Is scrypt the only algo worth investing time and effort on?

[sbtctalk]

With crazy BTC difficulty, SHA256 algo and miners will go obsolete fast. But looking at the China market, there is still demand for LTC and scrypt algo and the coins could be used to trade for BTCs.

Is SHA256/BTC mining dead?

[QuintLeo]

SHA256 mining is just sleeping for a bit - once the S9 comes down in price to around half, or competition starts DRIVING it down, SHA256 mining should take off again.

 Keep in mind that previous miner generations were short because miners were playing "catchup" with the state of the art in semiconductor tech - the 14/16nm Full Custom generation as exemplified by the S9 and that Bitfury chip of the videos a couple months back should have YEARS of being "the most efficient" or very close, giving a lot more time to achieve ROI on them as long as your electric rate isn't too high.


 Litecoin is due for a major shakeup starting next month or thereabouts, when Innosilicon starts shipping it's new A4 Dominator miners. The last year might look like a bit of a "golden period" of stable pricing, almost stable diff, and good profits even on older gear or at not-cheap electric rates.

[sbtctalk]

SHA256 mining is just sleeping for a bit - once the S9 comes down in price to around half, or competition starts DRIVING it down, SHA256 mining should take off again.

 Keep in mind that previous miner generations were short because miners were playing "catchup" with the state of the art in semiconductor tech - the 14/16nm Full Custom generation as exemplified by the S9 and that Bitfury chip of the videos a couple months back should have YEARS of being "the most efficient" or very close, giving a lot more time to achieve ROI on them as long as your electric rate isn't too high.


 Litecoin is due for a major shakeup starting next month or thereabouts, when Innosilicon starts shipping it's new A4 Dominator miners. The last year might look like a bit of a "golden period" of stable pricing, almost stable diff, and good profits even on older gear or at not-cheap electric rates.

I am at a point of looking at focusing on Scrypt miners, or getting some S9s. I'm currently unsure which way to go. Recently, AMD released a new generation of electricity-saving graphics cards, another option. I'm inclined to think that graphics cards have more resale value.

[philipma1957]

SHA256 mining is just sleeping for a bit - once the S9 comes down in price to around half, or competition starts DRIVING it down, SHA256 mining should take off again.

 Keep in mind that previous miner generations were short because miners were playing "catchup" with the state of the art in semiconductor tech - the 14/16nm Full Custom generation as exemplified by the S9 and that Bitfury chip of the videos a couple months back should have YEARS of being "the most efficient" or very close, giving a lot more time to achieve ROI on them as long as your electric rate isn't too high.


 Litecoin is due for a major shakeup starting next month or thereabouts, when Innosilicon starts shipping it's new A4 Dominator miners. The last year might look like a bit of a "golden period" of stable pricing, almost stable diff, and good profits even on older gear or at not-cheap electric rates.

I am at a point of looking at focusing on Scrypt miners, or getting some S9s. I'm currently unsure which way to go. Recently, AMD released a new generation of electricity-saving graphics cards, another option. I'm inclined to think that graphics cards have more resale value.

I mine eth coin and I mine BTC.  I was up to 330mh in eth coin miners but I cut back to  150mh to prep for new gpus.

I am mining 16th in avalon6's and s-7's.


I have 3 s-9s on order.
I hold btc
I hold cash

I stay in the 10k to 13k range for all of the above.  I shift from btc to eth to cash.  I go gear heavy to gear lite.

[leowonderful]

SHA256 mining is just sleeping for a bit - once the S9 comes down in price to around half, or competition starts DRIVING it down, SHA256 mining should take off again.

 Keep in mind that previous miner generations were short because miners were playing "catchup" with the state of the art in semiconductor tech - the 14/16nm Full Custom generation as exemplified by the S9 and that Bitfury chip of the videos a couple months back should have YEARS of being "the most efficient" or very close, giving a lot more time to achieve ROI on them as long as your electric rate isn't too high.


 Litecoin is due for a major shakeup starting next month or thereabouts, when Innosilicon starts shipping it's new A4 Dominator miners. The last year might look like a bit of a "golden period" of stable pricing, almost stable diff, and good profits even on older gear or at not-cheap electric rates.

I am at a point of looking at focusing on Scrypt miners, or getting some S9s. I'm currently unsure which way to go. Recently, AMD released a new generation of electricity-saving graphics cards, another option. I'm inclined to think that graphics cards have more resale value.

I mine eth coin and I mine BTC.  I was up to 330mh in eth coin miners but I cut back to  150mh to prep for new gpus.

I am mining 16th in avalon6's and s-7's.


I have 3 s-9s on order.
I hold btc
I hold cash

I stay in the 10k to 13k range for all of the above.  I shift from btc to eth to cash.  I go gear heavy to gear lite.

