Topic: Why is difficulty still very high (Read 1167 times)

Miner waiting new coin based on gpu mining like zcash back then, but from 8 years mining only eth can handle lot of gpu miners like btc did with asic, but asic to fast growth, and buyers ended with door step each 3years, beside gpu will dou double and resale value to gamer, even my 6years old gpu sold more than inital price when I bought

I agree for those people who want to build their miner in a cheap way or for those who are wanting to try mining there is no better time than now in terms of pricing for the GPU mining rigs.They can be found now at less than 1500 dollars most likely with 4-6 GPU-s and ready to run.I think having the devices even if not running them at a loss right now is still a good option if someone chooses to buy them,they can start mining when mining will be profitable again but I would do it even at a loss now because when that next bull run comes I would be very happy to have mined some coins for that time.

I believe some miner began to pick up second hand gpus at the moment, fomoing while the price still low, anticipating bullrun began sooner, new gpus wont be good price/performance, building mining facility in bear market but humidity tailwind hit asian miner

I am also mining at a loss but of course not as a hobby,with a long term vision that this amount generated during this time after many months or after a couple of years can be very well x10 to x500 of the price of these coins I am mining.

As a hobby I am only mining ZIL and staking it in Atomic wallet which hopefully by the end of this year should have given me a minimum of 1500 dollars as pure profit,15% APY for staking if the price is like near 0.03,if it happens that ZIL goes again to all time high it had at 0.27 then it will be near 15.000 dollars of profit so this hobby can turn in something uniquely beautiful.

Fpga getting bigger and many miner adopt this very quickly, and they ruined gpu&cpu mining, there is lot of miner using free electricity and some of big farm had water turbin generators so they only focused about maintenance fee, sad but true you cant compete with them in bear market, some miner just mined at loss to support the network as hobbiest

We are talking about other coins that are mined on video cards and they have a small hashrate. Large bitcoin mining pools will not transfer their power to other users if they themselves do not want to do this. But renting video cards for mining is much easier.

https://www.crypto51.app/

Could you even rent hashpower for only 1 hour? Consider SHA256
Looking at Nicehash which is the largest place to rent hashpower

https://www.nicehash.com/my/marketplace/SHA256

You got 2 servers which have up to 0.1205 + 0.0785 EH/s.

What is the total hashrate for bitcoin?

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/hash-rate

Looks like 250,000,000 TH/s. So about 250 EH/s. So you can rent max 0.7% of the total bitcoin hashrate.

The purchase will be very expensive, and renting a hashrate for 1 hour is quite possible.

Yes but any coin is subject to this risk. However as the hashrate is much much higher it’s more expensive to attack and less common to happen.

It’s possible for someone to have 51% power but that is like what? 5 million GPUs? It would be very expensive to achieve this. So in general the higher the hashrate the better.

I'm not sure about this.
If 10 million video cards participate in the mining of a coin, and 55% of the hashrate belongs to one miner. Is this safe for you?
Difficulty shows only the arrival or departure of miners, and miners are interested in profit.

Mining the ETHW coin is not profitable on most video cards, and on expensive video cards the payback is so long that such investments are not interesting for many miners. Today it is more profitable and easier to buy these coins for 500-1000 dollars than to pay for electricity in the next 2 years.

I don't think that difficulty is high for example for ETHW which is the coin by some unknown miners who decided to keep mining the Ethereum when it moved to PoS.It is just less than 300 T which can make you nice amount of this coin daily,almost half of these coin in two days when you have a near 400 Mhsh rig.For now may not be profitable but who knows at which levels this end in the future,so mining it for the longer term is easily doable for people who mine at home like me and many others.

If you look at the graphs, then the hash rate has fallen for many coins. Industrial mining on video cards cannot be profitable now due to the many additional costs, but small miners who have no expenses other than paying for electricity continue their favorite pastime.

Many factors feed into this and some have already been mentioned.

