Bitcoin Forum

I have been disengaged for some time except I had few miners mining eth. I used to mine zcash but difficulty has increased drasticaly. Most problem was ASIC miner bitmain has been centralizing the altcoin mining. From what I know bitmain itself is in deep trouble nowadays. Is difficulty increasing or decreasing nowadays?

Difficulty is always increasing. Bitcoin and Litecoin are hitting all time high difficulty levels and alt coins like Eth are not at ATH levels but the profitability is dreadful these days.

One reason is they have reduced the block reward twice already and second issue are the ETH ASICs which are on the network. I think mining in 2016 was triple the profitability than today. I remember back in 2016 I made like $2 a day with my old R9 280X while today I make like $0.50 a day with a more efficient GPU before power costs.

So you aren't missing much.

It's only profitable to mine if you have free or dirt cheap electricity.

Yeah, I agree and you can make a profit if you go directly mining with ASICminer you can reach your ROI fast compared to build your own mining rig.

GPU mining nowadays is hard to reach the ROI because it's expensive unlike before last 2015-2016 GPUs are cheap after bitcoin is always come up on the news the price of these old and new GPUs are pretty expensive.

I have 4 cent kwh and its boring now.  Still profitable but I can't find a reason to expand my mine, I have 100 amp service maxed out at 80 amps and even with cheap electricity nothing is looking great.  I wanted to run a 400 amp service but i really can't find a good reason.  90% of my gear is 3 years old expect for a few z11s and so its all paid off, I should sell my gear.

Mining is still depressed from the bubble bursting. The bubble caused an explosion in mining
but when the bubble burst all that mining didn't burst with it. All those ASIC miners and GPUs
don't just disappear. At the same time more efficient miners continue to enter the market
adding more to the mining glut.

I only mine part time now when electricity is cheap.

I'm not a miner, but I've certainly read enough about it here and have seen tons of videos on Youtube.  My understanding is that even if you have free electricity, it would still take a long-ass time to recoup your investment on the required hardware.  That's if you're just starting off right now with no mining equipment.  Bitcoin is definitely not profitable for an individual to mine unless all the hardware is paid off and electricity is dirt cheap (Philipma1957 would probably say the same thing).

All of this is why I took an interest in proof-of-stake coins, which doesn't require anything other than a desktop computer in order to earn coins.  True, it's not real mining but I got into the game extremely late.  Wish I'd heard about and taken an interest in bitcoin years ago. 

Pardon my ignorance (which I freely admit), but what are you mining?

I'm mining beam with my NVIDIA, Eth with my AMD and ZEC with my z11s.

mining of coins decreases every time, and electricity rates are constantly rising. Draw your own conclusions, and I've already sold half of my farms

Cheap power is important but we are now in the overpriced gear stage.

I have about 910th in Btc
I have about   11gh in Ltc

My deal is 50/50 coin split.

And all the  the gear is just about paid off. 

But I can’t get new gear at a decent price.

We could add 40kwatt in gear bringing us to 150kwatts, but prices for new are too high.

We could also put in a second transformer and go to 350-400kwatts.

Unless bitcoin forks to a gpu algo (lol) or another ethereum hits, 2016-2017 levels of profitability are not coming back. There's also a ton of hardware now waiting on the sidelines to hash.

Also eth will go POS (soon :o ;D).

Pretty close to my thoughts.

Here is another way to look at it.

Bitmain was selling s9 for 3000 in dec 2017 when coins were 20000 and diff was 1.4


An s9 made 0.0024 btc a day and that was 48 dollars a day 3000/48 is about 60 day roi.

Now an s17 makes 0.0012 btc and that is 12 dollars a day. 3000/12 is about 250 day roi.

We are not close to December 2017.

Also 1 s9 burns 1300 watts
And 1 s17 burns 2225 watts.

Once you factor that in it is even worse then my 60 day to 250 day comparison.

More like 66 days if power is 8 cents for the s9 in 2017

And 414 days if power is 8 cents for the s17 in 2019

Basically gear is really over priced right now.

I’m have 110 kwatts running and 40 kwatts of idle power due to high priced gear.

We can go to 350-400 kwatts and we are not adding a transformer due to high priced gear.

Basically gear is 2x what it should be.

i have been slowly selling all of rigs and still have three rigs in my possession
i am going to sell them too in coming time as i really do not think that the mining burst is going to come soon
i think in two to three years we will definitely see another boom with new kind of mining on the rise too
but now i am just hoping that alts recover

Every quarter that goes by after Q4 2017, its getting harder and harder to sell gear for a decent price. I remember the days when you could sell an RX 470 on Craiglists in minutes. And now you make an ad for a RX 470 on Criaglists and its days before you get a reply and its usually a lowball offer offering 50% of your asking price.

Seems that gamers are very picky these days because they got lots of options. Many are mostly going for Nvidia's since its the gamers choice. And most gamers probably don't want to touch the RX series since most likely 80% of all the GPUs in existance were used to mine with.