Be a miner as a dayjob...

[64dimensions]

IMHO, of the various hats you have to wear, managing your GPU mix is the hardest.

[fanatic26]

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.

[adaseb]

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

[Fredomago]

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.

Wow with certain difficulty those numbers will not sustained the mining business unless you got free electricity and your ventilation and set is really cool enough to sustain the condition of the rig better to think twice before investing to this high risk set up.

[grape_tectonics]

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.

[puwaha]

Too much doom and gloom on this thread... I say go for it dude!

Create a thread documenting your adventure.

[kamerico]

Too much doom and gloom on this thread... I say go for it dude!

Create a thread documenting your adventure.

LOL, that was funny! I say the same! Go for it.. I bought a rig and in less than three weeks my profit went boom.. Anyway it will just take a little longer to pay off. No rush.

[hyet24]

Too much doom and gloom on this thread... I say go for it dude!

Create a thread documenting your adventure.

LOL, that was funny! I say the same! Go for it.. I bought a rig and in less than three weeks my profit went boom.. Anyway it will just take a little longer to pay off. No rush.

Huge difference doing it for fun vs working for it.  He will be more stressful and frustrated with current situation.

[Elder III]

Just finding, obtaining and setting up a facility to house 120 mining rigs is a challenge by itself. Just the power and cooling requirements themselves will be quite a bit of work and money to set  up unless you somehow already have a facility that's ready to go right now and is within your budget already? 

Small scale first then slowly scale upwards, not 100000% all at once.

Where would you buy 720 GPUs all at once? Do you have contacts at the manufacturer directly?

[kisk]

Dreams are great but you'd have to be able to find the cards first which is extremely hard to do right now.

[Tmdz]

Just finding, obtaining and setting up a facility to house 120 mining rigs is a challenge by itself. Just the power and cooling requirements themselves will be quite a bit of work and money to set  up unless you somehow already have a facility that's ready to go right now and is within your budget already? 

Small scale first then slowly scale upwards, not 100000% all at once.

Where would you buy 720 GPUs all at once? Do you have contacts at the manufacturer directly?

And then theres the part where you go to the bank and say hey I wan't a $300k loan to buy graphic cards to mine something called "ethereum".

[jwarren81]

I see no reason you can't make it a job, but as with any entrepreneurship its risky and stressful.  It will take some up front investment to setup and you will need to have the skill set to allow you to maximize your profits.  For me, it is supplementing my income as a side business quite well when combined with long term holds on select coins.  I am expanding, methodically, to increase my monthly income and plan on having 10 nvidia rigs with 7-8 GPU each by the end of the year; by building 1-2 per month.  You need to make sure you don't put all your eggs in one basket (i.e. ethereum).  Make sure you can effectively mine many coins instead of a couple.  Personally I don't focus on coins, I focus on hardware to algorithm efficiency and mining the most profitable algorithms available.  Let the multi-pools do the work of managing coins and take payment in BTC or your favorite available coin.  Then exchange some for long term investments and cash out the rest to pay bills.

I see GPU mining as inherently LESS risky than exchange trading.  Mining gear (GPUs) can easily be sold a year later to recoup 50-75% of hardware costs and mining during that time period will handle the rest easily with multiple times your ROI.  This depends on the GPU of course, which is why I focus strictly on nvidia GTX 1070's or above, which can mine everything, including ethash based algos.  They are favorites of gamers and  will easily resell next year or the year after.  If a new card comes out, evaluate and move to it once its ready.  All this can be done incrementally.  

Someone mentioned dumping $100k into the market as being a better plan . . . I completely disagree.  That whole amount could be gone in days or weeks with bad picks, let alone a year from now.  Trading is gambling at its simplest and extremely risky.  Mining is much less risky since when the market crashes you still have something of value afterwards.  The equipment is can be resold or re-purposed.  Devalued currency is worthless.

I don't see any end to the mining boom we are currently in.  It will ebb and flow like always but will continue for years to come.  Unlike what many here believe; ethereum is not the end all of coins for mining.  Hasn't been for many months.  Do your research find what will make the best profit and mine it.  You can make a consistent income from it, just like I do.

