Is it worth building a mining rig now ?

drov

Hello, I plan on building a relatively small mining rig with ~48 mh/s

It would cost me around 440 euros, and I theorically should earn around 4 euros per day.

Do you think it's worth considering difficulty is constantly rising ? Will I ever get a ROI ?

I had a bad experience with a 500$ asic miner that I bought like 15 days before btc value went from 800 to 300$ ^^

Thanks

ethfan

If we go with your figures you are getting 1% back every day. In less than 2 months you can cover a 50% depreciation of your capital outlay. That's the good news. Unfortunately you have to factor in electricity which I believe reduces your earnings by about half. Then there is the increasing difficulty. Overall I estimate you can only recover 50% after nearly 6 months. Mining was scheduled for a year when ETH launched. Thus after covering depreciation there is only about a month to make a profit. Then again the price of ETH may rocket to the moon... or plunge into the Marianas Trench...

dlehenky

@ethfan : And Frontier was only supposed to last 3 months ... POW mining will be over when it's over. The difficulty has been increasing because the ether exchange rate went through the roof and everyone and his brother started mining ether. The only way to keep the block time to 17 seconds is to increase the difficulty, in the face of a spontaneous increase in the network hashing rate. They (Ethereum Foundation) are not purposely making it harder to mine, at least not yet. If the value of ether drops back down to a USD, the miners will flee in droves and the difficulty will return to where it was 3-4 weeks ago.

cryptowizzard

Practically there are 3 parameters involved in currency mining: difficulty, energy cost and ETH price. Depending on the mining can be profitably.

As you specify the cost of hardware in Euros I assume you live in an area where energy cost is high(like I do). Give the current difficulty and ETH price mining can be profitable for a couple of months even with a higher energy cost. However, if it's "too" profitable, more people will mine ethereum and the difficulty will increase at a faster rate, making it profitable only if the energy cost is low.

Since I had the same questions I created a profitability calculator. You can try it here: http://cryptowizzard.github.io/eth-mining-calculator/

Any feedback would be appreciated.

daemon

I saw this old thread and wanted to chime in.

When you posted this, January 29 of 2016, ETH was worth about $2.47/ea. (USD)

You had about $447USD dedicated to building a miner.

If you would have just bought $447 worth of Ether, you'd have had just over 180 Ether all to yourself.

180 Ether at the going rate today (June 14, 2016) is valued at $18.73 USD each, and it's been going up almost a buck per day for the past week it seems like.

Your $447USD investment would have turned into $3371.40 over the course of 4.5 months.

Long story short, when in doubt - just buy as many coins as you can.

bctopics

daemon said:

I saw this old thread and wanted to chime in.

When you posted this, January 29 of 2016, ETH was worth about $2.47/ea. (USD)

You had about $447USD dedicated to building a miner.

If you would have just bought $447 worth of Ether, you'd have had just over 180 Ether all to yourself.

180 Ether at the going rate today (June 14, 2016) is valued at $18.73 USD each, and it's been going up almost a buck per day for the past week it seems like.

Your $447USD investment would have turned into $3371.40 over the course of 4.5 months.

Long story short, when in doubt - just buy as many coins as you can.

It could have also been worth $.02 hindsight is always 20/20

guntisvitolins

This here might help hopefully:)

radres

checkout radres.github.io

cryptowizzard

The calculator has a new home: http://cryptowizzard.com/eth-mining-calculator/

I also added 2 more pages with a list of available motherboards and graphics cards for mining.