It's Over
Graphic card stores are now panicking because many GPUs are flooding the market and they feel at loss because no one is buying them and the old GPUs they have in stores can't be sold at high price like before, I pity them though since they bought them out the country and can't sell, no one is willing to buy right now in my country, it is what it is.
Hooray!Time to load up on GPUs since you are guaranteed 6 months of mining before ETH PoS, if it happens this year. I don't think the cards will drop more in value over 6 months than the profit you'll make. |
|
|
|
|
I avoid Nicehash because they charge high fees and they have behaved unethically when it comes to 51% attacks.
You will learn a lot more by downloading lolMiner or T-rex or Gminer then configuring the pool yourself. You could also use Minerstat, which has a Windows version.
|
|
|
|
|
What about Minerstat? It has a decent alert feature. The price is $1.50/month per rig if you have multiple rigs & choose a 6-month subscription. That isn't too bad considering Minerstat has profit switching and is superior to SMOS.
|
|
|
|
|
If you want to start mining, I recommend GPU mining. It's cheaper to get started and electricity cost doesn't matter. There's an Altcoin board on this forum.
|
|
|
|
.....
Calculators are very precise for that current date and time, anything else the calculator or people assume will never be precise because nobody knows the future. Actually, mining calculators can be wrong even for a 24-hour period. Difficulty on some coins such as FLUX can fluctuate by +/- 40% in a matter of hours. In these cases, profit switching is essential. The key is % of power cost to ⛏ income.
I try to choose a balance between efficiency and cost per Mh. That's why I like the RTX 3060 LHR cards. They can do 44 Mh combined at 140w for just $430 each. The Radeons are a one-trick pony that can only do ETH well. Higher end LHR has thermal pad issues. |
|
|
|
Hmm I think this makes sense, no matter how profitable a pool is you can end up getting better results on other pool that your calculator said to be less profitable than the first pool, I am well pleased with Viabtc no matter what calculators are saying, I have tested many pools and Viabtc gives me better result.
You are right that pools can make a small difference... but my point relates to the elephant in the room that most newbie miners can't see: resale value. Miners are far more likely to win in the end if they buy cheap cards during a bear market than buy expensive cards even early on in a bull market. |
|
|
|
Only problem is I don't like selling stuff because I'm always being talked down. If I sell my six GPUs, someone will lowball me. I hate that. I sold a razor phone and the buyer gave a sob story and said it was for a senior to call 911. I tried to be firm at $50, but they kept to their sob story and only offer $30 and there were no other buyers. This is common on craigslist/ebay.
If you know what the market value of an item is, then offer it at a fixed price. No need to argue over sob stories with the buyer. Continue mining until somebody buys the card or rig. Selling is not easy, especially in bulk; but seeing the value of your card drop from $350 to $200 overnight is much worse, let alone when I suffered a $370 to $90 crash in 2018. I price in a 15% loss when I sell anything due to either 8-9% feeBay fees or the time I spend. If ETH can still be this profitable after all those millions of Asic miners around the world then its possible that other PoW coins will continue from where ETH left off, its only a matter of time, once every coins are worthless to mine the difficulty will start reducing, this is where I will get in.
