Ever since I entered into the cryptocurrency world by way of mining on my home computer, the excitement and fascination of "printing" currency has dominated my mind. Because of this it did not take me very long to start looking deeper into mining hardware with the desire to push my mining capabilities farther and farther. I feel like a kid in a candy store with the amount of options I have to choose from and throughout my day I am constantly having to snap myself out of a tunnel vision trance as I try and calculate the ROI of different GPU's. Even last night I lied awake in bed staring at the ceiling calculating the different prices of the GTX 1070 TI, GTX 1080 TI comparing it with Radeons R9 Fury and R9 580 GPU. But even after all of the reading and exploring of the different Hashrates and Solutions, the numbers just never added up to something that would realistically work for me.
It just so happens that the computers that I require for my work also meet the specs for mining rigs. Working in the film industry I have a lot of editing assignments which require relatively powerful computers. So when I set out to purchase systems that would be able to keep up with editing compressed 4K video footage I landed on a Lenovo Thinkpad P71 with Nvidia Quadro P4000 and a built desktop with a Nvidia GTX 1080 SLI GPU (at the time of my purchase the GTX 1080 TI had not been released yet so I did not have the option unfortunately). Now like said, at the time I purchased these machines they were solely for work and I had no idea what mining was, so by the time that I was introduced to cryptocurrency both of them were paid off. At that point all the money that I was able to make mining was just a bonus and it wasn't like I was making a whole bunch, but I was still able to pull in between $350 - $450 a month.
Now when you look at it like that it seems like a no-brainer, who wouldn't utilize their hardware that is just sitting there most of the day anyways. The challenge comes into play when you are purchasing GPU hardware solely for the purpose of mining and you have no other use for it. When you do this you will have to pay off the GPU's before you can start taking a profit, so obviously the shorter ROI (Return On Investment) the better.
For example, lets take the popular Nvidia GTX 1080 TI. If the price is around $750 USD and you overclock it, you can reach almost 750 Sol/s which translates to about $5 - $6 a day after electricity costs. If you take the average of $5.50 and spread it over 30 days you would make $165 USD in a month. So in order to pay off just the one GPU you would have to spend 4.5 months of round the clock mining to cover the expense. Now to be fair a lot of people mine using GPU farms and they can make a consistent profit, but it does take start up capital and patience in order to pull in stable returns.
Now for myself, I view it slightly differently. If you are going to say that a 4.5 month ROI is too long before you make a profit you must first compare it to its competitor, which for me at least is revenue from cryptocurrency trading.
To put it simply if I only had $750 to spend I have two choices available. The first would be to buy the GTX 1080 TI and lock up the full $750 for a minimum of 4.5 months. The second would be to invest in one or two coins with the hopes of the value growing exponentially. Now they both have their own pros and cons but I find it can easily boil down to how the market is currently doing. If there is a lot of steady massive growth like the market has now, I believe it is a massive waist to have that money sitting untouched in a GPU without any real growth potential for over 4 months.
When I was considering expanding my GPU collection to build up my mining rig, I noticed that there was some massive moves in the market due to the amount of publicity Bitcoin was receiving and decided to hold off and invest that money into altcoins.
I am a big fan of EOS, which I have been reading and following up with for over a month (partly due to my love for the Steemit network). When I saw that there was a big spike in positive movement I decided to take that $750 and buy 333 EOS Tokens at $2.25 a piece.
Well less than a month later that $750 has turned into $3,996; whereas if I had bought the GPU I would still be stuck trying to pay off the fixed $750 for another 3.5 months.
I hope that I haven't lost anybody at this point, but I needed to explain the two choices that I have been trying to decide between in order for this next bit to make sense.
Now this brings us back around to the purpose of this article.
Like I said in the beginning, I have a deep passion and interest in mining which I can't shake. After calculating the return possibilities for GPU's I inevitably entered into the field of ASIC Miners. After spending days doing all sorts of research on different options I came to accept that the only real legitimate company that you can buy from is Bitmain. I know that there are other brands out on the market but ASIC Miners are expensive compared to GPU's and unlike graphic card companies such as Nvidia that has a long standing reputation, ASIC Miners are unregulated and spotty at best. Being prepared to spend between $1,500 - $3,000 on an ASIC Miner, the only manufacturer that I felt remotely comfortable sending that amount of money to was Bitmain.
