I learned my lesson after that. I always save 50% of my mined coins and mine a variety of coins now. My hope is to mine at low diff for a year or two with ~100 cards at home and cheap 9-10¢ power, before the next bull market.

It is extremely difficult to set up a commercial mining site. Even renting a 3000SF warehouse for $1500/month is complicated. Getting insurance as well as upgrading the electric service are the hardest tasks. Most small warehouses in the U.S. only have 100 kW of capacity, which is enough for 500 video cards. Upgrading it to 1MW or so can take months. Good luck finding a place with decent capacity without having a ridiculous rent bill. Honestly it makes more sense to just buy a piece of land, set up sheds/containers, make sure the utility can service the land, then buy the equipment. The only benefit is the power cost will be 6-7¢ which is cheap for GPU mining.

I thought buying the video cards was the hardest part, until I saw how tough the world of commercial real estate is... Even during the height of the 2018 gold rush, I was able to procure hundreds of video cards easily as long as I offered the right price.

Gaming exerts heat/cooling cycles on the video card while mining is a stable 24/7 load. Gaming power usage is higher than mining for most coins. Heat cycles tend to crack solder joints over time, which is the most common reason a video card becomes defective.

But unfortunately, logic & reason does not matter to gamers, so they can continue experiencing higher failure rates.

GPU mining will never die, but the question is if/when we'll ever reach the profit levels of ETH. It's a high-risk bet, which is why there would be a very high reward, comparable to when I mined my first Ethers in mid-2016 and could've been a millionaire if I built another rig or two and held the Ethers. Imagine mining FLUX at current diff levels, then FLUX goes to $300. You effectively made $300/day per card, not just $0.75.

I would love a chance to buy cheap video cards. We haven't had that opportunity for 2 years. Crash or not, I will try to make a profit either way. This is why I don't dread August or PoS or Vitalik at all.

I will be going to the conference and I'll definitely visit your booth!

You probably should not buy a Bitmain S9 unless you have free power, or you think BTC price will go to > $100k this year.

There were never as many corporate mines 3-4 years ago as there are now. Corporations can easily raise capital to continue mining even when they can only pay the power cost. If they go bankrupt with Chapter 11, the ASICs will simply change ownership to the creditors while they stay on the network. These corp-o-miners won't be able to even afford the cost of ripping all those ASICs out of the wall, fire selling them (if they can even find large enough buyers), then reneging on their energy supply contracts, let alone the depreciation recapture. When a corporate mine is built, it will never ever get liquidated.

I don't think BTC price will ever fall below $10k, so in that case, Whinstone / Marathon will continue operating while smaller sub-megawatt farms with no ability to raise capital go out of business. Even 10MW or so multi-million dollar farms with private investors are struggling right now. The U.S. will host 70% of global hashrate and it will mostly be operated by corporate miners. It turns out the ability to get capital, which is where U.S. corporations have an edge, is more important than power cost now.

It probably isn't profitable because of the high fees Nicehack charges. Renting hashrate is no different from gambling on hitting a block with random luck.

Then be prepared to eat the extra power bill. Efficiency on non-ETH coins will matter very much because the longer you can absorb the losses, the longer you can survive during a bear market. The price of video cards is very important because if they are half the price, you can buy double the hashrate. The minimum standard for this bear market will be an RTX 3000 / RX 6000, and generations older than that will be obsolete for mining and 90% of those rigs will be liquidated to low-end gamers.

The prices of those video cards will crash far below their MSRP. In the last bear market, GPU prices were half of MSRP. I expect to see as dramatic of a crash this time, since twice the cards are on the network. The RX 570's that miners have used for years are going to be almost free.

It will essentially be a 'reset' back to 2019 conditions, where small coins like GRIN or RVN dominated GPU mining. I built a GTX 1060 rig for $140 per card, made $0.70/day of revenue mining GRIN, paid $0.25 for power cost, and saved the remaining $0.45. In 2 years, not only did I pay back the video cards 2-3x, but I sold them for $330 each.

However we'll be left in a complete world of uncertainty once ETH dies. We will only have FIRO, FLUX, ERG etc. left. There is no guarantee that any of these coins will become as big as ETH in market cap. But I will keep mining & HODLing in the hopes of another GPU boom.

Even during late 2018 the network difficulty only fell by 25%, which was probably the farms that had a power cost > 10¢. Diff grew exponentially even during the bear market of 2015-2017, when BTC price stayed stagnant.

Difficulty this year is expected to keep increasing as the corporate mega-miners start building farms in the gigawatt range, thanks to Giga Chad. That farm alone will be a 10-15% increase over current diff levels, assuming network power usage is 15 GW, and considering they'll use the newest generation of ASICs. He already has a 500MW farm and owns 6-7% of the network hashrate!

