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Just came back from a 4 months hiatus from the world of crytos. My GPU rigs have been asleep for the summer because of the heat. Right now, is it still possible to use a GPU rig in a manner that will be profitable? Or should I just dismantle them and sell the parts?

The days of mining shitcoins and dumping them on fools is over more or less, only the real coins will survive these shakeouts

mining and holding good coins is still totally viable med-long term

that being said, sell the rig and get cloud mining, thats what all the cool kids are doing these days

I don't know why miners are selling their amd cards even below half of the price they bought.

Its because the GTX750 and GTX9xx are about 100% more energy efficient.

btw GTX 9xx have yet to be put fully to work and be worked 100% so for the time being the 750ti's are still a better pick.

Some probably bought during the GPU boom and are now trying to get anything in return.  It's kind of like panic dumping.

I would definately not sell them. There are still some coins around that can be very profitable with GPUs,  or even have algos that only support CPUs and GPUs.

Since summer is over, same goes for a lot of people. Difficulty going to increase for all algo. So yeah GPU is useless for mining.

Why do you always make posts similar to this, which inevitably leads to noobs asking you how you do so, to which you'll brag about the magic kernels that you've made and only you have access to? You give people false hope and waste time. It gets annoying.

That said, I don't think you should share your kernels and understand why you don't. Doesn't it get annoying having people beg you for them? If I were you I'd STFU about them and enjoy the extra profit, like I'm sure a good number of people do who may have just as good or even better custom kernels.

Wolf,
You are a dev with private (read: highly tuned, not available to public) miners.  Your situation is irrelevant and unrelatable to your average miner.  


Now, back on OP:

GPU mining is dead at the moment, but this is exactly the same situation that occurred when bitcoin asics forced out the gpu farms a while back.  Something called Scrypt then hit the scene and GPU mining was back in force.  History will repeat itself. here All of the new attention on crypto-mining has brought even more programmers and academics into the algorithm scene (Squaggle dga, you there? ;D).  This spin-cycle is real and i'll call back attention to this very post when the next "Scrypt" hits the bigs.

I recommend people not dump their farms if they have 79xx/R9 2xx cards, but that's already happening.  I am not selling a single GPU out of my farm because i know they will be put to use again in not too long.  

In fact, if i had more disposable income at the moment, i would be buying a new rig or 2.  Image how quickly a $100 280 or $200 290 would ROI itself if profitability was there.

Yup GPU mining is dead for normal home user. Unless you are a good friend of wolf0 then you will be the few who is profitable...

also 0.11 per kwh isn't something special, unless you are running  mega farm, it's like mining air anyway

gpu mining will remain dead as long as gpu miners keep selling way below profitability rather than not selling at all (which would lead to higher price... but hey... gpu miner have only bills no self esteem and are definitely short sighted ;D)
If miners sells their unused gpu in the same spirit they sell coins, we should see soon lots of 750ti at 10euros...  ;D

So if gpu mining is dying it is mostly the fact of miners themselves, don't blame the market for your wrong doing and poor skills in selling your coins...

just in case: I'd be happy to buy 2 gtx980 for 20euros, so pm me if interested, this offer will last only today (the market so low, it is a very good deal no way you could sell them higher than that fud fud fud...  ;D)

I tried many coins and now i can seriously say they are useless atm.

Pretty much... Mining is a sinking ship for miners right now. It doesn't help that every coin an their mom is PoS now. The big coins that have sailed through x11 and x13 to PoS is mind boggling. The only ones getting fucked are miners.

I'm definitely considering parting my rigs. 'Break Even' with power isn't breaking even. It doesn't include ROI; Outstanding loans and interest (if applicable) and the fact that you're sitting on a buttload of money in hardware which is constantly depreciating.


I don't think that will ever come around. With the invention of sites like Nicehash, miners that are dying off are sucking other miners down with them. People who use Nicehash don't have to worry about returns, so they'll pay as little as possible for coins pulling everything down with it until miners simply turn their miners off.

