GPU shortages across the world, with both reactional effects to AMD and NVIDIA as well as eBay sellers, retailers, wholesalers, and even the second-hand market. Older graphics cards from AMD began doubling or tripling in price in the second-hand market, with the Radeon R9 295X2 selling for nearly $1000. This drove people to buy Radeon R9 290/390 series cards, on top of people stripping shelves bare of the Polaris-based Radeon RX 470, RX 480, RX 570, and RX 580. Both variants were depleted with 4GB and 8GB models selling out, and then NVIDIA felt the effects with GTX 1060s becoming super popular overnight, selling out just as quickly as retailers began cashing in on the Ethereum mining boom. It wasn’t long until the higher-end GTX 1070s began leaping in price, before also flying off shelves.

The blockchain keeps track of a set of validators, and anyone who holds the blockchain's base cryptocurrency (in Ethereum's case, ether) can become a. That validator the right to create a single block, and this block must point to some previous block (normally the block at the end of the previously longest chain), and so.

This trickle effect was hitting other markets that weren’t being talked about, including high-end PSUs. I had a near impossible time of finding high-end PSUs, with 1000W+ units selling out all over the place. There were a few high-end 850W units left, but the numbers were thinning. On eBay, there were plenty of mining-oriented products that began enjoying the Ethereum rush, including PCIe x1 to x16 risers, steel frames for multi-GPU rigs, and more. Please Don’t Buy Hardware For Mining Now. Now that there are virtually no Radeon cards on the market, and most of NVIDIA’s mid-range GeForce cards are extinct, the difficulty of mining Ethereum has skyrocketed. Six weeks ago you could make a very nice money mining Ethereum, but the difficulty of mining it continues to swell – and it is even faster now that there are thousands of new miners joining pools across the world.

The current price on graphics cards is f***ing ridiculous, with retailers and etailers cashing in on the feverish demand on AMD and NVIDIA hardware. It’s not right, and I hate it beyond words. A large reason for this is that I worked in IT retail for ten years before I changed careers and started writing for TweakTown. I used to sell the very hardware that I now review for a living and work with every day, and I rode waves of random popular spikes in sales.

The whole ‘can it run Crysis’ happened while I worked in IT sales, and we couldn’t get enough graphics cards in before they were flying off the shelves. This global GPU shortage is unprecedented. It hasn’t happened at this scale before, and we’re standing right under a gigantic bubble.

It might seem fine now, but NVIDIA and AMD can’t get enough cards onto the market, and even if they could, this pent up demand for Radeon RX 400/500 series and GeForce GTX 10 series cards will die. It will go down. This is a guarantee.

Ethereum mining has teased people with the ability to make a lot of money very quickly from their homes, using consumer level hardware. How To Become A Zcash ZEC Miner here. When mining Bitcoin was a ‘thing’ before it changed over to requiring ASIC specific hardware, we went through a similar wave, but it was nowhere near as all-consuming as the Ethereum wave. Litecoin LTC Mining Equipment. This new Ethereum wave feels like Pokemon GO, where it was everywhere for weeks – ramping up to around two months. Revenue is dropping in massive chunks every few days, so while you would’ve been making a steady amount of money a few weeks ago, that has dropped significantly. A single graphics card like the Radeon RX 580 or GTX 1070 was making you over $5 per day nearly a month ago, that amount has nearly halved. If you had purchased six new RX 580s for let’s say $350 a month ago, you could’ve been making somewhere in the vicinity of $900 over the month, with the cards paying for themselves in just over two months. Not bad, right?!

You can see why people wanted to jump right into the deep end with Ethereum mining, with some people spending thousands of dollars, while others spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are serious cryptocurrency mines in Russia and China with millions of dollars of investment, churning out more than you could ever wish for at home. The DAG continues to expand with Ethereum mining, and with the drive towards the sky in difficulty, the revenue per day continues to drop. Even for my mining operation here with 60 graphics cards spread across 15 systems, I’ve seen a 30% drop in the last couple of weeks, but it has nearly halved in the last month. To Hold, Or Not To Hold.

