Bitcoin Forum

While mining cryptocurrencies can be profitable on the long run there are few things that's making things very hard for miners

1. OBSOLETE
Back in the days when mining was still very profitable I used to have very good GPUs then, like AMD HD7970 6x and it was very fun mining Monero and making good profits within a week but now its impossible and all these cards are useless, I was forced to sell and move on, the fact is GPUs become obsolete faster than Asic miners

2. Cost of Electricity
Most profits from miners now are for electricity fees, I still have friends that mine ETH and by month ending 70% of his profits goes to electricity, he is able to even earn that 30% because he has multiple mining setups

3. Dead GPU
Your GPU can die on you at any time, it happened to me and I was able to fix some but not all, mostly this happens because of heat or failed GPU fans

My conclusion is if you don't want to go through all of this its better you switch to POS ( Proof of Stake) that won't cost you any energy and worries, its all about buying coins and staking them, no hassle at all, the higher the quantities of your coins the higher your reward

This can easily be avoided by undervolting and improving cooling. Yes, not everyone has AC in the room where the miners are, but i've been able to keep my cards at 60c with fans at less than 50%, by just adding couple of cheap chineese fans on the frame.

That is also a big problem for many miners. They always complain about the price of electricity and machinery, once it does not work well, it costs a lot to repair it. But PoS also has its drawbacks, it seems to be for the guys with more money. For example, if you give $ 10 and your brother spends $ 100 for staking, then your brother is likely to handle blocks and will receive a reward in front of you. because this is like a betting system and everything has its risks, PoS is really only for the rich. So please think carefully between the two methods. If we can choose a place to sell electricity cheaply, we should choose PoW, at least we can still control our profits.

Both pos and pow have their own shortcomings and characteristics. POS allows centralized power monopoly, while POW results in wasted resources. However, both are still good. POS will not waste resources, POW will not suffer from these power concentration problems, and the two can be combined to produce more efficient algorithms. This keeps the cryptocurrency market moving forward.

Individuals input to mining had not been profitable since last few months and this makes miners be more trade minded. Profit wont come from trading coin immediately and I believe the approaching Halving prompted miners to understand how rigorous it would get. Every one needs to know how to maximise the bullrun even as a miner. Keep enough fund for the next 4-5 years to cater for the bills. We will always have miners and they know how they profit now.

Lol, are we revisiting 2014, some people are desperate. Private cloud servers are not a reliable, stable immutable data ledger.

Yes Proof of stake is all about more money but I can't compare its lower risk to Proof of work, POW has higher risks than POS, Cards can get burnt or died before you reach your return of investment, you have to be a tech savvy to setup your miners too

Returned of investment is not really realistic when it comes to mining and mining now is almost obsolete because companies prefer creating token on Binance or Etherum chain, one token or coin that I recommend to mine id IDENA you can mine it using your laptop you only need to validate every week by solving turing test go check IDENA.

There are many things to worry about when mining that's why I hate POW, even POS isn't that great too, you have to buy thousands of dollars worth of coins to hold for your reward to be bigger, most POS coins rewards are around 8-15 percent annually

No wounder they fail

A mining hardware would need to be multiple purpose or have other valuable purposes aside mining, before I may consider buying it... so that when mining becomes unprofitable, I switch to other things that are profitable. Maybe even allocate some of my miners power to mining, and the remaining to other profitable things.

The cost of electricity is the main problem for me, I'm good at keeping GPUs at 60°c always so cards don't die on my watch, in my country electricity is very costly so I don't bother to keep mining, I'm better off promoting new projects through bounties

Profits from mining also depends on the coin you are going to mine.

If you are going to mine ETH you will probably less reward due to the increased difficulty but you can mine other alts with less difficulty then convert them into ETH will probably gives you more ETH than direct mining.

Nice move, this is exactly what I love to do when mining, I like holding Monero in my coinomi wallet so all I do most time is mine other altcoins like LOKI and exchange for XMR, I got more XMR instead of directly mining XMR

I am not against proof of stake coins and can tell you that it is smart to have them if you do not want to work for your money, after all with proof of stake all you have to do is have money on your wallet and that's it, literally end of story. However the fact stands that miners are still making a profit, I mean sure all those three issues are very well true but that doesn't change the fact that it is still a business.

