Well, well, well. Here were are 3 months later and we see who the real trolls are/were. My prediction, more of an expectation actually, proved to be pretty accurate.

The market has a ways to go before we see ATH's again. Look at 2013-2016 playbook, so far its been pretty much a carbon copy and I see no good reason for that to change anytime soon.

Anyway what I said previously still holds true. For all you mine and hold types who look at those online profit calculators to see if you are making money, if you held those coins until now you mined at a loss! If you are still doing this stop! Simply buy the coins outright and quit buying all that expensive mining gear.

This 100%.

Miners still need to feel the pain, too many are mining "at a loss", or at best breakeven, as they think the recovery is right around the corner and in 6 months we will be back at ATH. No, we will need the next year to find the true bottom and for the big boys to accumulate, and probably another year after that for prices to recover and start slowly climbing. This is basically the 2013-2016 playbook all over again.

I think the biggest problem most miners, and almost all traders, on here have is they are relatively small potatoes in the scheme of things. The big investors have plenty of capital and patience and they don't need the market to recover anytime soon to make their money. In fact they count on it to shake loose all those cheap coins from all the believers. Most of the believers or hodlers will need a good 2 years to shake loose the coins for them to lose faith and begin selling. Some of course will never sell, but the big boys know a lot of people will once their faith and beliefs in crypto's future have been shattered.

Anyway, as I said before to all those hanging on to mining equipment in the hope the recovery is just around the corner, you are better off unplugging your gear and selling off what you can than to wait it out. When mining does become profitable again, there will also be new equipment and GPUs that are a lot more efficient than your old gear, so even if you did keep it you would be at a disadvantage.

It probably has something to do with the fact you subscribe to the Warren Buffet “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” philosophy.

Also similar to Baron Rothschild's "the time to buy is when there's blood in the streets" mentality. Both men are famous for making their fortunes in the stock market, so probably good advice to follow.

Myself, I think the fear and blood levels are still a bit lower, but even if you are beginning to accumulate some coins now I don't think you will need to wait too long for at a minimum a relief rally.

Well if we break $100 ETH we will probably drop to $60 in short order. Altcoin mining is pretty much dead at this point, the only hope you can have is that the bottom get put in soon and the markets start to recover.

If you are a miner it is best to just turn off your rigs for now and see how the market reacts in the next month or two. Hopefully some of the bigger miners go bankrupt during this period to allow some of these coin difficulties to come back down to reasonable levels.

Here is a reason why not:

A 6x RX480 8 GB rig will earn $1.81 a day with free power. That is $0.30 per day, per GPU, of profit, again assuming you have zero electric costs.

Used RX480 8GB on eBay averaging around $120 (some cheaper some higher). That represents over a 400 day payback period just to earn your investment back before really starting to turn a profit.

Oh wait, I can already hear you say that the coin's price will recover by then making it a smart investment.

Well here is an idea, if the price is going to recover (probably well before the 400 days it would take to ROI on your used GPUs) why not just buy the coins outright, sit back and not worry about miners, electricity, heat, noise, etc., and profit?

Right now in today's market (may change in the future) it makes zero sense to invest in mining equipment even with free power. If you want to invest money, simply buy the coins.

Sure the prices may go down a bit more, but right now is the time to be thinking of buying coins. For less than the price of that used GPU ~$120 you can now buy a whole Ethereum coin, which would take you over one year to mine with the used GPU. I expect in the near future you may be able to pick up close to 2 ETH for that $120, so then would definitely be the time to jump in.

The super low coin prices will seem like everything is over but in reality they will represent the time of maximal opportunity. Opportunity that is for investing in coins directly, not in mining.

Also consider that sites like what-to-mine use the most optimistic projections possible, meaning your pool never runs into a bad streak of luck, your miners also never get into a slump for guessing shares, none of you rigs goes off for more than a minute, and on and on. Highly unrealistic and is usually estimating your income to be about 2-3% higher than it will be over the long term.

