Before you get HEAVILY invested in ETH Mining you should read this

[adaseb]

Seems everybody is dumping their Antminers and buying ASICs. Some of us are GPU miners who started with BTC, some of us were Litecoin miners, and some are completely new to ETH mining.

It might seem like a good idea to buy a new GPU because it will ROI in less than 2 months but keep in mind that history repeats itself.

I started mining with GPUs in January 2014 because with a 280X you made like $10 a day, so with $300 retail it would ROI in about a month. Nobody cared about power consumption back then because people were making huge money.

However like most good things, it came to an end the next month when Mt Gox caused a huge BTC price crash and Scrypt ASICs were being deployed.

The Spring of 2014 was a buyers market for GPUs on eBay. There were 7970/280X going as low as $100-125 while a month prior they were $300-400.

The 280X which made around $10 a day, 6 month later was only netting $1 a day.

A good thread to read is from the Litecoin forum about an individual who made good money with a small farm but got killed when he tried to expand at the wrong time.
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=11743


I am not saying right now is a bad time to stop investing in GPUs. Nobody knows when the turning point will be. But you really should buy used GPUs like the 7970/280X instead of going for new 380X to lower your depreciation on the cards in case it turns ugly and fast.

Good luck to all.

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[bathrobehero]

I can only agree with you. Mining profits will probably trickle down in a few weeks/months so it's advised that before people start breaking their banks and stocking up on GPUs to consider what they will do in case the profits go down.

[thesmokingman]

Seems everybody is dumping their Antminers and buying ASICs. Some of us are GPU miners who started with BTC, some of us were Litecoin miners, and some are completely new to ETH mining.

It might seem like a good idea to buy a new GPU because it will ROI in less than 2 months but keep in mind that history repeats itself.

I started mining with GPUs in January 2014 because with a 280X you made like $10 a day, so with $300 retail it would ROI in about a month. Nobody cared about power consumption back then because people were making huge money.

However like most good things, it came to an end the next month when Mt Gox caused a huge BTC price crash and Scrypt ASICs were being deployed.

The Spring of 2014 was a buyers market for GPUs on eBay. There were 7970/280X going as low as $100-125 while a month prior they were $300-400.

The 280X which made around $10 a day, 6 month later was only netting $1 a day.

A good thread to read is from the Litecoin forum about an individual who made good money with a small farm but got killed when he tried to expand at the wrong time.
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=11743


I am not saying right now is a bad time to stop investing in GPUs. Nobody knows when the turning point will be. But you really should buy used GPUs like the 7970/280X instead of going for new 380X to lower your depreciation on the cards in case it turns ugly and fast.

Good luck to all.

Do you see this as being a fair comparison though? I'm sure the BTC crash would have happened at one point or another, but without Mt Gox the ROI period would have lasted a little while longer I would have to believe. Who is the equivelent to MT Gox today for ETH? Are there any signs, as was the case with recent exchange crashes, that they are on the road to insolvency? As far as ASICs go, unless someone has been developing an ETH asic and kept it secret, I don't think we have to worry about them crashing the GPU mining scene like you did with Litecoins happening anytime soon.

I do think caution should be exercised when deciding how much to invest into ETH however. Nothing that I've read has indicated a reason for the price action we are seeing now, so any calculations have to take into consideration that we are in a ETH bubble currently. Most of the money was made by the people who've been mining since the beginning, with the rest of up playing catch up.

I think the biggest concern any "mining" ETH investor needs to take into consideration is if the ETH price can sustain a price point to make mining profitable with a decent ROI and when POW ends and POS period will begin. Short of that I'm not concerned about much else.

[Prelude]

People will get burned buying gpus. Oh well. Just means gamers will get cheap upgrades again when the bubble pops.

In mining, if you aren't already equipped and ready when something interesting happens, forget it. You'll fall into a race to the bottom with the sweaty unwashed masses trying to get in.

