Since we cannot beat the mining mania, I am considering joining in...

[liyihaha]

It has been 4-5 months since several major hardware launches, almost all the GPUs are still very hard to find at reasonable prices. I am starting considering buy a 3090 for whatever the cost it will be, which may be ~$2800-3000 from ebay and then mining with it to recover the cost. It is my first time thinking about it since I feel we really cannot beat the mining mania in a short period of time (3-5 months). Based on the profit calculation, it seems that a single 3090 can generate ~10-12 bucks/day profit and if I use it to mine for 90 days, I almost recover the price mark-ups and I own the card at near original MSRP.

 

It is now just a very rough idea and I don't know if I will go ahead and do it. I am just wondering if anybody have similar thoughts as me....

[bmx6454]

i would recommend a little more dd. electricity cost changes the 90 days by a decent amount.

[Vitamanic]

You'll spend more on electricity than you will gain in profits. There's no point.

[liyihaha]

1 minute ago, bmx6454 said:

i would recommend a little more dd. electricity cost changes the 90 days by a decent amount.

The profit calculation have already take the electricity into account. Actually, the electricity charge is too trivial now for mining since the price is very high.

[bmx6454]

2 minutes ago, liyihaha said:

The profit calculation have already take the electricity into account. Actually, the electricity charge is too trivial now for mining since the price is very high.

fair enough. not saying not to mine, but why not try to get a 3090 at retail, and then mine. i know how tough the cards are to get currently, but with enough effort, im sure it could be obtained at retail within 90 days. make sure to join the evga queue if you haven't already. also zotac store.

[ShrimpBrime]

47 minutes ago, bmx6454 said:

fair enough. not saying not to mine, but why not try to get a 3090 at retail, and then mine. i know how tough the cards are to get currently, but with enough effort, im sure it could be obtained at retail within 90 days. make sure to join the evga queue if you haven't already. also zotac store.

How long does a guy mine with a 3090 to pay off the card and energy used before making a profit.

 

Also, a question I have no idea the answer to. Please tell me some one knows.....

 

F@H folds simulated proteins for example......

 

What EXACTLY are you processing (mining) to achieve a "coin"? 

 

 

[bmx6454]

24 minutes ago, ShrimpBrime said:

How long does a guy mine with a 3090 to pay off the card and energy used before making a profit.

 

Also, a question I have no idea the answer to. Please tell me some one knows.....

 

F@H folds simulated proteins for example......

 

What EXACTLY are you processing (mining) to achieve a "coin"? 

 

 

not sure, but i wasn't going to argue with him lol

[ShrimpBrime]

7 minutes ago, bmx6454 said:

not sure, but i wasn't going to argue with him lol

Well... A long F'ing time. And you don't even know what the F it is your crunching...... 

[thrasher_565]

50 minutes ago, ShrimpBrime said:

Well... A long F'ing time. And you don't even know what the F it is your crunching...... 

ai

[Jtalk4456]

2 hours ago, liyihaha said:

The profit calculation have already take the electricity into account. Actually, the electricity charge is too trivial now for mining since the price is very high.

i'd love to see your calculations
This is a calculation based on the 50k price, a cheaper than average 10c power cost, the top end probably theoretical hash rate of a 3090 and basically not having a pool fee

Even with this, you're losing money every month. This hasn't taken into account a few things
1. Realistic numbers for electric cost (avg 13c), hashrate (The current hashrate is maxed out at 120 MH/s with a +1350 memory clock and a 100% power limit.) and adding a pool fee in there

2. how about the power consumption of the rest of the system using the gpu? also i put in the standard wattage of the card, and finding that hashrate quote I redid the numbers with a 300W and we saved $4 of losses per month, still very much losing money. 

3. Lots of times before i looked into it earlier on and you know i might make a few bucks a day back then, not anymore, but point being it was almost negligible. The cost of entry is super high, it's terrible for the environment, your electricity bill and heating your room, so extra AC costing more electricity. All for a few bucks a day? You'd make far more money getting a second job and throwing everything from the second job into a mutual fund, almost guaranteed to net 10% returns. Which brings us to the most important point. 
4. All of this is based off a temporary high price. Not a single stock in history has run it's course without diving at times, bitcoin is no exception to this rule, and due to the way it gains value, it's actually an exaggerated example of how stocks rise and dive.

 

While I think technology will make bitcoin continue to rise over the long term, mining it simply isn't worth it. I don't condone investing in something that's such a literal gamble all the time, but if you must, don't waste your time mining, just buy some and see if it goes up. Also def don't do any of this rn when the price is super high, buying when the price is high is one of the quickest ways to lose money

 

[Spindel]

3 hours ago, Vitamanic said:

You'll spend more on electricity than you will gain in profits. There's no point.