In any case, with an estimated profit at roughly 0.5 cents per GPU, it is not even worth considering. Even at 8 cent power with the unknowns and unseen overheads factored in, it is still a wash. People with 6 cent power may be desperately clinging to low profits, but in all cases except for the free power grabbers, I think most miners are now mining at a loss or in the best case barely breakeven conditions.

Well the way things are right now unless you have 6 cent power and no rent or other overhead, you are not making any money on any coins.

Using ETH as an example, at $130, I see 8 cent power is breakeven only figuring for power and already paid off rigs. In reality with pool fees, miner fees, pool luck, miner luck, reboot downtime, etc., it is probably closer to 7 cents power for a true breakeven, as the other 1 cent is for the (unseen by many) overhead costs.

So those continuing to mine in order to accumulate the coins for at or more than what you can buy them for at these levels is simply insane. Even at 6 cent power you are maybe making a whopping 60 cents per day for an entire 6x RX480 rig, or roughly 10 cents per GPU.

LOL, even an used $100 eBay GPUs will now need 1000 days to recoup their costs!!! Mining is dead!

Co-locations typically tack on administrative and rent fees on top of electric, thus bringing the final price difference to not too much cheaper than home mining unless you have very high power rates. But just for sake of argument, say you are  getting free electricity with no other costs involved, the revenue per day is still only around 75 cents per card, so it will still take 2 years just to pay off the card.

Of course in the real world there are always extra costs involved, even with free power you still need the rest of the rig to actually mine with, as well as time and effort maintaining the rig, watching for profitable coins to mine, etc. As far as tax deductions, sure they may help you pay less tax on your profit, but since current profits are basically zero, they will do nothing to increase your income. If you buy new equipment and mine all year and make close to nothing, your tax deduction is not going to help unless you are looking for a way to offset your other income. Even then there are much better ways to do this, preferably contributing the max into your retirement savings.

So really the only people where mining with new GPUs would make sense for right now actually are the gamers. Someone who is going to buy the card regardless of how much it makes in mining. That type of person can effectively get their card at a discount over its life by mining part-time (when not gaming) and not necessarily be worried about getting all their money back, but just offset some of what they paid is a bonus. Kids living at home or in a college dorm come to mind as they are usually the ones with so-called free electricity and they only need to worry about recouping the cost of the GPU (assuming they already had a mining capable PC).

So from a serious miner perspective, meaning one who is buying hardware solely to mine with, it makes no sense right now to invest in equipment. The only ones doing so are what I like to think of a speculative miners, who are maybe at best breaking even, or at worse mining at a loss, hoping that in the future coin prices recover and they can earn their money back. But at this point you are better off simply investing directly in the coin since it is now speculation on the coins future.

Well as he points out in the first minute he actually has the MSI Armor OC edition which as he states is "$30-40$ more". On NewEgg this card is currently listed for $550 (after rebate).

Putting his numbers 60 sols and 180 watts into What-to-mine today, he is netting around 30 cents per day. Just to pay off his investment of $550 will take over 1800 days (or 5 years), and even when he did the video at 60 cents a day profit it would have still taken over 900 days (or 2.5 years) to pay for his GPU, not including wear and tear on the rest of the system, fans failing, other components failing, etc. over that long period of time.

So yeah, pretty much no one really gives a damn anymore.

It might have been the mantra but that doesn't make it incorrect. The GPUs used back in 2012/2013 would have been very inefficient compared to the newer ones available in 2016/2017 when home mining made its comeback.

Sure if you hung on to your gear from 2012/2013 you would have made some additional profits in 2016/2017, but you would have made more money by selling your gear off back in 2014 when it still had value and with that money either bought coins directly when they were cheap or invested in newer cards in early 2016 when mining started becoming profitable again. Mining is cyclic which seems to take 4-5 years to work through the entire boom/bust phase, well GPU technology and efficiency changes quite a bit in those 4 to 5 years to expect your old hardware to compete when the new cycle hits.

