Topic: What happened to GPU mining (late March 2018)? (Read 1844 times)

"New" ASICs for ASIC resistant algos, making some algos no longer resistant + the unwillingness of some devs to fork in order to continue previously touted ASIC resistance.

He seems to have confused "bids" for "final sale price".

There is also the question of how many of the listings are from miners, and how many are from gamers that can "finally get the card I WANTED, now selling off the old card".

Yeah... he totally understated these prices.  I would say real world price reductions have been 10-15% over the last 3 weeks across the board for Nvidia cards.

Your statement isn't entirely right. Keccak, for example, is quite friendly to AMD GPUs. And mining SmartCash since last August converting it later to BTC or ETH or whatever you please gave about x2.5 profit in comparation with ETH mining.

Can 9 million (minimum) GPUs be wrong?

Well, yes - but for the LONG term ETH has been beating or a tossup with anything else for AMD GPUs, with some short-term spikes for some small-cap coins here and there.

It's also a lot more liquid than most GPU mineable coins - a lot of those "small cap" coins that have been "more profitable" suffer from only being carried by 1 or 2 tiny exchanges with SMALL transaction volumes that can often kill any "higher profitability" because they can't handle the volume of coin generated by a large or even a medium mining operation.

"ETH, the most profitable coin to GPU mine for the past months" - this statement nearly had me falling off my chair LMAO

Prices of GPUs are insane right now, I'm not denying that. And all that is beacause of mining. But gamers can whine all day long, and everything will stay the same. As long as companies which manufacture GPUs are making profit, nothing will be changed.
Developing new ASIC miners for other algorithms could change things around. If mining with ASIC miners rise, GPU mining would drop. And if that happens, prices of GPU will drop down.
Also if companies that make GPUs start making GPUs dedicated for mining, I guess prices of Gaming GPUs would fall down a bit.

GPUs are not changing the world... Blockchain is. 

Increasing the price of GPU is bad for fans of PC games, because they will think twice to continue to build the computer for better. Worse yet, an estimated increase in the price of this GPU also affect the world.

Mining IS profitable - it's just not at the crazy-high "anyone can make money hand over fist" levels it hit for most of the past year.

At this point there have been ZERO announcements of ASIC that are more efficient than GPUs, and only one RUMOR that so far is not confirmed if "the miner" even exists or what algorithm it is for or what it's power consumption is.
As I've already pointed out (as have a few others), the E3 is NOT more efficient than CURRENT GPUs - and the "next generation" Nvidia cards should be noticeably more efficient YET, later this year.

ETH switch to Proof of Stake is a "when" not a "if" question - but it looks like the earliest move to "full POS" won't happen 'till late this year at the soonest, and the non-ETH coins that also use the ethash algorithm don't appear to be planning "anti-ASIC" forks anytime soon.

*HOWEVER*, there is going to be a major shakeout on miners with ETH stops being mineable - 9 million (ballpark estimate) GPUs is 3-4 times more than all other GPU mineable coins COMBINED are using, which is going to swamp profitability to the point that you have to have super-cheap electric to survive, and WILL drive a lot of miners out of mining.
It's going to be worse than 2014 in some ways, as there are a TON more GPUs involved at this point - but on the other side, it won't be as bad in some ways due to the much larger choice of other coins to mine that also have a large existing GPU count.

GPU mining never died - you just had to be in a LOW COST area for it to be profitable between mid-2014 and spring of 2017.
I was making enough money at it to turn pro *2 YEARS AGO* - which put me in quite a good situation when the price explosion happened and all of a sudden my mining net income jumped by a factor of "lots" due to the massive profitability jump.

On the other hand, profitability RIGHT NOW is somewhat lower than it was 2 years ago - but I invested enough of my profits back into my farm that I'm still able to live off it with some leeway - it is just taking noticeably more GPUs to manage that.

I could almost make money running a S7 right now - and if I was one county over those old units WOULD be profitable.
It is NOT "all about price", part of the equation is also about your COST - mostly the cost of electric.

BTC miners are NOT losing money, those that are in areas with too high electric cost have probably shut down their miners while those that are in super-low electric cost areas are still making money.