Also, you don't need 120 rigs to make a significant profit.  10 rigs would net a very nice profit at a modest $30 a day per rig. That's $100k a year gross income . . . I think most people would be pretty happy with that per year.  The sky's the limit after that.

[bibyfok]

I see no reason you can't make it a job, but as with any entrepreneurship its risky and stressful.  It will take some up front investment to setup and you will need to have the skill set to allow you to maximize your profits.  For me, it is supplementing my income as a side business quite well when combined with long term holds on select coins.  I am expanding, methodically, to increase my monthly income and plan on having 10 nvidia rigs with 7-8 GPU each by the end of the year; by building 1-2 per month.  You need to make sure you don't put all your eggs in one basket (i.e. ethereum).  Make sure you can effectively mine many coins instead of a couple.  Personally I don't focus on coins, I focus on hardware to algorithm efficiency and mining the most profitable algorithms available.  Let the multi-pools do the work of managing coins and take payment in BTC or your favorite available coin.  Then exchange some for long term investments and cash out the rest to pay bills.

I see GPU mining as inherently LESS risky than exchange trading.  Mining gear (GPUs) can easily be sold a year later to recoup 50-75% of hardware costs and mining during that time period will handle the rest easily with multiple times your ROI.  This depends on the GPU of course, which is why I focus strictly on nvidia GTX 1070's or above, which can mine everything, including ethash based algos.  They are favorites of gamers and  will easily resell next year or the year after.  If a new card comes out, evaluate and move to it once its ready.  All this can be done incrementally.  

Someone mentioned dumping $100k into the market as being a better plan . . . I completely disagree.  That whole amount could be gone in days or weeks with bad picks, let alone a year from now.  Trading is gambling at its simplest and extremely risky.  Mining is much less risky since when the market crashes you still have something of value afterwards.  The equipment is can be resold or re-purposed.  Devalued currency is worthless.

I don't see any end to the mining boom we are currently in.  It will ebb and flow like always but will continue for years to come.  Unlike what many here believe; ethereum is not the end all of coins for mining.  Hasn't been for many months.  Do your research find what will make the best profit and mine it.  You can make a consistent income from it, just like I do.

THIS !

Here is the whole story:
With some friends we are talking about mining since few month, last month during a bbq we decided to start a small mining farm. We started with a rig, then a second one. As we have different skillsets, I manage the hardware and my partner the money aspect.

The only thing we agreed is that no money that cant be losed has to be invested.

We have made a lot of upgrade at our small farm: Whole new electricity network, industrial ventilation etc.

Today we have 50+ GPU running and we see the coins coming. We ask ourself if it is possible to make economies of scale and try to run a real farm where we would actually work: 48 more GPUs are arriving today and we have no real difficulties to get them so we are doubling our capacity this weekend.

Yes it require a constant monitoring, (we had the whole farm shut down because of a bad RJ45 connector in the night !) but man, this is so exciting ! I feel that we are on the verge of something new: something that the vast majority of people are completely unaware of !

I may be dreaming that we could run this as a business but as you, we think of the diversity of coins: today we are mainly mining ETH, tomorrow it will be something different and as you, we think that what is important is the processing power, to be able to mine a lot of different coins. I have the feeling that people are only seeing ETH as profit making because right now it's a cash cow, but even if we mine small coin and making half less profits it would still be super profitable with 200+ rigs.

I also feel that Trading is WAYYY more risky as you could lose everything is a matter of second and mining could be run in a more longterm: Our cards may be inefficient in 6 month, but they will already be ROIed, so it would be "free profits" as we live in a country where electricity is super cheap. And the resale value is real, even if it's 25% of the purchase price, an amount of money can be recovered in case of a disaster.

Someone will probably destroy my entire thinking in a coming post. We have created this post to have a sense on what the community is thinking: we were not in the game 2 years ago, so we wanted the feeling of the profits that could be made at that time. Thank you for all your input.