Now, this is something that’s up to you to hold what you’ve got, or not. Personally, I’m holding onto what I’ve got, but not just in the hopes of a possible rise in the price of Ethereum. I’m holding it because I genuinely believe in the future of digital currency. I believe it is the future, and we’re getting a tease of it now before it becomes an integral part of our everyday lives. I’ve diversified into holding other currencies as well, with a spread of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Zcash, Ethereum, and Siacoin.

I don’t own much of Bitcoin ($10 worth right now) – but I traded $500 worth of the Ethereum that I mined a few weeks ago into Siacoin. If it were to go up from its current price of $0.01 to even $0.20, that’s a 20x increase. It might not happen, but there were millions of people who said the same words about Bitcoin years ago and look at where we are now. Put Your Seatbelt On Any minor crash of Ethereum could spiral out of control at least temporarily, and when the DAG increases to the point of squeezing out anyone with less than 20-30 graphics cards, it will be fruitless to mine Ethereum on even a 6-way GPU system. I’ve got friends who are either building, have just bought, or are upgrading their PCs for mining. I wouldn’t recommend getting into Ethereum mining right now, as the ROI isn’t there – and it won’t be coming back. Everything is changing so quickly, with today being a day of red across the entire digital currency field.

Give it another two weeks, and you’re going to see Ethereum mining dead for anyone with less than ten cards, and another 4-6 weeks before the rest are squeezed out. There might not be many Radeon and GeForce graphics cards right now, but the flood of GPUs that will hit the second-hand market in the next couple of weeks is going to be like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

This is going to be a great thing for consumers, and either a regrettable thing for the ex-miners, or a break even point as they leave the digital currency mining game. AMD and NVIDIA will no longer have gamers mad at miners because there’s a lack of stock, because stock will get replenished over the coming weeks and most likely won’t get to the point of where it has been for the last few weeks. This doesn’t mean there won’t be demand, but the coming DAG increase will push so many new people out of the market, they’ll give up very quickly once they realize their revenue and profits are dropping rapidly making it more expensive to run the mining system/s with larger power bills to run it all 24/7.

The mining-specific cards will be useless in the second-hand market with 90-day warranties and no display connectors; they will only be a good buy for fellow miners who want cheap mining-specific cards. But if these GTX 1060/RX 580 cards are selling for $249 and are let’s say two months old at the time of sale, they’d have to be something under $100 before most people would prepare to buy them. The Canary Isn’t Dead, Yet. I don’t see cryptocurrency mining going anywhere, but it is going to be squeezed out of the hands of mainstream use, and into the realm of more serious miners. Mining won’t die, but it will transform. For anyone who is just getting into mining, you might not have looked at some of the available charts that show the DAG for Ethereum is ramping up quickly.

Let’s take a look at the Ethereum difficulty chart, which is available on CoinWarz. This is over the last 30 days, and you can see here that we’re looking at nearly double the difficulty of mining Ethereum, the main driver behind the amount of Ether you mine each month dropping significantly. Here we have the last week, where you can see that each wave is getting bigger and bigger, and lasting long before it bounces back down. If we then take a look at the price of Ethereum over the last month, you can see it reached those massive highs of $400 from a month ago, to the slump of under $300 just before June 16. It really went down in the end of June to nearly $200 before recovering to $300+ a few days later, and is now below $250 once again and coming down still. With this in mind, please take care in the mine it’s an exciting, but very volatile place.

The Ethereum network began a planned hard fork at block number 4,370,000 yesterday and it appears that the Byzantium hard fork has been a smooth transition so far (). Miners are having some fun as they are seeing that some blocks are being mined in as little as while others are taking almost a minute during the transition time we are currently in. Over the past month we have averaged about 30 seconds seconds per block and with the fork adjustments that has dropped down to just over 14 seconds! The ETH rewards for a mined block has been cut from 5 ETH to 3 ETH to combat inflation, but miners are seeing about a 30-40% increase in profit with the hard fork changes! Is showing that a single AMD Radeon RX 480 was getting $0.94 in profit per day on October 16th and just 24 hours later that card is now bringing in $1.37 per day.