[SparkyU]

If you start investing big when the price is already soaring for any coin, you're already too late to the party...

[DrG]

The good old boom and bust - it's been going on since 2011.  If you didn't already have cards up and mining by end of January it's probably too late.  Looking at eBay you can see the 7970s have already been cleared out.

I was lucky enough to sell my 6870/7870/7950/7970/280X for a pretty penny the last few months on Amazon and bought BTC when it was about 1/2 what it is now.

Unless you have insane $0.01 KWH China power I wouldn't start up a new GPU farm.  No harm in using any GPUs you have laying around but the 380 and 380X are essentially the same card as was released in 2012 just with more RAM and about 25% more energy efficient - but the price has held.

I'll keep my cash liquid to pick up some cheap GPUs in about 6 months

BTW, BTC difficulty 4 years ago was about 1/10,000th what it currently is at - 5 magnitudes difference - back when each measly 6870 of mine was making about 0.25BTC/day

[Marvell1]

If you start investing big when the price is already soaring for any coin, you're already too late to the party...

Dont' be so sure the initial miners made all the profits , back when eth was launched they were dumping coins at .70-80 cents belive me i was one of them , if i had hind sight would have kept all my eth and make over 20k since i started mining right from the start.

I dont think its way too late to mine if you already have GPU's in hand , if you dont then its probably a bad idea , just buy ETH instead of GPUs unless you have access to cheap GPUs like i did.

I think the bubble has just started ETH is the new LTC it will pop to close to $20 usd at some point , i think thats where the reall $$ will be made , but it will be in buying and hoarding rather than mining, its too late to mine because the hash rate will just keep jumping as soon as the Chinese and their free power get into the action it will be over.

[thesmokingman]

I have to ask and I'm sure I'm breaking fight club rules, but if plans haven't changed from Vinay's blog post here (https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/ethereum-launch-process/), why would it be a bad time for me to buy GPUs if I'm a speculator, with a conservative slant on pricing and not paying inflated prices? I know everyone is talking about the move to POS, but that won't happen until Serenity that I feel is still a ways off based on the fact that we are still waiting on Homestead, and even once that is rolled out, there will be at least 1-3 mini releases after Homestead before we actually see Serenity. However, it seems the same arguments being made against Ethereum are the same arguments that were made against BTC and it's mining efforts. Then the price spike/collapse(Mt Gox) happened with BTC just like I expect it to happen with ETH. The only difference I feel is that ETH offers a value above and beyond what BTC has to offer. I mean BTC can't even get past the block size debate, yet people still pump thousands/millions into mining efforts. BTC doesn't have Fortune 50 companies as well as Banks investing in the technology. Everyone wants the blockchain, but don't want BTC. I see ETH filling this niche market quite nicely.

I don't advocate anyone emptying their bank accounts to buy GPUs, but certainly it's worth diversifying your mining efforts in todays environment. I mean look at BTC and the amount of money that one has to spend on ASICs in order to turn a decent profit, can you not contrast ETH to BTC in this aspect? BTC of late has had insane difficulty adjustments, so why are those difficulty adjustments okay with the same can't be said for ETH?

Even if gamers will love the upcoming market if/when people start selling their GPUs, but isn't part of the ROI model for BTC selling your ASICS to someone else? Seems the same can be said for ETH as I know I plan to sell my 7970s for 50% of what I paid ($108 USD) when they no longer produce for me. Thats the exact same thing I did with my BTC ASICs.

Even if the ETH price tanks down below IPS sales, I would still mine at a loss because I believe in the technology. I mean BTC traded at the $200 level for over a year from it's highs of $1000, so even if ETH takes a dips from it's highs of today, do you honestly believe the markets won't recover? If anyone feels they can answer this question, can I TX you some BTCs to invest for me as you can clearly have a crystal ball and can see the future. As I stated in my earlier reply to this thread, a price crash or move to POS is the only thing that I feel can stop this train. I'm not naive to think that a price crash won't happen, but a price crash happened for BTC and now look at it. So how can I not think ETH can share the same fate, especially since it has more functionality than BTC, and people don't have to worry about getting burned by ASICs like they did with LTC gpu mining.

