Topic: The future of GPU (video card) mining,,, In Plain English (Read 1975 times)

golem is another option as well. thats another distributed mining option where you get paid to let others process images and such...if etherium goes proof of stake well have 1000  million dollar corporate nodes instead of individual miners...is it a good or bad thing? who knows...

The idea of mining is sound, so I can't imagine it'll ever truly become impossible to profit. We'll just be moving to new currencies, or the next valuable distributed farm technology will come up. I find it hard to believe we won't find another use for the massive number of calculations the world can put out at the moment.

Proof of stake is not as secure as proof of work. there are a lot of negatives with proof of stake and it ties up a ton of coins. does anybody have an estimate on how many coins are going to be tied up with pos?

Agreeing to what other mentioned in this thread, mining calls in for good amount of investment, maintenance and other things to make sure that you still have working rigs/cards or whatever. POS works out lot better and is more efficient way of generating coins. With mining, you need to keep switching gears to find the right coin to get good returns or else you won't even be able to cover the electricity cost.

Most of my pals who mine ETH, do not know what's the next coin they will mine when ETH hits POS. They say they will think about it when time comes, for now they continue to mine ETH.

I'm going to say it here...it might not even happen...etherium moving to proof of stake. If they get the inflation rate under control and they improve proof of work algorithm why do they need proof of stake? Proof of stake will be centralized in a few powerful hands and it will require a huge reserve of coins being tied up in someones wallet. Bitcoin, litecoin, bitcoin cash, monero, zcash, zencash, ubiq, eth classic etc. will still continue to be proof of work. etherium will be truly living in its own bubble if it migrates to proof of stake...

I don't really think mining is going to die anytime soon, but it'll get a hell of a lot tougher when eth goes PoS, Eth is currently not the most profitable for a lot of cards but A LOT of gpus are still on eth, once eth goes pos they are going to flood every other coin and there things could get a little bumby

You will have a lot of other choices, I think. ETH is not the only choice for GPU mining, even not the best one.

If you don't want to mine ETH, you can still mine ETC.

If ETC is not so profitable, you can mine Zcash, XMR, SIGT.

Nowadays, new coins trend to design ASIC-resistant POW algorithm, if POW is still popular, or it's dominant in coin distribution, there are still other choice for GPU mining.

What I really care about is the trend of POS and POW, or the hybrid of both, which will be popular or may affect GPU minng

I have to commend you on the President Camacho reference -- two thumbs up!

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I have gotten heavy into GPU mining (around $60k in hardware)... but I do very little Etherium (Dagger). I sold 75% of my AMD cards on e-bay for 50-100% premiums after using them for 30-60 days and bought a bunch of GTX-1060s & 1080s.

I feel like they have enough time left in them mining *something* to pay themselves off and then some. I'm already to 50% of my hardware paid off so, frankly, I'm not sweating much.

As far as the OP... yes when Etherium mining ends it will hit other Alts pretty hard... but I get the feeling we still have a fair amount of time and if you mine / hold a bit with coin appreciation you will come out good (that's my bet anyway).

PS: With the cost premium of the 1080Ti I've been sticking to 1060s... I have a single 1080Ti and it doesn't really blow me away by any means for the cost. I can get almost four 1060s for the same price.

"just building on the stupidity that already exists"

LOL

Could be a slogan for a company or politician...maybe President Camacho

 1) It's probably a little worse than that - my best estimate is that Etherium has about 60% of the GPUs currently used for GPU mining, and might be as high as 70%.

 2) "Soon" is actually sometime next year, *IF* they actually hold to their current roadmap. They're not even planning to START experimental work with PoS prior to about December, and THAT is going to be a "1% POS 99% POW" split for likely quite a few months as they test and debug the POS implimentation.

3) Based on my estimate from 1) it will likely more-or-less triple difficulties over the first month after Ethereum goes to a full POS model on all other GPU mineable cryptocoins (except XMR which still has a substantial CPU mining presence).

