Be a miner as a dayjob...

[Vaccinus]

Just to poop on the party even more - once eth goes PoS, the difficulty of all other coins will jump by around 4x since around 75% of all GPU mining power is doing eth right now.

4x? that would be amazing. But the reality is more like 100x
I don't think you realize how much hashpower is behind ETH right now and how little is behind any other coin

1.5 millions gpu are behind etheruem and 500k on all the other coins combined, but the price can increase a lot after bitcoin go boom again, so it must be seen, also someone will sell his rig for sure, after eth go pos i'm sure on this

[Maskedman]

150$/day per rig is completely crazy, that would be near 20$/day per card ! Rather count on 30$/day/rig to be sure to always reach your target.

[AtomicDog602]

Can you be a miner as a day job?  Yes I suppose.  Issues like power availability (after all you can't pull more than 1400 watts from a 15A circuit), a place to keep the equipment cool and safe, and the ability to constantly monitor would be some of the few I see.

I prefer to make a hobby out of it.  I have 10 high end GPUs running on 2 rigs.  Already made enough bitcoin (via nicehash) to pay for half the cost.  I know earnings will diminish, but for this year I expect to have it all paid off and more.  I then sell off the equipment and either restart with better equipment or call it quits.  But doing it full time?  Nah.

[khaled0111]

if you have all that money and time; it's better invest it in trading it's more profitable or as other members said just buy altcoins and hold them for a while and you will gain more than you expected.

[QuintLeo]

99% chance that its not going to be that profitable until Mid 2018, maybe till the end of the year however it might.

Let me put it to you this way

At the end of 2013, a Radeon R9 280X made about $10/day in Nov-Dec 2013. $7.50/day in Jan 2014. $5/day in Feb 2014. $2.5/day in March 2014, $1.50 in April 2014, in the summer of 2014, it made ~$1/day, at the end of 2014, it made $0.25/day.

Why? Because you are not the only one "thinking" of this idea and got money to throw around. You got competition.

Where exactly are you getting these numbers from? An R9 280x mining Ethereum TODAY on $0.10/kwh power makes $2 per day.

 2013-2014 would have been the GPU days of Litecoin mining, then when Litecoin ASICs started showing up move to X11 (DASH) for a short while.

 Difficulty was a TON lower at the time - my HD 7750s were pulling in over $1 NET a day each for part of that timeframe, the R9 280x would have been pulling in ballpark 6 TIMES as much (4x cores and quite a bit higher core clock).


 Trading is a crapshoot. Way too many periods there was NO profit to be made, only varying amounts of loss unless you got LUCKY on timing a small spike.
 Mining is a lot less of a crapshoot, if you don't go overboard at the wrong time and keep your overhead low.

 There are over 2 Million GPUs mining ETH - not all ETH mining GPUs manage 30 Mh/s after all.
 ZEC has ballpark 1 million, might be somewhat less depending on how much of ZEC mining is high-end NVidia driven (GTX 1080/1080ti are GOOD on ZEC, so-so to poor on ETH).
 THEN you get to the small fry that might manage a half million between them all combined.

 ETH going POS will hammer profitability - but not 100x and it won't be all-at-once, given the current plan to "phase in" PoS in multiple steps.
 The "Ice Age" driven longer time between blocks is also going to start seriously impacting profitability sometime in the next month, it's ALREADY had a noticeable impact though not a big one.
 That will ALSO tend to make the "get out of ETH" transition a more gradual thing.

 Getting into mining NOW, due to insanely inflated GPU pricing and the serious profitability DROP on almost all coins the last week and some, is a major risk - one of the hedges of mining is that you can get MOST of the value of your rig back (as long as it doesn't die) by selling it when profitability dies - though as many rigs as are involved this time around, that might take quite a while to get a SIGNIFICANT percentage back - and the inflated sale prices on GPUs currently make it a LOT tougher as the GPUs are the large majority of the cost of most rigs.
 It's much less of a risk for those with VERY VERY LOW electric cost, as we'll retain profitability longer than anyone else - but there will come a time that 3c/KWH or less electric farms will be about the only folks showing a profit - and right now it's looking seriously like a race between that point and the "final" move to full PoS as to which is going to kill ETH mining first.

 On the other hand, this time around there is at least one OTHER coin with a fairly high market cap and a high network hashrate as part of the "profitable coins to mine" basket, and quite a few smaller ones, so it's not going to be nearly as much of a bloodbath as the end of Litecoin GPU days - and given ETH plans on POS I don't see any real probability of anyone building an ASIC for it to accelerate the collapse.
 ZEC on the other hand.....