\
AMD's now released its new Polaris architecture, and has a new card priced at 199$ that crushes the R9 390X with benchmarks and has half its tdp (150w vs 275w). Nobody knows the ETH speed of these yet, but because the card operates faster on DX12 than even GTX1080s do (in a leaked benchmark screenshot), I think this'll be a turning point for ETH. Nvidia doesn't do nearly as good of a job ETH mining than AMD, but it does a much better job than the 390X, so much that I think this'll bring decent ROI to whoever buys it at this low a price. If you're going to invest in ETH, do it now; we probably won't have new gpus for a while, and amd's price of 199$ is insane! R9 390Xs will probably be dumped and i'll probably buy some once they go low enough, but for scrypt, go for the Innosilicon A4s that are being released soon.  They'll flip the Scrypt world for a while, and we've yet to see a big Scrypt ASIC be released for a while. Pretty exciting times in non-BTC land.

[QuintLeo]

The RX 480 has been ANNOUNCED, the actual release isn't 'till about 2 weeks from now.
New tech - probably low availability initially, and there WILL be a price premium for a month or two.

 It specs out to crush it's market segment - but most likely it will be a good-efficiency but not super-high hashrate Ethereum miner.

 The 256 bit memory bus is probably going to be a significant limiter on Ethereum, but archetecture upgrades might make up for that or even more so - on the other hand, the Nano/Fury line have HUGE bandwidth yet barely match a 2 generation old R9 290 on Ethereum mining for hashrate (MUCH lower power consumption though).


 The price, if you can actually GET them at $200, is nice - even if the card turns out to be a 20MH/s miner the efficiency and price should make it a good option if AVAILABILITY isn't GTX 1080 level "nope, we're out of stock almost all the time".


 I suspect the A4 will be the ONLY new Scrypt miner for a few years - the only potential competition was the Alcheminer folks, and they appear to have failed on getting their funding going for their intended next-gen design. KNC is of course bankrupt and tended to have very low reliability (both corporate AND miner), SFARDS seems to have disapperered after the initial batch of those massively overpriced dumb SF100 "dual miner" units, which pretty much exausts the folks that have ever made Scrypt chips - and I doubt that the likes of Bitmain or Bitfury are interested in Scrypt.


 I suspect the timing of my move is going to prove pretty good overall, by the time I get moved into the new place there should be OPTIONS to consider.

[Searing]

er yep....pretty much

KNC Titans ( Unicorn's Own Phantom Now) (eBay 4.5k buy it now ..way to high) if you can find them

fhis pools calculator you can use (i use this pool it is great no downtime) below

www.litecoinpool.org/calc

1000mh at 14c kwh and 5.12 LTC price for such at 4100 watts is giving me the below

Profitability Analysis
                 Expected             Rewards             Costs            Net Profit
24 hours   11.70043945 LTC   60.14 USD   13.78 USD   46.36 USD
7 days   81.90307617 LTC   420.98 USD   96.43 USD   324.55 USD
30 days   351.01318359 LTC   1804.21 USD   413.28 USD   1390.93


Supposedly the A4 Dominator will be out in JULY (I assume will take 2 months to go out to the 100k buyers first in line) So figure Sept for the home miner folk.

I USED TO THINK it would be OVERPRICED at 4k ...but now with these LTC and BTC prices pumping they may go for 6K

probably too high priced with all the hype of halving etc....and I also expect with these high prices more scrypt miner firms will ATTEMPT to make

miners and/or get IPO $$$ for such

But yeah scrypt is pretty much it

The only other option is the baikal 150mh X11 (dash) miner for like (on their site) 800 bucks or so with shipping. In that X11 difficulty has gone up

10gh or so in the last month or so an price of dash has dropped from 10.88 to like 7.58 now....well MAYBE you could get one of these as a NON roi toy

for 300 bucks say in 6 weeks or so

http://www.baikalminer.com/products.asp

otherwise the market for scrypt miners are LOW...Titans are like (mine are Nov 2014 units) are 20 months old....they will eventually doorstop and all such are
used only sales on eBay at over inflated price...the 4.5k above just pop'd up on eBay....last month you could get a 325mh for like 3.3k (hmmmmm probably
in 20/20 hindsight should have got that)

My main problem with any asic of any type is they have only 90 day warranties and all asics of any type seem to have no luck with firmware or other issues the first 3 months
and/or ie they go doorstop in 3 months you have a brick....better to just buy and hold you crypto of preference imho ..but hey mining is fun

anyway give it a month at 5.14 ltc and 642 btc as we speak everyone and  his brother will likely announce scrypt miners in the next month with a 5 month or more ship time

count on it (I mean really they made 3 I mean 3 x11 asic miners in the last month or so......so anything is possible I guess)

good luck

[Liquid71]

With crazy BTC difficulty, SHA256 algo and miners will go obsolete fast. But looking at the China market, there is still demand for LTC and scrypt algo and the coins could be used to trade for BTCs.