So far, all of the announcements out of Samsung fit into "we're providing foundry space to ASIC miner makers" like eBang, JUST LIKE TSMC and GF have been doing for years now.

Samsung has NOT announced any intention of competing with them.

I meant March - and the hash rate increase goes back a LOT further than that 3 months, and there were CONSTANT small peaks and dips in there due to luck.
I also DID say "slowly" dropping - but it's still a DROP.

It will not kill but it will hurt A LOT. It doesn't matter if they have low hash rate as they have low price too. The biggest advantage will be its scalability for large farms. Maybe Bitmain was just testing the waters with E3. Maybe they have real asic for ethash like the rumored F3.

It seems to me that you don't understand the specifics of trading on eBay. 100 dollars is only the starting price of GPU. Look at the last day of trading and you will see the real prices. There is a downward trend in prices. But cheaper than 350-400 $ you won't buy the GPU. I do not believe that GPU mining will die. This supports the decentralization of coins and I think in the future a lot of coins will use protection from asic.

I'm still not mining today but when I get my moolah, regardless of the market condition, I'm going to mine! Oh yeah! 

You are right it does requires physical and mental labor.

I want to call you pessimistic, but I see you are cynical after looking in retrospect. I'm on the fence about GPU mining, ETH really resurrected GPU mining, Now that ASICs are taking control - I can't see any better time to sell my GPUs and just stop for a while (still, a part of me wants to swim against the flow). I know that ETH is planning on hardforking but they don't even have any idea how the ASICs work so it would be a guessing game until they are in market and for sale.  We know Jihan Wu is just going to keep the delivery to market postponed until whenever he sees fit.

I guess that now large number of people are looking for alternatives for mining. So I doesn't surprise me to hear that difficulty for Minexcoin increased 10 times. Many consider bailing out like you do, and I guess that is reasonable. If profit doesn't cover basic thing, its not worth doing it. So I guess that because of this things people are selling their equipment for such low prices that OP have seen.
With everything that is going on and things that are comming, we will see even more of things like this.

It's all about price.. BTC Miners are losing money until btc's price up to 10k$...

I'm a gpu miner of Minexcoin and difficulty increased by 10 times last 30 days. Still it's better than ethereum mining.

Anyway, this job is still profitable but it wants labor and time and the profit is not enough for my labor. So I'm thinking about selling my cards...

Samsung did announce it would be looking into the ASIC mining market - as one of the biggest silicon producers globally, why wouldn't they if there's a market?

Obviously they might change their mind (they do that a lot), plus it will take many months to see any action. They'd just white label chips to BM and co anyway, so you'd need a detailed teardown to notice. They aren't going to put out their own brand miner, it's b2b big business.

The GPU's price in my place still keep the same, even some 1070 Ti getting more expensive. For me, I will not surging to buy Asic miner E3, as Bitmain srewed us on monero mining, if Ethereum has fork, investing into E3 asic miner may turn to a bad deal. And the weird thing is in Chinese site of Bitmain, they also sold gpu miner just by the time they announced about this E3, whatever it seems like the very first batch of E3 already sold out, regardless, the E3 miner is likely to be popular. Hope that Ethereum development team will have some action: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/958

1060s and 580s under $100? Can you link this to me? I would BUY these without thinking twice.

What you've got to understand that people are panicking but they are doing it for the wrong reasons. People are selling because their DAILY income crashed. However, they fail to see that mining is not about your DAILY profit. It's a long term game that requires patience, research, and timing. You can profit by mining shitcoins then sell during pumps or you can mine the most profitable coin, sell, then buy potential winner coins. Noobs panic and sell. Be smarter and hodl.

Are u out of your mind? Bitmain just added more competition aka the E3 and GPU mining is going to take a major hit.
U want someone else to come.up with something stronger or on par with the E3? That just adds to less profits and more difficulty.

Why would anyone want that

Yes ETH fork won't do any good. It is now only in the hands of AMD or Nvidia or a asic resistant coin that can challenge the might of ethereum. Man ! one by one all of the big guys are down. We thought ETH will be safe, but no

I don't think so that will ever happen. Samsung is such a big name there is no need for them to touch this hot market of altcoins. I don't know where you get your news from but this is definitely a fake one.