I don't think ASICs are more than 30% of the nethash for ETH. Even if they are, the price of the ASICs is so high that building a GPU rig is better. You are right that it will take 'a matter of time' for a new GPU gold rush, but be prepared to make zero daily profit for up to 3 years while you wait and your rig depreciates by 20-30% per year. If there is a gold rush, your rig doubles or triples in value while the coins you HODL'd go up 3-10x. I would also only speculatively mine coins that are cheaper to mine than just mining the most profitable coin, then trading it for the coin you want. Usually it's cheaper and more convenient to just mine the best coin, then invest the proceeds into a portfolio of speculative coins. |
|
|
|
I've been a GPU miner since 2013. Here are 4 different times when I built rigs for mining Ethereum. Power cost was 10 cents. - Late 2017: $220/card (RX 570 4G), 100-125% ROI
- Early 2018: $370/card (RX 570 4G), -50% ROI
- Early 2019: $140/card (GTX 1060 6G), 400%+ ROI
- Late 2021: $1300/card (RTX 3080L), 20% ROI
Here is what the mining calculators said: - Late 2017: 400-500 days for payback
- Early 2018: 300 days for payback
- Early 2019: 600-700 days for payback
- Late 2021: 300-400 days for payback
What happened? The case in which I made the most profit was when Whattomine said it was the least profitable. When Whattomine showed rosy projections of payback in 1 year, I made the least profit. The most important factor in profit, especially for GPU mining, is buying the equipment for a reasonable price, then selling it for a reasonable price later. I think $425 for an RTX 3060 today is a decent price, considering PoS has been pushed back. Beware that the price was $600 just 2-3 months ago! There is no way anybody made $175 of mining profit in the last 3 months, even with free power. So don't blindly trust the calculators! |
|
|
|
|
Screw HiveOS or SMOS. Minerstat is far superior. The monthly fee is reasonable and includes bulk discounts. Minerstat has good profit switching / dual mining support as well, not to mention rich APIs. I'm not a paid shill; I've used Minerstat for months on multiple rigs.
|
|
|
|
|
Be careful with air compressors because if you blow air on the fans, they can spin at 50000 RPM then the power surge will fry the fan controller.
You should turn off the unit, then unscrew the fans before cleaning it. The only exception is for GPUs, where removing the fans is unnecessary. Also, check for fallen heatsinks, debris, corrosion or other issues inside the hashboards.
|
|
|
|
Besides, Etthereum, what coin should I mine after the merge? I get free power.
You have two options. 1: Wait until AFTER the ETH PoS merge. Wait until video card prices crash as miners go out of business then liquidate their rigs. Then buy cheap RTX 3060's for $200-250 each or RX 6800's for $300-400. With free power, you will probably make a 20%-50% per year return; then hopefully when the next GPU coin gold rush happens, you can make a 200-400% return in a year. 2: Buy video cards now and mine on them, hoping to sell them off right before the PoS merge. You're taking a risk with timing. However, PoS should take at least 6 months. Returns in today's market can be up to 300% at free power. You can combine both these options as well. What I plan to do is mine for the next few months, liquidate, then buy back 3x as many cards after the PoS aftermath is over. Switching over to a different coin after PoS will not work, because the resale value of your GPU will collapse overnight. You must liquidate before GPU prices crash! Anyone using this strategy with 4GB cards?.
Those days are long gone. Mine ERG, ETC, FLUX or the best coin for the hardware. Beware that after ETH PoS, all the ETH ASICs like the Innosilicon A10 / Bitmain E9 will be mining ETC/ZIL/MTP/QKC. Your GPU will be competing against ASICs which have no other choice, so expect to make 10x less revenue than you can these days. BTW, folks who bought ETH ASICs today will be the bagholders if PoS happens in less than a year. Imagine the value of an Innosilicon A10 Pro 750Mh miner plummeting from $14k to just $2k. They'll never get their money back even if ETH is $5000! |
|
|
|
Do you have two power supplies available? Get Add2PSU If your power supply is single but have less 6pins or 8pins get adapters online but make sure the POwer supply have enough wattage power to handle all the graphic cards.  There are alternatives like Antec's 'OC Link' as well, where you can connect two SP1000 or SP1300 units. But personally, I like using a 400w ATX PSU to power the system parts, then power the video cards with HP or Dell server supplies. The server PSUs are always 80+ Gold or higher (90%+ on 240v @ 80% load), they're reliable, and they are cheap per watt. The only downside can be the 40mm screamer fan noise if you load the PSU at > 80%. So for the HP DPS-750RB, I keep it below 600 watts for max efficiency and low noise. It isn't louder than the video cards. Rebooting isn't a problem if you power the ATX PSU with a smart Wi-Fi 120v outlet for no more than $15. |
|
|
|
|
This isn't possible. The chips are hardwired to do SHA-256. You can't mine any other algorithm even if you rewrite the firmware from scratch.
|
|
|
|
Buying different batches might be a good idea, but not in the way you mentioned, batches come out in quantities of thousands, usually monthly, so buying from different people does not mean you will get a different batch, they could all have bought that one bad batch you were trying to avoid.