So yes in 5 years we will be hearing the same thing and people will be home mining, but they will be mining with new GPUs not even available yet that will outperform your current cards by 2-3 times. I also say sell them off now while they still may have some worth and either save the money for new cards in 1-2 more years, or better yet just buy some coins outright while they are cheap and just hang on for the next cycle.

It is hard to directly compare mining Bitcoin to Ethereum, as while it it true that the BTC block reward halves every 210,000 blocks at least every BTC in existence was mined by miners. Ethereum started out with around 72 million coins and has since added 30 million more through mining.

So while further ETH block reward reductions will indeed limit inflation, it cannot be compared to Bitcoin's situation as only a bit less than a third of the Ethereum in existence came from direct mining. So it really comes as no surprise that Ethereum does not really care about mining as most of the investment in the coin came from private hands versus Bitcoin's more open and public approach.

Technically yes, but practically no. It is basically a GPU coin right now and has plenty of hashrate pointed at it to keep it that way.

OMG, this thread is still going? I cannot believe how hard of a concept this is to understand.

By mining you are buying the coin. The only difference is you are paying money to the electric company instead of an exchange for your coins.

So using your very own argument, you are spending REAL Fiat to buy electricity which in turn is used to mine assets that are going down every week.

The only difference is you are putting a extra layer into the buying process, mining.

Mining only makes sense when the cost to mine a coin is less than the going market rate, thus enabling you to obtain coins at a discount below market prices. Mining at a loss means you are paying above market prices for the coins you could get cheaper just by going to an exchange. What doesn't make sense about this, it is such a simple concept.

I never understood why people would mine at a loss. It is basically the same thing as paying more than the exchange rate for a coin. Simply buy the coin directly and save your money.

Unless buying from an exchange is not an option for you, but even then there are probably better ways to acquire coins rather than paying more in electricity than they are worth, not to mention the wear and tear on your rigs.

Totally False.

If you had sold all your GPUs one year ago (early Sept 2017), you would have been able to to buy coins at a price at, or lower than, what they are today (BTC was trading in the $2k region, ETH was trading almost exactly where we are now in low $200's). If you had bought coins and then sold at or near the highs which didn't come until December for BTC or January 2018 for ETH, you would have made way more than you could possibly mine in that same short time period. Also selling at the highs and re-buying now again at your original entry point, you would have not only made a ton of money, but also been able to buy back all your original coins. So no matter what you would have been in a better postillion than simply mining.

People who bought rigs one year ago and mined may have made a bit of profit during the run-up, possibly even paying off their gear, but they didn't make the equivalent to what someone who stuck to coins would have.

The only miners who really came out are the ones who were mining way before the start of 2017, when you could mine a block (5 ETH) every day or two with just one rig. So even people with a modest 3-4 rig setup were probably mining 10 ETH per day on average or 300 ETH per month. Yeah, they made out real well if they had the patience to wait it out and sell off near the top. Even selling at $1k per ETH would have made them a tasty $300,000 return on their 1 month pre-2017 mining. But miners just getting in mid-2017 the difficulty was already ramping up they might have had a month or two of profits, but that quickly dried up. Also the block reward reduction from 5 ETH to 3 ETH further put the pressure on profits.

You are welcome.

As you can probably see most people do not want to believe this so I really do not mind if you have doubt's. I am glad to see you will do further research as you should never rely on just one opinion, especially when it comes to finances.

I just throw the information out there to give people another point to consider to counter the 1000's of "it's going higher any day now" type of posts. Some people even claim I am a troll (lol), but I have found you are now simply called a troll for stating an opinion other than the one everyone wants to hear.

Well I guess we simply agree to disagree then. I try to stay away from saying things like it will never happen, and I don't claim to know what the exact new bottom will be, but using the 2013-2016 graphs as a model for what is happening now, I feel we have yet to hit the bottom in the current downtrend. Even ignoring the price totally, the lack of any significant trading volume shows this much. When volume returns then so will the bull market, but until then I fully expect a slow and steady market drip downward.