[Thetaj]

People don't understand how mining works: All the coins have a set number that can be mined in 1 day. That many cards and that much hashrate WILL IMPACT DIFFICULTY levels of any coin. Which means that you will get LESS of any coins you mine. And also difficulty will keep rising (the more hashrates comes in, the faster it increases).

There is no way to beat the difficulty level increase, the more people come in, the faster the difficulty adjusts. Because there is only a fixed set of coins that can be mined per day. Simple as that! Oh btw, the bear market's knocking on the front door, so yea, altcoiners get ready.

[xleejohnx]

Everyone keeps saying 30/day/rig and I'm over here like
Do you have 10 gpus in one rig to make 30/day?
1080ti would take 6/rig to make 30/day
480s would take 10
470s would take 11
580s would take 9
Etc etc
So saying one "rig" makes this much is completely over board and misleading

Being a miner full time is just like being a day trader
1 in 10 shot of making it

[Za1n]

Everyone keeps saying 30/day/rig and I'm over here like
Do you have 10 gpus in one rig to make 30/day?
1080ti would take 6/rig to make 30/day
480s would take 10
470s would take 11
580s would take 9
Etc etc
So saying one "rig" makes this much is completely over board and misleading

Being a miner full time is just like being a day trader
1 in 10 shot of making it

That was my thoughts as well when reading this $30 per rig per day business. Even if a 6x1080Ti rig could consistently make $30/day, which it won't due to the increasing difficulty as many have already explained, just the GPUs alone will have cost you close to $4200 and the including the rest of the components you are talking about a $4500 investment. So this would take you around 150 days to break even at $30/day, but the catch is both market price and difficulty are both variable and the $30/day will not hold for any length of time, so the ROI point is going to be even longer, perhaps well over a year.

It doesn't matter what facts people put out there, as new miners will believe what they want to believe and imagine that the good times will roll on forever and they have it all figure out. The dreams of quitting their jobs and living the easy life cloud any rational discussion until the reality eventually sets in. Also, thinking you are going to get 75% back by selling all those GPUs will be another hard lesson as once mining profitability collapses there will be millions of GPUs dumped on the second-hand market, you will be lucky to get 10% if anyone is even buying at that point. Thus will also drive down the price of brand new GPUs as the manufactures will find they suddenly have a glut, so trying to hawk that "barely used" mining GPU on eBay will be harder that it was in the past.

[Za1n]

I do agree, but many small players (like the tons of gamers that runs their cards when are at school will probably stop mining...)
I have met many people that started mining because it was super lucrative, I think that many of them will stop when it will be more complicated as you will have to switch currencies etc... But for sure, when ETH will PoS, it will be a bloodbath.

Actually the small players will likely last the longest, as you pointed out they mainly use their GPU for gaming so ROI isn't an issue as they bought their graphic card originally for a different reason (to play games). Since most of them are (like you said) likely school-aged, or in college, they probably have free electricity (mom and dad, or dorm room) so they really wouldn't not have an financial incentive to quit mining. They may reduce their single GPU income from $5-$6/day to $1-$2/day, but again since they have no on-going costs why would they quit?

Also, the other small players that do pay their own way would probably keep mining too, as keeping a few GPUs running could be considered a hobby and they might not mind if they just break even since the electrical costs for such a small operation would be fairly minimal.

The people who will be hurt the most are the ones who have just recently build new rigs, and lots of them, with highly inflated component costs. The increased up-front investment compared to just a few months ago and rapidly decreasing revenue may make ROI impossible except for those with super low electricity rates <5 cents KWh. Even then it will be a long haul.

So unless Ethereum recovers and starts pushing $500 or higher, along with increases in all the other mine-able alts, the revenues will be dropping pretty soon.

[Bulletdodger]

This should be a sticky topic for all the hot heads thinking about selling their apartments and cards to go into mining.

[crazyivan]

Not possible unless you ve got really, really cheap electricity.

Cause there s nothing to prevent people to buy 120000000 rigs by mid 2018 and bring you out of business. We ve seen this before, in 2013/2014, market gets saturated and everyone shut down their rigs. The ones who remain are people with 6 cents per kwh and lower.

[Vaccinus]

Not possible unless you ve got really, really cheap electricity.

