I do have my own private long term TA, but in short just look at the long term chart pattern. We are still very much in a bear market and only see low volume anytime we do get a small uptick in price. Still a long ways to go down yet in my opinion and it will take time to fully play out.

The parallels to the 2013/2014 BTC boom and subsequent crash to what is happening now is so close it is almost spooky. The way I figure BTC was trading close to or just under $100 for much of 2011, with a previous ATH of ~$270 set in April of that same year. After the run-up to ~$1,200 we took several months to drop down to a $100 low before bouncing a little and averaging out in the $200 to $300 range for much of 2015, which took about 11 months to find bottom then another 10-11 months to stabilize and begin climbing in earnest.

The current pattern very much fits this model and I predict the bottom to take a similar amount of time to be found (11-12 months ) or roughly December 2018 to January 2019. If we find the new low somewhere near the previous ATH high ($1,200), much like last time this would put us somewhere in the $1,200 range before rising again to somewhere in the $2k - $3k range to ride out much of the rest of 2019. I fully expect it to take a good 2 years before we start climbing again and looking for a real bull trend.

So even with a generous dose of "it won't be as bad this time around", a low around the $5k mark would "only" represent a optimistic 75% decline versus the more realistic 90% decline like we seen last time which would put us closer to the $2k value. So with either scenario, coin prices are heading lower making today's values look relatively expensive in comparison.

Since the original post was more about mining than trading, I will get back to my main point about how unwise it is right now to invest in mining gear to mine coins that will very soon become much cheaper to buy outright that it is to pay electric, along with hardware depreciation, etc. to mine them at a loss. Too many people think we are close to, or already have, found the bottom and the bulls will return any day, but other than forum posts from people hopeful that this is the case, there is 0 evidence it is about to occur anytime soon.

This is not what you want to hear but mining is dead, at least for the short-term (next 12 months or so). Any investment in mining gear right now is going to cause you and your investor to take a one way trip to Rekt City.

The bear market is not done yet. BTC WILL drop under 5k, probably down to under 2K before this is all said and done. Ethereum will hit under $100 before finding stability, and it might even do a quick drop to $50 or so first.

All of these posts of "I am breaking even so will continue to mine and hold" is simply delusional thinking, as once your breakeven point fails, all the mined coins you thought you mined at a profit are actually now underwater as well. You would have been better off waiting awhile and buying coins outright in a few more months at a discount.

I do believe crypto will recover, at least some of the bigger and more promising coins, but many of the alts will also slowly become worthless and disappear completely. Be careful of what coins you buy as next time the "sure thing" feeling will be over as many people have been burned now and will be a lot more hesitant the next time around and not just pour money into all the "me-too" coins.

I would say mid-2019 would be the time to start looking at promising coins again and mining under the radar, keeping it simple at first. I would expect 2020 to be the year crypto is taken seriously again and seeing meteoric rises like we did in 2017, but again not every coin is going to take the rocket-ship to the moon, so you need to really look past the fluff and research what coins you want to get into and have an actual use case.

Yes, ProgPoW is the best we currently have against ASICs and while nothing is truly ASIC proof it would buy a significant amount of time to hold off massive ASIC farms until further improvements can be developed.

I feel the real reason most of these teams are deciding against making any changes to the algo is lack of knowledge in the area. As much as they spout off about how great their version of a copy/paste coin is from its derived parent, they really have little to no real coding skills.

It is fairly trivial for anyone with even a passing interest in programming to copy/paste a coin's code from Github and create their own derivative from it. Simple name changes and adjusting a few well understood parameters means you can superficially create a new coin, but at its heart it is still chained to its parent code base.

I myself have created about a half dozen workable forks from various coins simply for learning and experimenting, and could have easily launched yet another worthless shitcoin to the world if I had wanted. Most of these similar types of coins will update their code only once the parent code base is modified for any non-superficial changes.

For real changes such as modifying the underlying mining algo, requires a much deeper understanding and also breaks them away from their safety line of being just able to fork from the main parent anytime a significant security or other change is required.

