Seems everybody is dumping their Antminers and buying ASICs. Some of us are GPU miners who started with BTC, some of us were Litecoin miners, and some are completely new to ETH mining.
It might seem like a good idea to buy a new GPU because it will ROI in less than 2 months but keep in mind that history repeats itself.
I started mining with GPUs in January 2014 because with a 280X you made like $10 a day, so with $300 retail it would ROI in about a month. Nobody cared about power consumption back then because people were making huge money.
However like most good things, it came to an end the next month when Mt Gox caused a huge BTC price crash and Scrypt ASICs were being deployed.
The Spring of 2014 was a buyers market for GPUs on eBay. There were 7970/280X going as low as $100-125 while a month prior they were $300-400.
The 280X which made around $10 a day, 6 month later was only netting $1 a day.
A good thread to read is from the Litecoin forum about an individual who made good money with a small farm but got killed when he tried to expand at the wrong time.
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=11743I am not saying right now is a bad time to stop investing in GPUs. Nobody knows when the turning point will be. But you really should buy used GPUs like the 7970/280X instead of going for new 380X to lower your depreciation on the cards in case it turns ugly and fast.
Good luck to all.
Well, I was thinking the same, but now how I'm building rigs little by little, I see that I didn't have to invest in 280 and 380, but just in 290 and 390 and I will explain you why !?
290 and 390 are a little bit more expensive than 280 and 380, but one day when ETH stop mining with 6 x 290/390 you have 100 MH/s in lyrav2, 100 MH/s in Quark, 100 MH/s in Qubit, 70 MH/s in X11 and so...
but with 6 x 280/380 you have just 24 MH/s in lyrav2, 24 MH/s in Quark, 30 MH/s in Qubit, 24 MH/s in X11 and you are nowhere, so if I have 290/390 I don't care if one day ETH will stop with mining because I have a lot of other options for earning good profit !! so from my perspective, now when you are investing good money, better give a little bit more and you don't have to care about the future !!! and of course, buy all cards with guaranty, because we are mining 24/7.