Usually, the first a few batches are the worst, when a few months have passed and the manufacturer starts getting a ton of warranty repair tickets, they "might" fix what seems to be the issue, but then missing the first batch might also mean paying a lot more for the same miner, it's pretty hard to time this, luck is a major factor.
In that case I guess a decent strategy is to never buy a miner that has just been released onto the market. Always buy a model that has been in production for at least 1 year, whether it's new or used. Avoid the new Whatsminer M50S, Bitmain S19 XP or I also remember buying an early batch of S9k where I got miners without heatsinks attached, the heatsinks were sitting in the case doing nothing, it seems like they forgot to heat the thermal  , on the other hand, I recall Phill got a different batch that arrived in good shape and worked for a while (not sure about the current status). Imagine what would happen if a manufacturer like ASUS or EVGA or Sapphire had a heatsink or solder ball issue on even 5-10% of the units. There would be mass outrage among gamers and they would go bankrupt. Looks like ASIC companies can get away with murder for whatever reason, while GPU companies build stuff that is meant to last... So ya, it's just a mess, very hard to predict and it's part of the risk you have to take when you are looking at a business than can get you a 1-2 year ROI, I highly doubt that even drug dealers have such a short projected ROI, , this is why when you invest in mining, you can win big just in the same way you can lose big, it's a very risky business, especially for those who are just starting, I always tell the majority of people NOT to invest in mining, at least not before knowing the full story, because things look pretty damn good on paper, you go to an online calculator and think to yourself that you will get your money back in 6 months, reinvest and double your hashrate in 3 months, get that many PH worths of hashrate and start making 10k a month while doing nothing, it's exactly how things look like in an excel sheet like the one you made, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The funny part is that I used to know a 'former drug dealer' who got into mining during the 2017-2018 gold rush, buying dozens of video cards because he thought ETH profit was so great. Then he quit after ETH crashed, then probably went back to selling drugs for a while. So you're probably not exaggerating. The mining 'calculators' are complete garbage because the market constantly reacts to difficulty & price changes. No spreadsheet I can make is much better than that, because the best I can do is account for different costs and BTC price levels. Such spreadsheets are useless for the #1 most important factor for profit; which is the price and reliability of the equipment, which is the hardest one to predict. I used to think the electricity rate was more important, until I did the math. I realized a 10 cent farm can easily beat a 3 cent farm if their timing is better by just 3-4 months. That's exactly what happened to me in the past. The rigs I built in late 2017 for $200/card did well, the rigs I built in early 2018 at $370/card were total losses, and the rig I built in early 2019 for $140/card returned 4x my money back. Of course, the 'all-knowing' mining Whattomine said early 2018 was the most profitable while early 2019 was a bad time to invest. That's when I figured out mining calculators were garbage. After all this research, I have decided to stick to GPU mining for now. If I build a warehouse, it will be mostly for GPU rigs. Now I don't even need to move to Texas since saving 1-2 cents on power isn't important for GPU mining. I think it's a good time to build GPU rigs since video card prices are relatively low and PoS has been delayed (to Q3 at the earliest). If you think many folks entering ASIC mining who just look at the calculator sites are useless... you don't want to know how stupid some of the GPU miners can be. The #1 biggest mistake is mining ETH on every single model of video card all the time, yet 90% of miners do that. These people don't harness the true power of GPUs, which is that they are Swiss army knives that can mine on 100 different algo's and switch in a few seconds. IMO, the stupidest investment these days is to buy Ethereum ASICs. Why pay the same price per MH as GPUs when you have to deal with 20% failure rates instead of 1-2%, then take a huge risk with resale value? If something happens to ETH, you're screwed, since you can't even sell it to a gamer; let alone mine another algo. "Bbbuuuttt the Antminer E9 is 3x as efficient as an AMD RX 6800!" Power cost hardly matters for GPU mining, dummy! Yet I see so many used Antminer E3's and Innosilicon A10's being sold on feeBay. Those suckers will never get their $ back even if PoS takes 12 months and ETH is $5000. |
|
|
|
|
$600 is definitely an attractive price, but the problem is reliability. I've seen so many of these mining motherboards die compared to mainstream gaming motherboards. The other issue is resale value. Would I buy this product? Probably only if I owned a farm with at least 20 rigs.