Is SHA256/BTC mining dead?

That's the last algo I'd waste my time or invest money in. The only reason there is demand for LTC is the miners propping up LTC, it's not people using LTC for transactions in China. After LTC halvening and the hashrate didn't really drop and the price didn't rise nobody knew wtf was going on. Charlie Lee the creator of LTC said on reddit that Chinese farms with free electric were the reason hashrate didn't drop. So the miners keep the market alive buying enough to keep it alive and create artificial demand.

If there was really demand for Litecoin then ASIC manufacturers would still be making new ASIC's but they aren't.

No new ASICS means no REAL demand
Transactions on the blockchain are not up more people are not using LTC and the price is just now getting to where it was when the block rewards were cut in half
Other scrypt coins are pump and dump one hit wonders. It used to be great when you could point to a multipool and make a lot of money, those days are long long gone.

DaggerHashimoto (ethereum) is profitable and when it goes PoS you still have a GPU to mine other DaggerHashimoto coins or other algos or you can sell the GPU. Bitmain has a 16nm miner and BTC difficulty hasn't been rising crazy, although you do have the block rewards halvening in July and the antminer isn't cheap $2,100 last I checked.

Your best bet is buy coins. second best is GPU. Third is Antminer. If you can find one x11 ASICS will ROI faster than a scrypt ASIC so a much better choice than a scrypt asic.

[sbtctalk]

With crazy BTC difficulty, SHA256 algo and miners will go obsolete fast. But looking at the China market, there is still demand for LTC and scrypt algo and the coins could be used to trade for BTCs.

Is SHA256/BTC mining dead?

That's the last algo I'd waste my time or invest money in. The only reason there is demand for LTC is the miners propping up LTC, it's not people using LTC for transactions in China. After LTC halvening and the hashrate didn't really drop and the price didn't rise nobody knew wtf was going on. Charlie Lee the creator of LTC said on reddit that Chinese farms with free electric were the reason hashrate didn't drop. So the miners keep the market alive buying enough to keep it alive and create artificial demand.

If there was really demand for Litecoin then ASIC manufacturers would still be making new ASIC's but they aren't.

No new ASICS means no REAL demand
Transactions on the blockchain are not up more people are not using LTC and the price is just now getting to where it was when the block rewards were cut in half
Other scrypt coins are pump and dump one hit wonders. It used to be great when you could point to a multipool and make a lot of money, those days are long long gone.

DaggerHashimoto (ethereum) is profitable and when it goes PoS you still have a GPU to mine other DaggerHashimoto coins or other algos or you can sell the GPU. Bitmain has a 16nm miner and BTC difficulty hasn't been rising crazy, although you do have the block rewards halvening in July and the antminer isn't cheap $2,100 last I checked.

Your best bet is buy coins. second best is GPU. Third is Antminer. If you can find one x11 ASICS will ROI faster than a scrypt ASIC so a much better choice than a scrypt asic.

Thank you for your insightful views. I am glad that I asked.

[reb0rn21]

With crazy BTC difficulty, SHA256 algo and miners will go obsolete fast. But looking at the China market, there is still demand for LTC and scrypt algo and the coins could be used to trade for BTCs.

Is SHA256/BTC mining dead?

That's the last algo I'd waste my time or invest money in. The only reason there is demand for LTC is the miners propping up LTC, it's not people using LTC for transactions in China. After LTC halvening and the hashrate didn't really drop and the price didn't rise nobody knew wtf was going on. Charlie Lee the creator of LTC said on reddit that Chinese farms with free electric were the reason hashrate didn't drop. So the miners keep the market alive buying enough to keep it alive and create artificial demand.

If there was really demand for Litecoin then ASIC manufacturers would still be making new ASIC's but they aren't.

No new ASICS means no REAL demand
Transactions on the blockchain are not up more people are not using LTC and the price is just now getting to where it was when the block rewards were cut in half
Other scrypt coins are pump and dump one hit wonders. It used to be great when you could point to a multipool and make a lot of money, those days are long long gone.

DaggerHashimoto (ethereum) is profitable and when it goes PoS you still have a GPU to mine other DaggerHashimoto coins or other algos or you can sell the GPU. Bitmain has a 16nm miner and BTC difficulty hasn't been rising crazy, although you do have the block rewards halvening in July and the antminer isn't cheap $2,100 last I checked.

Your best bet is buy coins. second best is GPU. Third is Antminer. If you can find one x11 ASICS will ROI faster than a scrypt ASIC so a much better choice than a scrypt asic.

