Seems almost every second thread in the mining section has some new person discovering there is something called difficulty.

Basically the more people mine the less profit everyone gets. Since BTC was $50K last there were less miners of ETH on the network, so even if price is the same your profits won’t.

ETH is even more difficult to calculate profitability because most of the miner revenue from April was by transaction fees. Remember the days of 100 Gwei. Those were largely why you made so much. Less transactions and less profit. And now with London fork even more difficult to calculate profitability.

This is completely untrue.

The way it works is that hashrate and difficulty follow price usually one way and not necessarily the other way around.

When hashrate goes up before price, it doesn’t mean the price has to go up with a certain coin. There are times in the past when this happened but it doesn’t mean it will happen again in the future.

I think it was just a coincidence that there was new ASICS released and Bitcoin just happened to have a massive rally in the next few months like in 2017 and 2020.

I’ve been in crypto since 2013 years or so and most people whenever they hear that I’m an expert they ask me about mining. I explain to them how you need specific equipment such as ASICS and low power costs. When they find out you make so little they either think I’m lying or just they give up.

Bitcoin and crypto is associated with the whole “get rich quick” mentality. Because when you think of a Bitcoin investor you think of someone that is wealthy. And it’s true for those that mined back in the day with their old GPUs. However many don’t realize that there is something called difficulty and that it’s vert difficult for a new comer to make decent money with mining let alone “get rich quick” type of money. If it was this easy, everybody would be mining instead of working.

Your starting capital doesn't really matter that much. Most think it does and maybe the capital is more geared towards living expenses and food while you trade. However whether you start with $1000 in your balance or $10000, most likely your outcome will still be the same. If you don't know what you are doing you are going to lose that $1000 or $10000.

Plus these days most future platforms allow up to 100x leverage. So you can easily use 10x leverage with your $1000 and trade up to $10000 in sizes, the leverage is big but not that big where a 1 minute candle can liquidate you.

However you will see that its VERY difficult to stay profitable in this business. My advice start with $100 and if you manage to turn it into $1000 then perhaps trading might be for you. If not then start with another $100 and see if it works the second time. Trading is not easy as it seems.

The worst decision in the last year or so I would say must of been not getting involved with DeFI. There was tons and tons of money to be made with DeFI. First there were those tokens like UNI which you pretty much got for free for every address that you made some Uniswap trades on.

There were some other airdrops if you got involved in other DeFI projects. All the coins such as 1INCH and UNI were crazy profitable. UNI if you bought at launch you could of made like 10x your investment, same with 1INCH. I kept thinking this is just a fad and due to the high ETH fees it'll be like the ICOs during the 2017 days however I should of tried it out.

Now all the craze is in NFTs it seems.

Back in 2017 Bitcoin led most of the initial rallies then it was alts like ETH and XRP and then it all crashed together. What happened was people poured money into BTC and then sold that BTC not for fiat but for other alts like ETH and XRP. And then when the bubble popped they went back to fiat or tether.

This time it seems different. However the way it plays out might be as follows. Alts will lead for a while and then the money will go back into BTC and then the bubble will pop and it’ll come crashing down as people go for fiat and tether again.

You sure it’s only 140Watts? How did you measure? From the wall?

I ask because when I used to mine ETH with my 280x back in 2016, the speed was around 20mhs and power consumption was always around 200 watts.

With a 5 GPU rig it consumed about 1000 watts and this is with every GPU undervolted as low as it can possibly go. I would of loved to get 140 watts and 23mhs considering my RX series GPUs hash at like 28-29mhs and they consume 130-140 watts.

Seems a lot of people here aren’t aware of what exactly “difficulty” is.

Difficulty is something Satoshi introduced to keep the daily reward of BTC fixed. So if more miners joined the network the difficulty would go up and it would be equally more difficult to find a block against all the other miners.

Think of a pie. If there is 1 person who wants to eat the pie, he gets the entire thing. If 2 people want the pie then it gets divided exactly in half. If 100 people want the pie then each person gets a very tiny slice.