Cause there s nothing to prevent people to buy 120000000 rigs by mid 2018 and bring you out of business. We ve seen this before, in 2013/2014, market gets saturated and everyone shut down their rigs. The ones who remain are people with 6 cents per kwh and lower.

not true you can do good with 20 cent now and more, in 2018 the profit will be much higher, so evne with more gpu there will be the same profit, while it's easy to double the gpu when they are few of them it's more difficult when you have millions already o the market

[Nebell]

I might invest $25.000 - $30.000 in Bitcoin mining in a year or so if difficulty doesn't drastically change. I don't have that amount of money now, so I have to wait.
But I have been paying close attention every day on Bitcoin price, the amount mined every day and difficulty increase and it hasn't changed, at all. There's a small variation in the amount mined and also in Bitcoin price, but the profit is pretty much the same, depending on Bitcoin price of course.

[grape_tectonics]

if difficulty doesn't drastically change.

  would you consider doubling every month "drastic"? Because that's what its doing.

[QuintLeo]

Not possible unless you ve got really, really cheap electricity.

Cause there s nothing to prevent people to buy 120000000 rigs by mid 2018 and bring you out of business. We ve seen this before, in 2013/2014, market gets saturated and everyone shut down their rigs. The ones who remain are people with 6 cents per kwh and lower.

not true you can do good with 20 cent now and more, in 2018 the profit will be much higher, so evne with more gpu there will be the same profit, while it's easy to double the gpu when they are few of them it's more difficult when you have millions already o the market

 In 2018, unless coin prices rise a TON, profitability will be very low indeed as ETH takes steps towards PoS driving MILLIONS of GPUs into seeking new homes and driving profitability on THOSE coins down a ton.

 This doesn't even factor in the number of folks that are deploying or going to deploy new rigs between now and end of the year.

 You can make good profits RIGHT NOW, and for the last 2-3 months, at 20 cent electric - but don't COUNT on that lasting even TO the end of the year much less past it unless prices go up a LOT.

 Keep in mind that the only REAL limitation on rig growth RIGHT NOW is the worldwide GPU shortage - otherwise profitability would ALREADY have dropped a ton - oh yeah, it already HAS dropped by over half on almost all coins in just the last 2 weeks or so DESPITE that shortage.

[QuintLeo]

Everyone keeps saying 30/day/rig and I'm over here like
Do you have 10 gpus in one rig to make 30/day?

 $30 a day for a single 6-card rig wasn't hard to achieve - a month ago, or even 2 weeks ago.

 Right now, it's very difficult and you have to find a specific small niche - or go with all 1080ti or possibly a VERY well tuned 1080 rig on ZEC - to achieve it.

 I don't think there's ANYTHING you can do with a RX-based rig to manage $30/day - but if you've had that rig more than a couple months it's likely paid off or fairly close to being so.
 ETH certainly isn't an option for that - $20 a day is about the best a 6-card RX-based rig will manage right now, as they struggle to match the hashrate on my R9 290 cards and my trio R9 290 ETH rig only pulls in a hair over $10/day now.

[Nebell]

I'm thinking about investing $30.000 and moving to China or something and mining with ASIC as a day job. Then expand it to maybe twice as much. I should pay itself off.

[mojoxc]

It is entirely possible to do it as a day job, learning to manage several hundred gpu rigs solo takes a little while but worth it.  Gotta get the cooling systems dialed in and the setup that is stable.  It's fun to see the progress how systems improve as you build more facilities.

GPUs for most people have issues for finding them at the moment in large quantities as most don't have the relationships in place to acquire the equipment.  Might want to diversify a bit on the gpu selection as well, some nvidia some AMD.

[botmanside]

buy it, bankrupt, you can make another thread where you can cry later...

[CjMapope]

It is entirely possible to do it as a day job, learning to manage several hundred gpu rigs solo takes a little while but worth it.  Gotta get the cooling systems dialed in and the setup that is stable.  It's fun to see the progress how systems improve as you build more facilities.

GPUs for most people have issues for finding them at the moment in large quantities as most don't have the relationships in place to acquire the equipment.  Might want to diversify a bit on the gpu selection as well, some nvidia some AMD.

Yuppp

this year i am officially filing with my gov as a "Crypto-Currency" miner, and it feels GREAT 
i still WORK of course, 10+ rigs takes ALTEAST 2 hours a day to keep on top of the game, but i have FREEDOM, i work from home, i make my OWN money

 it can be done boys, just keep on top of your farm and mining is easy really, its just off the bat thats hard sometimes