If the old cards become obsolete, then they buy the newer cards, if they spend 70% on electricity, they buy more cards with their 30% profits and increase the amount that 30% becomes, if their gpu dies they once again spend it on that 30% profit to buy more. Basically it may not be as profitable as it used to be but at the same time there is still a profit to be made from it as well, maybe less but it is still there.

Then you don't know what you are missing, it means you don't do research on the new coins before mining them, its just like looking for ICO or IEO projects to invest on, mining new coins can be profitable than old coins due to low difficulty

I think that PoW doesn´t fit to altcoins because they don´t have enough hashing power. But for Bitcoin it is the best consensus what we currently have and it fits perfectly for Bitcoin needs, so I hope that community won´t vote for switching to the PoS consensus.

You got it wrong, bitcoin has better hashing power because its the first coin ever, the fastest way for a coin to have hashrate is through mining, mining is profitable now only if you have enough money to build a mining farm and solar power

You can mine Monero with your CPU. Learn and ask more on moneromining subreddit https://old.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/

Problem with ASIC mining is that when your miner gets obsolete is worthless. CPU and GPU can always be used to mine something else or to use for something else.

Sorry but too much centralization in pos coins.  Yeah mining might not be ultra profitable and a get rich quick thing, it is certainly a good way to get yourself into the ecosystem and contributing positively to the coins ecosystem.  I've seen too many times where the top one percent own most of the coins in pos coins which will never work

Mining is profitable for users who can get free electricity through some schemes that are provided by the government for agriculture and for other industrial growth. Apart from this one needs good technical knowledge to make changes and change the coin to be mined according to the market conditions. Myself a sufferer investing on mining, I wasn't able to pay the electricity bill with what's been mined throughout the month.

Rather than investing into mining it is good to wait with patience and make use of the opportunity when the market drops low. Buying and holding at the lowest price will assure with bigger profit than profit made out of mining in small scale.

No its same thing with Asic miners, old Asic miners can still be used to mine new sha256 algorithm based coins and some Asic miners support other algorithm like cryptonight and Equihash based coins too and Asics always have higher hashrates than Graphics cards

If one has access to free electricity mining with old or new miners will make sense, most profits from mining this days got eaten up by electricity fees so if this can be avoided they mining will make sense,  just make sure you mine top coins or popular coins with good trading volume

One more fact. According to Jihan Wu (https://cryptogeek.info/en/blog/jihan-wu-investing-in-mining-is-more-profitable-than-just-buying-cryptocurrencies) (one of the Bitmain creators), these days investing in mining is more profitable than buying cryptocurrencies. Of course, he was talking about it to promote Bitmain products but still, there's a grain of sense in his words. He's not talking of mining as of using GPUs in a loss but as of serious investment, a business, not a hobby.

nice facts we have here  op  . i have heard the term obsolete for mining before but i forgot the idea that we can sell our gpu's which is cool because we can buy again a new model just to keep up to date on mining  . the electric cost is common and almost all newbies know that  . electric cost the one main reason why many people refrain from mining a coin  . the third one is the worst one because once your gpu died , that is literally called obsolete and you cant sell them for a good price

If someone decides to mine, he needs to calculate the electricity fee that he should pay every month, and he should know how much profit he can get from the mining. If many people mining the same coin, the difficulty can increase, and that makes the small hashrate power cannot get a nice profit than the big hashrate. The hardware itself will always come out with better technology that will support the mining process so people can still get a nice profit. So maybe that person needs to upgrade his hardware with the latest equipment, which has better technology so he can earn a bigger reward from the mining. But that will not be a good idea if he cannot make the profit from the mining.

Cryptocurrency mining, especially bitcoin, is one of the most rewarding way to acquire crypto before since the market was not yet saturated by many miners. But now it is a different story. With so many mining farms right now with powerful setup, it is impractical to compete with them. The cost of the setup, electricity, and the scarcity of the available bitcoins, makes mining less rewarding. Since then I have abandoned my mining setup and concentrated to day trading instead.