4 ms·

Care to share some insights into the economics of running it and how it became unprofitable?

joshvm 9y ago
The economics are simple - how much power do you use vs how much money you make per unit time. As a miner you're banking on the increase in difficulty correlating with an increase in price. Ethereum mining difficulty plummeted back in October, flatlined for a bit, and has been slowly on the rise since December. There is limited resale value in the cards (depreciation etc), but even after PoS hits there will be enough mineable things that selling them off wouldn't be necessary. Love or hate it, you could use a service like Nicehash. It becomes unprofitable if the difficulty spikes, but not the value, so your hardware takes a long time to mine little. Often this happens between new technology generations, like when ASIC miners made GPU miners unusable for Bitcoin. Right now Ethereum is still quite profitable to mine. I have a bunch of GTX1060's with a combined hashrate of 100MH/s running on an EthOS system. That's enough to earn between 0.35-0.4 ETH a month at the moment. The power usage is around 300W with some twiddling - around £25-30 per month. You also have to consider speculative value of the coin. Suppose you were mining 1ETH a month back in January '17. Your monthly payout (about $30) would have barely covered electricity, but now 1ETH a month is practically a minimum wage salary. You need to be honest with yourself why you're doing it - are you making money to spend today or are you holding?
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
I just exited when the calculator at mycryptobuddy.com (which calculates in difficulty increases) indicated that profitability would be miniscule and not much over electricity costs very soon. It cannot account for price increases in Ethereum, but if you are using that to stay profitable it is almost always better to invest in the coins themselves. I sold all my gear and cards while their price was high and invested all the money into cryptocurrency. The gamble has paid off handsomely, I make more from crypto investing than from my job now. It has allowed me access to things I never could have dreamed of, but I still miss walking in my Ethereum mine and feeling the over 100 deg. temps and the instant sweat and all the noise. I miss all the network cables and blinking lights and thinking about the new network I was helping to secure. Trading and investing can't hold a candle to it, but the money is better.

The economics are simple - how much power do you use vs how much money you make per unit time. As a miner you're banking on the increase in difficulty correlating with an increase in price. Ethereum mining difficulty plummeted back in October, flatlined for a bit, and has been slowly on the rise since December. There is limited resale value in the cards (depreciation etc), but even after PoS hits there will be enough mineable things that selling them off wouldn't be necessary. Love or hate it, you could use a service like Nicehash. It becomes unprofitable if the difficulty spikes, but not the value, so your hardware takes a long time to mine little. Often this happens between new technology generations, like when ASIC miners made GPU miners unusable for Bitcoin. Right now Ethereum is still quite profitable to mine. I have a bunch of GTX1060's with a combined hashrate of 100MH/s running on an EthOS system. That's enough to earn between 0.35-0.4 ETH a month at the moment. The power usage is around 300W with some twiddling - around £25-30 per month. You also have to consider speculative value of the coin. Suppose you were mining 1ETH a month back in January '17. Your monthly payout (about $30) would have barely covered electricity, but now 1ETH a month is practically a minimum wage salary. You need to be honest with yourself why you're doing it - are you making money to spend today or are you holding?

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

I just exited when the calculator at mycryptobuddy.com (which calculates in difficulty increases) indicated that profitability would be miniscule and not much over electricity costs very soon. It cannot account for price increases in Ethereum, but if you are using that to stay profitable it is almost always better to invest in the coins themselves. I sold all my gear and cards while their price was high and invested all the money into cryptocurrency. The gamble has paid off handsomely, I make more from crypto investing than from my job now. It has allowed me access to things I never could have dreamed of, but I still miss walking in my Ethereum mine and feeling the over 100 deg. temps and the instant sweat and all the noise. I miss all the network cables and blinking lights and thinking about the new network I was helping to secure. Trading and investing can't hold a candle to it, but the money is better.