It depends.

 

If you like me live in a cold country (you seem to be from Philadelphia so you have it a bit chilly right now) and like me have electrical heating you might as well use a miningrig as a space heater for part of the house. Thus the heat in theory isn’t wasted. In my case I have an air to air heat pump that takes a large part of the house so for that part I will not ”make” any money. But another part of my house in theory would benefit from this since most of the heat comes off electric radiators (right now).

[harryk]

12 hours ago, liyihaha said:

It has been 4-5 months since several major hardware launches, almost all the GPUs are still very hard to find at reasonable prices. I am starting considering buy a 3090 for whatever the cost it will be, which may be ~$2800-3000 from ebay and then mining with it to recover the cost. It is my first time thinking about it since I feel we really cannot beat the mining mania in a short period of time (3-5 months). Based on the profit calculation, it seems that a single 3090 can generate ~10-12 bucks/day profit and if I use it to mine for 90 days, I almost recover the price mark-ups and I own the card at near original MSRP.

 

It is now just a very rough idea and I don't know if I will go ahead and do it. I am just wondering if anybody have similar thoughts as me....

It's not a terrible plan, that's why so many miners are doing it right now. The risk however is that the value of what you mine (likely ETH) could crash before you finish earning back the money. 

 

9 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

i'd love to see your calculations
This is a calculation based on the 50k price, a cheaper than average 10c power cost, the top end probably theoretical hash rate of a 3090 and basically not having a pool fee

<snip>

Why are you doing calculations with Bitcoin? No one mines Bitcoin anymore because its difficulty is too high and it's not profitable. However, many other crypto currencies are very profitable right now.

 

https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-rtx-3090

 

[Jtalk4456]

33 minutes ago, harryk said:

It's not a terrible plan, that's why so many miners are doing it right now. The risk however is that the value of what you mine (likely ETH) could crash before you finish earning back the money. 

 

Why are you doing calculations with Bitcoin? No one mines Bitcoin anymore because its difficulty is too high and it's not profitable. However, many other crypto currencies are very profitable right now.

 

https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-rtx-3090

 

because the other cryptos are not worth 50K, that's the coin you quoted the price of. Looking at the link you gave, I refer you to my point about time vs money. If you take an 8 hr workday, which is small given an assumed 24/7 running time, you're making maybe $2/hr if you're lucky. If you go for a 24 hr day, you're talking less than a dollar per hour. So again, spend one hour cleaning up someone's yard, cutting grass, helping with a chore, you've already outearned the very risky not at all predictable or stable POTENTIAL value of a crypto currency. So my point remains it's a bad earning even if you assume the high value it is temporarily inflated to. It could drop back down to 300 tomorrow for all you know and you're losing money every day, not to mention the high upfront cost of the system, even assuming a 1 gpu setup. 

[harryk]

1 hour ago, Jtalk4456 said:

because the other cryptos are not worth 50K, that's the coin you quoted the price of. Looking at the link you gave, I refer you to my point about time vs money. If you take an 8 hr workday, which is small given an assumed 24/7 running time, you're making maybe $2/hr if you're lucky. If you go for a 24 hr day, you're talking less than a dollar per hour. So again, spend one hour cleaning up someone's yard, cutting grass, helping with a chore, you've already outearned the very risky not at all predictable or stable POTENTIAL value of a crypto currency. So my point remains it's a bad earning even if you assume the high value it is temporarily inflated to. It could drop back down to 300 tomorrow for all you know and you're losing money every day, not to mention the high upfront cost of the system, even assuming a 1 gpu setup. 

Yes doing actual work will yield more money, but that it only works if

a) one doesn't already have a regular job

b) the odd jobs are consistently available to earn $1500

 

Besides the initial cost, the barrier to entry for mining is extremely low. I'd argue much lower than the time and effort to find enough odd jobs to earn $1500. Once you have the card it's literally printing money. Sure the price of ETH could crash but historically it's rather stable and on par with many high earning stocks. Particularly with the profit margins so high right now it would have to fall significantly, more than it ever has before, to become not profitable.

[wkdpaul]

* thread moved to the Folding@home, Boinc, and Coin Mining section *

[Mick Naughty]

Can only do the calculations based on actual time spent mining. Are you gonna get it and never use it for anything else until it’s paid off? 
 

Makes pretty good money. Wouldn’t spend 2000 or anything close to that for it. 
 

Id buy 6+ cheaper cards and make a rig and do that. Or a few 1080ti’s. Or overpay for 2 3060’ti’s and match the hash of a 3090 and spend less. 