If you look at NH right now for instance, everything is super negative. I highly doubt those miners are paying a lot less in power then me, all have super optimized kernels, or super efficient hardware. They're just circling the drain and sucking everyone else down with them as they go. It will always gravitate towards the bottom. Even as difficulty decreases due to less miners, it will still equalize with power rates, as the only ones who will make more money are NH users and not miners, especially considering that the market is essentially run by bots. The cycle continues over and over again till we're just left with average joes mining on their CPUs on a whim.

The hardware war of ASICs doesn't exist in the GPU scene, so buying your way to the top doesn't work. We're all stuck with the same hardware.

If there was any one thing responsible for the death of GPU mining right now I'd say it's cloud mining like NH. It gives miners that don't know where to find coins a glimmer of hope where there is none and people who can find coins the ability to suck them dry.

A few rules of thumb to keep profitability where it should be and take back altcoin from penny-stock fraudsters

* stop mining/buying ipo coin (we know they are scams organized by p&d groups) and mining it is just giving credit to them.
* stop mining/buying coin which doesn't show any innovation

You might say that the other aren't profitable, but it is mostly the case because the money seems to go there... they are p&d scheme... so basically it just from the right pocket to the left pocket of some people...

So say no to scam coin...  ;D
(because for a small one time profit, you kill your long term profit)

 

home miner here and still mining...investing or mining a coin/coins is a risk.....cryptos including bitcoin is risk.

invest/mine only what you can afford to lose.

Oh, sorry. I assumed you meant with your private kernels. My bad.

I'd like to see these profitable public kernels... I've scoured the forums and pretty much all the good ones have been integrated into sgminer 5. So if it is public, as you say, and you aren't just bragging about your private kernels as per usual, where do you find these?


Just because you invest in something doesn't mean you want to lose it, even if you can.

I also would like to see it at 11 cents making profit.  I pulled mine long ago with 10 cents.  Can you show profit being higher mining then just selling cards and buying? 
 
I sold my GPU's long ago.  I could have mined for a little longer and never made what I sold them for.    I think some gamers got a good deal when I sold all mine.

only worth this point if y ou have free elec, you can make around 0.0015~btc/day/280x...

My 750 Ti makes a bit of profit... When a coins difficulty drops and simultaneously its price goes up. Then I make 3-7¢ maybe.

GPU will always be better than ASICS for the long term in my opinion.  AISCs get outdated very quick and become paper weights.  GPU always has some resale value and can mine all the new algos that will take months if not years to develop ASICs for.

Yes it was, now it's back to being almost on par with the other algos, only it uses more power. So people are losing money if they're mining at 'equal' rates across all their cards. Nice hashes % doesn't take into account power usage. Each one of my systems uses about 100 more watts of power when mining NeoScrypt.

It's fine and dandy to think GPU miners are better, but I could've probably made a lot more money juggling ASICs then I did on GPUs. It looks like the BTC market doesn't want to budge either, it climbs and then people sell it all.

I can't help but think people are mining on a whim right now because they think last november is going to happen again, so x11 and other algos are all SUPER negative at the moment. All the machines that were switched off, are on again mining at negative profit for possible 'future profit'. They're playing the lottery. On the bright side, that probably means when we're still sitting around 400 BTC in Jan, all those machines will be sold as this is their last 'huzzah'.

We (GPU miners) really need more efficient kernels.

Right now, R9 290s are consistently profitable at $0.10/kwh.  Not greatly profitable, but they produce more then power costs while providing free heat.  This is based on publicly available mining software and immediate conversion to fiat.

And that usually means more heat and more energy. Am I right?