These mega-corps can afford to mine at a loss for years. What they want is the Bitcoin; they don't care about fiat power bills. So difficulty will keep growing at 3+%/month, even during a bear market! And that is probably only because mega miners have trouble getting switchgear & transformers delivered. If we had no supply issues, it would probably be 6-7%/month growth.

I heard a few non-powered hydroelectric dams in western Pennsylvania are being retrofitted with generators. 100MW in total. Wait until another corp-o-mine discovers this trapped energy source.

Whinstone or Marathon can probably keep operating at BTC prices as low as $12k, even though they have so many employees. However, their income statement would show a loss because it would account for the depreciation. I would think a medium-scale 1MW miner in the U.S. who pays 7 cent power can keep the doors open at $15k BTC or higher, even if they have a Bitmain S17 Pro, as long as they downclock it.

I looked at this graph. Bitcoin mining revenue never dropped below the power cost, assuming 5¢/kWh, even with a Bitmain S9j ASIC with downclocked firmware 11 Th/s @ 750w. Mining farms were able to scrape by during the 2019-2020 bear market, especially if they had a more efficient Whatsminer M20S or Antminer S15/17. They weren't able to pay off the equipment, but they could at least pay the power bill. If they couldn't pay the power bill, they would just shut down.

Transport layer buffer hardware defect:

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/blockchain-drivers/110847/21

No coin will be profitable after PoS. Revenue for an RTX 3080 might drop as low as $0.40/day at first, which is 6 to 7x less than today. No mining rig will even pay for the power cost. Miners will liquidate their rigs en masse, leading to dirt cheap GPU prices, like $500 for the RTX 3080 10G or $200 for the RTX 3060.

Revenue will recover after a few months to maybe $0.80/day, which is enough to make a small profit and pay off the RTX 3080 in 3-4 years. The get-rich-quick miners will leave, while the long term speculative HODL miners will stay. If another GPU coin like FIRO/ERG/FLUX becomes as big in market cap as ETH, these miners will make a killing.

Gamers are not crazy. If miners are liquidating RX 6800 cards for just $400, then suddenly the RX 6800 is a 'budget card'. Gamers who have been using old GTX 1070's or RX Vega's will sell their card and buy these cheap RX 6800 cards. DLSS doesn't matter when the raw performance of a RX 6800 can be had for just $400.

'AI tech' will only help sell the new generation, thus depressing prices for the older generations, which will hurt miners. It will be a huge feast for gamers while miners who bought these cards at inflated prices will suffer.

It depends on how much of the selling pressure comes from miners. If miners are most of the sellers of Bitcoin, then yes, they will never sell for below electricity cost, which should be around $10-$15k. However, speculators might sell for well below that. In that case, miners go bankrupt until hashrate declines to a point where mining is sustainable again.

You're right. No other GPU coin will match the sudden crash in block rewards. ETC doesn't count because it will become an ASIC coin.  We're left with pennies of profit, if any. Only speculative mining will make sense, like mining & HODLing FIRO/FLUX/ERG. But those who still mine could become rich if one of these GPU coins ever becomes big like ETH. I remember back when ETH price was just $10, difficulty was very low, and my R9 270 rig could produce 1-2 Ethers every week. Should've saved them! But anyway, that will be my bet.

I don't think the number of PC gamers in the world has doubled over the past 4 years. At best, 1.5-1.6x. Meanwhile, the number of video cards that are mining has more than doubled.

To make matters worse, they will flock to the RTX 4000/RX 7000 series because of the doubling of framerates. Only budget gamers will want used mining cards below the RX 6800 XT or RTX 3080.

I think the only miners who will buy these cheap cards will be those who believe in the long-term future of GPU mining, like me. The get-rich-quick miners who sell for fiat every day will be gone.

I think the lowest BTC price can go is $20k. I have started buying some of them. I'll save the rest of my cash for buying cheap video cards after PoS.

Energy prices should have no relationship with PoW or Bitcoin price. The number of coins being emitted is always the same. If electricity price increases, network hashrate will fall or grow slower. The only variable is the number of machines on the network.

Speculation determines the price of all coins. Hashrate follows price movements. If the price doubles, the hashrate will at least double, assuming block reward stays constant. We will probably reach a point in 10-20 years when BTC price is very stable, at say $2m, and mining becomes like any other business where the ROI is < 10%/year instead of 40-300% like today. Miners will only make 7¢/kWh while having to pay 5¢/kWh for power. 1.5¢ goes to paying for the equipment, 0.3¢ goes to employees, and the farm owner only gets 0.2¢ in the end.

By then we should have Antminer S39's that do 1500 Th/s each on an 800 picometer or so node.