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Just took a quick look at this. If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits. A compute
by DanBlake 9y ago
Just took a quick look at this.
If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits.
A computer with 7 GTX 1070 graphics cards should produce ~230 mh/s and draw 1 kw. This would cost approximately $30/month in power factoring in kw demand + cooling.
The above setup will currently generate $385/month in ETH.
So basically for miners who are in the right spot with the right facility, this is still profitable. The question is of course for how long. You also need to factor in the cost of equipment, datacenter, employees and difficulty/price.
But even if you dont have a facility in washington and just mine from your apartment, your power cost would probably be $100 a month. So its still 'profitable', just not nearly as much as it was in the run up.
Cliffnotes: 'professional' miners dont care. Even with the 'crash' today, they are making more per day than they were before the entire run up. For instance the 'worst' time for mining was December 2016 where you would only make $7.50 a day gross in ETH.
- pfooti 9y agoBut that's 385 / month revenue? On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Seems like asking for 10 months to cover capex is a bit thin, given the price instability.
- mschuster91 9y ago> On a setup that's what, $3400 to buy, for seven 1070s? Well you can always resell them on the used market after stopping the mining operation and get a decent chunk of the money back...
- beedogs 9y agoOr just, you know, buy ETH with money right now.
- jameskegel 9y agoThat would have got you in trouble a week ago.
- Leilani99 9y ago$85 an hour! Seriously I don't know why more people haven't tried this, I work two shifts, 2 hours in the day and 2 in the evening…And whats awesome is Im working from home so I get more time with my kids. Heres where I went, --->>http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
- DanBlake 9y agoHigh risk, high reward. If you buy the average piece of real estate and rent it out, you are looking at 30+ years to cover the cost. You can also lose it all (housing bubble) or quadruple your investment (investing in SF 10 years ago)
- creyes 9y agoalso weird analogy cause the houses value will (theoretically) appreciate... a GPU prolly not so much.
- numbsafari 9y agoWhich is why you use leverage...
- raverbashing 9y agoBarring natural disasters and other extreme events, your real estate risks losing (let's say) 50% of value if you made a good purchase The intrinsic value of 1 BTC is ZERO
- Zpalmtree 9y agoBut you bought the GPU not the BTC? Even if BTC becomes worthless, you still have the GPU to sell
- raverbashing 9y agoTrue, that applies for investing in mining (there's also the electricity you used, but if you live in a cold place you saved on heating so that could be something not lost as well)
- ucho 9y agoBuying ASICs is high risk and (probably) high reward - in event of crash you are left with worthless machines. GPUs will still have some value, even after all crypto currencies drop.
- gwern 9y agoMiners shouldn't be meaningfully exposed since they can sell off their ETH as soon as they mine it (deposit it to an exchange address and sell off every few minutes via an API, or something like that). And while ETH might crash enough to make it no longer profitable and risking your capex, you can switch your GPU to mine whatever is most profitable, so you're more diversified than it looks and insulated from the instability.
- TylerE 9y agoIf Eth crashes (more) and bitcoin continues to drop, no crypto is going to be worth anything.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- AngryData 9y agoBit coin isn't dropping, yeah it had a small peak the last month but it is still at $2300 which was only first achieved in in May.
- flashman 9y agoResale value on the GPUs is also worth monitoring. While it remains high enough, you can discount much of the capital cost because you'll get a high fraction back if you decide to sell the cards.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stouset 9y agoI doubt resale values on GPUs running at 100% for months on end is going to be high.
- snuxoll 9y agoMiners don't want to push their GPU's that hard, a hardcore gamer may overvolt their card to get a more stable overclock but a miner will undervolt it to run it cooler and increase the life of the card. I'd rather buy a used Fury X off a miner than a gamer.
- justonepost 9y agoGPUs don't depreciate that fast.
- ikeboy 9y agoAverage price paid for electricity in many regions is 20 cents/kwh. Just using your numbers that translates into $300/month in costs for under $400 in ETH. At the national average it would be $200/month by rough math.
- kobeya 9y ago2 cents, not 20.
- ikeboy 9y agoIt depends on region, some are 20 cents, national average is 13.7 according to https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/news-release/averageenergyprices_newyorkarea.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/news-release...
- kobeya 9y agoBut the regions where people are hosting miners are between 2-4c per kWh. Those are the competition, and those are the people buying (and selling) these.
- ikeboy 9y agoI was responding to "But even if you dont have a facility in washington and just mine from your apartment, your power cost would probably be $100 a month." Even if they're only paying the national average, it's still off by a factor of 2.
- zanny 9y ago2 cents is an abnormality. Europeans pay around 20 cents per kwh on average.
- dgacmu 9y ago2 cents is what you're competing against -- very large mining farms located near cheap, under-utilized hydro plants. Many in China, due to the existence of many such plants. [0] Those are the mining operations that can remain (marginally) profitable when the small home miners are forced out because gross revenue is less than power costs. [0] http://www.afr.com/technology/lisa-kangding-story-20160706-gpzx7e http://www.afr.com/technology/lisa-kangding-story-20160706-g...
- nodesocket 9y agoSorry noob question, but if you don't pay for power at your apartment could you run a rig for just the cap x to get started?
- zachlatta 9y agoYes, but this is how you get evicted.
- jasonzemos 9y agoAnd I can attest to learning this lesson personally in 2012.
- nodesocket 9y agolol, sorry, but how long until your landlord contacted you? What was the conversation like? I'd would have said, sorry running servers for my internet business.
- twblalock 9y ago> I'd would have said, sorry running servers for my internet business. Why do you think that would have helped? The landlord cares about the fact that he/she is paying more money because power consumption is high, not about why power consumption is high.
