The current price on feeBay in the U.S. for a used RTX 3060 is $430, while new ones are $450. That probably means you can buy them wholesale for $400. This isn't very far from the MSRP after considering the 8% inflation over the past year. I don't really think that price will go down further unless something happens to ETH.

Absolutely not. Do not buy an ASIC for ETH mining! They are usually the same price per Mh as video cards. Build a GPU rig instead, because it provides more flexibility on algorithms, and it will have higher resale value because you can sell the cards to gamers after ETH PoS. It's possible that your Innosilicon can drop in value by 80-90% after PoS, but video cards can only decline by 50% at worst. Power efficiency does not matter since video cards use very little energy compared to the revenue.

I met with another miner dude to consider starting a warehouse for hosting purposes. But after looking at the spreadsheets as well as the upfront cost required to upgrade a warehouse electric supply to 1MW, we realized it was an awful idea. Even if we charged customers 11 cents on a 12-month contract, making a profit would be very hard if the underlying power cost was 5-6 cents. It would take a year to pay off the initial $50-80k in startup costs. There would be no profit for 6-8 months as we would go through the long engineering process of getting a new transformer.

The only way to turn a profit quickly would be deceiving the customers, which was unacceptable. This is why I believe so many cloud mining / colocation farms cheat the customer. Both the host and the customer are locked into a certain wattage and cannot adjust efficiency or liquidate the equipment, even if they think the market will go down.

Better to go with GPU mining and invest all of that $50-80k into viiideoo cardz without having to rent a warehouse!

Personally I decided to focus on new business ideas instead of copying thousands of other miners with much deeper pockets.

Ngreedia blocked BIOS flashing from the Pascal generation onwards. You're out of luck unless you're willing to spend weeks reverse-engineering the BIOS dump. Trust me, I went down the rabbit hole to try to overclock my Tesla P100 cards by 30% in order to get 50 Mh on ETH.

Older Ngreedia video cards like the GTX 1060 3GB used to have this issue, too, where most got 22 Mh while others with Micron memory were 18 Mh.

Miners who are waiting for next-gen cards will be disappointed. But you're right about the newer cards being very useful to gamers because of the high TFLOPs. So if gamers currently are 60% of the buyers of the market and they're waiting, that would drive prices down.

I disagree, because the type of people who are interested in GPU mining tend to be either college kids who spend mommy's money or upper-class technology workers. These folks aren't affected by inflation. If a recession happens, they need to worry about the value of their real estate or stock shares going down more than their mining rigs. Cryptocurrency may be an inflation hedge.

I also want to add that the new generation of video cards from all three vendors (AyyMD, Shintel, Neeveeeedia) will not be more memory-efficient. They will only be more core-efficient, which is only important to gamers. Memory bandwidth will not be improved by much, therefore hashrate will only be 10% better at the same price point at best. Remember that they will use the same ole' GDDR6X memory, which is power hungry.

I only expect GPU prices to fall significantly (> 20%) at the low end of the market (below RTX 3070 gaming perf.) thanks to Intel's Arc Xe cards. High end video cards should remain stable in price.

After PoS, LHR will be obsolete because it only affects the Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm.

I am skeptical of the A2000 model because it only has 6GB of memory and may not support all algos in the future.

Prices of low-end cards will keep falling because of the Intel Xe Arc launch this summer. If I were to buy a low-end card for mining, I would choose the RTX 3060 12GB LHR or RX 6600 XT 8GB.

Even though we are still 20-30% over MSRP these days, I don't think right now is a bad time to buy GPUs, considering the < 350-day payback time on most models. Just be prepared to sell them in a few months if you think you can time PoS correctly.

That's what leaked specifications of the new generation indicate so far. I don't think the compute efficiency increase will lower ETH power consumption by much. For nVidia's current RTX 3080/3090 series, the power-hungry GRRD6X VRAM eats up a big share of the overall board TDP. That is the part that won't improve by much.

One more important point: according to leaked rumored specs, the new Intel Arc Xe series, GreedForce RTX 4000 and Radeon RX 7000 series will NOT deliver more memory bandwidth per dollar or much less wattage per GB/s. This means the new gen will not be more efficient for mining memory-hard algos (Ethash, Autolykos, Octopus, ...) than the current generation of cards. It will only be 10-20% more power efficient per GB/s.

The only buyers who will benefit from these cards will be gamers or if a core-intensive coin like RVN has a mining gold rush. So hold on to your existing cards.

