GPU Shortages Will Worsen Thanks to Coin Miners

3 years ago the price of a 1080Ti was well over $1,000 due to mining. Just wait for the inevitable pullback. Then you'll get mining cards for cheap as people look to liquidate. It's all cyclical.
I remember there was a short period of time where miners were only buying the “cheaper” cards and the 1080 Ti price was unaffected. That’s when my friend and I offloaded our used 1070s for $75 more each than we paid for them brand new and then bought brand new 1080 Ti FTW3s for MSRP. One of the best PC hardware decisions I ever made since that card lasted me well over 3 years and is still going to be used in my second rig for years to come.
 
GPU shortages will continue because AMD isn’t making GPU’s and NVidia is pumping out parts as fast as they can but it’s nowhere near fast enough. Miners are just another customer group
 
I'm also mining but not in the same sense as everyone else: I forgot the password to an old Bitcoin wallet so I'm using hashcat to try to crack it... wish me luck! It's not FIRE money sitting inside of it, but it is a somewhat substantial amount now that Bitcoin is $40K.

I bought 3x B-Stock 2080Ti FTW3 HC for the task back in September, but only more recently had the time to spin things up. I'll probably be trying to crack it for the next year, given I've found how easy it is to generate something like 100 billion passwords, yet somewhat difficult to trim down a lot of the junk. At the very worst it's a fun personal project where I'm learning new things/skills that could be worth some pay raises in the future.

For a little while I was like "why did I buy these I'm going to get my 3080 pre-orders by the time I get this rig up and running". Let's just say I am very happy to have those cards right now. Watercooled is a huge bonus too as it's a quiet rig. I might even put my 3090 to work soon - again another card I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep back in November.
 
Crypto is treated like capital gains. As long as it's not traded for cash, it isn't taxed. Just like if you have stocks, you are not taxed until you sell.

This is only partially true. If you are mining you are required to report your mining income as gross income. You are comparing stocks to cryptocurrencies which, when mining, is not a valid comparison. If you purchase cryptocurrencies then your comparison is valid. But not for mining.

The IRS has had clear guidance since 2014 that mining any virtual currency creates a taxable income event. Mining is unique and is most similar to self-employment income and must be voluntarily reported in order to avoid extreme fines and audits. The IRS aggressively enforces tax reporting on mining and selling cryptocurrency. If you have been mining cryptocurrencies and not paying taxes on the income I highly recommend you begin, and also go back and amend any prior years' tax returns where you may have mined and not reported. No joke, they are serious about this. The government does not like it when we make any kind of income and not give them their cut. Cryptocurrency is not anonymous. They can tie back to IP addresses, email accounts, bank accounts, and exchangers like Coinbase and others. Please protect yourself.

https://taxbit.com/blog/2019-10-21-irs-guidance-on-cryptocurrency-mining-taxes/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyp...turn-over-court-ordered-data/?sh=7802642f1431
 
This is only partially true. If you are mining you are required to report your mining income as gross income. You are comparing stocks to cryptocurrencies which, when mining, is not a valid comparison. If you purchase cryptocurrencies then your comparison is valid. But not for mining.

The IRS has had clear guidance since 2014 that mining any virtual currency creates a taxable income event. Mining is unique and is most similar to self-employment income and must be voluntarily reported in order to avoid extreme fines and audits. The IRS aggressively enforces tax reporting on mining and selling cryptocurrency. If you have been mining cryptocurrencies and not paying taxes on the income I highly recommend you begin, and also go back and amend any prior years' tax returns where you may have mined and not reported. No joke, they are serious about this. The government does not like it when we make any kind of income and not give them their cut. Cryptocurrency is not anonymous. They can tie back to IP addresses, email accounts, bank accounts, and exchangers like Coinbase and others. Please protect yourself.

https://taxbit.com/blog/2019-10-21-irs-guidance-on-cryptocurrency-mining-taxes/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyp...turn-over-court-ordered-data/?sh=7802642f1431


It's been a while since I mined, back in the day - you declared nothing. How times have changed. Hard to keep up on the law changes, thanks for the update. Nowadays its just easier to buy low and hold BTC or ETH.
 
