I have looked far and wide. Can’t find any cards out there that have less than a 12 month roi with zec at current price and difficulty. Anyone with better luck? Yes price can change, but it has been trending down as the difficulty is trending up and up fast. If it maintains this pace, all newish miners will be burning holes in their pockets long before they make any money. I guess the good news is that cheap cards/rigs should be flooding the market over the next few months as people give up on mining.
Just ran the numbers for a 1100 us dollar top end of the sol/s range Gigabyte AORUS GeForce GTX 1080 Ti . At 800 sols can’t get much higher without a titan. Profit per year minus fees and power $953. So if everything stayed the same. It would be 14 months before you were making more than the cost of the card. That’s without a difficulty increase. It was only a few months ago that 6 months roi was considered long. And that is when people thought 400 zec was much farther in the future.
P.s. if you just bought this card and want to sell it to me used for 500us I will take it 
I’m only half joking. I feel sorry for anyone getting into mining this year so far.
You’re partially correct, but mining still has an incredibly short payback period compared to traditional investments. You won’t ever find a stock or bond that pays you 100% in dividends in 14 months. That’s more than enough economic incentive for miners. Mining isn’t a get rich quick scheme as some people believe.
The moon money comes from long-term holding. I’ve been an ETH miner for a few years, and at current rates my rigs earn about 150% of their cost per year, which would have been much more than what they were earning in 2016 if I had sold the coins when they were mined. The key was holding all my mined coins, which ultimately resulted in a ~40,000% ROI for that year.
It’s true that last year was what I believe to be a one time anomaly in crypto mining. You had eth go from a few bucks to 1200 in year. To suggest that that could happen again for etherum is pure nonsense(Not that you are suggesting that) but there is no way that any of the majors will see those price moves in 2018. So the golden period of mining and holding has passed. Especially with the difficulty increases, and let’s not even get into the pos that is supposedly coming to eth. Where most miners will be out of luck and can’t mine. Same with zec. It is doubtful we will see massive price increase. It is likely we will see difficulty increase. If graphics cards don’t fall in price it is over for any new miner. And as far as return on investment, yes 14 months is a looonngggg time to pay back something that could be worthless working 24/7 overclocked(most likely) and manufactures being difficult honoring warranties because they no the burned out cards have been used beyond what the warranty was based for. So yes 14 months is a risky and long time to pay back a card. I would love to build more rigs, but under current conditions, it’s plain stupidity to do so.
While I concur about potential price rise in ETH being small in comparison to what we witnessed last year, I’m not sure I agree about the golden period of mining and holding as being gone forever. I think people who mine and hold ZEC until after the first halving period, which is still a few years away, are going to see huge returns. You may not have been mining at that time, but Ethereum mining was basically dead in terms of profitability in the fall of 2016, but that turned out to be one of the best times to accumulate.
Yes. I am talking about those 10,000% increase not happening again. Could zcash increase 10 fold in the next 2 years? Sure that is possible. Btw, I just bought another card rog strix 1060 6gb. Paid more than I like at 380 USD brand new. But the card will do 26 mh at 90w and 340 sols at 90w. Plus it stays super cool 30c under full load with ambient temps at 15c and 40c under full load with ambient at 23c. So about 80 bucks more than msrp but a good performer.
I know it is stupid cold. 30c with fan speed set at 50% for the rig. It’s in a cold basement but still so cold. The other cards in the rig run about 48c in the same environment. But they are only 2 fan. These ROG are pretty cool. If I had known last year I could have pricked up a bunch of these awesome cards.
The Asus dual 1060 03g is pretty good too. 200 us for a card that gives 310 sols or 25 mh at only 90w Samsung ram. It was great value for money for the price of a 1080ti at msrp you could get almost 4 of these and produce 1200 sols verses 750ish, just take up more space and more electricity.
You know, I said the same thing when I was mining BTC years ago and sold them for a few hundred each because the “time had passed”.
I’ve been mining since 2011. This is all cyclical. There are booms and busts. During the busts you can either sell your hardware or mine at a small profit, waiting for the next boom cycle.
I am not giving up. But I have noticed a lot of used stuff hitting the market already. In fact I am hoping for lower zec. I have some big buy orders around 250 but we did not get there. Had some eth orders around 500 but also not there yet. I continue to mine eth on main rig and zec on older pc with 970s
Of course, you are basing this roi on the current price of ZEC and assuming it will not go up. What do you think the chances are of ZEC price not going up over the next few months? I got into ZEC mining when the price was less than it is today, and saw it rise to its all-time high. It will see higher. This is a speculators game.
You can only measure your roi based off current prices. But you can do so guessing. I am guessing that the price will rise somewhat, but so will the difficulty with the faster 20xx series. So anything with more than 12 month roi in my books is too much. When I started mining zec last year my roi was 5 months with the higher price and lower difficulty. It’s now about 6 to 7 months because I have move primary rigs to eth. I only mine zec on 900 series cards. I still have until about may or june to pay off my cards.
The way I see some people calculating ROI is not really correct. If you file a schedule C and take a section 179 deduction you can deduct from your income all your hardware the year you purchased it or you can depreciate it each year over its useful life (3-5 years). Or since a used video card on Ebay costs about as much as a new one you can mine for awhile pocket the profit from selling the ZEC or HODL it and sell the video cards and make close to your money back on the hardware. You can’t deduct it and sell it though unfortunately as you have to count the deduction as income if you sell before the useful life has elapsed.
So you don’t really have to earn as much as you paid for it unless you don’t maximize your opportunities or you run your mining rigs until they fail. I am debating on one of these options now. It depends if a new video card is announced next week versus if the crypto market picks up by the tax deadline.
I think you are assuming a person lives in the United States and they are paying taxes on their gains. You are also assuming card prices will stay inflated. The reason that someone can sell a used card for the same price they paid new, is that no one is making 10xx cards any more. They are end of life and there is limited supply. When the new cards are available in mass, the 10xx used market will probably be flooded with millions of used gpus, at that point if the supply is also met by new cards, used will not be worth half what a person paid . If a person is buying a 10xx card now at inflated prices they are screwed.
I think you need to ask yourself, how long do you think it’s going to take for all the miners mining with GPUs to dump, throw away or sell all their present investment in gpus and buy on-mass new more powerful gpus? Think about all those farms with 100’s of thousands of dollars invested in present-day gpus. How many months do you think this turn over is going to take, let alone when these new cards come available on mass and cheap? When you say “Not a single card anywhere worth buying new” I take that literally. That is exactly what the mining community will say, on-mass when new cards come available. It will be a year at least before we see mass turnover.
Card prices will remain inflated until after the new series is announced. If the new series is released in inadequate quantities then the prices will still be good. If people want to avoid taxes then that is the risk they take. Maybe not a big deal with just a few GPU’s running, but larger farms take a big risk not paying taxes. At EVGA Jacob stated they weren’t EOL yet. DDR6 doesn’t have enough volume yet so they can’t release the cards for a few more months and since DDR5 is basically EOL for graphics cards they can’t produce enough cards to meet the demand.
But I was just pointing out that you don’t have to pay off the mining rigs completely to reach a neutral ROI. There are other options. If mining is a secondary income a person can deduct the rig investment off of the income from the primary income source. It would be foolish not to do it.
Instead of buying over inflated cards that will be pretty useless in a year or so, I am putting the money in would spend in cards buying zec. I have lots on order below $250. Hoping we see that in a few days. Personally I think it is a better risk. Certainly if it gets to 200.