit on BTCe).

Having money now in hand allows for opportunities that may otherwise be missed. Man if I used my med school tuition debt and instead bought 2 houses in Southern California and flipped them just 2 years later I would have made $1 million and would only be taxed on $500k. I could have then bought again in the 2011 dump and made about $4 million at current prices. Sadly I have not come anywhere near that from my sad medical career.

But if you're only playing the mining game it makes no sense selling now other than being able to quickly liquidate to holiday buyers.

just keep mining if you just have a small loss and if you don't have a need to sell them every month to pay off the bills...
One day they will rise back!

Updated my original post today on March 31st - 2019, 6 months later after i created this topic :)
And yes Mining ETH is still profitable for me, but last year (2018) sometimes around in  the middle of December when ETH exchange rate hit 1ETH/82$, it wasnt profitable for a few weeks .

agree, for me mining ETH is also profitable. I also get used to it ), it is part of habits ). Should be quite unprofitable to make me stop.
sometimes it is more profitable to switch to cryptonight coins, but it requires more attention, so I do it rarely