Is it time to throw in the towel?

Is it time to throw in the towel & quit mining?

  • Yes. It's time to sell the hardware.

    Votes: 37 45.7%
  • No. (crypto can survive without China)

    Votes: 44 54.3%

  • Total voters
    81

J Macker

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jan 25, 2001
Messages
10,167
I'm sure many of you are wondering the same thing. There's a number of factors that are weighing in on my decision to stop mining.

I'm considering selling off about 20 gpus, and all other equipment, and two Terrahash BTC miners.

1. Price of LTC is down
2. Price of BTC is down
3. Difficulty is up
4. SUMMER HEAT is imminent!
5. All this results in a revenue per day rapidly decreasing to $1 per day per gpu. It doesn't sound like much, but it's $600 per month even with LTC at $11.

I've been mining since May 2013, and it's been interesting. But I'm pretty burned out now, and I'm not looking forward to the summer heat. My AC cannot handle all the gpus, so if I were to continue mining, I need to build a shed and get the gpus out of the house.

The funny thing is; I was mining LTC last summer when it was $2 per LTC. of course, each gpu was making about 0.8 LTC per day back then, so it was much more profitable.

What say ye, crypto [H] fellows? Is it time to quit mining and sell off the gear on the cusp of seeing a flood of used video cards on the market?
 
On the cusp...?

There's already a flood of GPUs, so if you're selling now you'll get bottom dollar.
 
Not really. Lowest I've seen 7950's is $220, that's only $80 depreciation for a year.

Even with the 280x cards I have, since I only paid $300 each, sold the codes, used price is around $250-260, that's not bad at all.

They'd move quick if I sold for $210 & $240, I think.

Plus, if you don't sell, then it's a matter of weighing:
** the depreciation rate from now until a year from now (realistically if miners use the cards through the summer, they'd use them through the coming winter for heat).

vs.
** Profit brought in during that time
 
What's with all the doom and gloom lately? Yeah BTC took a big hit and there is bad news in China but there always is. With BTC->USD at $437, your power needs to be at least $0.17/kwh to not break even.

For the last 24 hours, Clevermining payout per 1Mh per day with BTC at $437 = 0.00463 = $2.03
Total system power consumption for 1Mh (GPU) I'll be liberal and say 500W at $0.17 kwh = $2.04 per day
 
What's with all the doom and gloom lately? Yeah BTC took a big hit and there is bad news in China but there always is. With BTC->USD at $437, your power needs to be at least $0.17/kwh to not break even.

For the last 24 hours, Clevermining payout per 1Mh per day with BTC at $437 = 0.00463 = $2.03
Total system power consumption for 1Mh (GPU) I'll be liberal and say 500W at $0.17 kwh = $2.04 per day

Multiple chinese exchanges confirmed the ban less than 6 hours ago. Prices are plummeting
 
y'all get the hell off the network so my hash counts for more
 
"bottom dollar" meaning maybe MSRP.

no bottom dollar people do not want miners beat to crap cards @ msrp miners thinking they can sell their used cards @ msrp are really on some strong drugs. why pay msrp for a car that has significant hours and stress applied to it when they can get a new one for $309-$389for a 280x (7970ghz 2nd edition) and as for the 290/x those prices are dropping as well so why pay a miners msrp when they can get it new close to msrp
 
Multiple chinese exchanges confirmed the ban less than 6 hours ago. Prices are plummeting

I read the article and fortunately for me, I don't use this exchange. Just because Chinese exchanges are biting the dust doesn't mean that Chinese miners can't cash out elsewhere. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand the fear from this. Hell, they can cash out in USD and work the exchange rate to yen.
 
I don't really know. I'd be hesitant to offer advice.

It seems to me like with ASICs coming out there's not really anywhere to go.

I have I guess a couple questions. The alternative-algorithm (non-scrypt "ASIC-proof") coins rely /basically/ on people's ignorance, right? I tried wording this less inflammatory but I'm not sure how else to put it.

As I understand it, the only people who benefit from altcoins that can only be GPU-mined are GPU miners. Everyone interested in a coin for its merits as a medium of exchange is not at all interested in the profitability of some guy who bought a lot of video cards. Those are the people you need holding/using a currency.

The ASIC-mined coins have more power and resiliency plus they were "first" and are already established which is a huge boon. So it seems to me unless you're trading the coin or mining and immediately converting, these ASIC-resistant coins are kind of pointless? You're just making money off of people who believe there's going to be some future actual purpose for them. Am I correct in my understanding?
 
"bottom dollar" meaning maybe MSRP.

Plenty of 290s available at only slightly above MSRP brand new retail with non-reference coolers. Who is going to buy a card used at full throttle for MSRP when they can buy brand new for $20-40 more?

Already seeing 290 reference cards sell for $310 on eBay.
 
I don't really know. I'd be hesitant to offer advice.

It seems to me like with ASICs coming out there's not really anywhere to go.
..
The ASIC-mined coins have more power and resiliency plus they were "first" and are already established which is a huge boon. So it seems to me unless you're trading the coin or mining and immediately converting, these ASIC-resistant coins are kind of pointless? You're just making money off of people who believe there's going to be some future actual purpose for them. Am I correct in my understanding?