There are a few reasons why ASIC Miners are so appealing but one of the main ones is that they are extremely portable in comparison to dragging around a GPU mining rig. Personally I love to travel and I am always excited to learn about revenue sources that would allow me to travel around the world while continuing to make money. ASIC machines have this advantage as you can quite easily throw it into a suitcase and run it from a hotel room or a rented house as you move around the world. The biggest benefit of this is simply that you don't have to pay for the electricity at these locations so your mining revenue is significantly higher. Another reason why I fell in love with the idea about purchasing one is that they are actually designed and built for 24/7 mining at %100 power, compared to GPU's that stand a good chance of wearing out and/ or crashing due to the amount of stress that it can put on the components.
After listing a couple of examples of why I am so interested in investing some money into an ASIC machine you can easily start to see the possibilities and opportunities that these little boxes can give you. So the next obvious question would be why not just dive in, bite the bullet and buy one. Well to be fair on three separate occasions I have been on my computer counting down the seconds until the latest Antminers are released and every time I am one of the first people filling out the order form, payment method and shipping address. With everything filled in and completed all that is left is to hit send and I would become a member of the ASIC owners club. Unfortunately every time I stop, freeze and just stare at that stupid timer ticking down and decide against the purchase.
There is only one reason why I have struggled so much with pulling the trigger and that is to due with Bitmains unfortunate product policy/ design which brings us back to my dilemma trying to decide between trading and mining. You see Bitmain has a very frustrating policy in which they do not sell you an Antminer right then and there. What you are actually buying when you place an order is a spot in line to receive the next batch of ASIC Miners which will not be actually shipped out for an additional 2 - 3+ months. This is what I find so enraging as not only are you forced to lock up that $3000 for an extended period of time but you are basing the value of the machine on the current ROI and mining difficulty. Now you can calculate this using data that is currently available but you cannot calculate that for 3 months into the future, so by the time you actually receive your miner you would have already lost out on the most profitable months as the mining revenue generally drops over time.
That being said I am still very interested in buying one or two of Bitmains Miners, but at this point I have decided to wait until Bitmain sells one that is shipped right away or releases a cheaper one for pre order so I can limit the amount of money I have stuck in limbo while waiting for delivery.
Thank you for taking the time in reading this little rant of mine and I hope this article has helped some people out there. I would love to hear other peoples thoughts on my dilemma and if you have any questions or advice please comment below as I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Grayson
I would love to hear any thoughts you might have on this article, as I am very new to writing and have only released two posts so far.
In my experience mining as speculation is the best way to do it. Find the new but unknown coins to mine. For example i mined 800 stratis on the last day of their very short POW stage to get the coin going. From one day of mining That is now worth about 10k usd. This also led me to research stratis and buy in early.
Also mined deeponion in the first few weeks (absolute scam garbage coin) but i was able to sell those coins for well over 1k several weeks later.
Other than that mining is good for a certain kind of stability that trading cant offer. Im sure eth miners that have stuck it through even in the times of low roi are all probably doing pretty good.
All that being said, as you have discovered investing in a coin instead of in mining hardware almost always will be the better choice long term, unless you have a very efficient setup and a solid business plan.
Also POS is the future for efficiency/economic reasons, mining will eventually be (or already is) an environmental hazard.
Thanks for writing in. It is funny that you mention finding cheap undervalued coins that you can mine in the early stages that will grow exponentially a short time later. This is the exact same philosophy that I had which led me to dual mine Decred and Ubiq. Both of which have grown exponentially over the past few weeks.
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@roadsuntraveled/the-joy-of-printing-money-my-start-in-cryptocurrency-mining-and-finding-the-best-coin
Very well done. Thats what we call INFO! We have been looking @ (BTCS) BITCOIN SCRYPT>@7 cents. Its asic resist. ? Could it pull another Vertcoin ? Or is it just another scrypt coin?
:D :D THİS İS A GOOD MİNER CHANGE CENTRAL CHİP 1 CHİP CONTROL HEAD ONE....AFTER USE THE ALGO SCRYPT OR SOL/S ALGORITHM TRY İT İM USE TO THIS MİNER 25 PCS