I'm a noob and may have my rose colored glasses on to tightly, but this is just my observations from mining BTC, Scrypt and Ethereum.

[Ziskinberg]

My concern is that the PoW mining is just 10 months left for Ether, What else can we mine after that?

[Ayers]

i agree, one should invest in a mining rig when nothing it's profitable, so he is ready way ahead one something suddenly become profitable, waiting for something to be profitable nd buying a miners is not the way to go ever

[thesmokingman]

i agree, one should invest in a mining rig when nothing it's profitable, so he is ready way ahead one something suddenly become profitable, waiting for something to be profitable nd buying a miners is not the way to go ever

If that's the case then why are people still buying BTC ASICs when there are all kinds of threads talking about how unprofitable it has become. I plan to buy and build rigs until I start to see serious talk about moving to Serenity. Anyone claiming to know how long the POW system will last has no clue as the devs themselves don't even know. They could get into Homstead and find issues that take them months to solve. I mean after all Frontier was only supposed to last 3 months and here we are now 6-7+ months later and we are still on the Frontier release.

Once POS finally goes live, I will sell my GPUs and take the proceeds and buy either BTC or Scrypt ASICs. GPUs don't depreciate as fast as ASICs. I mean 7970s are still selling for $180-200 and they are 3 years old. I can spend $1,300 on 6 R9 390s and make $600 in one month and still sell them at a 50% loss and only loose $17 a card. In a 6-10minth time span how much will the resell value actually drop? Even if POW lasted 6 months and you only made $200 a month, you could still sell at 50% mark down and come out close to the top.

As I've said before the only way to loose is if price tanks...or the devs skip Homestead and go straight to Serenity

[dumana]

As I've said before the only way to loose is if price tanks...or the devs skip Homestead and go straight to Serenity

The hash rate of Ethereum is rising fast. Many people are building the rigs. So it might not be so profitable in the future.

[Meech]

Unless I'm mislead ( depending on initial costs and utilities ) it is very profitable right now.  Yes I know difficulty and price fluctuation always play a part but hey that's the name of the game.  Sure blocks were easier awhile back but if you already have the rigs... why not?  Is there something I'm missing?

[zzzzzzzzzz]

Putting aside ETH valuation, rising difficulty, and the specter of PoS somewhere down the road, the Ethereum hash algo will *never* be implemented on an ASIC. It was designed that way. ASICs are great for doing fixed calculations on a (small) block of data. However, the ETH algo is much more than calculations. To be able to perform the hash, you first most load the DAG data, which is current approaching 1.4 GB. That size increases every "epoch", which is approximately 30,000 blocks or, currently, -6 days. It increases because it changes, i.e. it has to be periodically loaded again. For each ETH hash, there are 64 *random* 128 *byte* reads of the DAG, with an intermediate FNV hash between each access. The ETH algo is not compute bound, it's memory access time bound. The limit of current memory cycle times is the limit of the maximum ETH hash rate. An ASIC can do absolutely nothing to improve that, nothing. Not to mention, current mining ASICs don't have any significant memory interface capabilities that could address the needs of the ETH algo. Saying you're at risk mining ETH with GPUs, because ASICs are going to come along, as they did with BTC, etc. is a complete fallacy, it's nonsense, and it reflects a total lack of understanding of what the ETH algo was designed to do, and does very well. The *only* viable way to mine ETH is with GPUs, and that won't change until PoS comes to be.

-Best Care
  David

[DrG]

Sigh, let me explain some basic mining concepts.  There's no need to get all wound up people.

Eth right now is valued quite high compared to its difficulty.  That's why it is a profitable coin for some miners.