It's been a while since I mined, back in the day - you declared nothing. How times have changed. Hard to keep up on the law changes, thanks for the update. Nowadays its just easier to buy low and hold BTC or ETH.

Realistically, you can probably still do that as long as you don't have a large scale mining farm or don't try to claim deductions for your equipment and electricity. Coinbase treats mining as a transfer of coin and assigns it a cost basis based on when you transferred it in. When I used Taxbit, it didn't even see Nicehash transactions as a taxable event based on what Coinbase said. I would have to go and manually tell it that the transfers were taxable. I think the IRS is more interested in capital gains paid on coin sales personally.

You don't necessarily have to declare it as self-employed income. There are other areas like "hobby income" you could use for a lower tax rate, but then you wouldn't be able to write off electricity, gear, etc. Unless you have your own power meter for the mining equipment, I don't know how you could realistically argue with the IRS if they audited your expenses, especially for a home use computer that also mines in its spare time. Hobby income might be the easiest way to declare mined coins.

Edit: After looking into it some more, you can write off expenses against your hobby income, but you can't take a loss like you could if you ran it as a business.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Mega6
like this
Realistically, you can probably still do that as long as you don't have a large scale mining farm or don't try to claim deductions for your equipment and electricity. Coinbase treats mining as a transfer of coin and assigns it a cost basis based on when you transferred it in. When I used Taxbit, it didn't even see Nicehash transactions as a taxable event based on what Coinbase said. I would have to go and manually tell it that the transfers were taxable. I think the IRS is more interested in capital gains paid on coin sales personally.

You don't necessarily have to declare it as self-employed income. There are other areas like "hobby income" you could use for a lower tax rate, but then you wouldn't be able to write off electricity, gear, etc. Unless you have your own power meter for the mining equipment, I don't know how you could realistically argue with the IRS if they audited your expenses, especially for a home use computer that also mines in its spare time. Hobby income might be the easiest way to declare mined coins.
I'll have to see what Bittrex sends me as far as forms. Not talking about a lot, just some leftover junk Dogecoin I traded for a few ETH. Traded at just the right time too, my ETH has already doubled. Thanks for the insight.
 
I'll have to see what Bittrex sends me as far as forms. Not talking about a lot, just some leftover junk Dogecoin I traded for a few ETH. Traded at just the right time too, my ETH has already doubled. Thanks for the insight.

Trading coins is a taxable event also. The problem is depending on how many transactions you had they might not send you forms. I've seen anything less than $10,000 and they aren't going to send you a form. You'd have to go and document it yourself. There are websites like taxbit mentioned above that will pull the transactions in from exchanges and give you the forms that you can print out.
 
Trading coins is a taxable event also. The problem is depending on how many transactions you had they might not send you forms. I've seen anything less than $10,000 and they aren't going to send you a form. You'd have to go and document it yourself. There are websites like taxbit mentioned above that will pull the transactions in from exchanges and give you the forms that you can print out.
That's fine, if I have to wing it - I can guesstimate my mining dates and know my sale dates and amount. Another reason to buy and hold. Turbotax last year started asking questions about crypto so i should be covered there.

Can get so damn complicated if you trade crypto and Uncle Sam does it on purpose.

Appreciate it.
 
The card I was waiting on MSI RTX 3060 Ti Ventus 2X OC the etailer informed me it won't be sold anymore which had costed only slightly above FE card MSRP, oh well guess I'll just skip buying a new card for now, can't be arsed to pick one up for a considerable amount more than they were originally intended to cost.
 
