February 16 marks a small 2-month anniversary since I've started to mine Ethereum and others altcoins. In today's article let's take a quick review and try to understand is GPU mining still profitable in 2018?
It all started with a FOMO back in December 2017, after successful second part of the year of investments in crypto, I decided to build a 12-GPU mining rig.
Currently, I've invested $1,661 in this mining rig and after 2 months of operations, the current ROI is 12.53% (not counting in cost for electricity). Meaning that in past two months I've mined coins worth of $208.05.
I have experimented both with different GPU cards and different coins. Here are coins I've mined so far: ETH, SC, ETC, and EXP
Mined coins
Currently, the rig consists of 4 GPU's:
- Mining with SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon™ RX 560 4GD5 Review
- Mining Ethereum With EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 (Single Fan), 6GB GDDR5 Review
- Mining Ethereum With ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti OC Edition Review
- Mining Ethereum With Asus Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ROG Strix OC Edition Review
Thanks to the open-minded crypto community I've learned a lot about how to overclock these cards and boost a little bit total income from GPU mining.
By building this GPU mining rig I'm using dollar cost averaging adding new cards time after time (originally I had a plan to add one card per month, but in the past 2 month's I've added 2 cards per month). Each time I add a new graphics card I make a brief recap on mining profitability, see:
- I'm Making $0.98 Per Day By Mining Ethereum and Siacoin, and I want MORE!
- I'm Making $2.44 Per Day By Dual Mining Ethereum and Siacoin, and I'm NOT HAPPY YET!
- Simple GPU Overclocking Boosts Ethereum Mining Profitability by 20.65% - Now Making $2.66 Daily
- With Rising Ethereum Price I'm making $5.22 daily by Mining Cryptos - And I Definitely Want MORE!
- Mining Ethereum @ ~53 MH/s and Siacoin @ ~310 MH/s Earns me $5.53 Daily - And It's Time to take a Pause
Indeed, daily earnings from mining depend on cryptocurrency exchange rates, with current mining speed and exchange rates my mining rig if mining Ethereum would make about $4.35 daily, which is about 20%decrease if compared to the end of January exchange rates.
That's the reason I started to explore options to mine other coins:
During the past 2 months a lot of have happened - after bulls run at the end of 2017, the crypto market tanked at the start of 2018, making it longer to reach a positive ROI for investments in a mining rig.
It seems Siacoin is no longer profitable for GPU mining starting 2018. See: Is It Profitable Mining Siacoin (SC) in 2018?
Last but not least, the so-called hard/soft forks happens not only for Bitcoin chain, but also for other coins, and currently, there is a planned Callisto airdrop planned for ETC coin. See: How to Prepare for Upcoming Callisto Airdrop (Ethereum Classic)