You are wrong there is 14nm LTC miner, bulk order from Innosilicon, sure you must bet on future price and diff but, etehreum mining soon is DEAD, IPO is scam from the start, just wait for bubble to poop!
http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/14.html

[s1gs3gv]

There will always a new coin to gpu mine.

[sbtctalk]

There will always a new coin to gpu mine.

But those new alt coins are ... not very useful. Just fanciful names

[ImHash]

you can't really tell which one  is the best.

[sbtctalk]

you can't really tell which one  is the best.

Most of these new altcoins are useless. Serve no purpose or new functions. I saw a seller in market place selling his service: his job is to create new coins at a price.

[QuintLeo]

With crazy BTC difficulty, SHA256 algo and miners will go obsolete fast. But looking at the China market, there is still demand for LTC and scrypt algo and the coins could be used to trade for BTCs.

Is SHA256/BTC mining dead?

That's the last algo I'd waste my time or invest money in. The only reason there is demand for LTC is the miners propping up LTC, it's not people using LTC for transactions in China. After LTC halvening and the hashrate didn't really drop and the price didn't rise nobody knew wtf was going on. Charlie Lee the creator of LTC said on reddit that Chinese farms with free electric were the reason hashrate didn't drop. So the miners keep the market alive buying enough to keep it alive and create artificial demand.

If there was really demand for Litecoin then ASIC manufacturers would still be making new ASIC's but they aren't.

 Do keep in mind there has only EVER been 4 companies that ever made Scrypt miners.

 KNC is bankrupt, and their miners tended to be crap anyway (VERY poor reliability).

 Gridseed turned into SFARDS, but they've always insisted on doing that "dual miner" stupidity where the Bitcoin side of the miner chip quickly becomes TOTALLY unprofitable thus making the Litecoin side the only usefull part, but at too high a cost. No clue what happened with SFARDS after that first batch of SF100 units was released - but the specs on those units wasn't all that impressive to begin with, the PRICE was insanely high, and reports from the field indicated yet another "VERY POOR board-level design" unit though perhaps not for the SAME reasons the Gridseed 80 Blades were a very poor board-level design.

 Alcheminer announced plans for a new-gen unit, but they appear to have had issues getting the financing together and may no longer be around.


 Innosilicon - appears that they should have A4 Dominators FOR SALE sometime in July, which refutes your "no new ASICs" theory.



 The mind boggler is that *3* companies that came out with X11 ASIC the past few months. I suspect the first of them is now regretting that decision as their miner is by far the worst of the 3 on efficiency and they appear to have had issues getting enough of them built to sell while they HAD the market to themselves, the second is TRYING to hang in there but has a competative disadvantage due to issues with their early units and somewhat lower efficiency, and dunno about the third.



 New coins tend to be worthless crap - just because they exist doesn't make them worth mining. There have probably been 100 "new" altcoins for every one that actually managed to achieve any REAL worth at any point - and even some well-known coins that DID achieve some success (DOGE for one) didn't have any staying power.
 I wouldn't count on new coins for achieving ROI on new hardware.


 Ethereum isn't a bad bet overall, as mentioned the GPUs (and the rest of the hardware) will have SOME value after they become unprofitable to mine with - but it's still a risk at this point unless you have most of the gear for a rig already on hand, with the rapid diff increase rate. If you plan to buy the hardware for some other use ANYWAY, it's definitely worth pointing it at ETH for the short term to help defray costs, but otherwise it's iffy if you'll make your money back on an investment into new rigs at this point - even factoring in selling the gear used after you shut down mining on it.
 If you have VERY VERY cheap electric, the risk goes down quite a bit of course, as your profit is higher and your mining will stay profitable longer - but that's true for ANY mining option.

[sbtctalk]

I will just wait for the release of RX 480 graphics card. Better resale value as some members here have posted before.

[cjmining]

There are many more coins to mine than just BTC and LTC. I have 1 Terminator A2 110MH scrypt miner and recently made really good money mining DBTC Debit Coin. Mined over 1 million of them at a cost of about 25 sat. Sold them for between 50 and 150. So don't just look at the big 2 when thinking of investing in mining hardware. There is money to be made on other coins. ETH is still profitable, but for how long i don't know.

[QuintLeo]

RX 480 should have very good resale value for a while - but do keep in mind it's not just the GPU that needs to have resale value, it's the entire SYSTEM, if you're going to count on reselling gear to achieve ROI.

 This does not apply to gear that has an already-planned repurpose, or gear that WAS repurposed to ETH from other stuff short-term and will go back to what it was doing before after it becomes ETH unprofitable.

[Amph]

i would never sell the base component such MB ram and cpu, they are always useful for the future, in case another "ethereum" appear

so you need to factor in my opinion, only the roi for your gpu