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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

as everyone knows, mining bitcoin has slim profit margins, due to hardware, electricity, increasing difficulty, etc.

So could mining an altcoin offer higher returns? I'm skeptical because if a coin is too profitable, people will mine the crap out of it and then dump it, sending the price plunging.

Since June, most alt coins have lagged bitcoin..there are simply too many of them and no differentiation. With very few exceptions, anything an altcoin does so does bitcoin.

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This description has it backwards. When an altcoin is profitable, many people mine it, which sends the difficulty of mining skyrocketing. Remember that for most coins, the daily production is fixed. So when more people mine, it just gets harder to mine it. This means that the profit goes down, but the price of the coin is not necessarily affected.

It's also not really true that Bitcoin does everything that altcoins do. It's just that most of what altcoins try doesn't seem to matter much in the market, with obvious exceptions for stronger anonymity (xmr, zec) or smart contracts (eth).

This depends very much on whether the underlying algorithm is ASIC-resistant or not. The lessons learned from the BTC mining power laws prove that coins that allow for ASICs to be developed and come online will see the trajectory you have outlined. Less so for ASIC-resistant coins like XMR.

Bitcoin has slim profit margins in places where electricity is expensive. He runs the same equipment that we do in the West, but the cost of living, electricity, etc. is significantly lower, and so it is much more viable. This is the same reason massive ASIC farms are viable in China (where the operators are able to get incredibly cheap electricity), but not elsewhere.

Electricity and internet are not cheap in Africa. They are even costlier here. Cost of living is even higher in Africa. A tourist from Detroit visited few weeks ago, he was surprised that the cost of a plate of decent meal is higher in Africa. Standard of living should be compared along with cost of living.

I don't think you can say anything about 'Africa' as a whole and have it be very true. I just came back from 2 weeks in Ghana and I was struck by the opposite, really great food at really nice places was very, very cheap.

You can say some things about Africa. Electricity and connectivity are always more expensive. It's one of the most expensive data and infrastructure markets in the world.

Of course, there is massive variability as Africa is huge and diverse. But the entire continent has more expensive power than say, Germany, or something.

Also, stuff that is human powered (food, tailoring, etc.) are much cheaper. Again, lots of variability, but food in Ghana is going to be cheaper than food in say, Germany, or the US. Although you can certainly get expensive stuff in some areas (SA, TZ, etc.).

deadbeef is, indeed, heavily subsidized in the US: those $1 McDonalds hamburgers are a bit of an anomaly. When I was living in Kisumu, I could get a decent meal that wouldn't kill me for a few dollars; I believe there were cheaper options for people with hardier stomachs.

Meanwhile, US mobile data prices are some of the highest in the world. I spend ~$40 month in the US for 2GB of data (before getting capped to low speeds). The last time I was in Kenya, 1GB ran about $4-5, so about 1/5 the price of my US plan. India (post-JIO) is ludicrously cheap right now: I just today got a 1GB/day 28-day plan for ~$5.

But, of course, all of this depends on income as well. The Kenyan data tends to be more expensive for everyday people because they buy it in rather smaller increments than 1GB (250MB or even 100MB at a time), which end up being more expensive per unit.

Here's some data comparing monthly mobile phone costs across the world, with various kinds of normalization, for your perusal: http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/where-are-cheapest-and-m...

Why voting me down? Please share your experience.

Mining specific alts with GPUs is currently profitable. You can use whattomine.com for an estimate.

It depends on what hardware you have available to you and what other limiting factors there are, hardware wise. Choosing what to mine is about efficient use of electricity, and miners make these micro economic decisions every day - but within the confines of what hardware they have. A SHA 256 ASIC is only ever going to mine SHA 256 coins, a Scrypt ASIC is only ever going to mine Scrypt coins. GPUs on the other hand, can mine a bunch of different things with just a change of software.

> as everyone knows, mining bitcoin has slim profit margins, due to hardware, electricity, increasing difficulty, etc.

It depends on what you do. You could mine today and sell a couple of years from now, profit margins (and losses) are usually only established when something is sold. Of course that leaves you open to a potential downside as well.

> So could mining an altcoin offer higher returns? I'm skeptical because if a coin is too profitable, people will mine the crap out of it and then dump it, sending the price plunging.

And so therefore everyone that mined and sold had a lower return?

multipool mining has been around for like 5 years

Ethereum and Monero are good examples of protocols that are different from the Bitcoin protocol.

That's exactly what the article says he does.

I want to invest in a mining index fund. Mine a bit of them all! Surely something will prove to have value long enough to sell.

Why do you need to bother mining them?

A much easier way to convert capital into cryptocurrency is simply to buy cryptocurrency.

Heating.

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