ASIC machine profitability?

[Niswendel]

So I’m looking into starting mining, and it seems like I could make like $6-7 a day of ETH on my 5700XT, so why do people try ASIC mining, is the profit margin much bigger, or is my $6-7 wrong?

[Enderman]

You're about 15 years late to the mining game m8

[Kilrah]

Just depends what coin you mine. Some need ASICs to get anything worthy out, some are designed to run well on GPUs.

[tikker]

As @Kilrah says it all depends on the coin. Some algorithms (e.g. for BTC), allow for the super high optimization with ASICs and have no ways to counteract it. Given the difficulty of say BTC now, it can only realistically be done with ASICs. Others like ETH are designed to not be ASIC mineable so GPUs are your only choice there and they remain profitable for small rigs. Trying your luck with BTC on a GPU, well that's just a glorified space heater at that point (if GPU miners even exist).

 

If ETH would be ASIC mineable there would've been ETH ASICs a long time ago.

 

$6-7 revenue seems in line with ETH's current profitability at the moment of writing this post. You'll have to subtract your electricity cost to determine your actual profit of course.

[Niswendel]

10 hours ago, Enderman said:

You're about 15 years late to the mining game m8

Ya but for me ~$6 a day extra is still nice, that’s like $2100 a year (pre any tax)

[Enderman]

11 minutes ago, Niswendel said:

Ya but for me ~$6 a day extra is still nice, that’s like $2100 a year (pre any tax)

When you take into account the cost of electricity and the cost of depreciation and degradation of the components, and the lower resale value or eventual failure, you lose money.

[Kilrah]

3 hours ago, Enderman said:

When you take into account the cost of electricity and the cost of depreciation and degradation of the components, and the lower resale value or eventual failure, you lose money.

Uh, no. 

I make $8-10/day after deducting electricity on a card that has 4 years warranty and would be fully paid back in 3 months anyway. 

[MrBrightSyde]

17 hours ago, Enderman said:

When you take into account the cost of electricity and the cost of depreciation and degradation of the components, and the lower resale value or eventual failure, you lose money.

This is wrong. Cost of electricity is like 12 cents USD in most US states, though there are a few states with really high electric costs. Using 150w as the power used (using my 2080 as an example), it costs about 50 cents a day. I earn 5 dollars a day on average (after fees) mining ETH using the 2miners pool. My 2080 still has 2 years of warranty, and I only need to mine on it for about 4 and a half months to make back what I paid for it ($620 used).

 

Unless ETH crashs in 4 months (highly doubt it), mining it would be very profitable, and there is low/no chance of really screwing up your GPU since you usually set a power limit that keeps it lower than 70c with fans running at 50%, with only a memory overclock.  Also "lower resale value" is not applicable when you have already mined on it long enough to pay back the card price. Any resale value at that point would be pure profit.

[Niswendel]

6 hours ago, MrBrightSyde said:

This is wrong. Cost of electricity is like 12 cents USD in most US states, though there are a few states with really high electric costs. Using 150w as the power used (using my 2080 as an example), it costs about 50 cents a day. I earn 5 dollars a day on average (after fees) mining ETH using the 2miners pool. My 2080 still has 2 years of warranty, and I only need to mine on it for about 4 and a half months to make back what I paid for it ($620 used).

 

Unless ETH crashs in 4 months (highly doubt it), mining it would be very profitable, and there is low/no chance of really screwing up your GPU since you usually set a power limit that keeps it lower than 70c with fans running at 50%, with only a memory overclock.  Also "lower resale value" is not applicable when you have already mined on it long enough to pay back the card price. Any resale value at that point would be pure profit.

Ya, not to mention you can sell your eth.

[tikker]

8 hours ago, Niswendel said:

Ya, not to mention you can sell your eth.

Selling won't help if you're not turning a profit as that's how profitability is calculated: revenue of selling your mined ETH at that moment minus electricity costs. So they've got that right. Currently it's profitable as revenue > electricity costs and as a nice bonus at the moment everything is rising.

14 hours ago, MrBrightSyde said:

Unless ETH crashs in 4 months (highly doubt it), mining it would be very profitable, and there is low/no chance of really screwing up your GPU since you usually set a power limit that keeps it lower than 70c with fans running at 50%, with only a memory overclock.  Also "lower resale value" is not applicable when you have already mined on it long enough to pay back the card price. Any resale value at that point would be pure profit.

Fingers crossed that it doesn't crash yet ETH is memory intensive. Even if the core is cool, there's no way of knowing what the memory temps are pre-3000 series on Nvidia, for example, so there's still a risk there if you push the memory too far.

[airborne spoon]

you're a little late to the ASIC game but they are still profitable in some cases like mine. I have 3x S9 and 3x S15 putting out a total speed of 120th/s i hit my ROI about 2 years ago and they are now just money making machines. I have free power though. if i had to pay for power they would cost $700/month so my daily take of $36 would change to $11 if i had to pay for power. so its still profitable but with the noise and the heat they make its pretty annoying to hear that fan whine 24/7