Any coin would be profitable if you had free electricity since your operating cost would be near zero and the only investment would be your hardware assets.

Any coin would also be profitable if it were valued 100x what it currently is  - ie if the exchange rate on Polo or cryptsy were to shoot up 100x everybody would mine it.

Conversely

Any coin would be trash if you cost more in electricity to mine than it generates in fiat to cover the cost of the electricity - this is irrespective of the hardware cost. At this point if you believed in the coin it would make sense to buy it with fiat unless you believed so terribly in the coin that you just had to support the network by mining at a subsidy.

Most any coin would be trash if its value relative to other currency went down 1/100th of it's current value.

Putting aside the talk about ASIC (I don't even know why that was brought up - nobody will bring ASIC to the market for a coin/algo that hasn't shown lasting power), the real question is will the ETH mined be worth more than electricity by the time you sell or trade it for $, Euro or BTC.  Looking at history - almost every coin has become less valuable relative to Bitcoin than it has been in the past - some coins almost by a magnitude of 10 or even 100.

So if you can mine RIGHT NOW with hardware IN HAND then by all means go ahead and do so and enjoy the coins rolling in. If you don't have hardware - ask yourself what are you going to do if ETH price tanks because it was manipulated by some cheap dev or some whales. What do you do with 10 R9 390s other than sell them at a loss to somebody else who can mine with free electricity. If you order the stuff from Newegg right now and you get mining 7 days from now the global hashrate will probably be over 1.2TH.  Some with cheap power will still make profits.  Some will be near break even.  Some will be losing money (like myself who has CA electric rates near $0.30/KWH).

If you're expecting ETH to climb in value vs BTC it just makes sense to grab some now while it is "cheap" and ignore the mining aspect and focus on trading and understanding the platform.  This holds true to any coin really.  If you're buying the currency at least you have access to the full assets instead of having to wait for it to trickle in over time from the miners.

Having mined well over 20 different coins which were all touted as the silver to Bitcoin's gold or even being better than BTC - I'm still waiting for one to knock the giant off his thrown.  All of these coins have come down significantly from their highs - LTC, XMR, XMP, PPC, etc.

Mine with enthusiasm, but don't jump in head first just because others are doing so - there's plenty of idiots out there.  The trend has been that most people except early adopters will not make significant profits when mining.

[adaseb]

Well a few moments ago ETH hit an all time high against the US dollars. A 280X makes $4/per day right now with ETH.

This is almost as good as the $10/per day I made with Dogecoin back in 2014 mining with a 280X.

[Amph]

Sigh, let me explain some basic mining concepts.  There's no need to get all wound up people.

Eth right now is valued quite high compared to its difficulty.  That's why it is a profitable coin for some miners.

Any coin would be profitable if you had free electricity since your operating cost would be near zero and the only investment would be your hardware assets.

Any coin would also be profitable if it were valued 100x what it currently is  - ie if the exchange rate on Polo or cryptsy were to shoot up 100x everybody would mine it.

Conversely

Any coin would be trash if you cost more in electricity to mine than it generates in fiat to cover the cost of the electricity - this is irrespective of the hardware cost. At this point if you believed in the coin it would make sense to buy it with fiat unless you believed so terribly in the coin that you just had to support the network by mining at a subsidy.

Most any coin would be trash if its value relative to other currency went down 1/100th of it's current value.

Putting aside the talk about ASIC (I don't even know why that was brought up - nobody will bring ASIC to the market for a coin/algo that hasn't shown lasting power), the real question is will the ETH mined be worth more than electricity by the time you sell or trade it for $, Euro or BTC.  Looking at history - almost every coin has become less valuable relative to Bitcoin than it has been in the past - some coins almost by a magnitude of 10 or even 100.