Pretty much, yes. The value of alt-coins is dependent on their ratio to BTC as long as the exchanges don't offer direct exchanges for Fiat money, and as long as there's no merchants taking payment via scrypt or whatever coin. If you can't spend the coins, then the only value is to speculators, and it is indeed a "property" and not a currency.

Scrypt asics are another factor to consider selling off gpu farms. I do not believe in the viability of the hundred+ alt coins out there in the long run at gaining any marketshare.
 
I'm continuing to mine, but then again, I don't have a farm anywhere near as big as yours - only 6 GPUs. The BTC price is pretty low now that it may make sense to sell some of your cards and just buy some coins with the money you get back.
 
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Same. I'm going to run it till the bitter end, then if profit drops to zero I have plenty of kids game machines and whatnot that could use the GPUs. I think it will keep turning over something though.
 
I too figure I have at least a month or two of life left in these mining rigs though I'm not sinking any new money into them. Even the air conditioner I had planned to purchase for this room may get put on hold.

Once I quit mining though, a few of my old GPUs will get put to use Folding or Crunching. I'm not going to run as many cards as I was mining, but some of them will get a good workout still.

I just got a few 290's in a few weeks ago and I've been waiting for the PSU to power them to show up for the past couple months... it finally did, but I don't think I'm going to sully them with mining. They will be my new gaming machine cards.
 
My GPU fan died a couple of weeks ago. I have yet to even fill out the RMA. If I do get the card replaced I'll probably just put it in a closet somewhere. Electricity is 17.5 cents here so it's not really profitable right now, and it's going to be getting warm soon...
 
I will keep mining, at least for another 2 months before the 25% price hike of electricity in the summer. Then I may see if I can sell the GPUs for BTC/LTC (bottom dollar GPUs for bottom dollar crypto) and if not then I'll just throw them into the attic and hope for another crypto bubble to sell them off at some inflated price. I certainly won't get much for them now.
 
I'm still running the same # of GPUs, six of a mixed bag, and I'm a little better than $4 a day in the clear. Scryptguild mainly.

But I have actually doubled down on BTC hash rate. Ebay prices on that HW has really dropped and the efficiency of what I can get on "sale" is much better.
I'm rid of all the BFL power-hog stuff finally but upgraded instead of selling off.
Up to 1.1TH/s and still making much more than power used. 7.8 cents per KWH at high consumption.

I still feel this is a temporary drop on all fronts with several of the shit-coins about to disappear.
Hopefully the "devs", and I use that term loosely, will see that spending the time to throw yet another coin copy destined to pump and fail out there over and over is no longer the quick buck it once was.
If more would spend the time to gen something more asic resistant I think the return would be much more rewarding.

I just believe there is too much capital involved overall with crypto for it to fail long term but holding what you mine at todays prices is an absolute must or you are just throwing money at the power companies.

My play money will stay in it for now.
 
I'll be mining on my basement rigs (about 1.4 Mhash) through the summer. It stays about 55F in the winter and 70F in the summer down there, without AC. I'll be betting against the future value of coins. I legit mined about 3K BTC and sold way to early (ie. cleared 20K instead of 3 million lol).
 
Seeing as how Maxwell was delayed, possibly until 2015, that makes the 290s still some of the best gpu's for the next year which keeps the value of them higher. So we could throw them in a closet, and in 9 months they wouldn't be outdated and might sell for more after the current panic selling is over.
 
In my opinion, unless you are going to be mining on a commercial or near commercial scale (10TH/s+) and reinvesting into your operation as prices remain low, it isn't going to be as efficient for you. I've been GPU mining alts for quite a while now. Electrical rates here go up June 1st, so unless I decide to move towards buying a large number of ASIC miners or BTC/USD rates increase, I'll probably suspend for summer.

I do feel strongly that BTC will recover and does signal a new method of transactional bartering. Just like any "new" fad, it may take a while for prices to stabilize.
 
I don't have a huge farm either, only about 5.5Mh/s. I'm planning on throwing my Sapphire cards to folding once it's no longer profitable. The way I see it is that we have at least 2-3 months before the scrypt asics come out in full force making it literally unprofitable to mine.

My two cents on the jane and scrypt-n coins is that I doubt these would catch on. As a previous poster had mentioned, these are coins created by gpu miners. We can hope to have them catch on but I doubt it.
 
I have a good size farm (20 Mh/s) and I'm thinking about selling it call and calling it quits. I already have quite a bit of LTC/BTC and I just don't see any future for this kind of tech any more. It's far too unstable to have any long term success IMO. I also don't see the ~$300 days I had a couple months ago ever coming back. Too much bad news/press.
 
My two cents on the jane and scrypt-n coins is that I doubt these would catch on. As a previous poster had mentioned, these are coins created by gpu miners. We can hope to have them catch on but I doubt it.

I keep seeing people saying this but IMHO srypt coins were created for the same reason and they are doing just fine (well at least as fine as BTC lol.)
 
I keep seeing people saying this but IMHO srypt coins were created for the same reason and they are doing just fine (well at least as fine as BTC lol.)