This is going to take more than a few months to play out and we have only just begun the shake out period. Yes institutional money will probably come in at some point and when it does rise again it will be quick, but these people are not fools and will want to buy in as cheap as possible. Expect some more months of that tree shaking price action before expecting a real recovery. All these temporary peaks and dips are just that tree shaking activity, and to loosen the most stubborn coins they will need to make some pretty big shakes yet, meaning some more big dips to try and convince everyone all is lost and they should sell now. I think we are overall on the same page, just have a difference of opinion on the price point.

I agree with the OP 100%.

Mining is in such a sh*t state right now, even if a legit miner came through with no dev fee, the extra 1 or 2% you might make will not make any meaningful difference, especially when you consider they are most likely a scam.

This is the time to be securing your coins and planning to hold on tight for the foreseeable future and not try to eek out a few extra cents by risking your machines and/or coins to some scammer. The get rich overnight days have come and gone and now getting rich is going to require a lot of patience as well as vigilance in making sure any coins you do have stay safe.

True, but I used to $152 as a low even if it did go lower to give you the benefit of the doubt on your 5x crash statement, if we go with $100 ($99) it would be closer to a 12x crash.


Yes, I did mis-type 2011 and indeed meant 2013. As far as the rest even if the price dropped to $100 for a few seconds it still represents a 12x decline from the high of $1200 (higher on some exchanges), but again I used a higher figure for the low anyway of $152 so it doesn't really matter. Even if we use the higher low value (which I did above) and assume only a 7.65X crash from the 2013 high, that model still puts us on a trajectory to a low somewhere around $2,500 - $3,000, again assuming we get a 7.65X crash.

No one is claiming to guess the exact dollar amount here, at least not me, but following the general trend from history we would still be looking for a low of roughly half of where we are at now to be closer to the true bottom. This is why even being generous I said it will go below $5k and may hit as low as $2k before truly hitting bottom. Even if that "hard" low is for a few seconds, the larger low trend somewhere below $5k will last much longer, probably several months before the bear trend reverses and we start to recover.

I agree there is no Mt Gox this time, if there were we would be looking to drop below $1k again, as until early 2017 that was still a high watermark for BTC to overcome for any significant period of time. So in that sense I am already padding the carnage to not be as bad as it was back then, and still think a $5k low is very optimistic with a $3k to $4k low being more likely.

I mean if you look at this from a totally zoomed out perspective, since we were all elated to see BTC go above $1,000 for the second time in early 2017, I do not think it is unrealistic to think that it could get down to $3k again, as that will still be a 3x gain in 24 months. Filtering out the 20K rise, which anyone should have known was a bubble, a $3k price at this stage of BTCs life cycle still represents tremendous gains in growth over its life. We just got used to seeing it too high due to the bubble so everyone expects it can't go that low, but again zoomed out $3k isn't really that low all things considered.

As a side note, while we don't have a Mt. Gox as stated above, there is the Tether questions still out there. If that were to prove to be in any way fraudulent we could indeed see sub $1k prices again. In all my assessments above I assume Tether will turn out fine, if not, look out below.

Well using Bitstamp pricing, simply because it was also around for the last boom/bust cycle, we had a previous ATH of $1,163 in Nov 2013. This was followed by a low of $152 set in January of 2015, occurring almost 14 months later. This would represent a 7.65 times crash, which a bit more than your 5 times statement. Using this 7.65X crash from the roughly $20,000 BTC high would put us around $2,614, so yeah I would say we have not bottomed yet according to history and still have some ways to go.

Also of note is the 14 months it took to get to the new low back then, so we will need to wait until around January or February to be of a relatively comparable time frame before putting in the new low.

I agree with your assessment that if someone held on to ETH from $1,400 until now it is probably not a good time to sell them unless you desperately need the money, but I don't think bears are clamoring for your coins quite yet. There is still more down to go, maybe not enough to risk putting in a big short portion, but definitely enough room to wait it out before buying in again.