- iak8god 9y agoThe landlord will very much care if the reason you're using so much power in your residence is that you're running an energy-intensive business there. In many states this would give the landlord really solid grounds to toss you out immediately, especially compared to the situation where you're just suddenly using more power because you just like to set your AC to 60F in the summer, for instance.
- Mtinie 9y ago
- lossolo 9y agoYou forgot to tell people about risk of rising difficulty. It's not 385$ a month forever, if difficulty will go up (as it steady goes up every month) you will mine less. And you can't get 230 MH/s with 7x GTX 1070 with 1kw of power draw. More like 215 MH/s and with around 1.2 kw. I know because I have mining rigs with 7x GTX 1070s.
- JohnTHaller 9y agoPeople constantly seem to get into mining by looking at the calculator at CryptoCompare without reading the last bit which states that "Block reward is fixed at 5 ETH and future block reward reductions are not taken into account." Using CryptoCompare and assuming your 230MH/s of mining ability will net you $470 a month (at current ETH of $165.47) people assume they make $5,640 a year. That sounds great! If, however, you use something like MyCryptoBuddy's calculator, which takes into account pool fees and difficulty increase, you realize you're only going to make $1,553 in a year. Which is a rather paltry return if you shell out for 7 GTX 1070s.
- grogenaut 9y agoWhere do I check my raw kwh price? just on my bill? I'm in WA as well.
- Sleeep 9y agoIt will be on your bill. It should also be published on your utility company website as well. At least my utility company posts rates on the front page.
- bogomipz 9y ago>" If you are located in the 'mining valley' of Washington where power is ~2c/kwh you are still getting healthy profits" Can you clarify what "mining valley" you are referring to? Is this Chelan County? If so I thought there was talk about a moratorium on new high load customers but maybe that never came to pass? See: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-public-utility-spar-over-electrical-costs/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-public-utility-spar-o...
- Madeline44 9y agoup to I saw the paycheck of $8390 , I didnt believe that…my… father in law was like they say realey taking home money in there spare time online. . there neighbour started doing this 4 less than seventeen months and resantly cleard the dept on there villa and got a top of the range Land Rover Range Rover . have a peek at this web-site………………http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
- nulagrithom 9y agoNot the parent commenter but yes, Chelan and Douglas counties have fantastically inexpensive kwh due to their hydroelectric plants. The dams are owned by a public entity and the cheap power and plants are meant to be a boon to the local economy. Last I heard (directly from a city council member last year) there is a moratorium on high load customers due in part to all the mining operations that sprung up. Realistically, for the Public Utility District it's been much more profitable to sell the power to other states than it is to allow more mining operations to eat the cheap power. There were high hopes for the data centers that sprouted up in neighboring Grant county, but they didn't bring anywhere near the number of local jobs that were expected (leaving a bunch of empty houses in Quincy). That in combination with the closure of the Alcoa aluminum plant (which purchased the _entirety_ of one of the smaller dam's output) and you shouldn't expect the moratorium to be lifted any time soon.
- bogomipz 9y agoThanks for detailed response. So it sounds like the power arbitrage game is done in Washington(at least for now.) Although I imagine this is good news for those miners who are grandfathered in.
- BoiledCabbage 9y agoCall me naive, but am I the only one who looks at mining as one of the worst inventions for consuming energy possible? Almost all of society functions on energy, some of the largest breakthroughs in society have been on sudden abundance of cheap energy and the machines, vehicles products they can create. Entire economies can be crippled by rising costs in energy (oil shocks of the 70s) and boom by sudden drops in cost of energy. So we've created an "industry" where you are essentially paid by comverting energy to waste. Paid to perform extremely intense difficult (ie wasteful) operations to back a useful technology (digital currency). Assuming it catches on, energy will never be cheap, there will always be a higher floor now due to options for "mining". As we get better at it and it becomes less wasteful, the digital system will simply raise the reward so people are incentivised to once again waste it. Ignore the short term for the moment, and which ever currency you're backing. We've created a long term societal motivation/reward to harvest every joule produce by the sun and use it to calculate hashes. I'm not talking about the next decade obviously, but we have incentivised that behavior. If there is anything technologists should understand is that whatever your beautiful perfect technology is, it will instead be used based on whatever has been incentivised. Regardless of the technology it powers, this is a terrible societal incentive - and one that will be around a lot longer than people are considering.
- jstanley 9y agoUntil we come up with a viable way to secure cryptocurrency without proof of work, such incentives are necessary. If good people weren't incentivised to spend energy on securing the network, it would be easier for bad people to spend energy on cheating the network.
- dogecoinbase 9y agoUntil we come up with a viable way to secure cryptocurrency without proof of work, such incentives are necessary. This assumes, of course, that cryptocurrency itself is necessary.
- Samantha34 9y ago
- blairanderson 9y agoWhere exactly is the mining valley? Very few articles showing up about it...
- nulagrithom 9y agoWenatchee Valley. KWH are somewhere just above 2 cents. Lots of electric plants down the Columbia river, and Wenatchee has great 1 GBPS connectivity throughout.
- herpdorplarp 9y agoBut that's still break even in about 10x July 2017. How many times will difficulty double until July 2018?
- marblar 9y agoIt seems like if you were located in a "mining valley" the last thing you would want to do is have it mentioned in a top comment on Hacker News.
- TokenDiversity 9y agoWhat's the breakdown between power drawn by card and cooling? You seem to be suggesting they are equal... (1kw would cost $14.4 at 2c/kwh) and you say $30. I don't know much about stuff but i didn't know cooling is that expensive.