Here are some reasons that might make you want to reconsider trying to make it your main source of income.
1. Your power cost is way too high to make it a viable in the long term as a business where you currently live. You have to buy large amounts of power in most cases to get it cheap enough to make sense for what you are doing.
2. ETH is much more profitable than any other GPU mined coin at present. This presents a problem in that the difficulty is skyrocketing because everyone is flocking to the coin. This means every difficulty change will reduce your profits.
3. ETH is not a coin to invest in mining long term, the devs have already announced it will go Proof of Stake which basically takes gpu mining out of the equation. There are other profitable GPU coins but none that can rival ETH so you will have to balance on a razor thin profit margin.
4. If you did want to turn it into a business there are a ton of other costs to factor in. When you buy power in bulk it comes in on these high power lines and have you have to buy big expensive transformers to step
it down to a usable range. You will need a large warehouse sized location. You will need massive amounts of cooling. You will have to pay for an expensive reliable internet service. GPU mining rigs tend to be very picky and you cant have any internet hiccups or you will have way too much downtime.
5. With profit margins being so thin you will need a very large farm to cover bills and pay yourself a decent wage.
6. Since you did not already have the equipment when ETH went to the moon you have already missed out on the most profitable stage of its life cycle.
7. Since you are only interested in a small salary to live on I am going to guess you do not have a lot of money to start this venture. Id say you would want at least $1 million to start a company that mines full time.
1. Yes I do realize it's far too high to base any long term expectations off this. I can get it for 0.8usd with a bit of work. Or 0.4 with a *lot* of work, like moving out of province or setting up a remote facility out of province. The cost involved in setting up my own facility though, it would almost make more sense to just move to get those rates.
2 & 3. I'm fine that ETH is not for mining long term. I already know full well that it's mining phase is going to end. But that is the entire point of my post, to see if it's possible to truly make a living by hand picking the most profitable coins of the time. If that means changing to a different coin each month or even each week, so be it. If this is something I'm going to work on full time that's easily manageable.
4. These are certainly some additional things to consider. While being aware of all of these issues, power limitations, cooling and redundant internet access, the power limitations would be my biggest concern. I've got some workable ideas for the cooling and redundant net but have not much "electrical" experience other than installing some new lights and ceiling fans & light electrics soldering (fixing some TV's, etc), I have zero experience when it comes to industrial power.
5. Yes, I did pretty much figure this. EVEN if I was doubling my cost of electricity per month on say a 6 card rig AND paying only 0.5 cents, lets say I was making $75-100 per month per rig. I know I would require 25 - 50 such rigs to make a living.
6. Again, ETH itself is not a huge factor in this to me. Sure, having gear when ETH started would have been absolutely wonderful. People making tens of thousands of dollars just based on the shoot up in price. This would certain help a lot with purchasing more equipment.
This is why I'm curious of people who have may already have been doing this for years, i.e. well before ETH was even on the scenes. Say in the days between "end of BitCoin GPU mining" up til start of ETH mining. Aside from LiteCoin, were miners making anything in that phase? I mean, serious miners, not hobbyist miners.
This is also why I'm curious if it's possible/where to get cheaper than retail bulk equipment because it will lower the ROI time allowing one to expand and build faster.
And, if I can slowly build up my equipment, even if profit margins are very thin for now, it will allow me to have the equipment in place if/when another new/big altcoin comes onto the scene.
Obviously I don't want to count on something like that and just want to plan to make money if ETH wasn't even part of the picture right now.
Anyway, you've giving me a couple extra points to think on for sure, I appreciate this input and exactly why I started this post.