Anyway, I have personally began to sell off and limit my exposure to many of these me-too coins, Zencash included, as I really do not see a future for them once the initial euphoria has wore off, and I think the euphoria is running out fast with the current bear market. Once the overall crypto market does recover, I think the only coins that will significantly rise again will be the unique or main coins, BTC, ETH, ZEC, Monero, etc and all of the clones will stay at low prices and eventually become worthless as they bring no real meaningful contribution to the space.

About 2 more years left, but yeah once the founders reward period is over it will be interesting to see if any of the Devs actually stick around or will they have made enough money by then to move on to the next scam project.

I mined ZEC early on but sold most of it when it was skyrocketing around $800. I still got a small amount I will hold "cause you never know", but for the most part I am done with it due to 20% of the coins being siphoned off during founder reward period and now the going back on one of their founding principles (ASIC resistance). I now feel it is only a matter of time before they start going back on other promises as well, and/or just bail completely once their income stream dries up.

As the other's have already pointed out the difficulty has never been higher.

The day-to-day variance you may be looking at is normal and unless it would drop significantly, like to pre-February levels, those minor daily fluctuations mean nothing. The end of this month it will only get worse once the ASICs start shipping.

Also don't count on ETHs price to rally anytime soon. This current rise is but a small relief rally in the already several month's long bear trend, prepare to see ETH drop well under $400 again before we see any meaningful long term rise.

Considering that rig new would cost about $6500 in parts, the 1950X cpu alone costs $950, and figure $350 for the mobo, and about $750 each for the 6 1080TI boards ($4500 for all 6), and at least another $500 for the PSUs, RAM, SSD and cooler, I very much doubt the seller would let it go for $3500 the poster above me quoted you.

Even if the seller is desperate he can part it out and sell it off to gamers and still fetch $6k plus for the components separately, so I think that is about the price you will be looking at. Anyway, that seems to be too way much rig for general mining and I think you would be very hard pressed to earn your money back in any reasonable time-frame. The great GPU sell-off has yet to begin, wait another month or two and I think even at new prices you would get a much better bargain.

Good catch. Either Metroid's account was hacked and someone else posted this or the situation he paints is so grim and dire that even he cannot manage to make light of the situation any longer.

You failed to also account for the rise in mining difficulty. Even if the coins price stayed the same or even edged up a bit over the one year you projected, the difficulty would continue to rise so you would mine fewer coins each month, thus reducing your income.

With the rapid introduction of ASICs to most every algorithm and considering how fast ASICs are replaced and older ones become obsolete, also thinking you will continue making $50k each subsequent year is another false assumption. In today's mining world $50k of ASICs bought today would most likely need to be replaced by $50k of newer ASICs next year and so on, thus your profits will be very slim in between upgrade cycles.

If your calculations were solely based on using GPUs, with the Z9's out now and the E3's launching next month, GPU profitability will be next to nothing very soon. I predict by September the used GPU market will be swamped. So under either scenarios, GPU based, or ASIC based mining, the days of thinking you will ROI in one year and enjoy subsequent years of profit with paid off hardware are over.

It is likely pressure from both fronts, as Equihash miners are now switching over to ASICs freeing up their GPUs to mine other coins, which right now mainly means moving to ETH. Also, the Antminer E3 is due to ship in late July, but I bet some are already starting to trickle out to large farms or other well-connected miners ahead of time, thus also driving up the hashrate.

Combined with the current downtrend in all coin prices this is creating the perfect storm of destroying any remaining profitability, as hash-rates and thus difficulty skyrockets while at the same time the coin prices plummet. Happy times are indeed here again, enjoy!

This is actually a good learning opportunity long-term as incidents like this should encourage the DEVs to be more proactive ahead of time rather than waiting until the problems gets so big they cripple themselves when trying to migrate away from ASICs.

Hopefully they and other coin developers learn to become a lot more aggressive against ASICs taking over their block-chains. I guess it is either that or simply give in and embrace ASICs as some other coins have opted to do.