Depends what you mean by "efficient."  Usually faster kernels use more power and therefore produce more heat, yes.  But, if by efficient you mean balancing power and output, a maxed out kernel and miner configuration is rarely most optimal.

sure aint no more, its now neoscrypt and nh now has neoscrypt too

People are fucking retarded if they're using their GPUs as space heaters and using that as part of their profitability equation. That means in spring, everyone is going to be super negative, everyone will sell their rigs (or hold them till next winter?), and the economy will bomb again. I wondered what was going on, but this is so asinine I don't even know what to think of it.

Breaking even with power costs is not the same as making money, especially considering how much you could have if you sold your cards. They DO depreciate, which happened recently with the release of the 970/980 and AMDs price cuts to all their cards because of it. People that are using their GPUs as space heaters (and using that as part of their profitability equation) are just wrecking things for themselves and other people.


Efficiency is hash/watt


Miners don't magically scale up, people buy them. People aren't going to buy them if they aren't remotely profitable. There are some (stupid) people that have been clinging to their hardware till winter to switch it on and use it as a space heater, but they'll die off in spring time. Otherwise it doesn't magically scale up. There is opportunity cost and if say a 280x was making a dollar a day, it'd still take a half a year of those prices to pay it off. As it stands right now, most people didn't get to pay off their loans from their mining hardware if they bought it last January or later (not nov or dec).

Mining reached equilibrium around the price of power and that's a real world variable people take into account. Higher hashrate kernels always means higher difficulty as everyone ends up on the same kernel. Lower power costs does not mean more GPUs as their is a entry cost, depreciation, and opportunity cost for using a GPU, there isn't for using a new kernel...

I don't think anyone would tell you it's a good time to get into crypto mining on GPUs right now.

What's wrong with subsidize heating?  You don't like free heat?  It absolutely makes sense to mine for heat even if you're only breaking even on power costs...

Only short-termers sell rigs in the spring...  It might only take a week of highly profitable mining to make hanging onto 30 cards worthwhile vs selling them.  And if you've got large spaces or several buildings to keep warm during the winter, then you can save yourself thousands in heating costs.

Slightly above breaking even with power costs is the minimum required to make money..  Sell cards?  Why?  Wrecking it for other people?  LOLOLOLOLOL

That's one way of looking at it - you could also say that the most efficient miner is the one that's producing the most hashes... depends what matters to you... wattage won't necessarily matter to everyone's idea of mining efficiency.

You call it stupid, I call it smart.  All my hardware made ROI long ago (of course, after paying for the power), and is well in profit.  Now it's the most efficient heater you could ever imagine (it pays for itself and then some!)

Oh definitely, I can't see who would invest right now.  But if you already have the GPUs, and you're keeping them for some reason (people will have various reasons), why not have free heat for the winter?

Bingo.  It's not very many comments capable of earning that many L's and O's strung together.

Nothing in technology that is profitable for a home user is likely to stay that way.  Economies of scale are simply too advantageous, and where there is profit (or these days, free or heavily subsidized heating), there will be those who take advantage and those who cry about it.

Opportunity cost, buy a $30 heater from WalMart. Thousands of dollars worth of hardware that is depreciating isn't the same thing (They've already lost 2/3s their value since last spring)

30 cards wouldn't heat large buildings. That's probably 6000w worth of heat at x11, that's enough for a small house depending on how cold it is and how well it's insulated. Gas is cheaper then electric for heating as well, much cheaper.


Opportunity cost. What could you be doing with the $5000 instead of having it depreciate in your basement as a space heater. Like put it in a savings account. If you bought those cards with a loan, you're talking interest on top of it, which slightly more then break even isn't covering.

This goes back to spring time, when everyone is super negative (heat isn't subsidized anymore)and it'll either force everyone to sell or sit on it for another six months, which the hardware will depreciate further. If they sell, it'll crash the reusable market and further depreciate the cards.


Efficiency isn't a foreign concept that's up for definition. More hash when you lose more money is not more efficient. Hashrate is dynamic. If everyone has the same 280x and is using the same kernel, if the hashrate is 1GH/s or 1h/s per 280x it doesn't matter (if they're hashing at the same speed). What does matter is how much power is being used to achieve that. Hashrate is a arbitrary number used to denote how much work a card is doing. The percentage of the pie stays the same (all else being equal) as the difficulty will adjust.