Article is misleading.
  • There is no real way to know or even be accurate with how long an investment to break even
  • The mining rewards vary day to day, hell even minutes it can change significantly, for current mining rewards/profits use WhatToMine, select the GPU you want to look at, self explanatory, it will tell you where as well as how much:
  • The kicker is buying one card or 100 of the same kind, if you can keep them all mining, they will all get paid off (if mining rewards stay high) about the same time period. For example 1 or 10 5700XT after pay off period, example: 100 days, all becomes 100% profit minus electrical costs
The mining craze is real now, get any GPU you can if you are looking for one ASAP

If I threw all my cards I have laying around plus what are in my machines it works out to be $42/day (only valid if price holds up, number of active miners, it will swing up and down and sometimes stays down). $1242/month, pay off that 3090 in less than a month and a half if prices remain at or above. What will happen is more miners will get into the game and that profit will noise dive due to the increase hashrate causing the difficulty level for the mining algorithm to increase. The dough will be spread out more with more miners.
i would imagine buying a 3080 to scalp back on ebay is much more profitable than actually trying to mine to roi then make profit. o_O
 
i would imagine buying a 3080 to scalp back on ebay is much more profitable than actually trying to mine to roi then make profit. o_O
Unless multi purpose card, game, work and mine when it is not doing anything else which will help pay some of it as time goes on. Who knows how long the current profits are going to last, they are slowly going down as a note due to more folks mining. ETH is going up faster than BTC so this is getting rather interesting.
 
I've been mining since summer of 2017. At the peak, (December 2017) I had 85 GPUs and 10 ASIC miners going. Sold the ASIC miners summer of 2018 and all my 1060 3G cards summer 2019. I held onto all my 1080Ti's until early last month when things got crazy and sold them all for $500 a pop after they had been mining 24/7 for 3.5 years. Had about 30 of them. Also sold off all my 1070's and 1070Ti's during that same time. I was able to pick up 16 5700 XT's for around $350 each mid November before they went to $500+. They do between 57 and 58 MH/s once BIOS modded.

I was at 2.4 GH/s ETH when I started selling off the 1080Ti's. I'm currently at 1.1 GH/s with my 5700 XTs (and a couple of left over Zotac 1070Ti's I kept as spared. I also got a 3080 with a couple more coming along with a 3090 KingPin. With the 56 GTX 1000 series cards, I was consuming right around 9,000 watts 24/7. With the 5700 XT's and 3000 series cards, my power is way down, currently right around 3,000 watts.

It has been a fun ride and I plan to keep mining since my power is free (have 50 kW solar array). Mining paid for all my gear, including the solar arrays.

So while I'm a miner, I do agree that Nvidia should not be selling large quantities directly to large farms. They should have to play the game the same way the rest of us have to, F5'ing, EVGA queue, Discord, etc.
 
Last edited:
I'm also mining but not in the same sense as everyone else: I forgot the password to an old Bitcoin wallet so I'm using hashcat to try to crack it... wish me luck! It's not FIRE money sitting inside of it, but it is a somewhat substantial amount now that Bitcoin is $40K.
have you tried using other peoples rainbow tables to crack it? they offer services out there that specialize in rainbow tables, or no? i havent been into computers in about 7 years so i am out of touch. but i do remember there use to be services that people offered that you could run your hash through. if you are worried about it being stolen or copied, well i can see your worry.
 
I was wondering why I saw my 5700XT listed at like $669 the other day in my PCPartpicker build.

Update:
It's $715 now. Whaaaat. *hears Jim Kramer voice* SELL SELL SELL, SELL SELL SELL
 
have you tried using other peoples rainbow tables to crack it? they offer services out there that specialize in rainbow tables, or no? i havent been into computers in about 7 years so i am out of touch. but i do remember there use to be services that people offered that you could run your hash through. if you are worried about it being stolen or copied, well i can see your worry.
My brief understanding of rainbow tables is that they do not work well for this because of the random salt the Bitcoin wallet applies on encryption. So other people's precomputed rainbow tables wouldn't work for me. I'd have to create my own rainbow table, and in doing that I'm doing just as much if not work more work than just brute forcing. And if I don't have a good reduction function it's just not going to find the password. I could be wrong though, as I'm no expert in any of this.