You should be fine and your rig is well within the 80% rule. Your estimations of 100W for the processor + another 130 watts for the motherboard are way over estimated, its more likely that these components will only contribute about 40 to maybe 60 watts combined.

From my personal experience using a rig running 1060's (set at 65% or under PL), total power usage comes in at a little under 80 watts per card factoring in everything, meaning this includes the GPUs, risers, motherboard, ram, PSU, processor, and SSD.

So your 4 x 1060 rig should draw around 320-350 watts at the most unless you neglect to adjust your GPU PL (Power Limits). In fact, I think you could add another 1060 card to your rig and still be within the 440 watt 80% safety zone for your PSU. If you can, I would recommend buying a Kill-a-Watt or similar power usage meter and measure the power usage at the PSU input to double check.

The other benefit for using dummy plugs is if you use software to remote view the headless rigs (VNC, etc.), the screen resolution will be higher (matching the HDMI dummy plugs resolution). This may or may not be a big deal for you, but I know with AMD cards it used to only display a very small 640x480 window making it very hard to manage the rigs remotely.

This may have changed with the more recent AMD drivers, I do not know as I mainly have Nvidia cards now and all my older AMD's have the dummy plugs already, but something to keep in mind. Not having them right away should in no way affect your ability to begin mining, so you can decide if you need them once you have your rigs up and running. If all your cards are Nvidia, then as others have mentioned you will not need them at all.

The problem with ASICs is that you are always chasing after the new models. I have a pile of older ASICs that are no longer profitable to run and quit chasing the ASIC dragon about two years ago. You get to the point of just about being profitable with them, or maybe even make a few bucks, but then bamm, a new model that is 5-10x more efficient than the older model comes out and soon your looking at turning off your now useless space heaters. At least with GPUs the GPU can switch to other algorithms and for the most part retains some resale value.

My advice would be to make sure you have low electric rates before spending too much money on ASICs, as in about 6 months any ASIC you buy today will be on its way out the door in terms of efficiency and profitability, so the lower you electric rate is the longer you can last.

The 20% thing always bugged me from day one with Zcash. For one why did they need it all in the first 4 years and not just do the 10% over the life of the coin? Who is going to fund development after the first 4 years? 

I let such questions go early on, but now with this attitude they are taking of embracing ASICs after launching the coin as ASIC resistant as one of the core features really has me doubting their long term commitment to the project. How long after the 4 years worth of dev payments stop does Zooko and his crew move on to a new coin as Zcash is no longer the viable platform they hoped it would be.

New coins are a dime a dozen, and realistically the features they claim that makes them unique are often superficial at best. There are probably only a handful of coins that are truly unique, and even of those, other coins could copy many of those features with ease. The only thing left is the community that stands behind it, and when you start alienating a large percentage of that user base you no longer even have that. 

I am going with Phil on this one, in that my biggest beef with all this is that Zcash was launched as an ASIC resistant coin but the very first ASIC threat that comes along they decide to punt claiming it's a lost cause. Really? They haven't even tried yet.

Sure, they may fork and a new ASIC gets released, but to Bitmain this isn't a free ride. They will need to invest time, money, and effort into developing a new ASIC, so after a point they are going to tire chasing after coins that fork away from them. So not, I do not believe beating ASICs is a lost cause, but it does require some amount of effort from the dev team to fork away and from the community to support the new ASIC resistant fork.

ASICs in their current implementation are not a good thing. I would agree with you in that they would be no different then GPUs but with one exception, currently publicly available ASICs are provided only by one company Bitmain.

We already seen what they did back with Bitcoin and their ASIC boost software giving their own miners a secret advantage (until discovered) over even the hardware they sell off to the public. They have also included kill switch code in their hardware in the past, of course they spin it as it is good "in case someones miner(s) are stolen they can remotely deactivate them", but just the existence of such a feature should be alarming.