Large farm (warehouse) type operations that have a lot of sunk costs and already paid for leases will still keep mining for some time before turning off. Many of these also have negotiated low industrial electric rates so are only paying 2-3 cents per kWh and can keep up longer than most home miners or small farm types.

There is a rather large portion of small miners, that each run maybe 1-3 rigs with perhaps 2-20 GPU's total, that have access to free electricity. These can be students in dorm rooms, renters with heat included in rent, people on some kind of government subsidy program, etc. So any miners in this category that already own the equipment really have no disincentive to quit mining, especially if they don't need to sell coins right away. For this group mining is actually cheaper than buying coins as they are essentially free due to no electric bills.

Then their are the people who are mining at a loss, but continue on for some reasons. While it is true they could just buy the coins cheaper, as already mentioned in this thread, some seem to prefer mining over direct buying of coins. In colder climates mining can offset heating costs somewhat, assuming you are paying the bills anyway, so that can help offset a little, but not all of the current losses. There are also some from this group who mine to keep their coin accumulations anonymous, especially if solo mining to a clean (unused) wallet.

Its only been roughly 2 months now since ETH went POS, so I think many are still toughing it out hoping for a short bear market. As was mentioned by someone earlier, the last bear marker miners held strong for about 4-6 months before significant reductions of hash rates started to become clearly visible. This would put us in the January to March time frame before miners start "giving up" so to speak. Curiously, this is also roughly the same time frame some are predicting the crypto market bottoms start setting in.

The difficulty remains high because all those who mined eth have flocked to the other minable altcoins and therefore the hash rate has increased as well as the request this has meant that the difficulty does not go down as one would have expected

Who will you sell it to, if now most video cards for mining do not even pay off the cost of electricity?
I disabled most video cards, but some mine with very small profit of a few cents per day, because it is very difficult to sell video cards now even at a price that is slightly below the market.

Lol no idea but I still haven't made up my mind, if I sell it will be over time may be a a couple gpus a week.

Do you have any estimated time about dealing with selling 150 GPUs? 

Like I said before:

If I had 150 GPUs, I probably would pay some person to test, clean, put in a box and take pics to sell 
Sometimes the buyer asks for me to make a video with the gpu working 

It has been three weeks. Difficulty has done nothing but go up. Many factors, but two I see 1) people's willingness to mine speculatively and/or 2) people having cheap electricity

I learned my lesson from liquidating gear in 2014. I enjoyed selling $175 motherboards from 2019 for $500 in 2021.  The community of miners are getting more experienced and won't make the same mistakes.

I have 150 gpus turned them off and switched to DCA.  Bear market plus no coin near the marketcap of eth I don't see gpu mining being close to profitable for a good while.  Probably going to start  slowly selling gpus and see what things are like in a few months.  I'm always searching for opportunity and don't see any, even BTC difficulty went up 10% last adjustment.

There are plenty of people who mine at a loss in hopes that the coins they are mining will raise in price.  There are also still plenty of hobbyists that aren't completely in it for straight profit.  Amd than lastly most of the hash power comes from places who pay little to no electric fees so they can afford to mine no matter the difficulty and profitability.

I know adaseb, believe me, I know what are you saying, but each case is a different case.
It's easy to say: buy coins instead of mining, but when you are in such situation you have to think better

Sometimes you don't want to deal with selling your gear, if you have only 1 GPU ok, but try to sell 20 GPUs, 4 CPUs, 4 Motherboards etc, and them 1 year after, mining can become profitable again 
It's a huge amount of time and effort to me
Some people like to mine, some want to support the network, some like you said have problems with buying directly due to restrictions etc

And in the end you still have your hardware, most warranties are 3 years.

It doesn't make sense to mine at a loss. If you want to accumulate coins you can just buy them directly without mining. If you are mining at break-even you are pretty much losing money since you are wearing out your gear.

