Bitcoin Forum

I am confused on the mining profitability, I started mining back in January and I was making 6-7 dollars a day now I hardly touch the $2 mark.
Currently I am mining on a single 1080TI to test things out before I go out and buy a mining rig.
I don't understand the sudden drop in the reward, is it because of difficulty or the mining reward is slashed to half (as I understand this should happen every 4 years, and for a specific coin only).
Also I am wondering why does the price drop of bitcoin effects all the cryptocurrencies mining reward?

Well, bitcoin was priced significantly higher last January than right now, so obviously you're probably going to make less money(in dollars) right now as the price is significantly, not taking in to consideration the mining difficulty.

Take note that the mining difficulty increases as time goes by. So with the same hardware, chances are you're going to receive less BTC.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Mining rewards are closely tied to naked demand for coins because buyers go to exchanges to get coins fast and miners sell their coins there after they’ve racked them up.

Good places to track mining rewards are whattomine.com and nicehash.com’s mining profitability page. These rewards fluctuate over the long term because of a complex series of factors but their movement in the short term is a strong clue to what coins are hot and what are not.

The difficulty increases as the number of miners and the block size increases. This reduces the reward of miners. Since all coins are traded relative to bitcoin, the price of other altcoins changes with the fluctuation of the bitcoin exchange rate. I apologize for my English.

Hi! First of all, I don`t think it`s a wise decision to mine Bitcoin on videocard for now. You should try ZCash, Ethereum, Ethereum Cash, Zencash. At least, they were more profitable at a time, I was curious about mining. That should give you more profit. As for profitability of Bitcoin mining, guys above rightfully said about BTC price and state of market. Still, I think you should ask for advice people on Mining board https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=14.0 , I`m sure they can help you more.

Mining difficulty will go up constantly with quite high jumps often.
You must constantly buy new rigs and sell on bubbles only to make profit actually when you have small scale operation.

But shouldn't the other coins be disconnected of BTC market? therefore the mining reward will vary depending on the coin & its difficulty?

This is my essence of my question, why does other coins follow BTC exchange rate given that other coins (not tokens) follow other protocols than BTC?

There are many newcomers start mining with GPU last December and January including me because the profitability is higher than these days.
The causes of low profitability its because of high difficulty increases and the price of cryptocurrency decreases.

The mining profitability always depends on difficulty and the price of the coin you are mining.

Whattomine.com if what coin is the best to mine with 1080ti and only true miners will remain mining altcoin.

If i understood your question right, you practically asking why everything falls down when BTC does? If so, I can say, that BTC is representing all cryptocurrency market. The reason is, something about 40-50% of operations still involve Bitcoin. It`s like reserve currency of the market and so everyone reacts to it`s price falling like if market itself is falling.

So this situation is bound to change in the future when some coins like ETH be fully independent from BTC. meaning fiat money > ETH and vise versa?

Something like that. I`d say, when market will be formed with all it`s institutions (yes, I think it will be happening in a few years as soon as Big Money will come, and they will) and BTC stake in all transactions will decrease to somewhere about equal to other top crypto`s. But I`m not an expert so that`s like just my humble opinion.

Thank you for your help. it is clear now. I was just confused of the strong bound between all cryptos.

Oh yea. The other coins do have different mining difficulty levels and rewards compared to bitcoin, so it does depend on what coin OP is talking about. But the prices of other coins(and tokens) highly depend on the price of bitcoin. They pretty much rise and crash together.

But isn't the mining rewards and prices are independent? I mean sure after you collect the reward its obvious that it will be effected by the market, but the mining reward as i understand should not be effected hugely by coin prices especially other coins.
And if coins are dependent on BTC prices isnt that a token not a coin?

Your mining reward is all to do with the price of said coin you are mining. Bitcoin and most other crypto currencies have lost alot of value in the last half of this year. You also have to remember that when pioneers first started mining bitcoin it was relatively worthless.

Are you Mining a Bitcoin? Please be remind that Bitcoin Block reward is being half every 4 years since it starts the genesis block on year 2008
with initial reward of 50 BTC per block and the difficulty is very very low.

2008 - 2012 Nov ; 50 BTC every 10 mins
2012 - 2016     ; 25 BTC every 10 mins
2016 - 2020     ; 12.5 BTC every 10 mins
2020 - 2024     ; 6.25 BTC every 10 mins
2024 - 2030     ; 3.125 BTC every 10 mins
2030 - 2034     ; 1.56 BTC every 10 mins

As per Mining Difficulty, As long the miners increased the difficulty of the coins also increase thats why you choose wisely the coin you mining to take a full profit