Bitcoin Forum

Hey,

For the past few days the mining difficulty has increased. I'm mining Zcash and the value went from 9$+/day per GTX 1080 TI to 6.5$/day.
Is this normal or will the difficulty continue to increase? :(

Thanks !

It'll probably increase as some eth miners likely saw the hashrate drop articles and panicked, switching to Zcash. It'll likely continue as ETH becomes less and less viable to mine on.

The hashrate drop for Polaris is largely overstated. My reported hash for seven cards went from 202.7 to 202.2 MH/s. with the new epcoh. I think it has more to do with the fact that AMD cards have been unavailable for a month now, resulting in large numbers of Nvidia sales which do better on ZEC than they do on ETH.

Doesn't mean it can still cause panic and cause people to switch algos. It'll go down over time anyways and eventually we'll see people switching over to ZEC anyways, as well as other cryptocurrencies.

Do a simple benchmark with Polaris on claymores. The drop increases as the epoch keeps increasing, so its 0.5mh between 129 and 130, it will be 5mh between 130-140 and 15 in 140-150 etc. In 6 months more than half of all Polaris owners will have switched to other algos.

Benchmarks are just an estimate. When I ran my own benchmarks on Claymore the figures were overstated. Claymore's benchmark for a 5 card RX 480/580 8GB and RX 570 4GB rig showed a 0.8 MH/s drop between epoch 129 and 130, from ~143.3 MH/s, at epoch 129 to 142.5 MH/s at epoch 130. The actual hashrate for the 5 cards was 144.1 MH/s and that was dual mining with DCR. For 7 cards, the actual epoch hash drop was less than 0.1 MH/s per card while dual mining. People also mine ETH with 1060's now at ~23 MH/s and 1/3 of the dual mining performance of the RX 570 4GB.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1977653.msg19727441#msg19727441

The difficulty bomb on ETH is causing miners to switch over as profit reduces, expect more in about 2 weeks.

That makes no sense. Mining ETH is more profitable than mining ZEC with the RX cards. Currently a single RX 570 4GB will make ~$150 a month on ETH dual mining with DCR.

https://whattomine.com/merged_coins/1-eth-dcr?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr_eth=28&fee_eth=3&hr_dcr=750&fee_dcr=2&p=150&cost=0.1&commit=Calculate

On ETH alone it's $118

https://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=28&p=125&fee=3&cost=0.1&hcost=0.0&commit=Calculate

Compared to $92 mining ZEC.

https://whattomine.com/coins/166-zec-equihash?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=300&p=125&fee=3&cost=0.1&hcost=0.0&commit=Calculate

It makes more sense than switching over because your hash rate will decrease in 6 months.  :D

The market probably just over reacted to the FUD and there is the Nvidia factor.

It's not a single issue.

Yep, and the biggest one being there are no AMD cards for a month now. Vega release is going to very interesting.

Provided is not going to be paper launch, as usual with AMD lately. HBM2 volumes are limited, so I'd expect that all cards will be gone immediately.

Back then no one was mentioning about possible hash rate drop for RX cards. How does it work for HMB2 models? Will those have same issue estimating they will be profitable to use for mining?

same with 1070x6 farm + 1070x3 PC. nicehash.

profit was dropped about 25-30%.  :(

It's normal that the diff increase they are adding new gpu all the time there is no shortage of nvidia gpu  the supply is unlimited it make sense that the diff is rising

Of course we are seeing people switch over to Zcash, but better it be slowly like this than all at one time right?

Anyone here planning to hold onto their RX cards is fooling himself, why not get a free upgrade to 1070 while you still can? Dont be stupid. 

Nobody will buy a RX 470 for $400 second hand when they can just buy a 1070 for the exact same price.

Nvidia GPUs are selling out now too, the stock of 1060s is very limited and usually overpriced right now and 1070s are starting to do the same. I don't know if they will be able to put more in stock quickly or if it's going to be a repeat of AMD the past month.

LOL...it's only going to get worse...

...if I was looking to get into mining right now....I would run.  There is no way you are going to ROI any equipment that is purchased at the current prices for a very, very long time...