Every hour your gear runs it increases the chances of something getting burn't out such as a fan bearing going back. If you want to invest in crypto, just buy it directly. Only people who mine at a loss are maybe those that have difficulites buying crypto due to regulations, in that case its worth mining at a loss. However that doesn't apply to most.

Hehe, I'm of of those miners, it was my mistake to stop mining at a loss in 2018, but in my case electricity rates were high, and unfortunately I did not sold coins at the top.
All I had was ETH and BTC but no cash to afford some months at a loss.

It's not easy to make a decision in the heat of the moment, I only know this after the ATH in 2021, talking about the past is easy, but in general, if we believe in another ATH, we can continue mining even at loss and we can wait the next bull run

Some miners won't capitulate yet. Although more and more will do so the longer bear market lasts. If I'm speaking for myself, I think POW coins will skyrocket eventually, so I'm stocking up on them now that difficulty is relatively low. Yes shutting off the machinery and just buying them directly would be more profitable at this point but I feel bad letting my GPUs be inactive for prolonged periods of time. In other words sunk cost fallacy

That looks like the miners are not giving up and that is why we have this high difficulty.They learned their lesson in 2018,those miners who liquidated their gear by then and after seeing what happened in late 2020 and early 2021 they saw that they did a huge mistake by doing so but that was also a lesson that even more miners that come here after 2018 learned and thus that is the reason why the difficulty is staying high and it won't look like it is going down anytime soon because the miners are still active mining despite at a loss.

In order for difficulty to come down we need a price of Bitcoin of less than 10.000 and all other cryptos to come down significantly and that is the only time I believe many miners will quit or shut down their rigs.

Stubborn or already had cheap electricity.  We may see the difficulty dip depending on how long crypto winter lasts but some TA are already saying the bottom is in for bitcoin. If that's so and we see a steady march up for crypto prices then difficulty won't get any lower and profits might actually get better and make even more miners come back.

Vitex is a liquid market. Plenty of buy orders for miners and EPIC maintains first place for mining profits as it has been for years.

Yep, you got it right. I'm the community lead out here spitting facts.

Mine EPIC and sell to get more than twice the amount of ETHW if you choose. 

go here:

t.me/epicminers

and enter:

@epicradarbot mining pp 50 mhs

To see calcs for a 3080 GPU

If we recall 2018, then the main sales of video cards and the capitulation of miners began en masse in 4-6 months. So far, little time has passed and many miners turn off video cards, but do not sell them, and hope for a new season. I also disabled 80% of my mining farms, but I will not sell video cards.

The difficulty does not suggest so though.People are still mining and most of these warehouses you mention probably don't know nothing yet if they were mining in Ethermine they were automatically redirected to mine ETC from ETH,when they will realize this and seeing how small the profit is,turning down the rigs can be a viable option for them.I believe when these huge warehouses and farms go away from mining by liquidating their gear,only then the difficulty will come down to normal levels again and no matter if the bear market is still here,it is a sure thing that miners who will still be in the game will make more of the coin they are mining and that should be their end goal for the long run.

You and Epic Cash, I think you are one of the dev or team, its listed only on Vitex exchange for now since the Pancakeswap has no volume at all, the problem is 1200$ volume that this project has, how do you think this is a good idea? If I have to mine any PoW coin right now it will be ETH PoW, I believe this coin will survive.

A lot of people do really dumb things because of profitability calculators.  I'm sure there are people who purchased warehouses and setup hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear to take advantage of the massive profitability while things were going good.  Now they're stuck with bills that aren't going away, and they've invested a fortune in trying to get low electricity rates and good gear.  They have no choice but to mine no matter what the profitability it.  Worse, they are forced to sell at any price to make ends meet.  This is how bankruptcies happen to miners and mining companies.  We've started to see it a little bit, but I suspect it's going to get much worse before it gets better.