You probably won't even be able to mine Monero profitably with CPU's. You should probably sell your little mini-datacenter on feeBay, then use the funds to buy a GPU rig.

Exactly. According to TPU, the top-end Arc 7 A780 model will have 560 GB/s of memory bandwidth for 200 watts. That is only 10-20% better than the RTX 3070, while the TFLOPs are 10% lower and it has the same wattage per TFLOP. So the ARC 780 should be comparable in price to a RTX 3070 or RX 6800 to gamers and miners alike.

The rumor mill seems to suggest that the lower-end Intel ARC cards will be available first, then the high end ones will follow. So I'm not bearish on video cards that are in the 3070 range or higher. Since prices have already fallen a lot since December, I expect a 10% decline at worst (if ETH price stays stagnant). The cards that would fall in price are the lower-end ones that gamers are desperate for. So don't buy current low-end cards! I stopped buying RTX 3060's.

As for Neeveeeedia's RTX 4000, it will take a long time to be launched. ETH PoS is a bigger concern than that. Even when Lovelace does arrive, it only offers 10% more VRAM bandwidth than the RTX 3080 12GB. So it will be uneconomical for mining regardless of the node or compute efficiency, even if you can get it down to 300w.

What about the AyyMD Rayydeon RX 7000 series? Same deal as the RTX 4090. Also AMD, being a smaller company, can only ship so much volume. So it shouldn't materially affect the market.

Here's my board view of the 2022 market



The new gen will have similar ETH hashrates as the old gen, but will be a lot more expensive because gamers care about TFLOPs. The only mining use case for them will be core-intensive algos like ProgPoW, FIRO or KawPow.

Then it seems that there are a lot of fools out there when it comes to mining.

I agree, I really look forward to the bear cycle in order to get cheap video cards.

Absolutely, I lived through those times. But it will be at least 6 months until that happens.

It heavily depends on how much free electricity is available. Let's assume I get unlimited power for free and I have 10 video cards that do 50 Mh each on ETH.

I would choose ZANO and SERO or FLUX.

I would just sell the cards. The only decent coin you can mine is ETC for 1 more month on Linux. You'll only get $0.40/day of revenue.

Assuming you get $125 in profit for each card on feeBay, you can buy two RTX 3060L's then mine ETH+CFX; or two Radeon RX 5700's or RX 6700 XT's.

They're going to be bought up by all the 12-year-old Fortnite kids, so prices will stay high. They will be inefficient per Mh. RTX 3000 series prices should not drop by more than 10%.

But the problem is these websites mislead newcomers into only caring about profit tomorrow. They don't have big bold red disclaimer text saying "Our calculations are only an estimate. Pay attention to the market value of your equipment".

If a newbie really wants to learn about the GPU mining market, they should create a feeBay account then look up historical GPU prices with the Terapeak seller tool. They should look at ETH revenue on Bitinfocharts over the past 5 years. I haven't seen a single mining calculator site put effort into taking account hardware price, let alone coin prices.

Yes, it's important only to buy video cards at the right time, which is usually after the price has been falling for a few weeks but the decline has slowed down. That's the situation we are in right now, which is why I want to buy more cards.

Dual mine Conflux at 75% power limit to get 85-95% the profit of the FHR version

You got it backwards. FHR video cards would fall more in value than LHR. In fact, this has already happened. Here are the historical eBay prices:

RTX 3080 10GB FHR


RTX 3080 10GB LHR


If you bought the FHR version on January 1st, you lost 50% in depreciation (-$1000). You made $529 of mining profit at free power. Total return: -23.6%

If you bought the LHR version on January 1st, you lost 43% in depreciation (-$750). You made $476 of mining profit at free power on ETH & CFX. Total return: -15.6%

With ETH+CFX dual mining, the LHR card would have made ~90% the profit of the FHR version while only being 87.5% of the price. I just looked at feeBay for today's prices on the RTX 3080 10GB card. The cheapest FHR model is $1130 while the cheapest LHR model is $890. Why pay 27% more only to get only 10-15% more ETH-only profit than the LHR version?

This is exactly why I stick to LHR cards these days, with the threat of PoS. I care most about gaming resale value, not getting an extra 10-15% revenue on only one algorithm (that may be gone before the year ends). The #1 most important factor in mining, especially GPU mining, is the price change of the equipment.