So if you can mine RIGHT NOW with hardware IN HAND then by all means go ahead and do so and enjoy the coins rolling in. If you don't have hardware - ask yourself what are you going to do if ETH price tanks because it was manipulated by some cheap dev or some whales. What do you do with 10 R9 390s other than sell them at a loss to somebody else who can mine with free electricity. If you order the stuff from Newegg right now and you get mining 7 days from now the global hashrate will probably be over 1.2TH.  Some with cheap power will still make profits.  Some will be near break even.  Some will be losing money (like myself who has CA electric rates near $0.30/KWH).

If you're expecting ETH to climb in value vs BTC it just makes sense to grab some now while it is "cheap" and ignore the mining aspect and focus on trading and understanding the platform.  This holds true to any coin really.  If you're buying the currency at least you have access to the full assets instead of having to wait for it to trickle in over time from the miners.

Having mined well over 20 different coins which were all touted as the silver to Bitcoin's gold or even being better than BTC - I'm still waiting for one to knock the giant off his thrown.  All of these coins have come down significantly from their highs - LTC, XMR, XMP, PPC, etc.

Mine with enthusiasm, but don't jump in head first just because others are doing so - there's plenty of idiots out there.  The trend has been that most people except early adopters will not make significant profits when mining.

you forgot that one should buy a new miner for the future also, for the unknown that will arrive, like eth was profitable now and none knew in the past that something like eth would have been profitable...

this again will happen in the future, many times(it must happen, because the gpu mining scene is self-sustaining), so even if you don't have nothing profitable to mine with your rig, right now...

you simply shut it down and wait for the next good coin, there will always be at least one that will be released in the future

[miayama]

Well a few moments ago ETH hit an all time high against the US dollars. A 280X makes $4/per day right now with ETH.

This is almost as good as the $10/per day I made with Dogecoin back in 2014 mining with a 280X.

Does it mean the good days for Ethereum will be over soon? Dogecoin mining became less profitable after that.

[DrG]

Well a few moments ago ETH hit an all time high against the US dollars. A 280X makes $4/per day right now with ETH.

This is almost as good as the $10/per day I made with Dogecoin back in 2014 mining with a 280X.

Does it mean the good days for Ethereum will be over soon? Dogecoin mining became less profitable after that.

DOGE is a perfect example (actually all coins are but DOGE is almost exactly 2 years to the date).  Everybody who had cards was able to switch over from PPC or Scrypt and pile on DOGE for a couple of months until that price tanked.  The coin is still alive, but nowhere near its high.

Pop into the ETH threads and you'll hear people talking about insider pumping and dumping.  I cannot validate the veracity of these claims but I would not be surprised if true.  Even LTC which was the darling for 3 years was pumped to 0.03xx a few months back and is back down to 0.007x right now.

Sure some can sit on idle cards for months on end if they have the space (remember some people have warehouses or literal farms).  Some people living with an a wife or GF may not have that luxury 

Again, do a little planning and research before jumping head first.

[Castreat]

Well a few moments ago ETH hit an all time high against the US dollars. A 280X makes $4/per day right now with ETH.

This is almost as good as the $10/per day I made with Dogecoin back in 2014 mining with a 280X.

Does it mean the good days for Ethereum will be over soon? Dogecoin mining became less profitable after that.

DOGE is a perfect example (actually all coins are but DOGE is almost exactly 2 years to the date).  Everybody who had cards was able to switch over from PPC or Scrypt and pile on DOGE for a couple of months until that price tanked.  The coin is still alive, but nowhere near its high.

Pop into the ETH threads and you'll hear people talking about insider pumping and dumping.  I cannot validate the veracity of these claims but I would not be surprised if true.  Even LTC which was the darling for 3 years was pumped to 0.03xx a few months back and is back down to 0.007x right now.

Sure some can sit on idle cards for months on end if they have the space (remember some people have warehouses or literal farms).  Some people living with an a wife or GF may not have that luxury 

Again, do a little planning and research before jumping head first.

The network hash rate is 833MH/s now. It is more than double last octoboer's number, it is rising fast.