It would be great if you sold a rackmount bracket with rails for this box and sized it as a 4U case. That would allow me to colocate this rig in a datacenter.
|
|
|
|
RTX3090s have no LHR lock 🔑
The problem is this GPU is hard to cool down once the factory thermal pads are not strong anymore, if this is purchased by a newbie there will be problem about high temp later and newbies might not be able to fix them, its hard to cool a RTX 3080 and 3090s, go with 6700XT like FP91G said or RTX A2000.
The biggest problem is it's overpriced. Get the RTX 3080L 12GB or RTX 3060L 12GB instead. That's where you will maximize profit:equipment price. |
|
|
|
That's probably because people know that rx580 graphic cards will be the cheapest of them all once merge on Eth is activated, that gpu is getting older every day but still capable, now that we have awesome AMD gpu like 6600XT I wonder why people will leave this for RX580s.
Correct. Efficiency will become the king again. GreedForce RTX 3000 cards, especially the LHR ones, will hold their value the best. Not a bad deal considering the LHR cards are still a bit cheaper for the same profit, as long as you run dual mining. I think that after ETH PoS, these will be the numbers for an RTX 3080: Cost of an RTX 3080 (after tax) w/system parts + cooling + utilities: $350 Revenue for an RTX 3080: $0.90/day yearly average (range: $0.70-$1.10/day) Power cost after tax @ 7¢/kWh: $0.27 Depreciation @ 30%/year: $0.35 Net income: $0.28/day for 360 days = 33%/year return If you sell as little coins as possible (to cover rent/power) and HODL the rest, you could make a 300-800% ROI if another GPU gold rush happens in a year or two. You could then sell most of the video cards too. At least these were how the numbers worked out during the 2019-2020 bear market. |
|
|
|
I can go on forever, but I think I need not, it's plain simple, GPUs are more reliable than ASICs by an order of magnitude, nobody in their right mind should assume that the quality of both is similar in any way, shape or form.
Wow, that's a lot of good information. I think you made a good point about bad batches of ASICs, where one batch can have a 50% failure rate but other batches have hardly any issues. I would guess a way to mitigate this luck effect is to buy small amounts of miners at a time from different places (ex. feeBay, Reddit Minerswap, or this forum). But they'll probably be more expensive in smaller quantities. I do have a question about the failure curve. Is it a 'bathtub curve', like with hard drives, where lots of miners die in the first 4-6 months, but after a year, the survivors last for years before they eventually die of old age? Or is the curve more linear, where a small number die consistently every month? The reason I'm asking is that if I bought T19 units that have been fully working for 1 year, are they going to have a lower failure rate than if I bought brand new T19's? Yeah, GPUs can be extremely reliable after even 10 years of mining especially with the low-power algorithms after 2016. Even during the high power Bitcoin/Litecoin/Doge days, the failure rate was < 5%. Warranties are honored 90% of the time for free, and repair service is quick. The other rig components are almost as durable, as long as you don't buy some cheap knock-off mining MOBO from Chyyna. I prefer 'gaming' MOBOs because they have better resale value even if I can only attach 8-10 GPUs instead of 12. The power supplies for GPU rigs, whether they're gaming ATX supplies or server ones, are built to last long as long as it's a mainstream brand. They have all kinds of safety protections. Efficiency is usually as good as the ASIC PSUs. |
|
|
|
|
Can Phoenix Miner dual-mine ETH+Conflux like T-rex can? This would be a very useful feature on LHR video cards with 12GB+ of VRAM, since I can make 5-10% more mining both than mining either ETH or CFX alone on my RTX 3060's or RTX 3080 Ti.
|
|
|
|
|
Back in 2016 when I first installed the official ETH wallet onto my computer, I had to specify a password for encrypting-decrypting the keystore file. So yes, you probably need the password. Always back up the keystore file, which should be located in `C:\Users\x\AppData\Local\Ethereum\" or something like that.
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