That is a 40% increase in profit thanks to the difficulty being readjusted lower and the lower block times! The Byzantium hard fork hasn’t brought us back to the $4+ dollar days we experienced back in May 2017, but we’ll take it!

A single AMD Radeon RX 480/580 video card will bring in about $42.50 per month after power. You can actually buy AMD Radeon RX 580 video cards now with prices starting out at just for the 8GB model or for the 4GB model. ETH should go Proof of Stake (PoS) long before 4GB cards go obsolete, but who knows about other alt coins that might become more profitable to mine in the months and years to come. You are looking at just over 6 months to get you GPU investment back at current prices and difficulties if you mine 24/7.

If you happen to look at mining profitability calculators today be sure to look at the numbers carefully as hard fork has many thrown off! Why mine for such little profit? Ethereum now has a US $30.77 billion market capitalization with a price $323 per ETH, but many expect that price to continue to go up. Those bullish on ETH believe that it could reach a target price of $650-$800 a ways down the road. If that happens it means that the ETH mined today will be worth more later and that The other thing that you have to remember is that much of the Nothern Hemisphere is entering Autumn and that is bringing cooler temperatures. We fought over 110F temperatures this summer when we were mining with dozens of cards in June-August and our electric bill was crazy since power rates in the summer were $0.1261 per kWh.

Now that summer is over we have 8 months of winter rate electric costs and that puts power at $0.0878 per kWh up to 750 kWh and $0.0602 per kWh once over that threshold. One can also use the mining systems as a source of heat for the home, so rather than fighting the heat from the systems the warmth is actually beneficial! So, we are seeing a 40% increase in mining profitability thanks to the Byzantium hard fork and over a 30% reduction in electricity costs due to lower winter rates in our area. We often have people reference our articles from June 2017 and ask if we are still mining. We did turn some machines off near the end of summer as we had over a week with 110F temperatures and our mining operation room was cooking. We’ve since turned them back on thanks partly due to the cooler weather and increase in mining profitability! We are still using Claymore’s Dual Ethereum AMD+NVIDIA GPU Miner v10.0 () and the Ethermine Ethereum Mining Pool () with solid success.

Since our original articles we’ve gone back and picked what Ethermine servers we connect to in the bat file based on ping times now. We are based in Missouri and discovered we get 32ms ping times to the East coast Ethermine servers versus 62ms ping times to the West coast servers. This simple server switch has decreased the number of stale shares we’ve gotten and that helps the bottom line. Our video cards are all overclocked and undervolted as much as we can get away with and Windows 10 has been tweaked to ensure solid 24/7 use. We’ve been mining for roughly six months now and it’s been profitable for us.

We’ve learned a ton of things along the way and hopefully those that purchased hardware back in May/June/July have had a similar experience if they stuck with it 24/7. It would be nice to see the price of ETH higher, but we are still making money and most importantly having fun! Hopefully the same goes for all of you! If you are new to mining and want to build a system for mining we highly suggest starting with. Be sure to check out our previous coverage on Ethereum mining: • • • • • •. Hi Nathan From my point of view, after Byzantium we only obtained between 10-20% increase in mining profitability. I have a mining rig with 6 overclocked NVidia GTX1070 cards doing 32MH/s each.

Before Byzantium my estimated earnings were 0.76ETH per month and after the Byzantium the estimated earnings is 0.94ETH. I wrote to Ethermine.org Support and they told me that “the difficulty decrease has only brought about an increase of aprox 10% regarding miner profits.

Though the difficulty has decreased, the reward has also decreased from 5 eth to 3 eth every block found. This along with the same amount of network hashrate means less rewards to go around to miners.” Therefore in my case the profitability was increased in 23%.