It's a difficult problem, but I think not a lost cause. I do remember creating a long password because I well aware that password length is king and not doing things like upper/lower/symbol etc. So it's very likely it's a long lower-case and digits password. There is an exception, and I have that covered. But here's the challenging part: I went a little bit off-the-wall in making it, and my hope here is that it wasn't totally off-the-wall. I don't think it was, and I do remember a chunk. Let's say 10 successive characters. But given I made it long, it could be up to 30 characters long. Let's just say 35 for safety. So I have up to 25 wildcards - except I'm kind of confident those wildcards are based on my particular "pattern" of making passwords. But given I'm confident in what that pattern is made up of - I'm throwing down anything and everything. Even today I'll ask myself a question: if I were to do this again - how would I make it? As a result, I've got a search space of billions. Most of those are junk, just because you just create all possibilities and hope that one of them is correct.

Like I said, tentatively I'll try to brute force through 1T unique passwords. Right now I'm chugging along at around 20,000 pw/s. I'll add some hardware as I can get it and hopefully ramp up to 50,000 pw/s. That should get me through my search in about a year (downtime included). Electricity costs will be ~$10K, but even at today's crypto prices I've got it covered and it's worth the effort.~
 
Last edited:
My brief understanding of rainbow tables is that they do not work well for this because of the random salt the Bitcoin wallet applies on encryption. So other people's precomputed rainbow tables wouldn't work for me. I'd have to create my own rainbow table, and in doing that I'm doing just as much if not work more work than just brute forcing. And if I don't have a good reduction function it's just not going to find the password. I could be wrong though, as I'm no expert in any of this.

It's a difficult problem, but I think not a lost cause. I do remember creating a long password because I well aware that password length is king and not doing things like upper/lower/symbol etc. So it's very likely it's a long lower-case and digits password. There is an exception, and I have that covered. But here's the challenging part: I went a little bit off-the-wall in making it, and my hope here is that it wasn't totally off-the-wall. I don't think it was, and I do remember a chunk. Let's say 10 successive characters. But given I made it long, it could be up to 30 characters long. Let's just say 35 for safety. So I have up to 25 wildcards - except I'm kind of confident those wildcards are based on my particular "pattern" of making passwords. But given I'm confident in what that pattern is made up of - I'm throwing down anything and everything. Even today I'll ask myself a question: if I were to do this again - how would I make it? As a result, I've got a search space of billions. Most of those are junk, just because you just create all possibilities and hope that one of them is correct.

Like I said, tentatively I'll try to brute force through 1T unique passwords. Right now I'm chugging along at around 20,000 pw/s. I'll add some hardware as I can get it and hopefully ramp up to 50,000 pw/s. That should get me through my search in about a year (downtime included). Electricity costs will be ~$10K, but even at today's crypto prices I've got it covered and it's worth the effort.~
Sounds like a fun problem. Also, you are modern day digging for treasure.
 
It's a difficult problem, but I think not a lost cause. I do remember creating a long password because I well aware that password length is king and not doing things like upper/lower/symbol etc. So it's very likely it's a long lower-case and digits password.



If its worth so much you should consider trying hypnosis, it can work and is much cheaper. I used it for something similar several years back. One session and the information was retrieved. Either way,best of luck.
 
It has been a fun ride and I plan to keep mining since my power is free (have 50 kW solar array). Mining paid for all my gear, including the solar arrays.

This is such an incredible, impressive project! I envy your knowledge and skills to be able to do this. (I assume you did most of it yourself.) Do you happen to be an electrician? Engineer? IT? Or self-taught?
 
My latest console is a Playstation 1. What is the supply on consoles nowadays? Equally as bad a GPUs?

edit: those look to be sold out too, haha

man, all going to have to start reading books or something
Miners will then figured out how to do hashes on trees man....

Incomming debate on soil to optimizes hashes/hour/branch.
 
Back
Top