If ASIC miners prove to be profitable (which they are), I guess many will buy them, and in that moment GPU mining of Ethereum will be over.  Also I wouldn't call something a crap, at least not just because I don't like it. Difference between mining around 30 MH/s and 180 MH/s, is big difference.
Ethereum Fork could happen, I head something about it too, but I think that would not solve anything. And about that 100% ASIC resistance algo... So far I have understood one thing: Everything is possible, nothing is 100% clear.

Source?

samsung's getting into asic development, i'm interested to see where that goes

This is not how decentralize crypto concept from the beginning. When a greedy company decides to start monopolizing just because they have a big resources, like Bitmain does, is just something gone wrong.
There's should be a movement against this kind of monopoly. Like how Monero really hates this ASIC bastard, therefore they decides to give Bitmans and other ASIC company a lesson. Creating expensive door stop and heater.
I really hope more and more dev unite and fight against this kind of monopoly.

We need more competition.....competition in asic development. Bitmain is capitalism gone wrong. No competition, complete monopoly and exploitation. There is no company that can stand against Bitmain that's why they are doing whatever they want. If there was competition then prices would be low and so would be the chance of them mining the hell out of those asics before releasing them. Until AMD and Nvidia develops a mining specific gpu or until a asic resistant coin surpasses ETH's market capital it will be dark ages for gpu mining.

It is now april 5th. I do not know what u mean by april 26.

If u mean march 26th, well, it is 3333 TH on that day and 3197 on april 2nd. U could call that a drop, but it is a drop of 4% which is normal now and then haha. That is just people switching to another algorithm that is more profitable. People will not burn or throw away their rigs.

Fact still remains it is 1935 on 1st Jan and 3197 on April 2nd. A major increase no matter how u look at it. And it is about to go higher with this cheap asic coming in.


Buddy, the hash rate increased over a period of 3 months. There is no luck involved as it is a constant increase over 3 months. I would like to be more optimistic also but I dont see how. I expect things to get worst now that asic for it is being sold to the public.

It's easier to look at their hashrate chart, but the diff chart will work too.
Note that except for one "single-day" spike on April 26 that was probably LUCK driven (might have been folks on auto-switch miners bouncing out of ETC or some such though), the Ethereum Total Hashrate (and difficulty) has been slowly DROPPING since April 16.

Yes, there was a big surge for several months before that - but the surge is OVER unless Ethereum price starts rising.

Is it practical to buy this another piece of crap? Can you imagine what profit may this asic eth miner with the hash speed of 180MH/s? now can you sell it after you realize that even this crap is not also profitable? I think there's a lot of people there that will going to make a solution for this.. I think the real Ethereum Fork must be on its way... A 100% ASIC resistance algo.. I read about it in some articles I hope that this is true...

We dont know for sure about that. It could have just been the gpu miners that push it up. After all, GPU is sold so much to crypto miners that the price is elevated. Gamers are suffering. Putting that aside, difficulty has risen up alot on its own and now, a strong asic appears to increase it more.

ASIC manufacturers have been mining on gpu only coins for months now. That has killed profitability almost everywhere for gpu miners. I expect a strong backlash and a bunch of algo changes coming up.

I believe that mining never die, but now is bad time to hurry enter in it. Very risky if you want more than 1 farm - too low roi.

It is nice to be positive buddy. I notice u often are. But lets look at the chart

https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty

On 1st Jan 2018, difficulty is about 1938 TH.
On 1st April 2018, it is about 3200 TH.

This is 1262 TH higher, or 65% higher, in just 3 months and this is without the ETH miner being sold to public. Ethereum price did not increase by 65% to keep mining at the same profitability. That why profitability has dropped. In fact ETH price dropped while difficulty increases. The manufacturers ramp up production in anticipation of future price increases of the coin but coin prices wont rise up like last year. We have overcapacity of mining equipment manufacturing and yes, I know u disagree with me.

65% increase in 3 months is roughly about 18% monthly with compounding included. Thus, if the coin price increases by 18% a month, and network difficulty increases by 18% a month, that would make profitability to be the same. Thats not the case. I say overcapacity of mining equipment exist even without this new eth miner. And now this ethminer appears...


