Bitcoin Forum

SO over the past 4 weeks I've been building my additional GPU mining rigs... Well in that time, virtually overnight it seems its now not even worth mining on GPU's

I've watched 6,000 GHash/S added to Slushes pool in the last couple weeks... Rewards are roughly 1/3 what they were 2 months ago, and isn't worth the profit anymore with electric cost for me. Wow, that all happened awfully fast  :o  Guess its that time we can all kiss GPU mining goodbye  :-\

time to start mining altcoins..

We didn't want your GH's anyway!!

Don't go by Slush's pool.  String of bad luck in the last 48 hours.  I mined Slush with 2Ghash/s but 50BTC with only 1.4Ghash/s.  In that same 48-hour period, 50BTC bright in 3x the amount of BTC. Seems to be back on track now though.

do you even understand the concept of "luck"? Previous "bad luck" streaks don't affect future earnings.

WTF?  That's EXACTLY what I was saying. I said no matter what your hashrate is, you can get good or bad luck.  Did you even read what I wrote?

Rewards are 1/2 of what they were 2 months ago because difficulty has roughly doubled. It is not likely that difficulty will double every 2 months forever.  ;D

But yeah, alt coins.

You can mine alt coins and trade them for the most prominent coins (e.g, Bitcoin, Litecoin).

there are alt-coin, they are also more profitable

Alt coins are too volatile, might as well power off and sell the parts.  You are saving a lot on electricity bills too.

I worry that altcoins won't be terribly valuable for mining. Once ASICs own a bigger chunk of the bitcoin mining pool in late summer-ish or whenever, that all that will matter is how difficult it is to earn 1 unit of fiat. So if litecoin for example becomes the go to network to hash on with no threat of ASICs (don't know of any in development for LTC), it will probably have a relatively flat rate of increase in difficulty compared to bitcoin which I think will for a while always outpace LTC in the rate of increase in difficulty. As a result LTC/BTC trade rates will probably go down and if they didn't, more people would move to LTC until a lower ratio is achieved. So in essence, I unfortunately agree with OP but also believe in BTC as a means of transaction in a year or so rather than an earn wealth scheme.

I mine BTC just to own some for transaction purpose. I mine LTC to hoard for future value.

LTC is never going to be worth anything, I'm sorry to say. Right now, no alt coin ever will.

This is exactly right. but even since I posted this thread the total G/hash has gone up another 2500!!  :o

But Why would you not expect the difficultly to continue to rise as the recent rate? There really is not much explanation except for recent asic chips hitting the streets, which will only grow at a quicker rate from now on... Worst part is that BTC value is dropping as asic is showing up which seems extremely ass-backwards IMO  :P

Both the pools I mine in have gone WAY down in hash rate.

At the moment, there are still lots of GPU in BTC. If the difficulty rise further, then some of them will move away from BTC so the rate of total hash power rise might be lower.