What happened to GPU mining (late March 2018)?

[gameboy366]

It's all about price.. BTC Miners are losing money until btc's price up to 10k$...

I'm a gpu miner of Minexcoin and difficulty increased by 10 times last 30 days. Still it's better than ethereum mining.

Anyway, this job is still profitable but it wants labor and time and the profit is not enough for my labor. So I'm thinking about selling my cards...

You are right it does requires physical and mental labor.

[emmanmalaman]

I'm still not mining today but when I get my moolah, regardless of the market condition, I'm going to mine! Oh yeah! 

[Lieldoryn]

Today I had a look on ebay and oh, god! So many cheap used GPUs! Used RX 580 and GTX 1060 at under $100?! Seriously? Looks like miners are selling used GPU as fast as they can!

And mining Ethereum (the most profitable coin to GPU mine for the past months) with 1 RX 580 or GTX 1070 Ti is only earning $1 per day. If electricity cost is $0.12 per kW/h the revenue is less than $0.7 per day. A mining rig of 8 RX 580 or GTX 1070 Ti only earns $5.6 a day...

If mining less profitable coins like monero with higher electricity cost, miners are losing money.

If anyone bought the overpriced GPU last month, it will take 2 years to break even the cost, if mining profitability doesn't continue to drop.

With all these negative factors, mining difficulty continues to rise with even more hashrate joining, altcoin prices continue to drop. Bitmain already released cryptonight ASIC miner and may release ethhash ASIC in the future.

So. Is mining dying now?

It seems to me that you don't understand the specifics of trading on eBay. 100 dollars is only the starting price of GPU. Look at the last day of trading and you will see the real prices. There is a downward trend in prices. But cheaper than 350-400 $ you won't buy the GPU. I do not believe that GPU mining will die. This supports the decentralization of coins and I think in the future a lot of coins will use protection from asic.

[gameboy366]

Hi,

There are multiple reasons:

- The whole market is/was bleeding so mining is not profitable right now
- There [are?] will be ASIC-miners for ETHASH which are more efficient than GPUs*
- GPU-Mining ETH will die anyway as ETH will switch to POS

However I don't think GPU-mining will die - there are enough other algos (even other Ethash-Coins) - for now it depends on the price-development of the whole market.

* According to the sources I could find it seems this ASICs wouldn't completely kill GPU-mining as the hashrates aren't ridiculously high.

It will not kill but it will hurt A LOT. It doesn't matter if they have low hash rate as they have low price too. The biggest advantage will be its scalability for large farms. Maybe Bitmain was just testing the waters with E3. Maybe they have real asic for ethash like the rumored F3.

[QuintLeo]

It is nice to be positive buddy. I notice u often are. But lets look at the chart

https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty

It's easier to look at their hashrate chart, but the diff chart will work too.
Note that except for one "single-day" spike on April 26 that was probably LUCK driven (might have been folks on auto-switch miners bouncing out of ETC or some such though), the Ethereum Total Hashrate (and difficulty) has been slowly DROPPING since April 16.

Yes, there was a big surge for several months before that - but the surge is OVER unless Ethereum price starts rising.

It is now april 5th. I do not know what u mean by april 26.

If u mean march 26th, well, it is 3333 TH on that day and 3197 on april 2nd. U could call that a drop, but it is a drop of 4% which is normal now and then haha. That is just people switching to another algorithm that is more profitable. People will not burn or throw away their rigs.

Fact still remains it is 1935 on 1st Jan and 3197 on April 2nd. A major increase no matter how u look at it. And it is about to go higher with this cheap asic coming in.


Buddy, the hash rate increased over a period of 3 months. There is no luck involved as it is a constant increase over 3 months. I would like to be more optimistic also but I dont see how. I expect things to get worst now that asic for it is being sold to the public.

I meant March - and the hash rate increase goes back a LOT further than that 3 months, and there were CONSTANT small peaks and dips in there due to luck.
I also DID say "slowly" dropping - but it's still a DROP.