No matter what your views this is not leading at all to decentralization of the network and in fact is going more back to centralizing it in the hands of one hardware provider. If there were several ASIC manufacturers who made available and sold new hardware without restrictions or secret access, similar to the GPU manufactures, than yes ASICs would really be no different than GPU mining.

The thing GPU mining offers is that it truly helps to decentralize the mining network as even though we will always have differences of scale regardless of ASIC or GPU, at least the GPU route lets home miners have a foot in the door. With ASICs you have several hurdles to overcome, first you need to be even able to acquire them, you need to keep up with the queen's race game as new hardware is routinely released, you need to often pre-order them months in advance, and often you need to scale up to even make it worthwhile. All these things make ASICs available to far fewer people, thus further reducing the number of miners, or essentially reducing the decentralization of the mining network.

Mine your ETH while you can and quit complaining. There are many events now in motion that will make mining ETH all but impossible a year from now.

Public release of ASICs coming at the end of July, quite a few were sold at $800, all of these will come online basically all at once. This does not even include all the secret ASICs running currently.

Fools continue to buy and build GPU based rigs, not realizing they will never ROI, at least not with Ethereum, Zcash, or any of the other algos that Bitmain has developed an ASIC  for.

With the upcoming transition to POS, the mining reward for ETH will be reduced once again, this time going from 3 ETH per block down to .6 ETH per block. Eventually mining reward will go away completely.

Once this finally does phase out, the remaining coins and algos that can still be GPU mined without ASIC competition will be very few and all those GPUs will need to point somewhere. The days of easy gains and paying off your hardware investment in a few months are over and will not be returning anytime soon, if ever.

Just be glad you got to participate while you could, but from here on out only the big boys with multi-million dollar plus farms consisting of the latest hardware coupled with private mining software and cheap electric contracts of a few cents per KWh will be able to make a go of it. You may have another year to play around with ETH and a few other profitable coins, but I really do not foresee profitable home mining continuing much past that.

You are going to cook alive if you are in that room with that many cards running in the summer.

What you need is to come up with a way to get a large amount of airflow exhausting all of that heat. You will need a fan sized to your window to blow the hot air outside and ideally have a window opposite it to draw in fresh cool air. Even with good airflow with 20 GPUs in only a 300 Sq ft room you will probably still be sitting around 10-20 degrees above ambient temperatures.

If you bothered to read the OP that is exactly what he said:


Myself I think it works great as is since it offers a baseline that everyone should be able to get their cards running at before using mods or making adjustment to their rigs.

Not every rig or GPU is the same and will not acheive the same results when pushed, so this list serves as the foundation on which to judge the effectiveness of further tweaks. Good job OP.

First I want to thank the authors for this great tool and for their giving spirit to help the community. I would encourage everyone to donate some or all of their first week or two's increased profits to the developers to promote such releases in the future.

Secondly, I want to add my voice that this tool does indeed work as advertised. I have been running it now on my 1080TI rigs for the past 4 days and can verify that not only does it increase the hashrate as shown in the miner, but also increases the shares submitted to the pool.

My first test of this software was on a smaller 4x1080TI rig I have and the rig's poolside shares went from ~150 per hour on the Ethermine pool to around 190 per hour after using the enlargement tool. This corresponds pretty closely with the rig hashrate going from 140 MH/s to 200 MH/s, or the difference of going from around 35MH/s to 50MH/s per 1080TI.

After having switched my remaining 1080TI rigs over they all displayed similar results, with cards running from 49 to 52 MH/s and increased share count pool-side.

Myself I think some of the haters and disbelievers may have other agendas at play and they get mad when people release such helpful tools to the community, especially for free. I hope the people who are taking advantage of the increased performance of this tool can realize this and not only help cast light on the trolls for what they are, but also to recognize that a small donation will help to promote this type of software in the future.

If you do not choose to donate, realize if that becomes the prevalent attitude, in time the only software available to the public will be either with developer fees, costing you a lot more in the long run than a donation would, or remain in private hands of the big farmers everyone claims to so despise.

Once again to the developers, thank you for this great software as I for one appreciate it.