Are alt coins profitable to mine at the moment?

[rovchris]

I mean there are so many people willing to lose money on hardware + electricity for mining

Also unsustainable. Unless they are stealing electricity of course.

LOL... I have free electricity in my condo...
As long as I don't go crazy no one notices.

That's why I focus on hardware cost.

Yeah I wish they did that here but the problem is if you want to make some decent cash you need large amounts of electricity. Because in essence all we are doing is converting electricity into money, more electricity more money.

The feed into my apartment is 32 amps and I using about all of it for mining.

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[wormbog]

Today I have mined 100 cgb in a 24 hour period and have been burning 7.5kwh - 8kwh on average. My electricity cost here in the UK is 11.5 pence per kwh (and that is one of the cheapest tariffs) so that is £22.08 per 24 hours. The cgb I have mined are only worth around £18!!!

The electricity is everything used including switches, router,  extractor and inlet fans.

I find the coinwarz calculator to be over optimistic for the number of coins mined as well.

Is anyone actually making any money?

Based on those calculators, the alt-coins show a profitability percentage compared to mining bitcoin using the same hardware. Currently the best option for mining scrypt coins is the GPU. Nobody mines bitcoins with GPUs anymore because they're so inefficient compared to ASICs. So it's a misleading comparison.

For example:

Let's say you can mine .001 bitcoin per day, but you pay the equivalent of .01 bitcoin per day to power the GPU. That's clearly a money loser. But the enterprising miner looks at wheretomine.com and sees that AlphaCoin is 500% more profitable that bitcoin. Sounds good right?

When you start mining AlphaCoin and exchanging the coins for bitcoin, now you're bringing in .005 bitcoin per day. But the power cost of .01 bitcoin per day is the same, and you're still losing money.

Alt-coins are still causing you to lose money, you're just losing less than if you had been mining bitcoin directly with your GPU.

The profitability of sha256 coins is a more accurate indicator of alt-coin profitability, because you can mine them on ASICs, just like bitcoin. Look at the chart and you'll see that sha256 coins are never more profitable that mining bitcoin directly. If they were, they'd get flooded with ASICs and their difficulty would spike, driving their profitability back down very quickly.

[Cryptstarter]

IMO its down to the volume of coins on exchanges diluting values especially the ones with no services/future. If I was you sell your shizzle and buy asics like me

[coldbreeze16]

I'm not from US, I'm from India. But I believe some areas in US (I heard about some green county or something around Washington) have prices as low as 0.02/unit, which is what I'd be paying as well if I were in another state in India. Oh and btw Coinwarz is extremely wrong on predictions, it doesn't eve update the difficulty for all coins quick enough.

[Buffer Overflow]

Alt-coins are still causing you to lose money, you're just losing less than if you had been mining bitcoin directly with your GPU.

+1

This should be made a sticky post.

[saamxx]

 There are  many places in the world where the electricity is very cheap. This means that you should to buy coins, and not mining them.
 
 What are you thinking about  when  you are building your rigs?

No one is interested in your problems with electricity

[markm]

Quite a few American families like at least a whole room to themselves too, instead of sharing a room with another family and splitting costs.

So although American families might in some areas find lower electricity costs they might end up paying so much more for a room, or maybe even multiple rooms, that it would eat up the electricity savings. Though maybe one could live in a shared room somewhere else and just rent enough space in America to co-host and power however many rigs you want to run.

Mining is hideously expensive, and justified mostly by the assumption that once you have massively more hashing power securing your chain or merged collection of chains than the entire remainder of the world could feasibly manage to combine together for an attack the sheer scale of the expense involved becomes more of a barrier to attackers than it is to the incumbents - the people defending the chain(s).

So basically it does not really make much sense for anyone to "pay you well" to waste electricity on a pretty much doomed attempt to defend one of many many many little toy blockchains that are not even all ganging up together via merged mining to at least share the cost of defense. Instead it makes much more sense to keep those chains so pathetically low in value that it is their sheer worthlessness that "protects" them from attack, by making them "not worth the trouble of attacking despite their puny defense".

Also, it seems most miners of alt-coins are not even really engaged in defending blockchains at all. Very often they damage the value of coins they mine by doing crazy things like driving their difficulty way high then abandoning them, so that blocks get generated massively slower than the target time, which seems unlikely to enhance the value of the coin. So those coins aren't even actually paying for security at all, they are in effect paying for the fact that they do not have enough security. Probably the first thing they should have done before launching was secure far far more hashing power than all the gang-bang pools all added together, so as to launch a coin with high enough hashing power that being gang-banged would not make much of a blip at all on their hashrate...

-MarkM-

[rovchris]

it is their sheer worthlessness that "protects" them from attack

-MarkM-

I think you have summed it up very nicely and it made me laugh...

[smeagol]

I am running 28 7970's and I can barely make enough money to warrant the time spent selling the coins on Cryptsy what is everyone else doing?

28!?