[QuintLeo]

We need more competition.....competition in asic development. Bitmain is capitalism gone wrong. No competition, complete monopoly and exploitation. There is no company that can stand against Bitmain that's why they are doing whatever they want. If there was competition then prices would be low and so would be the chance of them mining the hell out of those asics before releasing them. Until AMD and Nvidia develops a mining specific gpu or until a asic resistant coin surpasses ETH's market capital it will be dark ages for gpu mining.

samsung's getting into asic development, i'm interested to see where that goes

So far, all of the announcements out of Samsung fit into "we're providing foundry space to ASIC miner makers" like eBang, JUST LIKE TSMC and GF have been doing for years now.

Samsung has NOT announced any intention of competing with them.

[QuintLeo]

It's all about price.. BTC Miners are losing money until btc's price up to 10k$...

I'm a gpu miner of Minexcoin and difficulty increased by 10 times last 30 days. Still it's better than ethereum mining.

Anyway, this job is still profitable but it wants labor and time and the profit is not enough for my labor. So I'm thinking about selling my cards...

I could almost make money running a S7 right now - and if I was one county over those old units WOULD be profitable.
It is NOT "all about price", part of the equation is also about your COST - mostly the cost of electric.

BTC miners are NOT losing money, those that are in areas with too high electric cost have probably shut down their miners while those that are in super-low electric cost areas are still making money.

[QuintLeo]

It's all about price.. BTC Miners are losing money until btc's price up to 10k$...

I'm a gpu miner of Minexcoin and difficulty increased by 10 times last 30 days. Still it's better than ethereum mining.

Anyway, this job is still profitable but it wants labor and time and the profit is not enough for my labor. So I'm thinking about selling my cards...

I guess that now large number of people are looking for alternatives for mining. So I doesn't surprise me to hear that difficulty for Minexcoin increased 10 times. Many consider bailing out like you do, and I guess that is reasonable. If profit doesn't cover basic thing, its not worth doing it. So I guess that because of this things people are selling their equipment for such low prices that OP have seen.
With everything that is going on and things that are comming, we will see even more of things like this.

I want to call you pessimistic, but I see you are cynical after looking in retrospect. I'm on the fence about GPU mining, ETH really resurrected GPU mining, Now that ASICs are taking control - I can't see any better time to sell my GPUs and just stop for a while (still, a part of me wants to swim against the flow). I know that ETH is planning on hardforking but they don't even have any idea how the ASICs work so it would be a guessing game until they are in market and for sale.  We know Jihan Wu is just going to keep the delivery to market postponed until whenever he sees fit.

GPU mining never died - you just had to be in a LOW COST area for it to be profitable between mid-2014 and spring of 2017.
I was making enough money at it to turn pro *2 YEARS AGO* - which put me in quite a good situation when the price explosion happened and all of a sudden my mining net income jumped by a factor of "lots" due to the massive profitability jump.

On the other hand, profitability RIGHT NOW is somewhat lower than it was 2 years ago - but I invested enough of my profits back into my farm that I'm still able to live off it with some leeway - it is just taking noticeably more GPUs to manage that.

[QuintLeo]

Hi,

There are multiple reasons:

- The whole market is/was bleeding so mining is not profitable right now
- There [are?] will be ASIC-miners for ETHASH which are more efficient than GPUs*
- GPU-Mining ETH will die anyway as ETH will switch to POS

However I don't think GPU-mining will die - there are enough other algos (even other Ethash-Coins) - for now it depends on the price-development of the whole market.

* According to the sources I could find it seems this ASICs wouldn't completely kill GPU-mining as the hashrates aren't ridiculously high.

Mining IS profitable - it's just not at the crazy-high "anyone can make money hand over fist" levels it hit for most of the past year.

At this point there have been ZERO announcements of ASIC that are more efficient than GPUs, and only one RUMOR that so far is not confirmed if "the miner" even exists or what algorithm it is for or what it's power consumption is.
As I've already pointed out (as have a few others), the E3 is NOT more efficient than CURRENT GPUs - and the "next generation" Nvidia cards should be noticeably more efficient YET, later this year.