 These estimates are based on current pricing staying fairly stable (give or take 20%), a major price move WILL change things dramatically.

If 75% of the world lives in poverty, i think our definition of poverty is off.
  Maybe it's more accurate to say 25% of the world lives in luxury.

When i was a kid living in Haiti our household income may have been about $8,000-$10,000 a year. We lived in a small but nice house had a car a full time Maid, and a house Guy, who lived on the property. Funny thing is even our maid had a house keeper.  Buy our local standards our maid was not considered to be in poverty. But by other 's standard we were poor as dirt.
Anyway i do get your point, but i wonder if  mining doesn't help in some way with overall with opportunity and income in some underdeveloped country's...   I guess this is Off topic but your perspective is Interesting.

Transition to the POS will not pass quickly, only the estimated time from one and a half years, and at first they said that the transition is planned this year.
Perhaps all this will also be delayed for some time. Planning for this activity is something for the years ahead, when things change very quickly, this seems to make little sense.

It is a file that gets generated in the gpu's ram, because of the growing size it caused a slowing effect on amd cards.  Amd released a one time driver update that fixes the slow down issue, though there can be other pitfalls such as under volting compatibility with the update.

I think you missed my point. I do not mine ETH. My concern had to do with the possibility of a massive flood of miners looking for a alternative to mining ETH when POS hits, and causing the difficulty level to skyrocket,causing and possibly drastically lowering profitability across the all GPU mine-able coins.
 
TMDZ seem to address most of my concerns.
Now if i could find a crystal ball to see what China was going to do next...

GPU mining is stupid. All this electricity and heat generated so a few of us can profit from a digital currency that does not exist. It's really ridiculous when you think about it. But a lot of the world is ridiculous. Central banks print money and 75% of the world lives in poverty. So as stupid as GPU mining is, it's just building on the stupidity that already exists.

With that said, the future of GPU is not going away but it should transform. GPU companies are going to cash in and they should but they can develop products that are more efficient at what they do on the consumer level. I think what the OP wants to know, is what is the future of GPU mining when Ethereum goes POS:

1. People will switch to mining another coin, since it won't be nowhere near as profitable, it won't last long and we'll get a big GPU sell off
2. The big sell off will eventually be a positive to those who hung in there. How much of a positive? Impossible to know.
3. As time passes, another (profitable) GPU mineable coin will emerge that needs people to mine and build the network.

GPU mining is building an infrastructure. Right now the majority of that infrastructure is supporting Ethereum. This will switch to something else. Crypto was just born, it's hard to know what will happen tomorrow, let alone next month.

Awesome reply Thanks.
1. Wow 80% is huge indeed.

2. Good to know,,, i can't imagine 3 million or 80% having to switch at once to try and find profitable coins.

3. what's a "dag fix" ?  i'm still trying to learn the lingo 

4. Gotcha , sounds like very good advice

Except with POS you will need $500,000 for etherium node and tie up a shed-load of etherium coin. I think there will be substitutes for etherium if they switch over.

It is more profitable for ti's to mine other coins than ETH, so you shoudnt worry about POS, check whattomine

1) Maybe 80%, ethereum mining is huge...over 3 million gpu mine ethereum currently.   Other coins have a decent amount minable money with the excellent market value but ethereum is just massive.

2)  That is misinformation, ethereum did plan on moving to POS but the devs have agreed that the full transition will likely take years if even completely.  When you have a 30+ billion dollar market then you do what is safe.

3)  They are not switching for the most part people have upgraded their drivers for the dag fix.

4)  POW to POS should not be your main concern.  The growth of gpus is the main threat if the crypto market experiences months of stagnant growth then your profits will continue to dwindle down.

Heat's not really a problem for the environment.  Where I live I will be using excess heat from my rigs to heat my house.  If you are truly concerned about the environment don't mine anything and buy a bunch of POS coins and stake them.  No GPU involved.