£6 per card per day (1080ti) is quite appealing. 60p electricity costs.

£48 per day minus £4.80 costs. Every day? For just leaving something switched on? It is quite appealing.

I got my 1080ti's for £650 a pop. ROI is 108 days. That's why people, myself included, are doing it.

I still don't get it :( That's 108 days before you _start_ to make a profit and future returns are guaranteed to diminish as difficulty goes up.

Versus £5,200 capital to invest immediately in a basket of safe (as much as crypto currencies can be), liquid coins that will likely x3 to x8 over a 12 month period.

To each their own I guess but it's not the bet for me.

In the "invest in ETH" example, you're taking the appreciation of ETH into account, but in the case of mining crypto, you're ignoring it. Still, you're right in the overall point that just investing is more profitable. If you are going to gain value from the GPU, though, mining is a great way to make some extra cash.

Sorry, I just assumed ETH was out of reach of personal mining now.

Sure, you could hold "shitcoins" that are currently easier to mine but that's a lot more risky than long term holding something like ETH, LTC, XMR (at least I think it is anyway).

Pretty much any coin that you mine could be exchanged into the coin that you would prefer to hold for the appreciation.

So: * Mine whatever is most profitable to mine at that time. * On mining that coin, convert to whichever investment vehicle gives you the risk/return that you want (BTC, ETH, XLM, VFIFX, US T-bonds, etc).

It takes 3 months to make all of your initial investment back on mining ETH with a 1060, after electricity.

That's actually better than I would have imagined. What's the difficulty growth like with ETH these days? Or, what's a safe estimation of how many ETH a 1060 could mine before Casper lands?

3 months is longer than 108 days ;)

I don't mine ETH directly with Nvidia hardware though it is still profitable on AMD gear. I use whattomine.com to get a rough estimate of my daily earnings...

I mine to a pool called miningpoolhub which auto exchanges my shitcoins to LTC (or whatever I choose). From there I send to Coinbase -> GDAX -> Sell for ETH or FIAT. So far, since starting mining 1 month ago I have ROI'd 1.8 1080ti's already. Once they've paid themselves off the rest is pure profit and the best part, GPUs have intrinsic value beyond mining.

Also as per other commentors - coins I mined will appreciate too. If I buy ETH with FIAT (which I have also done btw) I am literally buying thin air. At least with GPUs I own a thing if the shit hits the proverbial!

- whattomine.com - https://goo.gl/94KHv4

- https://simplemining.net/

- https://miningpoolhub.com

> 3 months is longer than 108 days ;)

Following the Gregorian calendar (international defacto standard) this statement is always false, never true.

There's no way all these coins are going to be accepted currencies (literally none are, not even Bitcoin). There's no way all these coins will retain long-term value either.

Anyone who joins in on the mining is doing two things: 1) joining in on the pyramid schemes (on which you as miner and cryptocurrency owner depend) 2) adding to more electricity waste.

As for GPUs. Once the shit hits the fan their price will freefall. If their price falls now, they're pretty much worthless. More so because many of them will be abused. GPUs aren't made to be used 24/7. But yeah, you can play games on all your 1080s...

If the whole crypto ecosystem crashes (unlikely in my opinion) graphics cards can be resold and recoup losses.

Not sure this holds either. With such a black swan event, there would be a glut of second hand graphics cards on ebay etc.

Seems safer to me (if you're worried about a huge crash) to leave your principle investment equivalent amount on a good exchange with fiat support (e.g. Bitstamp) setup a sensible stop loss order and then, as soon as you've x2 your original investment, pull your initial stake out and leave the rest in crypto (on a Nano Ledger S or similar).

I think people are going to be increasingly wary of second hand graphics cards. How many of them will have been trashed by running in a poorly-cooled mining rig for months on end?

What could cause such an event? Would coinbase going insolvent cause everything to crash beyond repair?

What if satoshi appeared and dumped his entire stake? That is probably the worst case scenario I can think of.

Bug in crypto where every private key is revealed? Not likely, just saying.

108 days and afterwards you make $1,500 income per month and you could travel the world and never have to work again if you don't want to?

Sounds like a pretty good deal.

What you didn't take into you account as well was the fact that this is $3,000 if Ethereum doubles in price, $4,500 if it tripes like you specified.

That income is not coming from mining Ethereum and, as time goes on, the amount of any coin you can mine diminishes (sometimes rapidly).

The only way to avoid diminishing mining returns as difficulty increases is to swap to a new, lesser known coin. Eventually you run out of coins to swap to or the ones you are mining don't go up in value (because if they did, bigger miners would come in and knock you out of the game as the difficulty shoots up). All the time your GPUs are ageing too.

If you want a steady income with arguably a lesser risk profile and more staying power than personal mining offers, why not put some money in to coins that offer node payouts?

If you want a steady income with arguably a lesser risk profile why not simply invest in low risk stock market?

There's no way all these coins [1] retain proper value compared to NASDAQ [2]. Take AAPL for example: ~48% [3] in one year. GOOGL for example: ~36% [4] on one year.

[1] https://whattomine.com/calculators

[2] http://money.cnn.com/data/hotstocks/index.html

[3] http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=AAPL

[4] http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=GOOGL

It isn't really hard to mine profitably, you can look up which ones are profitable and choose out of over 1,000 coins, of which 100 are already above market cap of $500M, so that's not the bootleneck.

Yeah but you're forever capped at meager returns.

As soon as a coin's value increases, more mining hash power enters the scene and difficulty shoots up (ruining your profit margin). You then swap to another coin, eventually the same thing happens. Rinse, repeat.

During all of this, you still have to make back your initial investment on the GPUs and power, then you have usually another 6-9 months max before your entire rig is too outdated and you have to start again buying newer, faster cards (which will then take you another 3-5 months just to earn back your cost).

Just seems a very painful and slow way to cash in on the crypto bonanza (which isn't going to last forever).

> £6 per card

which cryptocurrency is this? I'm only getting <£3/day mining ETH on my 1080ti..

I am using simplemining os to mine ALT coins (mostly equihash based) to miningpoolhub which auto exchanges to LTC for me. From there I send to coinbase -> gdax -> trade for either GBP or ETH depending on my mood!