You could mine EPIC, earn over $70 mining just 48% of the time (how the protocol works 48/48/4 CPU/GPU/ASIC) and liquidate half what you mined to be converted to ETC while also adding a holding of EPIC to hedge/diversify. Idle/savings of 52% energy cost OR could use software that enables switching to ETC mining for cycles when EPIC is on CPU mining.

I have 10gh in gpu hash over 100 cards. The key is I have no debt on them.



my power use is 25kwatts at a nickel (less but it is too complex to explain all the different rates)

25 x 24 =600 x .05 is 30 dollars a day in power

I have it pointed to ETC and I am earning 0.88 etc a day times 29.16 = 25.66 in earnings

so 30-25.66 = 4.34 daily loss.

So I sell 3 3090 for 700 each 2100

and 2100/4.34 = 483 days.

now the flaw in that math is I would need to sell all the coins mined and use the sale of the 3 cards to break even after 483 days.

---

but  figure things like this method:

 it is  30 a day  in power so 900 a month

Just sell 2 3090's for 1400 and a 3070 for 400 you have 1800 bucks you lose 280mh of your 10000mh in hash


That means you have 2 full months  power  paid off and you are earning 0.88 coins a day so .88 x 60 = 52.8 coins

So it is easy to mine for 2 months. you spend nothing (other than 3 the cards you sold) and you have 52.8 etc

So bigger miners with 100 plus cards are doing this.

I can do this for 6 months and have 156 ETC and my hash drops from 10000 to 9240 no out of pocket money.

Why panic.

The difficulty is very high because there is big demand. Lots of people want a piece from this action, so the piece everyone gets becomes smaller. I don't think it is too late to sell GPU's though. If you are done with mining then sell. Why wait? GPU's lose their intrinsic value over time regardless of the price anyway. In every 2 years, there will be a better designed GPU which renders obsolete the previous generation. If you ROI'd your investments then there isn't anything to think about. Sell and forget.

GPU mining diffuculty has gone up because all those GPU rigs previously mining Eth are now mining other coins driving
up the hashrate and consequently the difficulty.

I saw that too, but unless you have really great per kWh rates, it doesn't seem worth the capital.  The XP's are about 3X more but are about 4X more profitable per day given a normal per kWh price range.  Plus, I think energy prices are going back up a bit so whatever is there will be squeezed a bit more. 

I think it's also worth mentioning the ASIC miners on the BTC blockchain continue to get faster and are readily available.

Hell Bitmain is now selling a 100TH miner for $1900 plus 25% customs charge for those in the US.

Bitcoin mining difficulty has been increasing and will continue to increase:


live chart here: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/difficulty-chart

I don't see any reason why it would decrease. It's the best money ever invented, so it makes sense that more and more miners are interested in it over time.

You mentioned graphic cards, so I guess you're referring to mining alt coins. In that case this should be moved to the appropriate section of the forum.

Why you are looking for low difficulty? High difficulty gives you more security and is far from a 51% attack on the blockchain and it also helps transactions confirm faster.
If you see the high difficulty it means more people still mining and more units are produced and you know most well-known companies like Bitmain always developed machines that can mine faster and more efficiently. I'm sure they also run them to get benefits while selling them.

Doubtful the mining industry is going to slow down, because if one does, the other players who are still going strong will produce more in the absence of the miners that were just taken down.  So unless a huge capitulation occurs and BTC drops precipitously from here, I dont see anyone letting up.

If you're talking about mining with GPU, then you must be referring to altcoin mining. If that's the case, the altcoin mining board would be more suitable for this topic.

That being said, I do expect the difficulty to drop, but won't be that instant. Some miners probably have access to a good energy source (very cheap, for example), which allows them to continue mining despite losing some dollars every day. Or, they just believe that the condition will get better and speculate that it is better to hoard some sats from now on and sell them later.

It's too late to sell some graphic cards now I believe, when are these miners going to leave the game for us that still believe? Lower difficulty should be in play by now but some are just too stubborn it seems    leave the game for us that don't care about profit today, we just want more coins.