POW is the same. So sure they will be coins to mine. However if everyone switches to these low cap coins then there will be almost no profit to go around.

First of all ETH 2.0 is a few years away from going fully live and POS.

Second there is something called difficulty. The daily supply of a coin is fixed. When more miners join its equally split among them. Profits won’t be the same if ETH goes POS and everybody switches to that coin.

Third, hashrate follows price and not the other way around. Just because a coin has more hash doesn’t mean more people will buy it, even if it means it’s more secure due to the large hashrate it has behind it.

Why is it that whenever BTC is rallying we always get newbies here who want to mine with their mininum hardware such as a laptop, MacBook, 2 GPU rig and instead of being happy with making like $5/day they want to make like $15000 a month.

My friends are also like that. They want to get into mining, I tell them that you buy a $500 GPU and you make like $2 a day. They are like “$2 not enough I want at least $50 a day” and they basically give up because it’s not “get rich quick money”.

Yeah the worst GPU fans are probably Gigabyte. I'd had most of my Gigabyte GPUs with failing or almost failing fans. I used to buy them on Aliexpress however those new ones also failed. They had a very bad design because some of their models featured 3 fans per GPU and even those fans started to all fail and they were all under low loads.

I got so bad that I either basically slapped on a few case fans to cool the GPUs or I just took some dental floss, put it on the fan blades, pulled off the fan to see the bearing and lubricated it from time to time. Did it so many times that I managed to do this while the GPU is inside the rig and mounted vertically. Re oiling the fans made them good for another 90-365 days.

Yeah those fans are great. I used them before with an undervolted Antminer S3/S5 and it ran fairly quiet (not silent) compared to the stock fan. And surprisngly it pulled enough air to provide adequate cooling even if the room temp was fairly high.

The only reason why I didn't use more of them is because they are crazy expensive. And I looked at other brands of "silent" fans but none came close, there werent even any chinese clones which you could get cheaper.

Love the setup, very clean.

I think you meant "Funny how like last week almost everyone's bearish..." Read your post a few times until I finally got the typo. But I agree with you. Seems every week people are flipping back and forth. Right now everybody is bullish and if we get a slight pullback, everybody will be bearish expecting $30K again.

Its funny because we are almost over $50K however most of the people on crypto twitter, reddit and bitcointalk forum are very bearish. It either means they went short, or they sold all their crypto and want to buy back at a cheaper price. Because its strange to believe why all of a sudden everybody thinks bitcoin will crash any day now. Similar to how at $64K, everybody was saying we are going to $100K.

Its not the cost of ETH that determines what the price of a GPU is. Its the profitability. ETH can cost $2000 but difficulty can be 1/3 of what ETH at $3500 can be. Even if ETH hit $10K or so, people won't be buying the GPUs if they aren't making at least close to $5/day/GPU.

Don't know what it is but BTC almost hit $50K and it seems everybody in the mining section of bitcointalk is talking about a bear market. So I am wondering did all these miners already sell all their coins and they want a bear market or are they all going to be selling soon since there might be a bear market lurking around the corner. Makes it seems there are way too many bearish people while price is very bullish.

Here is my experience with Sapphire cards.

The really really old GPUS before 2013, where very solid built. I am talking about the Sapphire Radeon 7950 etc. Then in 2014 they had a bad batch of GPUs. The worst was the Sapphire Dual-X R9 280X. This card had faulty MOSFETs or something. Basically after mining for a few weeks, they all went up in a poof of smoke.

I think the Sapphire Triple Fan R9 280X was more solid built. Anyways the issue I had with the Dual-X was that if you want to RMA you need to ship it overseas. And if you want to RMA you need proof you are the original owner. They require the original bill of sale along with your RMA. Since I bought them second hand, I couldn't RMA any of them and they were all less than a year old.

Since then I never bought any Sapphire cards however I think the RX series and up were more solid built and didn't really hear of any issues with them.

I don't think GPUs will be that cheap if there is a crypto bear market. Back in 2014 and 2018 there was a crypto bear market and there were some "deals" you can get on some "dead" fan GPUs however there weren't any red flag deals to be honest. And 2021 is completely different because there is a chip shortage. So even if there is a bear market there will be a bunch of gamers that will be bidding heavily on any decent GPUs that get dumped onto the market.

