be scared then an quit , gpu mining is going NOWHERE in fact its making an even bigger com3back next year
its harder to centralize than bitcoin , x11 and scrypt so it will only get bigger as new projects are developed when eth goes away.
I was hoping wise minds of this forum will overturn my arguments and prove me wrong and I could go on building my awesome rig. That hasn't happened yet. You are very emotional, almost religiously defending your optimism. Numbers speak other language tho. The argument "there will be always other coins to mine" doesnt cut it. Just compare network hashrates. ETH has 100 TH/s, next contender is ETC with 8 THs, rest are even not worth mentioning. After ETH goes PoS, all of those gpu-s that are part of this 100 TH/s are goint to look for "other coins to mine". It's ridiculous. There's not enough money in other coins to make this computing power profitable. How do I get this through to you people? Let's try a simpler analogy:
There are two cities next to each other.
City 1 has 100 car repair shops (miners) that cater 100,000 cars (hashrate need).
City 2 has 10 car repair shops that cater 10,000 cars.
Now, all of the sudden, all cars in the bigger city cease to exist (ETH stops needing miners). According to your logic the 100 car repair shops in bigger city will be fine, because there will always be cars that need repairing in the smaller town.
I'll try to be as wise as I can with the little time I have to type this.
I started mining in mid-2016 with 2x R390X. ETH was barely worth 15$ back then. My electricity cost is around 0.2 so I'll let you calculate how much I was making per day. Then I went to mining ZEC when it launched which was kind of a giant waste of time and effort. had I continued to mine ETH, I'd have a nice load of cash today. Anyway, I kept mining, built more rigs and here I am a year later with 1Gh at home on ethash/24kh on cryptonote + a farm project on the side.
There is very little doubt in my mind that GPU mining still has a few years in front of it. Saying there are other coins to mine and that there always will be is perfectly true, but you need to take that statement with a grain of salt.
For instance, my kWh cost is relatively high, so as long as I can turn a profit, I'll continue mining. So say ETH goes to POS, everyone switches over to other coins, diff rises, prices stagnate or drop, well, I'll stop mining like many others out there. But for those that have super low costs, this will still be perfectly profitable.
But, from my experience in the past few months, there have indeed been a ton of new coins to mine to turn a nice profit with, and this even with ETH diff rising and rewards per block dropping. Honestly today with 1Gh you can earn like 0.15 ETHs a day. To me, it's not worth it even if it still turns a profit.
You have to do your own due diligence and elaborate a strategy. Just because everyone's mining ETH doesn't mean it's the smartest choice for you, and from your posts, you seem like you're just following the masses (i.e. your initial post), no offence. I think many newbies went crazy buying gear to mine eth a few months ago, only to find themselves selling their hardware today because they're not looking at the bigger picture here. There are many coins you can mine TODAY that will return a profit, sometimes even larger than ETH.
Personally, I don't know of an investment that has a 4-6 months ROI other than mining, even today.
In the end it's a very personal decision.