This increase is without a bitmain coming in to pump up difficulty. Thus, difficulty can increase at a higher rate now because a new manufacturer is now pushing it up too, not just the current ones. This is why competition in mining is stupid. It hurts those at the bottom, the miners most.

Just my 2 cents.

I guess for me mining for this time is not very much profitable because the price of BTC is not high as we expected. And also it will affect the performance of your PC in this HOT weather condition and most of all electricity bill...

And it turns out that the F3 shown in that video is apparently NOT an ETH ASIC miner.

Bitmain released their E3 today for preorders - delivery NOT 'TILL MID JULY (indicating that they do NOT have many units on hand).

180 Mhash
800 watts

(they CLAIM these are minimums, but they'd have to do a TON better to change the below commentary).


About the same hashate and same power draw as a well-tuned 6-card  RX 480/580 "BIOS modded for memory straps" rig.
Slightly LESS hashrate and slightly MORE power draw than a well-tuned 6-card GTX 1070 rig.
NOT exactly a GPU mining killer.

Note that they would have to sell well over ONE MILLION of these units to achieve 50% of the current ETH network hashrate.
For perspective, current Bitcoin network hashrate equates out pretty closely to 2 Million S9 units (but PART of that hashware is LW.COM internal-usage miners, some is Avalon 721/741 units, some is EBang miners, et cetera - Bitmain PROBABLY has sold a total of ONE MILLION S9 units but it took them almost 2 YEARS to manage that despite having THE best performance miner on the market).

The E3 is NOT a GPU mining killer - in fact, I doubt it's going to make much more than a SMALL DENT in ethash mining profitability before ETH goes Proof of Stake and the REAL shakeout happens.

On the positive side, they DID get the price at $800 to a reasonable level, and probably WILL sell as many of these units as they choose to make since that's a LOT cheaper than building a GPU rig that can match the performance.

lol these companies have made billions being smart not dumb , they ALWAYS make Money on their hardware because either they sell it to you at a high price or like the cryptonite  miners they’ve been using them for six months or longer my name making millions before list them for sale is because the algo change to get a grip

Based on a video claiming to show the new Bitmain ethereum ASIC, it's not all that impressive.

1500 Mhash (about 50 1070 or BIOS modded RX 470/480/570/580) but no power number quoted.
At 1000 watts (LOW for a Bitmain miner) it would only be 5x or so as efficient as current GPU mining.
At 1500 watts, it would be LESS THAN 3x more efficient.

Factor in the probably efficiency improvements of the next-gen Nvidia cards (due later this year SOMETIME) and the numbers get even less impressive.

Given the HUGE amount of ETH hashrate alone, even at Bitmain's typical "3000 or so" miners per batch it would take quite a few months for their ASIC to capture *HALF* of the ETH total network hashrate.
Then add in the existing total network hashrate from the other ethash coins like ETC.....

Yes, it's a threat - but it's not going to kill ETH mining soon, and unless they price it CHEAP it's likely to never make enough to pay for itself.
Unlike SIA and X11, it's NOT going to kick the hashrate multiple times higher in less than a month - it's going to be closer to the move in Scrypt where the L3+ and Innosilicon miners are ONLY NOW finally getting deployed in enough numbers to replace the "previous generation" like the A2 and the Titan and make them generally unprofitable.

IMO if Vitalik and crew keep their current target timeframe for POS deployment and actually MEET it for a change, it'll be a waste of time doing a "algo change" fork.


I don't class this miner as a "big mistake" like the Cryptonight ones from Baikal and Bitmain, but it's not looking a TON better.


https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate shows an all-time high spike on March 26, but seems to have been a "day of the week" or "luck" thing as the trend has been a gradual DROP for about 2 weeks now.