[wkdpaul]

12 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

*snip*

Sorry, but that's either uninformed, or disingenuous, nobody is mining BTC with GPUs, everyone is mining altcoins and converting them to BTC. Altcoins are going up with BTC.

 

Mining is profitable, if it wasn't, miners wouldn't be snatching up GPUs.

 

 

@harryk I've been mining on-and-off for the last few years, mostly only in winters since that offset my heating cost as suggested by @Spindel. Currently with a 1060 and a 290x, I'm making about $1.5 CAD / day (after factoring electricity). The cards have already paid themselves many times over (the 1060 I bought for $250 CAD, and the 290x I paid $65 CAD, both are undervolted and underclocked).

[Jtalk4456]

32 minutes ago, harryk said:

Yes doing actual work will yield more money, but that it only works if

a) one doesn't already have a regular job

b) the odd jobs are consistently available to earn $1500

 

Besides the initial cost, the barrier to entry for mining is extremely low. I'd argue much lower than the time and effort to find enough odd jobs to earn $1500. Once you have the card it's literally printing money. Sure the price of ETH could crash but historically it's rather stable and on par with many high earning stocks. Particularly with the profit margins so high right now it would have to fall significantly, more than it ever has before, to become not profitable.

1. again you can do an hour of overtime at a min wage job and earn more money in one hour than that rig earns you all day. regular job is not a barrier if you really want that money.

2. so a part time pizza delivery job, which are highly in demand due to covid? also 1500 is 4 times what you earn in a month based on a conservative $12 a day earnings based on the link you gave me. If I go the highest from that link around $16, it's 3 1/8 times the amount. all i have to make to beat that is 480 in one month, that's nothing.

barrier to entry is non existent with a part time delivery job, just fill an application and boom. 

Crypto is not historically stable at all, not sure where you got that idea, it's known for being more volatile than the stock market by orders of magnitude. 
we're talking 12 a day, its already not worth your time. if $12 is your idea of high profit in a day, you need to look around at other jobs and see the money to be made

[airborne spoon]

using a 3090 you'd be mining ETH at about 120mh/s and drawing about 300w if you paid $200 for the card and had free electricity it would take you about 270 days to break even. adding in power cost of .10 it would raise your ROI to 310 days. Now if you add in the increasing diff both those numbers will increase by about 60-90 days by the time you hit your ROI.

If you wanted to make profits you want cards that cost less but still put out some speed. I got 6x RX 570 when they were $200 each and hit my ROI in about 3 months.

[liyihaha]

Firstly, I am not meant to be a miner. I am just a casual gamer with a secure job but suffered the shortage of GPUs since I want to upgrade.

 

Secondly, I am just very pessimistic on the future of GPU prices so instead of wait for another 3-6 months or even longer for GPU, I am just want to get it at a mark-up prices and try to recover some cost via mining. I don't plan to fully recover the GPU cost but just to break even the mark-ups.

 

I understand it means that I will have to buy the card from potential scalper on ebay, which is a sensitive area in the forum. I just feel there is no other choice. Of course, a lot of people will say you can wait until everything come back to normal, but nobody knows when the waiting will be over...

[tikker]

3 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

1. again you can do an hour of overtime at a min wage job and earn more money in one hour than that rig earns you all day. regular job is not a barrier if you really want that money.

2. so a part time pizza delivery job, which are highly in demand due to covid? also 1500 is 4 times what you earn in a month based on a conservative $12 a day earnings based on the link you gave me. If I go the highest from that link around $16, it's 3 1/8 times the amount. all i have to make to beat that is 480 in one month, that's nothing.

barrier to entry is non existent with a part time delivery job, just fill an application and boom. 

Crypto is not historically stable at all, not sure where you got that idea, it's known for being more volatile than the stock market by orders of magnitude. 
we're talking 12 a day, its already not worth your time. if $12 is your idea of high profit in a day, you need to look around at other jobs and see the money to be made

It takes 1 minute of your time to start or stop the miner and you're doing absolutely nothing while it's going. $12 a day isn't bad for that. My GPU is only making like €1-€2 a day, but I still have it mine when not in use. That aside, every casual miner out there knows (or should know) that mining with a single GPU won't make bank anymore. If you want to try your had at making big bucks you're better off investing the money directly by just buying your coin of interest.

 

You are right that crypto is volatile and investing in hardware at this time is a big gamble, so the general advice always is, to not invest what you cannot afford to lose. The current growth will indeed end and it will come back down. Hard to say when and by how much, but that's just the game.

 

52 minutes ago, liyihaha said:

Firstly, I am not meant to be a miner. I am just a casual gamer with a secure job but suffered the shortage of GPUs since I want to upgrade.

