
How Much Can You Make Mining Ether and How Much Does It Cost to Run? - jotto
http://www.learn2ai.com/2017/09/how-much-can-you-make-mining-ether-and.html
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dmurray
It's an interesting analysis, but it misses the key point: the payout will on
average always be a little more than the running costs on a completely
optimised setup, and therefore a bit less than your running costs if you don't
have the most power efficient machine and the cheapest electricity, and
certainly not enough to pay for your time on a single machine with a handful
of GPUs. If you want to mine cryptocurrencies because you have an interest in
them, fine, but if you want to make money you'll be just as well (or as badly)
off by buying them with dollars.

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tzs
> It's an interesting analysis, but it misses the key point: the payout will
> on average always be a little more than the running costs on a completely
> optimised setup, [...]

Is that necessarily true?

I can see why it would be true for a blockchain system when it is at a stage
of development where the primary reason people run nodes is to mine for that
chain's cryptocurrency, but there is other functionality provided by many
blockchain systems besides just a simple currency.

If those other functions become important enough to enough people, then could
we end up in a situation where people who rely on those functions run nodes to
help keep those functions working even if what they can make from the coins
and transaction fees of their nodes will not cover the costs of running the
node?

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dmurray
It's possible if there isn't an easy mechanism to exchange the benefits of the
mining. If there is, in a large enough market, the people who benefit from the
nodes being run could pay others a premium to run the nodes, and that premium
can be thought of as part of the "payout".

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Animats
_if you 're in on ETH, you better be in it for the long haul because
everything else is just gambling and posturing. Being in ETH for the long hodl
means you believe in the underlying infrastructure, and if you believe in
that, then you know the price today is irrelevant._

There are two businesses here - mining, and speculation. You have to calculate
the ROI on both of them separately. Mining and holding is a form of
speculation, which can be done without mining. If mining and selling
immediately doesn't have a useful ROI, don't do it.

The way the difficulty is rising, mining isn't going to be profitable for much
longer unless you're getting GPU boards in bulk, operating in a cold climate,
and have really cheap power. Difficulty will self-adjust until only the most
efficient miners are profitable.

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brownbat
These sort of analyses really need to baseline against the opportunity cost of
simply buying and holding.

> "If the price goes around $400, we should be at break-even in the next 75
> days..."

Yeah, but if the price goes to $400 you could have just spent your original
startup costs on the coin and not spent $77-150 on electricity.

If you require the value of the currency to steadily increase for mining to be
profitable, then you're just bullish on the value of the currency. If you're
bullish on the value of the currency, just buy some.

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blazespin
If you're relying on rising value to break even, probably just buying the eth
low and selling high would be a better approach.

The reality is that any big miner will get economies of scale for buying
memory in bulk. Though eth is asic resistant, nothing will ever be bulk
pricing resistant.

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wyldfire
For the most part I assume that all of the cryptoasset mining opportunities
quickly reach an equilibrium where the difficulty has scaled in direct
response to the ratio of the exchange rate and the cost-per-PoW-unit. The cost
of electricity in your region is one small wildcard that could be exploited
when you scale up.

The complexity of operating and maintaining the mining equipment is low enough
that anyone who's mildly interested can order it and flip the switch.

It's interesting and fun but rarely a money making opportunity. For the PoWs
that are yet-to-move-to-ASICs, it's more interesting. When the exchange rate
changes rapidly, it becomes a bit more interesting.

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maxander
I have a moderately powerful gaming GPU in my bedroom and my apartment has
electric heat (in Boston! Its downright criminal), so I've been considering
mining some kind of *coin just to get back a bit of the money that I'm
spending on heat anyway.

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al2o3cr
"Don't worry about breakeven, if you hold the value is SURE TO GO
UP!!!!one1!!!!!"

I knew I heard that sort of thing before someplace...

[http://ssoltanhistory.weebly.com/uploads/8/8/1/0/8810349/266...](http://ssoltanhistory.weebly.com/uploads/8/8/1/0/8810349/2662125.jpg)