I suspect they have some engineering and "early production" test units up and running - but a few hundred at most.

don't you count on eth fork which could prevent this coin (or maybe rather GPU miners) from ASICS?

all gpu and Bitcoin mining is dead and its bad times now as after electric there is only a few dollars profit

quote

nevermore

 

actually nvidia cards are moving to raven , its like two times more profitable than eth or 3x zec

Looks like best investments were rx570 4gb 30mh for 250$5
Worst is nvidia 1070ti and 1080ti.  1.2k $ per card.  ROI is years and next gen is comming. thats make even harder to sell these hi end card at reasonable prices. while 1060 are good mh/s to wat. half of them startes dying because of dag file size today
should invest in pv solars also to reduce energy bill

Yes I am noticing this also. Basically nivida were best for ZEC due to the high hashrate and low power consumption.

And now the profitability of ZEC became magnitudes lower than ETH profitability.

So many of the older gen AMD GPUs and most Nvidia GPUs are suffering.

It seems that nvidia pushed the production of mining cards last 2 months and flooding the market with them thus killing the mining profitability.Also its probably not a bad move to sell gpus now as most of them wont mine the same amount of money in a year that you can get from seling them

When all miners rush to Equihash then the difficulty will make it unprofitable.



Mining right now is only unprofitable if you MINE-N-DUMP into USD/BTC. If you mine good projects like BTCZ you get a lot of coins right now and if you dont convert to USD/BTC then you could be gaining a lot. The reverse is also true, if you have been mining good coins in the past two months but never converted to USD then your profitability for back in Jan is also impacted. For example, my rig made $35/day back in Jan but I didnt sell any of the coins I mined and they went down 80% so even back in Jan I only made $7/day because the coins I held onto have become worth so much less.

You can say what happened in the first quarter of 2018 is exactly what happened in the first quarter of 2014.

Basically MtGox caused BTC to go down which is similiar to what happened this year with the selling of the coins by the trustee.

Also Bitmain introduced ASiCs for ETH which made difficulty sky rocket. Basically exactly what happened with LTC back in 2014.

History repeats itself I guess.

In general, do not go check Ebay and similar sites if you want to probe the status of mining because they are flooded with counterfeit products.
These so-called $100 1060 cards are just BS.

But yeah mining profitability has gone down recently, that's not a secret.

--ypsi

If you want to buy the GPU you must go with the reputed online e-commerce store or local market in your city bro. There are many scamming websites which is having the all type of cards and some ASIC hardware as well buddy.

So if you new websites which is for using selling hardware you will not go with those kind of websites bro.
If you want to buy the Rx 580 with the 300 dollar USD means you need to go with the second hand ebay cards. No where you find with that cards for cheap cost.

Yes, things sure are crazy here in makebelieveland!

We humans should help each other, if there is opportunity to make money for free.
Share the knowledge with each other.  I came to know about GPU mining this year but nothing is too late ever.
I am mining FOLM coin for past two weeks and have earned good profit. some good man shared information to Join FOLM coin with me and now I am sharing with you. Join https://discord.gg/ByfhsCk

Equihash is still exist.

The listed GPU-s under 100 dollars are a scam, I asked in the service discussion here sometime ago as I was tempted too by them. What the seller does is they ship you an old card or Gtx 960 chinese version in the 1060 box and you get cheated.

Now on real prices of GPU they should go down but so far they haven't at ebay. I am not seeing any RX 580 under 300 dollars while MSRP price of it from AMD was 229 dollars for the 8 GB version , we are still way overpriced in GPU market.

With high electricity cost at $0.2 /KWh, Ether under $400, difficulty so high and low hashrate on GPU, I'm losing money mining.

Mining has definitely taken a hit. I have sold my L3 and my A3 ASICs before they become doorstops.

I am not sure about that, correct me if I am wrong. I was using Nicehash to mine, via the Equihash algorithm, mid of June if I am not mistaken, I was making 0.5mBTC per day. Not long after that, I was making less and less till I was only making 0.10-0.15mBTC during Bitcoin's all time high. Now, I am making even less in terms of BTC. I've actually shut down my rig not long ago.

It didn't die in past when it was much worse, why it should die now?
''2 years to break even'' DO you think that market will be down for 2 years? I don't think so.
1$ per day, well yes in general, but if you do some smart moves you can get a little bit more.