I bet it did. Except that heater costs $5000 and you could sell that and buy yourself a nice high efficiency furnace and redo the insulation in your house. Not to mention it'll depreciate greatly over the next year. A furnace and insulation will not.


Opportunity cost, depreciation, artificially depressing the market for the sake of spiting others.


Why would my motives matter if the points make sense unless you're being illogical and doing 'dumb' things for the sake of spiting me?

Apartments are usually tiny from a square footage perspective and have heat included (almost always). If you're into a upstairs unit you're also more then likely receiving plenty of heat from the unit below you.

Having close to that number of GPUs, I can tell you it will maybe heat a small house using x11. Blast furnace my ass. You have no idea how many BTUs a normal furnace puts out to heat your home (hydronic or forced air). Gas is ridiculously cheaper and so are furnaces.

Not everyone uses the excuse 'hobby' to operate at a loss. If that's you, obviously talking about trade offs and profit doesn't apply to you. There are plenty of people who got into GPU mining to make a profit, I'd say most people did. The residual may be hobbyists after everything crashes and burns, but we're in the middle of crashing right now, which is why I'm trying to talk to people in various ways.

If people are super negative they should sell, trying to get the word out about more efficient algos and hoping I change some minds as far as that's concerned, so people wont be so negative.

Opportunity cost, depreciation, and artificially depressing the market.

That might be true where you live... it certainly is not the case everywhere - far from it... some people pay $1000+ to heat a 500sqft condo over the winter.

HAHAHAH... NO!  You can easily spend $3000-5000 on oil to heat a house over the winter months.  Or, you can mine $5000 worth of crypto, and make the same heat.

Who said anything about operating at a loss?

More efficient algos?  What?  I totally don't understand this statement.  Change what minds about what?

Opportunity cost being paid for in spades - all calculations considered.  Also - what's your lost opportunity cost if there is say, a few days in the future where GPU mining is immensely profitable?  Artificially depressing the market - I also don't understand what you're talking about here...  Either non-sense or, well, something close to non-sense as far as I can see.  There isn't anything artificial about it, and I don't know how actively mining is depressing the market.

I am pretty sure many are using GPUs as space heaters as the difficulty went thru the roof recently.

If you're heating a 'condominium', I'm guessing scrounging for money with GPUs isn't on your table... and if you are, seriously bro, do something around your pay grade.



Not sure where you're mining, but you need a LOT of GPUs to make $5000 over winter. Winter being about five months of cold season, I'd make a fraction of that in RAW BTC and I am using about 25 GPUs. You're probably talking about $2000, not including power, which will eat all of that.

No one uses oil to heat their homes anymore, that's ancient (and if you do for god sakes by a high efficiency gas furnace). A standard natural gas bill for a bigger house (like mine) runs about $60 a month. That's $300 over the course of the entire winter.

I'm definitely starting to think whoever is left mining BTC (on GPUs) aren't the brightest bunch, which is why we're left in the predicament we are and unfortunately I bought into this.


Show me how you're profiting and then I'll believe it.


Fresh was one, x11 at the beginning was another.


Reread the definition of opportunity cost. If you're still making a profit on GPU mining you're either using maxwell GPUs or your calculations aren't working out. Opportunity cost is not just making profit either, it's what you could do with the money if you weren't otherwise investing it in say GPUs. Like buying a high efficiency furnace instead of a oil heater you still apparently have, redoing your insulation in your subzero arctic renaissance era condominium.

If the trend of the market is anything, it's that it basically reached equilibrium at power prices ($300-$400 per BTC), so it's not going to spike to $1000. like I said I don't think I'm being grouped with the smartest bunch anymore. As per your last statement, you're betting on the lottery.

