amd vs nvidia. meh. just roll with the punches and enjoy the ride i figure.
there is not such a ride to enjoy. Hashrate destroys all profit. more coins produced destroy profit. More Asic destroy profit. More Nvidia guys switching to ETH destroys profit. PoS will destroy profit totally. more coins in the market means less profit. No demand or a declining demand destroys profit.
well true for those who bought in at the wrong time, didnt understand mining, got burned by the various ASIC/overpriced prebuilt rig scams etc. but for those of us who made a profit, based on luck/timing/whatever, its been an interesting time. i guess ive seen and experienced enough in crypto that i just roll with it now.
So the question remains unsolved: why is hashrate increasing since profit is almost neglectable??? are people betting on a price increase blindly?? What if that does not happen?? have they thought about it???
sunk cost. if you already paid for the hardware and it makes anything above (or even equal to) zero profit, you will keep running that hardware no matter what. some hodl hoping for a price increase. some sell to cover equipment/power costs. either way hash rate rises.
so as asics/fpgas drive gpus out of a particular algo gpu miners pile in on whatevers left, which seems to be eth for a lot of people at the moment. not to mention eth asics and fpga that are already here. so there is a frenzy of miners trying to get every last bit of profit out of their rigs before they are pretty much useless. and eth seems to be more or less the last hurrah for many miners.
for those not into asics, i personally think fpgas and fpga/gpu hybrids are going to be the next generation of miners. they are adaptable and much more efficient power wise vs gpus, although initial cost is high. gpus alone are going to have a rough time unless your power is basically free. perhaps new algos or coins can prolong their life, but even then everyone and their brother will just pile onto that algo or coin, dropping profits very quickly.
i think it could be this: the pill for 1080/1080ti. in a reedit post some guys have reported an increase from 37 to 54 simply by using a program that performs a "tweak" in the memory settings for GDDR5X. Considering a huge amount of people have those cards, the damage of this pill on the hashrate is huge because it increases the hashrate of Nvidia guys by 30% which is and could be this peak we are suffering.
i have two 1080tis and ever since the pill they have been on eth, running 53ish mhs. with the extra 34 mhs between them it was basically like getting a free 580 or 1070ti. before that they were on equihash iirc.
plus bitmain now has an asic eth miner.