 

Secondly, I am just very pessimistic on the future of GPU prices so instead of wait for another 3-6 months or even longer for GPU, I am just want to get it at a mark-up prices and try to recover some cost via mining. I don't plan to fully recover the GPU cost but just to break even the mark-ups.

 

I understand it means that I will have to buy the card from potential scalper on ebay, which is a sensitive area in the forum. I just feel there is no other choice. Of course, a lot of people will say you can wait until everything come back to normal, but nobody knows when the waiting will be over...

The future of mining is a little uncertain. GPU mining BTC hasn't been profitable for a long time due to the sheer difficulty and ETH will move to Proof of Stake soon(TM) somewhere in 2021/2022, which will be the death of ETH mining. The massive amount of hashpower now foccused on mining ETH will then probably focus on other arbitrary still gpu-mineable coins, but it's impossible to predict which ones and how profitable they'll be.

 

Personally I would not go for a €3000 investment in hardware just for mining anymore unless either it's money you can miss or it can "guarantee" (as far as that's possible) a quick ROI. If you really want to invest that amount of money in crypto, I would personally just buy some BTC, ETH and/or other projects you like with it and hold.

[Jtalk4456]

9 hours ago, tikker said:

If you want to try your had at making big bucks you're better off investing the money directly by just buying your coin of interest.

Very true, as I stated earlier, I don't endorse the gamble with how volatile the market is, but if you want to get in you're better off just buying during a dip and hope it jumps back up. While 12 a day seems like a lot for no effort, that's based on just cost of running vs profit, this doesn't take into account the rig heating the room and needing AC  which is more electricity, it doesn't take into account the risk and volatility of the market, and with recent hacks on crypto platforms, it's just superhigh risk right now. It's a gamble, and I don't gamble as a rule. 

 

9 hours ago, tikker said:

to not invest what you cannot afford to lose

AMEN

9 hours ago, tikker said:

The future of mining is a little uncertain. GPU mining BTC hasn't been profitable for a long time due to the sheer difficulty and ETH will move to Proof of Stake soon(TM) somewhere in 2021/2022, which will be the death of ETH mining. The massive amount of hashpower now foccused on mining ETH will then probably focus on other arbitrary still gpu-mineable coins, but it's impossible to predict which ones and how profitable they'll be.

coming back to the recommendation to just buy coin and treat it like a high risk stock. Again, not my recommendation, but if you have to gamble, just grab the coin and don't worry about the rig. I wasn't aware about the eth move, can you describe what the move is and why that is going to kill it? 

[tikker]

2 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

Very true, as I stated earlier, I don't endorse the gamble with how volatile the market is, but if you want to get in you're better off just buying during a dip and hope it jumps back up. While 12 a day seems like a lot for no effort, that's based on just cost of running vs profit, this doesn't take into account the rig heating the room and needing AC  which is more electricity, it doesn't take into account the risk and volatility of the market, and with recent hacks on crypto platforms, it's just superhigh risk right now. It's a gamble, and I don't gamble as a rule. 

All fair points. I don't count for AC as where I live I consider it free room heating and otherwise I'll just open a window (not too hot here). Profit is indeed also calculated today and is no guarantee for tomorrow. I do consider it a bit more investing than gambling at this point, but surely the internet mostly shows survivor bias and not a whole lot of people losing their live savings.

 

2 hours ago, Jtalk4456 said:

I wasn't aware about the eth move, can you describe what the move is and why that is going to kill it?

Well from reading up they've been saying "soon" for a while now, so an exact date isn't available, but eventually they will be moving to Proof of Stake (their site says 2021/2022 now). Mining is Proof of Work: you crunch numbers fo find blocks and you get the block reward (solo mining) or get paid according to your work (pool mining). More hashpower = more work = higher payment. With Eth's proof of stake you still get paid for verifying transactions, but who gets to verify transactions is randomly determined from a pool of stakers (people holding ETH). The more you stake the more transactions you are allowed to verify. This kills mining for it, because it's solely determined by your stake in Eth and not by your available compute power.

[5terky]

The people who will turn a profit on a 30 series mine are flipping their old 20 and 10 series. You can't just jump in when the market is hot like this, your just helping the long term miners get ROI on their old equipment.

The best time to get into mining was last summer when the last mining craze chaser capitulated and sold their cards at the low.

Good time to learn, put some old hardware to work. Investing in a mine right now has too much premium.

[Jtalk4456]

7 hours ago, tikker said:

but who gets to verify transactions is randomly determined from a pool of stakers (people holding ETH). The more you stake the more transactions you are allowed to verify. This kills mining for it, because it's solely determined by your stake in Eth and not by your available compute power.

yikes... I had only ever heard of the proof of work part, and not in those terms, that sucks