You have a weird idea of a solution to hoarding GPU's....by making ASIC's made by 1 - 3 companies, who also own the largest mining pools, of which those who can afford the high entry point $1500-$2000 minimum for one machine.  That leaves a small number of individuals/corporations.

I have 2 ASIC's and 2 GPU rigs and the ROI on each is night and day.   You need volume with ASIC's to be profitable.  ASIC's are like the amazon and walmarts.   It is about quantity.  I'm not saying you can't be profitable with ASIC's and those who by 1st generations are generally those who ROI on the ASIC's.

GPU is decentralized because pretty much anyone can get into the game with 1 GPU and scale up over time.  With ASIC's....you literally have all your coins in 1 basket and if that coin is forked, well you are forked too.

I have noticed owning both ASIC and GPU rigs that the GPU tend to hold their own in terms of profitability per day whereas the ASIC's tend to only go down. 

The ASIC's are super easy to set up and i haven't had to troubleshoot them at all in months where there was a big learning curve for GPU's and a lot of troubleshooting. 
From only that perspective, the ASIC's can be easy for individuals to set up and run in a corner of their house. 

However, the centralization of ASIC's is frustrating because when the difficulty rises from a new operation going live profitability is affected greatly in a short amount of time. 

I have been mining ETH solo and the time frame hasn't really changed much with the difficulty.    Mining LTC has gotten much more difficult over the past few months to where only with a massive price increase would it be profitable to buy another one and be ROI by the end of the year. 

ASIC's have their place, however bitmain is something akin to amazon.  While it is super easy to shop and watch and sell and read and etc. on amazon.   What are the future setbacks that havent been considered. 

Bitmain has the market cornered and if I were them I would be doing the same thing.  That's called business and they have the cash flow to do what they want. 

However, what are their implications for the space in the future.   They are out-competing competitors  (Obelisk is one)

I don't have any answers to this, but it isn't about GPU vs. ASIC.  It is about centralization vs. decentralization. That should be the conversation, which should be balanced. 

The ethics of cryptocurrency need to be considered as well, not just the profitability.

My 2 doge.

I would less than $50 or so. 

Realisto is doing a coin burn as well from originally 3.6 million down to under 2 million.  Which means if they get up and running and start gaining traction....your $50 investment will be worth more than it would if you bought $50 when the coin cap was 3.6 million. 

Understand it is riskier especially in this environment and they dont have an MVP released publicly yet.  They do have a demo'd version screenshots on their medium blog release however.

I'd just buy a little on idex first. Think about a coin that has a working product and unlike bitcoin which has 21 million coins.  REA has a less than 2 million. 

It's risky and you could lose it all.   So if $50 hurts.  Try $10.  and skip a meal out. 

So eth is tanking, just like everything else. 

I have a small dilemma.   I had set a low ETH order of like .5 ETH on GDAX a while back at $700.  Figured it would do a bounce and I could make some quick turnaround money. $30-$50 or so. I already have my holdings and mine more so this was cash I had just sitting there.

Well it didn't and I forgot to set a stop loss.  Call it lazy and distracted.  Anyway,  2 things.

Should I just cut the loss of about $120 right now back into cash (again, this isn't my holding stuff) and call it a learning experience or should I just take the ETH and look for deals to switch it into? 

Technically, I haven't lost any ETH due to the drop in USD trading does that mean I technically could put it into EOS or something else to diversify and have less risk and a greater chance of gaining back my ground?

Basically instead of selling and confirming a loss, I buy something else that I think is on sale right now using the ETH/COIN basis rather than the ETH/USD basis.  So even if ETH comes back up, I have diversified into others I think will go up more.

Is this making sense?

So...

Take profit and you'll never feel bad about it. 

Take ripple. 

I bought 1500 for less than 25 cents a piece. 

I sold some at 1.50 and some again at 2.60 or so and then just put the last 200 I had on my ledger and will forget about them for a few years.

I did the same for stellar and ADA etc.   Sold portions of them at profit intervals I felt comfortable with.    Now, whether they go out of business or whatever,  I've made money.  Those will just be in cold storage till either they just go crazy or whatever.


I would have made a killing just waiting for it to sell at 3.00+  but do I feel bad..  Nope. 

And taking profit means putting it in your bank account or buying something with it.  Not just putting it in another coin. 

I have done both, and I've sold at a loss before $300.  It hurt, but it also made me learn why I did it and why I got into that spot....I was watching the charts.  So now, I set limits and turn off the trading views.

You could set some for profits you want in the future.  A friend did that on this last LTC bump up in february and made out well.

[/quote]Why do you think a 1 GHz LTC miner will come out in June / July?
[/quote]

https://www.ehsminer.com/product/ehs-asic-scrypt-miner-vi/


Well......crap.  I copied that and was looking for their news update on shipping and found that in late february they cancelled all their orders and refunded everyone because they didn't meet manufacturing quotas...


https://www.ehsminer.com/2018/02/13/ehsminer-withdraws-wolf-preorders-maintains-asic-chips-development/

So...nvm on that.