Exactly. The only change I'd make to that statement would be substituting "were up to now" for the word "are".

The sole reason we have a proliferation of standard scrypt coins now was the threat of SHA-256 ASICs two years ago when about the only scrypt coin was LTC. Up to that point you were doing just fine mining BTC on a GPU. Fast forward to three months ago, and you were cluelessly losing money mining BTC on a GPU, but you could make money hand over fist mining scrypt coins on a GPU. A year from now you'll probably be cluelessly losing money mining standard scrypt coins on a GPU. And so the world turns...

GPU miners will always put their hash to work somewhere, and provided with that demand, the market will always supply them a means to do it.
 
I keep seeing people saying this but IMHO srypt coins were created for the same reason and they are doing just fine (well at least as fine as BTC lol.)

Mined some Hirocoin to hold onto. Might be worth something, might not.
 
I turned my rigs off yesterday to put them up for sale. I felt like I was turning off a friends life support. :(

But here's my reasoning in case anyone else is curious....

1. I'm at ~$0.16/kw and it's been in the 80s this week. I'm guessing within the next week or 2 my GPU's will start overheating without any additional cooling (AC unit/more fans/ventilation/etc). Instead of running the risk of ruining the GPU's, they either need to be turned off or I need to invest more money, and the latter is not an option.
2. I was thinking about just turning everything off and waiting until it gets cool enough again to mine, but the Asics seem to be inevitably coming. Most likely coming online during summer and getting into full swing by Q3/Q4 of this year. That'll be able the time it's cool enough to start mining again and the difficulty will be so high by then, my piddly 3MH will be like trying to dig a car tunnel with a toothpick.
3. I've invested most of my coins into crypto stocks which yield dividends every 3-4 weeks. It's not much, but it at least keeps some coins flowing in.
4. I got a pretty decent deal on most of my gear and with the current prices I won't take too much of a hit. I'll have to eat the cost of about 20 of those PCI-E risers I did the group buy for, but in the grand scheme of things it's not too bad.
5. BTC/LTC prices are down to a point that virtually EVERYTHING I mine would have to go towards electricity costs.






Gentlemen, it's been a privilege mining with you.
 
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I turned my rigs off yesterday to put them up for sale. I felt like I was turning off a friends life support. :(

But here's my reasoning in case anyone else is curious....

1. I'm at ~$0.16/kw and it's been in the 80s this week. I'm guessing within the next week or 2 my GPU's will start overheating without any additional cooling (AC unit/more fans/ventilation/etc). Instead of running the risk of ruining the GPU's, they either need to be turned off or I need to invest more money, and the latter is not an option.
2. I was thinking about just turning everything off and waiting until it gets cool enough again to mine, but the Asics seem to be inevitably coming. Most likely coming online during summer and getting into full swing by Q3/Q4 of this year. That'll be able the time it's cool enough to start mining again and the difficulty will be so high by then, my piddly 3MH will be like trying to dig a car tunnel with a toothpick.
3. I've invested most of my coins into crypto stocks which yield dividends every 3-4 weeks. It's not much, but it at least keeps some coins flowing in.
4. I got a pretty decent deal on most of my gear and with the current prices I won't take too much of a hit. I'll have to eat the cost of about 20 of those PCI-E risers I did the group buy for, but in the grand scheme of things it's not too bad.
5. BTC/LTC prices are down to a point that virtually EVERYTHING I mine would have to go towards electricity costs.






Gentlemen, it's been a privilege mining with you.

/wave
 
I know they're uncommon, but if anyone is parting out and has a 260x, please drop me a line :)
 
ditto here with non-x 270s, or any 7000 series or newer 4GB AMD cards. Send a PM
 
$1/day profit? or gross revenue?

my 7950's are running at 670 kH/sec and about 230w. My power is $0.07 per kwh
So it's down to $1.19 revenue, $0.40 electric, only $0.80 profit per card per day.

the low profitability is even lower now that it was last summer. I remember making between 0.5-0.8 LTC/day per gpu, but LTC was only about $2-3 back then.

Of course, I'm glad I kept mining last summer because those coins increased a lot in value.
 
The sole reason we have a proliferation of standard scrypt coins now was the threat of SHA-256 ASICs two years ago when about the only scrypt coin was LTC. Up to that point you were doing just fine mining BTC on a GPU. Fast forward to three months ago, and you were cluelessly losing money mining BTC on a GPU, but you could make money hand over fist mining scrypt coins on a GPU. A year from now you'll probably be cluelessly losing money mining standard scrypt coins on a GPU. And so the world turns...

GPU miners will always put their hash to work somewhere, and provided with that demand, the market will always supply them a means to do it.
Good post.

It's anyone's guess right now as to what the next algo will be popular to try and stay a step ahead of ASICs. If X11 turns out to be as good as people are claiming it to be, we might actually have a decent, low-power alternative to scrypt and people shouldn't have to turn off their rigs for the summer.
 
I saw the ship sinking in late Feb / early March and recouped most of my investment. Sold my 2 280x and bought 2 2 TB hard drives a gtx760 and a 27" monitor. I now enjoy my computer again.
 
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