Mining is much like holding Bitcoin - you have to hang on through the bad times not just the good times.

this is when you buy up lol this isnt the 1st time or 2nd

I’m one of the ones that just got into mining recently this year and it’s defintely hard times.  Not the returns I was expecting at all.  Hopefully things turn around or else it will be a long time before I can recoup my investment. 

People, who bought their GPUs with stupidly high prices, are still trying to break even with their mining rigs. Also, some new miners are hoping to make some quick cash without learning the background (rising the difficulty) and BTC value is just going sideways or even down. Hard times.

Publicly Bitmain's ETH ASIC miners are still in development phase, but I guess that some people are not believing that, at least not in that context. Some believe that Bitmain has already made ETH ASIC miers, and that they has been mining ETH with their ASIC miners secretly. If you want to read more about this, go check this discussion https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.32929859

But no matter what is true, its just a matter of time before we would be able to buy ASIC miners for ETH or maybe some other crypto as well. When those miners come out, I guess GPU mining for that coin will die.

I think mining is not dying but yes, the rewards right now are reduced because the bitcoin price is reduced too. but for some altcoin, I think it still profitable because this coin will increase and maybe it will get a pump in short of time. the problem is we need to know how much the electricity fee that we should pay in monthly so we can decide to try mining or not and we can see how much profit we can take in monthly. without doing this, we are only mining without making a profit.

I just saw some news quoted that Bitmain develped Ethereum asic miner "with a massive amount of RAM" which is quite incredible, the shipping date is very close at Q2 of 2018. If it's the case, it's incredibly hard for our GPU rigs, and of course Bitmain's going to kill my mining farm very soon. Even now the mining profit is already very low. https://www.ccn.com/bitmain-has-developed-an-ethereum-asic-miner-wall-street-analyst-claims/

Listing a GPU for <$100 and actually getting it for that price are two different things. LOL

I don't think there is any ethash ASIC miner on market yet? Bitmain is still developing it.

Where are you finding GPUs at under $100? Used ones are still selling for $200+ on Ebay. At least the ones with auctions close to ending or with "Buy It Now".

ETH is no longer GPU only.

As a different point.  A lot of people believe in crypto and will still build rigs when profits are down but I don’t think that’s what’s going on in your example.

Ethereum network total hash rate just got ATH yesterday at 272 TH/s... How crazy! With mining profitability decreasing like this people are still joining and building new rigs!

Hard times are upon us, but that doesn't mean GPU mining is dying. Because of difficult rising and prices of new GPUs, return of invested money is long process.
With prices of crypto drop, things have become even worst. I guess because of the situation we are in, some people are looking for way out, and that could be the reason why prices for those GPUs are so low (of course there could be other reasons). Also don't forget that Nvidia has announced new series of GPUs, so I guess that some people will go for those.
Mining with GPU is slow process, and most of people don't like that. Plus there are those new ASIC miners. They change the game a bit too.

If you are mining ethereum or zcash at the moment and the amount of coin are still the same it was back on January then it's fine. It's just correlated with the price of BTC, I also knew and studied when a fellow miner told me about it. Just hold to the coins and wait for another ATH maybe or just the same as it was December. As most of people saying in my country mining is dead, but the truth is it's not for the people who have access in cheap electricity.

The whole market is down. I'm mining with 570s currently and the difficulty + price has been a nightmare. Not sure mining is dead though, just hopefully in a rut.

Today I had a look on ebay and oh, god! So many cheap used GPUs! Used RX 580 and GTX 1060 at under $100?! Seriously? Looks like miners are selling used GPU as fast as they can!

And mining Ethereum (the most profitable coin to GPU mine for the past months) with 1 RX 580 or GTX 1070 Ti is only earning $1 per day. If electricity cost is $0.12 per kW/h the revenue is less than $0.7 per day. A mining rig of 8 RX 580 or GTX 1070 Ti only earns $5.6 a day...

If mining less profitable coins like monero with higher electricity cost, miners are losing money.

If anyone bought the overpriced GPU last month, it will take 2 years to break even the cost, if mining profitability doesn't continue to drop.

With all these negative factors, mining difficulty continues to rise with even more hashrate joining, altcoin prices continue to drop. Bitmain already released cryptonight ASIC miner and may release ethhash ASIC in the future.

So. Is mining dying now?