Unless the chip shortage ends and who knows when it will end due to 4th covid wave, I don't see any cheap GPUs deal with a bear market or not. GPUs have many uses unlike ASICs. People buy them for rendering, gaming, data analysis, etc. They have many uses these days. Hence always keep a decent value over time.

Back in 2014 there was a forum called Litecointalk. Basically like Bitcointalk except for Litecoin. There was a very popular and long thread there called "My huge mining farm". (or something of similar name).

Some guy started to mine in late 2013 litecoins with GPUs. He started with 1 GPU, and made a profit and was like "Wow, if I had another GPU, I would make twice the profit". So he got another GPU, then another, then another, then he had an entire rig. Then a month later, he got another rig, then another. Then he was mining with like 30-50 GPUs in his garage.

I think he earned like $5/day/GPU. So he was netting like $250 a day however he would mine Dogecoin OR some new POW coin and there were days when he made like $500+. He quit his job and everything.

Then he wanted more...

He basically was reinvesting all his profits and kept buying more and more GPUs at slightly higher inflated GPU prices. Not only that I think he got his cousin or brother involved also by borrowing his money.

Then the bubble went pop.... in Nov 2013.

As each month went on the profitability was less and less. Basically each month the profits halved. So instead of $5/day/GPU, he made $2.50, then $1.25, then $0.62, etc, etc. Eventually it got to the point where he was breaking even with electricity and no point in mining. Issue was he maxed out his credit card and was being charged interest. So he had to sell his GPUs. He ended up selling many of his GPUs at very low prices on eBay, especially ones with damaged fans. He stopped replying on the board and no idea if he got out of crypto all together or not.

Maybe someone here remembers that guy....

I was around in 2018 and I remember that at the beginning of the year, the 1080Ti which was suppose to retail for $700 or so was being marked up to around $1000-$1100 or so. We were calling people "nuts" for paying $1000 for a $600 GPU. I am pretty sure it never was being flipped for $3000. The bear market came VERY quick and people got cautious very quickly. Then perhaps on eBay you could of found some 1080Ti for around $400 or so.

Was similar in 2014, the R9 280X which was the popular mining GPU back then was retailing for $300 or so. Surprisngly there wasn't too many people flipping those GPUs. However a year later I remember selling a few of those for almost half of what I paid for them. Maybe $150 or so. Same with the R9 270X gpus of the time.

So you can say it might be worth only 50% of MSRP, not of a scalper price. However with the chip shortage going around. No idea if that will be the case this time. In 2014 and 2018 there was no chip shortage.

Its funny because I was asking myself this question back in Spring of 2016, "should I buy more GPUs since ETH is going POS in Summer 2016" and its been 5 years and technically still no POS. The point is that the devs are always late for their deadlines. It will be a few years before ETH POS is fully live. You got bigger issues right now to worry about.

First is obviously the lack of supply and high GPU prices. Second is the new ASICs coming out which will make difficulty even higher. Third is the price of ETH. There are many factors to consider. There is always going to be some form of risk. You don't want to invest $10000 in GPUs and then have to sell them on eBay for $5000. A loss is a loss. 

And you are right. Those other PoW GPU mineable coins don't have enough miner revenue for all GPU owners to be happy. They obviously won't be a situable replacement.

Maybe I am out of the loop, however I don't see any meme coins pumping lately. Last meme coin were all those dogecoin clones like Shiba which all have died down right now. Right now its mostly mid-cap type of coins rallying like AXS, SOL, AVAX, ATOM, etc. These are not meme coins at all.

Obviously its never a good idea to hold a meme coin for long. However look at what happened to Doge. I sold it at like 45 Sats and it ended up peaking at over 1200 Sats. So obviously it would of been better to hold that meme coin because I would of made 20x more profit. So sometimes there is an advantage to holding something very volatile, it might crash upwards and make your multiples of $ rather than selling for small profit.