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Looks like the inevitable mining crash is happening but this purportedly won't bother Nvidia and AMD: https://www.thestreet.com/story/1422314 ... rices.html

I'm waiting on the inevitable rush of lightly-abused graphics cards.

the ether price might have dropped 50% from its all time high but it's still up 20x year to date

don't get your hopes up

So long as the currency it's worth more than the cost to mine i don't think the market will be flooded with used cards.

I'm optimistic that it's not so much a crash, but a settling down to stable values. There was a lot of hype generated on this upswing and a flood of miners because of it. It will be interesting to see what the long-term sustainability turns out to be. Heck, even if I can make $50/mo/GPU net profit mining Ethereum I'd say it's worth it.

Seems to be legit. There's a lot of talk on /r/ethermining about bailing, and Ebay prices for P10 cards are dropping.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/co ... _with_you/

The difficulty bomb at block 4,000,000 (or any of the previous ones) evidently wasn't factored into any of the profitability calculators, which gave miners an even more unrealistic picture than normal.

That is, Ethereum has a constant adjustment every 100k blocks that is not a typical dynamic difficulty adjustment, but rather a huge increase of difficulty that is arbitrarily introduced solely to wean people off of PoW and towards an eventual PoS (even though that hasn't been officially introduced yet).

https://hype.codes/sites/default/files/ ... impact.png

Glorious wrote:

The difficulty bomb at block 4,000,000 (or any of the previous ones) evidently wasn't factored into any of the profitability calculators, which gave miners an even more unrealistic picture than normal.

Oops. Sounds like there are probably a lot of really pissed off Ether miners, to be followed shortly by a massive glut of used GPUs hitting the market.

Just checked the local classifieds and there are a LOT of BNIB of RX 580s for sale, price hasn't seemed to adjust yet. So many are BNIB that I frankly don't understand what's going on, were people hoarding them? Or are they actually used & re-shrinkwrapped? Some people are just selling their whole mining rigs.

Glorious wrote:

The difficulty bomb....rather a huge increase of difficulty

If that chart is correct, even the latest "bomb" only increased difficulty by 2.25%. Not a drastic increase IMO.

TwistedKestrel wrote:

Just checked the local classifieds and there are a LOT of BNIB of RX 580s for sale, price hasn't seemed to adjust yet. So many are BNIB that I frankly don't understand what's going on, were people hoarding them? Or are they actually used & re-shrinkwrapped? Some people are just selling their whole mining rigs.

Good catch. I'm curious about this too. I sold off some 1070's on eBay (that were actually retail) a little bit ago when they were in the $600 range. There were only a handful of NIB available, now there are 589 and more are being added as I refresh. Maybe demand started going down a bit ago and people started snatching them up from vendors thinking to turn a profit?

TwistedKestrel wrote:

Just checked the local classifieds and there are a LOT of BNIB of RX 580s for sale, price hasn't seemed to adjust yet. So many are BNIB that I frankly don't understand what's going on, were people hoarding them? Or are they actually used & re-shrinkwrapped? Some people are just selling their whole mining rigs.

Probably hadn't got around to building their next mining rig yet, but acquired the GPUs on the assumption that GPU prices would continue to rise.

I think they made a mistake in labeling the y-axis. The difficulty bomb at 4mil blocks was ~20%

Glorious wrote:

I think they made a mistake in labeling the y-axis. The difficulty bomb at 4mil blocks was ~20%

That could definitely tip the balance for some, depending on local electricity cost.

What I don't understand is why they do such things when it's so counter-intuitive to the continued popularity of their crypto-currency. Obviously there's a fine line to be walked to combat inflation, but....
Who am I kidding, there are so many crypto-currencies that it's probably typical to just start one up and get it popular so you (as the creator or early insider adopter) can cash out big. Then move on to the next thing while leaving a burning heap in your tracks.

The developers of ethereum want to move away from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. This is therefore the result of a calculated decision.

If that doesn't mean anything to you, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

You might not have to agree with the wisdom of their decision or their implementation of it, but it's entirely intentional.

I notice a lot of mining stuff for sale on my local Craigslist, but the GPU prices are still pretty high. Between this and the coming of Vega I hope this summer brings back cheap gaming cards!

Put in a bid on a low-priced 470 on eBay, the HTPC could do with a GPU upgrade. Just hope it's not been too roughly abused.

Used graphics card from mining....YMMV.
I only trust ones from known sources.

yeti wrote:

Used graphics card from mining....YMMV.
I only trust ones from known sources.

Yeah, I'm already kind of regretting it... oh well, maybe I'll get outbid.

chuckula wrote:

Looks like the inevitable mining crash is happening but this purportedly won't bother Nvidia and AMD: https://www.thestreet.com/story/1422314 ... rices.html

Some of the statements in this article are retarded.

About $600 million has been spent on chips for mining Ethereum so far this year, with roughly $400 million of that coming from the last three-and-a-half months, Steves noted. The Ether rally in June is likely priced in to the chip companies' second quarter expectation; after that, there will probably still be demand, but it won't be as significant as last month, especially if the price of Ether continues to drop.

$400 million, but remember if it was being bought for mining that's only about $200m worth of GPUs being sold for that purpose, thanks to scalpers. Nowhere in the article does it discuss how resellers have been marking up cards and neither AMD or nVidia making anything extra per GPU.

Proof of Work is a highly inefficient way of doing things. The energy cost is simply unacceptable.

Given that, fundamentally, people invest electricity (ie $) to generate work, we should simply adopt proof of stake and use $ without wasting energy in the intermediate step of calculating useless crypto functions that do not have any other purpose.

And I say this as someone who mined for a few months a few years ago.

I have a feeling the idea of making your computer work to make money is part of what helped all this get started. I agree that it's time for something smarter though.

589 being sold on Wednesday to around 759 today, and they are still selling at an incredible rate. Fascinating to watch.

These bubbles happen so fast it amazes me that people can actually buy a slew of GPUs and mine long enough to pay them off before it crashes.

DPete27 wrote:

These bubbles happen so fast it amazes me that people can actually buy a slew of GPUs and mine long enough to pay them off before it crashes.

I don't think they can honestly. I know a guy that was trying to make a career out of this and kept spending the earnings on more equipment. If I had to guess he'll probably break even before electricity costs.

DPete27 wrote:

These bubbles happen so fast it amazes me that people can actually buy a slew of GPUs and mine long enough to pay them off before it crashes.

I think what you end up with are a bunch of disappointed people. Shoot, the guy that bought my GPU was heading for a $560 mistake before he returned it. The mistake only cost him about $112 after my 20% restocking fee.

So technically I've made $112 off mining. Technically.

southrncomfortjm wrote:

I think what you end up with are a bunch of disappointed people. Shoot, the guy that bought my GPU was heading for a $560 mistake before he returned it. The mistake only cost him about $112 after my 20% restocking fee.

So technically I've made $120 off mining. Technically.

You made more than most I'm sure.

Heiwashin wrote:

southrncomfortjm wrote:

I think what you end up with are a bunch of disappointed people. Shoot, the guy that bought my GPU was heading for a $560 mistake before he returned it. The mistake only cost him about $112 after my 20% restocking fee.

So technically I've made $112 off mining. Technically.

You made more than most I'm sure.

I also have $20 in my bitcoin wallet from 10 days of mining with my RX 480. I'm calling shenanigans on this whole deal.