If you want to offload any I may buy some

[rovchris]

There are  many places in the world where the electricity is very cheap. This means that you should to buy coins, and not mining them.
 
 What are you thinking about  when  you are building your rigs?

No one is interested in your problems with electricity

It is just a fact gathering exercise - there are many places where the electricity is cheap but that is offset by the low wages paid and a $500 GPU could be a months pay. So it all evens out eventually cheap electric but no money to buy the hardware!

[saamxx]

It seems so there is a promoting of scrypt asic. They are much more energy efficient

[rovchris]

I am running 28 7970's and I can barely make enough money to warrant the time spent selling the coins on Cryptsy what is everyone else doing?

28!?

If you want to offload any I may buy some

There is a high possibility I will want to offload them in the very near future as it just does not make sense for me to mine.

If you send me a private message I will let you know as soon as I am 100% sure that I am going to dismantle my rigs.

[rovchris]

It seems so there is a promoting of scrypt asic. They are much more energy efficient

Totally agree - it is the only thing that makes sense moving forward. It is unfortunate that no one is selling them yet.

[saamxx]

There are  many places in the world where the electricity is very cheap. This means that you should to buy coins, and not mining them.
 
 What are you thinking about  when  you are building your rigs?

No one is interested in your problems with electricity

It is just a fact gathering exercise - there are many places where the electricity is cheap but that is offset by the low wages paid and a $500 GPU could be a months pay. So it all evens out eventually cheap electric but no money to buy the hardware!

I dont mean deep india, some east europe countries, and africa
I mind leading economic countries.

[markm]

The experiments, pilot projects and initial deployments of what is now being called "CPU mining" (a somewhat different approach than "dumb hashers" or even "fancy jane-type hashers" or even "prime chain finders" are accustomed to) are still looking quite promising, although they do not actually attempt to "secure" the currencies they are used with; instead their aim is simply to distribute the currencies. So although they seem to have been so far a "win" for their "miners" and for holders of the currencies (see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for valuations) the problem of how to actually secure blockchains so that those currencies can reasonably move back to using blockchains (like they used to originally) is still a waiting game. (Wait until the sheer volume of transactions is high enough for the transaction fees to be enough to attract and retain hashers...)

-MarkM-

[Buffer Overflow]

It seems so there is a promoting of scrypt asic. They are much more energy efficient

Totally agree - it is the only thing that makes sense moving forward. It is unfortunate that no one is selling them yet.

Don't hold your breath.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg3222593#msg3222593

LTC ASIC
ASICMINER determined LTC ASIC is not viable since a high-speed memory bus is much more useful in other industries and very expensive to make in this regard.

[coldbreeze16]

There are  many places in the world where the electricity is very cheap. This means that you should to buy coins, and not mining them.
 
 What are you thinking about  when  you are building your rigs?

No one is interested in your problems with electricity

It is just a fact gathering exercise - there are many places where the electricity is cheap but that is offset by the low wages paid and a $500 GPU could be a months pay. So it all evens out eventually cheap electric but no money to buy the hardware!

Who buys a new GPU for farming! You can find loads of 7950's going on ebay being auctioned for 100$ or even less.

[xray]

Mining for profit on day to day basis is not viable at the moment.
what I have found is mine and sit on it until it becomes profitable to sell (fingers crossed)

[mercSuey]

No, you are definitely not the only one thinking along the lines that gpu mining just might not be worth it by year's end.

Hence why CGB has accelerated PoW subsidy halving.  And we'll be experimenting in testnet as strictly a PoS blockchain.  Yes, there are potential DOS issues with PoS, but we're researching the possibility of different solutions.  Because we'd like to get rid of PoW altogether, especially with respect to energy efficiency.  This was the plan from the start.  We just have to tweak the math (among other things) so we can assure a lower bound on the number and frequency of PoS blocks in the future.  And this is exactly why we are marketing CGB as a value preserving/interest bearing 'investment' vehicle, which can be used as a currency.  We never once tried to be an all-knowing-all-seeing currency to displace Bitcoin or USD.  

In my humble opinion, scrypt-only coins will survive by true supporters willing to take a loss from electricity in order to secure the blockchain.  But in general, scrypt-only coins are in trouble.


-Merc

[nwoolls]

Plus I could earn 0.002-0.008 BTC extra each day if I use multipool.us which is what I was using until their servers went kaput 2 days ago or use multiminer which I fiddled with yesterday. But I believe trading manually is too time consuming especially when you have to track so many scamcoins. Auto trade is kinda inefficient at the moment.

Cryptsy started rolling out a feature several weeks ago that lets you mark wallets for "auto sell". So one potential setup with MultiMiner would be to:

• Setup MultiMiner to mine the most profitable coins
• Setup all of your alt-coin pools to deposit to your balances to Cryptsy
• Set your Cryptsy wallets to auto-sell
• Login to Cryptsy every few weeks and withdraw BTC
• Optionally enable profitable coin suggestions in MultiMiner