As a hobby I mine crypto currencies. After all when your work station has a couple of high end GPUs why not? Of course those of you in the know, obviously know I am not mining bitcion, but rather one of the hundreds of other ALT coins that are still minable with GPU, and haven't been taken over by the ASICs... yet.. Forever I have done pool mining, but recently I decided to give SOLO mining a try, and now I will likely never go back.
Even though the estimates are all over the place we an make some predictions based on performance of past models.
As more time goes by the difficulty to mine bitcoin gets higher. Difficulty ultimately determines how much electricity its going to take to mine a single Bitcoin. Using WhatToMine.com's ASIC page I calculated that anyone with electricity that costs more than 26 cents per KWH is now spending more to mine, than they are earning.
Gamers want to know when Miners will stop hogging all the GPUs. Here is your answer.
Bitcoin has rised to $6000 a coin. This has encouraged many in the investment community to label it as a bubble that is backed by nothing. Yes I haven't heard a single person from the tech industry with the same view. Lets for a second pretend that one day Bitcoin Crashed. I don't mean a sudden short term drop in value, I am talking that the market for bitcoin was absolutely destroyed. where your bitcoins were worth absolutely nothing. What would happen to everyone who was benefiting from bitcoin.
Recently I decided to utilize my workstation's video cards to mine for Ethereum while I am not working and sleeping. My 2 GTX 1080 running 24/7 should yield me about $100 / month, not taking out electricity cost or wear and tear on my hardware. But then I started to wonder where will the Peak in Ethereum be? So I worked the numbers.
Its a sad day when you start to reflect on your life, and realize that the best investments you ever made were ones you bought when you were 10 years old. Thats the realization I came to when going through my coin collection.
After upgrading my graphics card ealier in the year, I gave up on bitcoin mining. Not because the returns were quickly dropping as the Hive's Hashing power continued to increase, but because of the amount of heat a monster video card creates. That combined with a hot texas summer, and a home office that does not have a dedicated AC unit, instead its central air, caused me to prefer comfort over Mining. But with it now being mid November and temperatures dropping in Texas, I had a new reason to Start Mining again. To Keep my office warm and cozy.