Artificially depressing the market is raising difficulty by subsidizing it with something that wont always be there. Heating costs. As I described earlier, when spring time rolls around, everyone who is operating super negative now will either be forced to sell (and there seem to be a lot of people mining at a loss right now) and it'll further push the resale value of GPUs even lower due to the supply surging to market. Or they'll hang onto it till next winter which it'll depreciate again.

Opportunity cost also includes you hanging onto a 280x, which has already been depreciated by the release of maxwell and furthermore by 970/980, which AMD reduced the price of the cards. A high efficiency furnace doesn't depreciate in value every three months.


Yes, there are a lot of really stupid people clinging to cards. I didn't expect so many people to still have rigs laying around. Either that or chinese farmers all sold and bought maxwells, which is a possibility, but highly unlikely. With the increase in difficulty it has to be people using GPUs as space heaters. If people are so against selling right now, I'm sure they wouldn't be smart enough to liquidate and buy maxwells.

I have been selling my rigs, with almost half of buying price.
If consider of what i got during mining time, i can say that i make a quite loss

But i have to be "move on" and not stuck with my R9-280X
Crypt coin these days are not suitable for small miner with just around 6 VGA
Better use the money to buy some btc and keep it

I just sold my entire farm: http://s1242.photobucket.com/user/Ignition75/media/DSC_0008_zps4d33cb7e.jpg.html

Purchased shares in larger operations, best move I ever made, already made ROI and no electricity bill.

With GPU developers selling custom mining software to the privileged few that are sucking all profit out of the system, don't bother mining unless you have free electricity.

You're situation is different. Many have small rigs (<10 GPUs) who live in old apartment building (where power is a flat rate) or get free electricity from Business/University.

Right now an R9 270X is worth about $100, in one year, it will most likely be worth $80-90 or so. They already depreciated to the max.

At the moment an R9 270X only makes $0.25 per day. After 6 months thats $45. From there the daily profit might either stay the same or become lower.

So the point is, if you have free electricity just keep mining. You already missed the boat to dump the GPU before the price fell.

Those rigs are just about worthless now! ::)

I will keep my rigs for now. Be patient, soon the price of BTC will raise and our profit will raise  ;)

Got 65% of my RRP back, definitely not worthless.

I bought top of the range of each card, which gamers gobbled up fast  ;)

Many I bought were used so I maybe lost 25% value or so.

need to build solar panel if want continue GPU rigs

I picked up some ASICS and replaced my GPU farm. I found that mining GPU coins was not profitable anymore. Unfortunately I will probably never see ROI on my ASICS. So I would have to say all mining is not profitable if you calculate equipment costs + electricity. I do it for speculation and hope. I hope the prices go up and I really hope the coins I'm mining and holding go to the moon.

I also believe this trend of low prices is only temporary and will pick up again in the next two years.

Mine #NeoScrypt with your GPU rigs. #Feathercoin #Phoenixcoin or #UFOcoin.

Yeah, I actually thought it was stupid to buy into ASICs originally as you need to keep turning them over and reselling them to keep up with the game, but at this point it seems as though I backed the wrong horse. I honestly didn't expect so many people to keep their rigs as space heaters for winter. It seems now that ASICs were the better solution simply as people didn't play hanky-panky with them by subsidizing their heating costs. It doesn't help that the people tweaking the the algos don't care about efficiency either (check the other threads and this one).

More hash doesn't mean anything (all else being equal) when it's at the cost of higher power usage. The only exception to this is compared to maxwell, which is where hash/watt comes into things.

:D - just like #!

ASICs are a good ROI if you know the right time to buy and sell them. If you keep them too long you will lose money big time

Amen to that, I'll come back to mining one day, in a house with walls made from solar panels  ;D

I find selling solar panel's power back to the grid is a better investment. And you don't need to do anything...

Solar power is indeed the best option but intial setup is expensive .

Mining is not profitable for most people.

only way to gain profit is neoscrypt

Do you have hard data willing to share?

