What the hell happened to mining profitability while I was waiting on my 1080?

[OGBabeh]

Alright, so a month ago I was looking at profitability of alt-coin mining on 1070s and 1080s and it looked pretty good, even just being lazy and using Nicehash and even in Australia with .45c USD power costs. Was looking at 120 day ROIs. I ordered a 1080 and all the gear to eventually plug in 6 of them and after a million emails, phone calls, drop shippers and cancelled orders, I finally got everything ...

Just took a look at Nicehash calculator again and everything is looking hopeless even with Bitcoin at new all time highs ...

WTF happened?

It can't just be the ETH decline, because a) ETH has mostly recovered and B) ETH wasn't even the most profitable coin I was looking at from memory ...

If someone could please console me and tell me everything will be alright, that would be awesome

[oisilener1982]

Mining is Dead  

360 day ROI is the new Norm considering the Cost of Electricity, Place and Video card degradation

There is also a risk for Fire / Natural calamities that might destroy all the investment

Signatum is the most profitable to mine 2 weeks ago for 1070/1080 but maybe not right now with the Halving

[Za1n]

You failed to take into consideration the ever increasing mining difficulty. Even with the price recovery, difficulty has steadily increased over that time period which basically means you will generate less coins with the same hash-rate as you could a month ago.

Just some making up numbers for a basic illustration, but assume when you first were looking at your figures where ETH was at a difficulty where you could mine 1/ETH day at your hash rate. Now the difficulty has doubled and you can only mine 0.5 ETH a day, or it now takes two days to mine one ETH.

So in this example, a month ago you could make $300/day when ETH was trading at $300. Now even though ETH is again trading in the $300's, you will only make $150/day since it takes you twice as long to mine the same amount of coins. This declining profitability ratio will continue until the mining costs versus reward balances out. I am not sure exactly where this will be, but I would expect it to be well under $1.00 average net income (minus electricity) per card per day.

So yeah, I think 120 day ROIs are pretty much a fantasy at this point in the game. You might get lucky and with a big enough price spike past $400 (using ETH as an example) you might get a small window of increased profits, but realistically you are probably looking at a one year+ time-frame just to break even.

Also don't count on some unknown miracle coin bailing you out, as all the people mining ETH, Zcash, Signatum, or whatever the coin of the moment is will also be looking to jump over at a moments notice. The name of the game now is survival, this means that only those with hardware already paid off, or very close to it, and those with low electrical costs will survive and flourish once the bloodbath is over

[KaydenC]

Alright, so a month ago I was looking at profitability of alt-coin mining on 1070s and 1080s and it looked pretty good, even just being lazy and using Nicehash and even in Australia with .45c USD power costs. Was looking at 120 day ROIs. I ordered a 1080 and all the gear to eventually plug in 6 of them and after a million emails, phone calls, drop shippers and cancelled orders, I finally got everything ...

Just took a look at Nicehash calculator again and everything is looking hopeless even with Bitcoin at new all time highs ...

WTF happened?

It can't just be the ETH decline, because a) ETH has mostly recovered and B) ETH wasn't even the most profitable coin I was looking at from memory ...

If someone could please console me and tell me everything will be alright, that would be awesome

You must be crazy lol, trying to mine at $0.45/kwh. I'd rather do some solar farming. Even in my country with $0.20/kwh I gave up setting up my farm here, and set my farm remotely.

[maxpowerzz92]

Hold during the downswings.  Maybe even buy some gear if it's selling for cheap.  I've been mining with 50 older GPU's (280x, 290, 290x) and bought my last ones when profitability turned to s**t around 2 years ago.  I thought WTF when I made my last purchase, but have profited nicely since then.  It'll come back, and you just need to be ready for it. 

[Tidsdilatation]

Im not into mining just for the profits. I have a full time job that pays for my life. Im doing this becourse im interested in crypto currency. Maybe you should think about doing the same?

[maxpowerzz92]

Im not into mining just for the profits. I have a full time job that pays for my life. Im doing this becourse im interested in crypto currency. Maybe you should think about doing the same?

Then you're doing it wrong.  What started as a hobby has now made me more money then the last 10 years of working at my full time job.

[crazyer]

Currently there are many types of bitcoin diggers dedicated to replace the old vga card.
Performance is much higher than the old vga cards.