Promote a RX 470 with "custom mining bios" with adjusted memory straps on Craigslist and I bet newbie miners bite.

What you are doing is plain fraud. Never cheat a newbie into believing something that is not,everyone starts from zero and never be an ass to take advantage of people who does not know anything.@ OP mining difficulty will keep on increasing and there is nothing you can do about that,make the most when you can and get out when you think that profit is not that good.

I intended that more as a joke, actually. 

Actually I have seen cards on Ebay that are pre-modded for Ethash.

I would not call it fraud either , they would be getting exactly what they paid for and won't have to tinker with the bios or anything.
If they fail to understand difficulty, then that's their problem.

It will keep increasing for sure. The reason is very simple and I think I have mentioned it to many miners that the more people will come into mining industry the more the difficulty. It is simple maths that, if there is one miner in the world doing all the mining then finding a block for that miner is 100% true. Now, if we have two miners in the world then they divide the smart work to 50-50% profit. In similar way you are having thousands of miners now a days and it has broken down the share of hash rate to tiny percentage. So hope this will explain your question smoothly.

i am sure that the difficulty will be increase more like bitcoin mining. this is what you need to thinking before you start your own mining hardware and you should know this. i think soon the difficulty of the coins will be increase again and if finally you think that mining is not profitable again for you, then you need to stop the mining and don't mining again.

I think even if the difficulty of ETH rise 4 times, it is still profitable for most miners.

difficulty is nothing new thing. its always gonna get higher :). never gonna down. You already must understand this.

as long as ethereum rise, no problem for miners. For myself, if my electricty costs: 200$/month. and if i get 400$ profit from ethereum. its still worth!

Nowadays profits are crazy. This wont go forever i know, but mining still be here!

Can't wait to scoop up their gpus for 50 bucks  :D

I did some epoch increase tests and found that my Pascal Nvidia rig was pretty much unnaffected, while the AMD cards suffer, though with my 290s not so much. It's going to be interesting times.

I'm seriously considering just selling and swapping over to 1060s and 1070s. They are awesome for hashrate vs. power and looks like the difficulty bomb isn't going to effect them much.

I would might even consider 1080ti as the 1070s are already hard to get and from price / performance you are very close with that cards and you get higher density with 1080ti in addition.

TIs use a ton more power like 200 watt and max out at eth at 37.5 or so

1070s are better as long as you can get them under 500

why to spend nvidia mining power for eth if there are much better currencies for nvidia available?
e.g. for ZEC you make + 470 Sol/s with 1070 and ~ 720 Sol/s with 1080ti - from Sol/W the 1080ti is even a bit better there what i saw from numbers here in the board (have just 1070 by myself).

and i do not say the 1070 is worse, just to consider it e.g. for higher density per rig - of course it's harder to power / cool 6 x 1080ti than 6 x 1070 ;)

Doesn't need panic.

 A lot of miners will switch coins when one gets noticeably more profitable than another - and many cards are quite good at mining both ETH and ZEC, so with ETH profitability dropping due to the combination of folks adding new rigs and hashrate + price has been DROPPING some since the ATH ballpark a week back, I suspect some have moved to ZEC as it poked a bit higher than ETH on profitability for many cards.

 This is why I tend to refer to a "basket" of profitable coins, which will keep their profitability close for the majority of cards used to mine them all with.

 GTX 1070 is a lot better on ETH than the GTX 1080 ti is, due to the GDDR 5X memory latency issue with ETH that hammers cards that use that memory type.
 It's WHY the GTX 1070 mines ETH at a HIGHER hashrate than the GTX 1080, despite having a quarter fewer cores and a tossup on clocks.
 GTX 1080 ti has enough more cores to make up for the memory - partly - but eats noticeably more power to do so.

 As of right now though, even the 1070 can still make better $ mining stuff other than ETH.

 For stuff like ZEC, the 1080 and 1080 ti are viable options - very close on hash/watt and pretty close on hash/$ even before the recent 1070 price climb.

 GTX 1080 Ti on ETH would be closer to 250 watts I suspect. Perhaps 200 if you drop the TDP but you'll also be seeing reduced hashrate by a bit.
 Might be more efficient though for those with high power cost.