$4200 for a 6 GPU RX570 and RX580 rig. (I bought Titanium rated PSU's vs. the G2)

$1100 for an A3 (includes a power cord and cat6 cable) 

The price difference and ROI timeline is very different.  The A3 is riskier and way louder than the l3+.  If these ASIC's die or whatever their depreciative value is way lower than the GPU rig.  I can sell everything on it and still make a profit if I had to today.

That is one benefit of a GPU rig I have found.  Re-sellability.   Kind of like buying a toyota vs. something else.  I could sell a toyota tacoma with over 150,000 miles and still get a higher ROI than say a Ford F150. 

So if you do get into mining I'd do two things.

Make a decision tree analysis and figure out your best case and worst case scenario down to difficulty rate and price.

Estimate your rig cost for a bare minimum setup.  If you want a 6 GPU or 12 GPU capability, figure out how much your rig would cost to build with 2 GPU's and then shoot for that. Get that up and going....You won't be making a lot.  Just a dollar or 2 a day after electricity...but it will be running.  Then be patient and hunt for GPU deals...on craigslist, on ebay, on facebook, on new egg, etc.  Buy them individually and just add them in.


Or just buy an ASIC and forget about it.  Know your ROI will be about 12 months with that.  Unless you get an A3, but know they can be bricked by a fork.  Or an L3+  but know you will be getting about .3-.4 LTC by december if there are no other major difficulty increases  (and keep an eye on a potential 1GHz LTC miner coming out about june or july.


Anyway.  It's risky.  Do your due diligence.  Take a week and gather data, run scenarios and allocate percentages.  So when the price drops you can just hang on or cut your loss. 

J

Yes it is profitable.  Will it be in the future.  Don't know.  ROI for me is 11 months left if prices stay stable and difficulty increase doesn't spike like it did dec. - mar.  2018.   

If the price goes up to 11-13k.  7-8 months.

If you haven't bought a miner yet.  Don't.  It's risky. 

Take the l3+ mining stats
December 2.5 LTC
March 1.6 LTC

I expect my L3+ to make less than .4 LTC per month by December 2018. 

At today's prices thats just a little over the electricity usage.  $57 (at a .10 kWh rate)

If it goes down below $140 and stays there till december.  well....poop.

I agree for those who are mining at a larger level (i.e. all those mining in washington) who are taking the local electrical authority beyond its capacity because of the cheap electricity which is a byproduct of companies taking over what was supposed to be a de-centralized activity.

1 word.  Greed.  We all have some sense of it.   For those who were in for a long time, maybe not....but when the buzz words are "moon" "lambo" etc.  makes you wonder. 

I think a lot of money flowed in and out kind of like a Tsunami wave from December to January. 

It was flowing in from the ocean rising the tide (i.e. bitcoin)  and then hit a critical mass (December) and flowed over the banks into (altcoins) and then receded back into the ocean.   I don't believe there will be another tsunami like that for a while.  I'm just paying off my miners with 75% of profits and 25% is holding.  It'll be a while, might as well hold some.

So...when I loaded my A3 out of the box it was pulling 820 - 900.   Did y'alls start at 600?  I thought the 820 was standard and it's been running fine no errors or drops.   It is loud as all get out though, blows the L3+ out of the water in terms of dB.  The power cord is warm too, it is generating heat way beyond the L3+.  I unplugged it once and touched the 3 prong and burned my hand they were so hot.

Also, there were pre-configured settings for mining using antpool  (this is direct from bitmain, not an third party or ebay sell).  Is this standard?  I don't remember that for the l3+

Using standard APW3  and I haven't touched A3 in terms of OC.

Superminator is right, Shapeshift is super easy.

If you are looking to trade on bittrex it can be a bit confusing when you first start out but you get more confident in it. 

With shapeshift you can trade for whatever you would like that they offer.  In bittrex, you will be trading your sia for bitcoin...maybe ethereum (i cant remember if that is a pair off the top of my head)  and then you can trade that out to gdax or coinbase or USDT if you want for cash  (USD, EUR, etc.)

If you are just wanting another coin, then use shapeshift.  If you are cashing out.  use bittrex.

PM me if you need any help.

I heard about it in college back in 2011 and almost bought some then, but was afraid of losing my $10 so put my CC back in my wallet and closed my browser.   I was in grad school this past year and looked up bitcoin before it hit $1000 and saw that litecoin and ethereum were like $10 and $5 or something during my stock trading class and went gosh.  I could've made money if I had bought in.  Closed the browser.  In october, I just said, screw it.  I'm going to buy in even if I lose money.   So I did.  And I made money buying and selling and now have cryptocurrency left over after cashing out what I put it.

