A couple years ago I dabbled in mining. I got a top end card that would mine transactions for 16+ hours a day. When I actually wanted to use my computer, I'd flip mining off for a couple of hours and do whatever I needed.
I got to game with ultra graphics, have a PC for school work, and do some mining.
£48 per day minus £4.80 costs. Every day? For just leaving something switched on? It is quite appealing.
I got my 1080ti's for £650 a pop. ROI is 108 days. That's why people, myself included, are doing it.
Versus £5,200 capital to invest immediately in a basket of safe (as much as crypto currencies can be), liquid coins that will likely x3 to x8 over a 12 month period.
To each their own I guess but it's not the bet for me.
Seems safer to me (if you're worried about a huge crash) to leave your principle investment equivalent amount on a good exchange with fiat support (e.g. Bitstamp) setup a sensible stop loss order and then, as soon as you've x2 your original investment, pull your initial stake out and leave the rest in crypto (on a Nano Ledger S or similar).
What if satoshi appeared and dumped his entire stake? That is probably the worst case scenario I can think of.
Sure, you could hold "shitcoins" that are currently easier to mine but that's a lot more risky than long term holding something like ETH, LTC, XMR (at least I think it is anyway).
I don't mine ETH directly with Nvidia hardware though it is still profitable on AMD gear. I use whattomine.com to get a rough estimate of my daily earnings...
I mine to a pool called miningpoolhub which auto exchanges my shitcoins to LTC (or whatever I choose). From there I send to Coinbase -> GDAX -> Sell for ETH or FIAT. So far, since starting mining 1 month ago I have ROI'd 1.8 1080ti's already. Once they've paid themselves off the rest is pure profit and the best part, GPUs have intrinsic value beyond mining.
Also as per other commentors - coins I mined will appreciate too. If I buy ETH with FIAT (which I have also done btw) I am literally buying thin air. At least with GPUs I own a thing if the shit hits the proverbial!
- whattomine.com - https://goo.gl/94KHv4
Following the Gregorian calendar (international defacto standard) this statement is always false, never true.
There's no way all these coins are going to be accepted currencies (literally none are, not even Bitcoin). There's no way all these coins will retain long-term value either.
Anyone who joins in on the mining is doing two things: 1) joining in on the pyramid schemes (on which you as miner and cryptocurrency owner depend) 2) adding to more electricity waste.
As for GPUs. Once the shit hits the fan their price will freefall. If their price falls now, they're pretty much worthless. More so because many of them will be abused. GPUs aren't made to be used 24/7. But yeah, you can play games on all your 1080s...
So: * Mine whatever is most profitable to mine at that time. * On mining that coin, convert to whichever investment vehicle gives you the risk/return that you want (BTC, ETH, XLM, VFIFX, US T-bonds, etc).
Sounds like a pretty good deal.
What you didn't take into you account as well was the fact that this is $3,000 if Ethereum doubles in price, $4,500 if it tripes like you specified.
The only way to avoid diminishing mining returns as difficulty increases is to swap to a new, lesser known coin. Eventually you run out of coins to swap to or the ones you are mining don't go up in value (because if they did, bigger miners would come in and knock you out of the game as the difficulty shoots up). All the time your GPUs are ageing too.
If you want a steady income with arguably a lesser risk profile and more staying power than personal mining offers, why not put some money in to coins that offer node payouts?
As soon as a coin's value increases, more mining hash power enters the scene and difficulty shoots up (ruining your profit margin). You then swap to another coin, eventually the same thing happens. Rinse, repeat.
During all of this, you still have to make back your initial investment on the GPUs and power, then you have usually another 6-9 months max before your entire rig is too outdated and you have to start again buying newer, faster cards (which will then take you another 3-5 months just to earn back your cost).
Just seems a very painful and slow way to cash in on the crypto bonanza (which isn't going to last forever).
There's no way all these coins [1] retain proper value compared to NASDAQ [2]. Take AAPL for example: ~48% [3] in one year. GOOGL for example: ~36% [4] on one year.
[1] https://whattomine.com/calculators
[2] http://money.cnn.com/data/hotstocks/index.html
which cryptocurrency is this? I'm only getting <£3/day mining ETH on my 1080ti..