ETH switch to Proof of Stake is a "when" not a "if" question - but it looks like the earliest move to "full POS" won't happen 'till late this year at the soonest, and the non-ETH coins that also use the ethash algorithm don't appear to be planning "anti-ASIC" forks anytime soon.

*HOWEVER*, there is going to be a major shakeout on miners with ETH stops being mineable - 9 million (ballpark estimate) GPUs is 3-4 times more than all other GPU mineable coins COMBINED are using, which is going to swamp profitability to the point that you have to have super-cheap electric to survive, and WILL drive a lot of miners out of mining.
It's going to be worse than 2014 in some ways, as there are a TON more GPUs involved at this point - but on the other side, it won't be as bad in some ways due to the much larger choice of other coins to mine that also have a large existing GPU count.

[KorakPawon]

Increasing the price of GPU is bad for fans of PC games, because they will think twice to continue to build the computer for better. Worse yet, an estimated increase in the price of this GPU also affect the world.

[Eternu]

Increasing the price of GPU is bad for fans of PC games, because they will think twice to continue to build the computer for better. Worse yet, an estimated increase in the price of this GPU also affect the world.

Prices of GPUs are insane right now, I'm not denying that. And all that is beacause of mining. But gamers can whine all day long, and everything will stay the same. As long as companies which manufacture GPUs are making profit, nothing will be changed.
Developing new ASIC miners for other algorithms could change things around. If mining with ASIC miners rise, GPU mining would drop. And if that happens, prices of GPU will drop down.
Also if companies that make GPUs start making GPUs dedicated for mining, I guess prices of Gaming GPUs would fall down a bit.

GPUs are not changing the world... Blockchain is. 

[sigtmerchant]

"ETH, the most profitable coin to GPU mine for the past months" - this statement nearly had me falling off my chair LMAO

[QuintLeo]

"ETH, the most profitable coin to GPU mine for the past months" - this statement nearly had me falling off my chair LMAO

Can 9 million (minimum) GPUs be wrong?

Well, yes - but for the LONG term ETH has been beating or a tossup with anything else for AMD GPUs, with some short-term spikes for some small-cap coins here and there.

It's also a lot more liquid than most GPU mineable coins - a lot of those "small cap" coins that have been "more profitable" suffer from only being carried by 1 or 2 tiny exchanges with SMALL transaction volumes that can often kill any "higher profitability" because they can't handle the volume of coin generated by a large or even a medium mining operation.

[sigtmerchant]

"ETH, the most profitable coin to GPU mine for the past months" - this statement nearly had me falling off my chair LMAO

Can 9 million (minimum) GPUs be wrong?

Well, yes - but for the LONG term ETH has been beating or a tossup with anything else for AMD GPUs, with some short-term spikes for some small-cap coins here and there.

It's also a lot more liquid than most GPU mineable coins - a lot of those "small cap" coins that have been "more profitable" suffer from only being carried by 1 or 2 tiny exchanges with SMALL transaction volumes that can often kill any "higher profitability" because they can't handle the volume of coin generated by a large or even a medium mining operation.

Your statement isn't entirely right. Keccak, for example, is quite friendly to AMD GPUs. And mining SmartCash since last August converting it later to BTC or ETH or whatever you please gave about x2.5 profit in comparation with ETH mining.

[ygrenys]

Today I had a look on ebay and oh, god! So many cheap used GPUs! Used RX 580 and GTX 1060 at under $100?! Seriously? Looks like miners are selling used GPU as fast as they can!

Where are you finding GPUs at under $100? Used ones are still selling for $200+ on Ebay. At least the ones with auctions close to ending or with "Buy It Now".

Yeah... he totally understated these prices.  I would say real world price reductions have been 10-15% over the last 3 weeks across the board for Nvidia cards.

[QuintLeo]

He seems to have confused "bids" for "final sale price".

There is also the question of how many of the listings are from miners, and how many are from gamers that can "finally get the card I WANTED, now selling off the old card".

[2stout]

"New" ASICs for ASIC resistant algos, making some algos no longer resistant + the unwillingness of some devs to fork in order to continue previously touted ASIC resistance.