  If I had held onto those $1 bitcoins I was gonna buy,  it would've right now still been worth close to my house.   If I had bought litecoin and ethereum in april the way I was going to,  I would've had about 20-30k.   As it stands, I made money, no where near those other figures, but it does feel good to do that.   

Now though,  I also bought some mining equipment.   I'm done trading, it takes too much of your time.  I'd rather mine and then trade for the coins I want that have longer term value.

I also read satoshi's whitepaper and started going through his links.   I would highly recommend anyone who is in this realm to do so.   I also plan on trying to figure out how to code my own blockchain.  If I am going to invest any more in this, I want to know it in and out. 

PT

If you already have GPU, you should look into offsetting perhaps with an ASIC for Litecoin or maybe an A3. 

Those costs have gone down. 

However, I agree with above posts.  The benefit of GPU's and their associated PSU, memory, HDD, etc. is that they have resale value.

I have a 1080 I somehow got at newegg in January for $549.   Used on eBay today they are worth, $635. 

I am selling it because it will offset the cost of the other 5 GPU's I have while the price is lower.   It also doesn't hash as well out of the box as 1070's.

Personally,  I prefer AMD RX series.  They are much easier to use in a windows OS.  If you are using SMOS or something like that, you'll be fine with NVIDIA. 

If you are using Nicehash, then go with NVIDIA.    Using AMD RX you get an error if you use the most updated version of the RX series drivers.  They are incompatible with the nicehash legacy program. 



You could build a rig with 1-2 of the NVIDIA Titans.   Those would have even longer resale value than the 1070 or 1060's.

You're hash rate would be lower but in the event of an all out  crash back to April 2017 prices....those things would hold their value a lot more than the flood of 1070's or 1080's that would fill up ebay.

my 2 sats PT

If you'll notice on Bitmain's website those $1900 price was for batch4.   batch 3 is $3000.   They are selling forward contracts for those things.

The ones that are available now or shipping in late march = $3000.

Noticeably missing are batches 1 and 2.   Which I never saw on the website.

Those jobs are for bitmain's own personal use. 

Scam projects will always find a way to scam people.  Craigslist, facebook groups, phone calls, emails, etc.

The bigger issue is that google which controls most of the world's advertisement revenue is deciding to ban all ads.  

They will sell banner adds for porn, guns, gambling alcohol and casinos, but are restricting crypto currency ads because they deem them injurous to others well being.  


They are getting hammmered in other areas and just didnt want to deal with some new issue.

PT

Coinbase doesnt' take a 25% fee.  Ethereum has fallen in price. 

Also,  you should be able to look at the detail of your order with fees shown on coinbase without. 

If Ethereum had tripled in price you actually would have more in your account.

Coinbase buys it at the market rate that day using GDAX and then holds it until your funds clear.

So....I really think you are just mad.  Don't worry.  You are in good company.    I used GDAX to set buy limits to what I thought was as low as ETH would go weeks ago. and it hit yesterday....I was wrong. lol.  Now I'm on the losing end of the stick as well.

And don't use coinbase.  Use GDAX their trading platform.  You can login using your coinbase details. 


PT

 

I believe there are hodlers from before november, but I expect prices to go back down to pre-december levels and then start a slower climb. The ones I think are hodling are those who got in during december's rise and bought bitcoin above 10k.

I was lucky enough to sell my alts when they were around their ATH.   I sold most and left the rest in my wallet and don't really worry about the price.  I got my money back, and made a pretty good profit.  So technically, I'm hodling, but only about 3-4 coins. 

The rest I'm trying to get those ICO coins that I couldn't get into earlier as they come on the exchanges. 

I will say though, I made a pretty good profit vs. what I invested, I bought mining equipment and at these prices it'll take longer to pay those things off than I was expecting.  But they are generating revenue.   

So I'm hoping the prices go up enough to where I can sell my earnings to pay off the rigs. Then, the price can fluctuate all day long and I'll be dippity do da fine.


So I'm hoping for around a 13-15k bitcoin.   Beyond that, thrilled.

PT

Bitcoin
Litecoin
Ethereum

Take your pic.

Anyone watch the LastWeekTonight special on cryptocurrencies?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg


I thought he did a pretty good job of summing it up. 

Feel bad for electroneum,  EOS, and DeepOnion

They got mixed in with s***coins to post the absurdity. 


He's right for new people getting in they need to be #craeful

Thoughts?

People are taking profits...large ones early in the year.  And people were still buying at those prices thinking it would go higher.  It could've.  But it didn't.  People got tired.

Bitcoin was in the news every day.  So much so I remember seeing a CNN article asking for people to submit how bitcoin changed their lives. 


Did anyone see the John Oliver cryptocurrency thing?  I laughed real hard.  We shall see what comes of that.

PT