Topic: If you are thinking of mining... learn what DIFFICULTY is first. - page 2. (Read 2909 times)

This is all speculation. But consider this, if you are 100% sure the price will rise, then why not just buy the coin instead of going through the headache of mining.

But like I said before. Rising difficulty doesn't mean rising price. Just look at Bitcoins price and difficulty during 2014-2015.

Broadly speaking, you are right.  Except your assumption may not hold true.  If the price stagnates or even falls, your rig will quickly become worthless.  Difficulty will likely continue to increase during a period of price stagnation.  Even selling off the parts won't get you much back as ebay will be bloated with them.  From a pure business risk/reward prospective, buying and holding the coins themselves is less risky and possibly more profitable in the long run.  
But not as much fun as mining!

Don't be tempted to see it as more than a hobby.

Right now since mining is crazy profitable your main concern shouldn't be the power rate. Pretty much anybody anywhere on the planet can mine and net a profit right now.

You are better off mining today at your home then you are getting some remote location going in a couple weeks/months.

But yes you can mine remotely, many do it here.

The rigs do crash from time to time. Especially with the newer GPUs and with AMDs bad drivers. Every few days I need to manually hard-reset a rig. However you can buy some product that lets you power cycle a rig remotely and that should work most of the time.

If you want something that can be left unattended for weeks/months you should look at an Antminer.

Thank you for explaining it to this newbie.

I'll use ETH as an example. I'm operating under the assumption that it's popularity (and hence market cap) is bound to rise faster than its difficulty. While mining rewards may dwindle as difficulty rises, the value of mined coins rises faster. Of course, we have no way to know for sure, but is my reasoning at least based on good logic?

Thanks for the tip.

Do you think it's possible to do mining semi-remotely. I have the chance of mining in a familiar location at a competitive rate. I am able to hire a non tech person to take care of it if necessary (labor is cheap at the location) however I myself won't be able to attend to it in a daily/weekly manner. Does mining need constant attention to the machines or things can be managed remotely easily, thanks.

I see every second post about some newbie who wants to quit his day job and mine for a living.

You need to learn what difficulty is first and why its important. When I started mining, I had no idea what it was. I just assumed if the price stayed constant I would make the same amount of money everyday.

Difficulty is basically a bad term for newbies. The correct term should be 'Competition ratio'. Basically the amount of coins mined in a day is capped. For ETH its 30000 ETH/day.

Unless there is some network protocol issue this figure will stay constant. So if there is 1 miner, he will receive 30000 ETH a day, if there are 30000 miners all with equal hashrate, each will receive 1 ETH a day.

Hence your enemy isn't only the ETH price, its also the amount of other people that start mining and who's profits you will have to share. In the past, difficulty rarely decreases.

When difficulty increases, it doesn't mean price has to increase. Its a false assumption.

Does this mean you shouldn't mine? No. In fact its highly unlikely you will end up losing money if you start mining. Unless you start a fire and burn all your equipment to the ground.

However for comparison consider this.

RX 470 mining @ 28MH/s ETH today makes ~ $4.63 USD
RX 470 mining @ 28MH/s ETH on March 1 2017 made ~ $1.04 USD