[cjnmoh]

Is there any way of mining of bitcoin or other cryptocoin free of cost? Currently i am using the EOBOT site for cloud mining and it is paying. But it also need to invest some amount of bitcoin.

[adaseb]

Yes it require a constant monitoring, (we had the whole farm shut down because of a bad RJ45 connector in the night !) but man, this is so exciting ! I feel that we are on the verge of something new: something that the vast majority of people are completely unaware of !

I may be dreaming that we could run this as a business but as you, we think of the diversity of coins: today we are mainly mining ETH, tomorrow it will be something different and as you, we think that what is important is the processing power, to be able to mine a lot of different coins. I have the feeling that people are only seeing ETH as profit making because right now it's a cash cow, but even if we mine small coin and making half less profits it would still be super profitable with 200+ rigs.

I bolded your points.

There are way too many people who are aware of mining, and that's a bad thing since it causes the difficulty to increase. Discovering something that's on the verge of exploding happens before it actually explodes. The GPU mining bubble exploded like 2 months ago, first sign would of been the sold out AMD GPUs.

Unfortuntely, most new coins are usually not POW. They are usually POS and distribution is done by a ICO. We all would be super rich if all these overpriced ICOs actually were POW like Bancor, EOS, Status, etc. However the developers hardly get any money that way so they create an ICO instead of POW which causes miners to dump coins on the exchanges.

Either way you will probably do your thing. We are just giving you our input after years of mining thru the doom and gloom periods.

[Bulletdodger]

It is effin' not for everyone. FFS, I see chicks on YT who advertise nail polishes now talking about their ETH rigs - wtf,
it that doesn't feel off, I don't know what does.

The situation is VERY different than 2013-2014 when this was an extremely niche thing, and even then the course of 1 gpu profit ran from almost $10 per day to less than $1.
Now imagine what will happen with MILLIONS people mining every day, ETH diff went up 10x in a matter of few months, who will you dump your worthless hardware to in a year or two, when it can't even cover the cost of daily electricity.

It is almost a full time job to handle 10 rigs, not to mention 50 or 100 or more... Million things can go wrong, it is even illegal in most countries to run such an INDUSTRIAL operation without having fire-related certificates, proper ventilation, etc. In my country, only the 50kW electricity supply costs a shitload of money (houses usually have 5-8kW I think)

Don't get me wrong, I have a few rigs myself, but this is a VERY risky business, ETH crashed a few days ago and suddenly your rigs are making 50% of what they used to, and there is no telling what will happen, now we were in an extremely bullish period, but correction will come, and oh boy - will it hit everyone hard like it's 2001.

Kids download a HTML5 web template, do an ICO for their imaginary "decentralize all" crypto project and collect $10 million in a few days and somebody
dares to tell me it's not a bubble the size of Jupiter? Wake up people.

Invest only what you can lose and not want to jump off the bridge when the crash comes.
My most honest suggestion.

[Usuadog]

Is there any way of mining of bitcoin or other cryptocoin free of cost? Currently i am using the EOBOT site for cloud mining and it is paying. But it also need to invest some amount of bitcoin.

I think the Hashnest site could be a good one. But you need to do your own research.

[Toxicable]

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

[bibyfok]

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.

[CjMapope]

when you guys ask how miners can make money please keep in mind that most of them are ROI already, so their profits are 100% everything left over after power costs
Getting into mining NOW is a terrible idea, i myself recently expanded knowing FULL WELL it was a terrible time, but i have been doing this for years, so i worry not

Its the same old gloom and doom, personally i never worry, shit i have a 270x still running profitable on 0.1Kw/h, the trick is for miners to stop looking at whattomine...   or actually, please KEEP doing just that

crypto itself is so young lol, everyday is another opportunity for miners IMO

but i tell ya, everyone thinks its a great idea till the 6th and more rig, then you start to think, "oh shit"
the money comes too fast, the heat is unbearable, you start to worry about your house, your wife complains, mo' rigs , mo'problems ;p