It's not pointless to me. I haven't seen a single declaration of "profit" stand up closer scrutiny and I'm interested in knowing if those declaration come from data or feelings.

attracting attention isn't good for profit either  ;D

Wrong. Big farmers dump their altcoins to pay the electricity bill. Gamers and small miners keep them, and secure the coins blockchain. Private kernals are destroying the altcoin marked.

I currently sort of agree.
As a side note: it seems reasonable to me the whole X11 FPGA rumors might currently be just elite kernels but that's another rumor I like to watch... sort of like the chemtrails bullshit.  :)

I don't think its the FPGA its simply miners turning on their GPUs because its cold right now and they want to heat their apartment.

The largest difficulty increase was when the snow fell not before that.

If FPGA existed on a large scale, X11 would be very close to Scrypt.

this isn't obvious
The main problem are multipool and them, they don't even look at the price and dump all the time.
(although it is ok for good coins where there is buy support, it prevents any grows of smaller coin).
Here is the problem.
And even though they aren't profitable to small miner, small miners who don't want to do their homework (meaning researching coins) jump on that and kill as well the market.

The other thing: sell walls   ;D Just watch for fun on any coins, any exchanges all the small miners dumping at low price just to sell their dust before a whale (or a clever investor)... yeah small miner keep their coins until they start acting like morons on exchange...  ;D

I guess I'm one of the few who is still profitably mining using GPUs.  My little farm is covering 200% of its electrical costs at $.125 per KW/H as of 11/30 with BTC/USD calculated at $345.  The farm reached full ROI as of about 8 months ago, so anything above cost is a win to me. 

No private kernels - everything I've done code-wise is available.  I would not recommend anyone putting one together now though - chances of ROI with a new GPU rig is not looking good.

What are you mining exactly?

Same question. I think the profit is marginal.

Multicle Scrypt-Chacha coins - YACoin, Ultracoin, (was YBCoin and Cachecoin).  The trick is to have low power GPUs with lots of memory - check my post history for all the details (granted, you're almost a year late to this train).  Profitability for this month is down, but I'll cover electricity for the month at the 2.5 week mark instead of the two week mark.

Would like to know this too, profit has dropped again on December so I guess its break even now?

Already did mate!

So maybe you should start mining on Lyra2RE, which is a custom implementation of Lyra2 made by the Vertcoin team. Remember, as soon as a Lyre2RE asics come out, they will swap again. You can rely on that.

ENDLESS MINING

ASIC resistance won't matter if GPU mining profits keep on sinking down.

i checked that new algo, and vertcoin is still un-profitable even with it, there is just not enough interest in it, no matter the algo, based on that lyre2re asic won't come out anytime soon

The dumping is relentless. Mining VTC is not profitable at al for most miners. Maybe some miners have free electricity.

Does anyone remember that link to the site that showed which coins to mine with a GPU rig?

Yeah VTC was very profitable in the first 6 hours but now its a crap-shoot. The price fell so much before I could sell.

so why sell ? You understand that you are just making it even more unprofitable (and not the other way around...)   ::)

asic was able to rape vtc, without much depreciation and a bunch of gpu miners can't keep their coins more than hour...  and complain it isn't profitable...
"so unprofitable... lets dump " right...

The problem is really the miners not the coins/algo/electricity bill

now mining the coin seems is waste time and money

Not really, a lot of people mine cause they still have positive profit (cheap electricity). So its not profitable for you I guess?

I sold VTC because looking at the weekly chart, it does nothing but go down. Just like any other currency out there.

Asics are borring. Impossible to Roi. Gpu's are advancing. Donate some beers, and we upgrade the performance :).  Klaus_t and me just gave you Vtc +12% more hash for Nvidia. @github. In Software....

Don't the $100.00 USB 500GH/s and NIC $350.00 TH/s configurations on ebay make expensive graphics accelerators obsolete in mining?

Only with free electricity, if you pay it, you lose money