I'm low on money and need to start mining as cheaply as possible. I have my current gaming pc mining $100/month and am looking to buy a new pc for mining only. I need to know the best low cost gpu to start with and would love to possibly eventually make a living mining ethereum. I'm looking to start off with 1 gpu but eventually turn it into 2-3 gpu's for this pc until I can afford a motherboard capable of holding 5 gpu's for 2-3 gpu's do I need a quad core amd processor? or will a cheap $40 dual core work as well? I need the build as cost effective as possible and will borrow ram and an hdd from my current pc.
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The 2nd cheapest is the R7 370.
Keep in mind you will not be able to make a living mining ethereum, most likely this will only be profitable for a few more weeks/months.
Don't get into debt thinking this.
This is a very competitive business and difficulty is going up like crazy. EXP went up in price and already people started mining it like crazy.
remember the price can only go up now that its found a bottom around 10ish.
most Large businesses will not be able to put alot resources into mining eth due to the fact that its only a one or two year business model more suitable to small deployments or indivuduals.
I think we will see a rise in the hash rate yes but it will still be more profitable to bitcoin or any other currency for at last six more months to a year.
But the way it was with Bitcoin and Litecoin mining, the minings are always short lived. History repeats itself.
I could double, triple, my hashrate easily but only thing thats stopping me is because I don't want to get stuck with 100's of GPUs with no buyers.
There's the PoW to PoS shift which will eliminate GPU mining altogether. This will likely be at least 9 months if not more like 12-18 months away, depending on how fast the devs decide to — or can — get to that stage. I think everyone can agree on this basic point.
The second is whether any miners can continue to produce enough ETH to make it worthwhile, if the global hash rate/difficulty starts rising again anything like it did since January. There's been a bit of a reprieve since the Homestead fork, but I don't expect that to remain, particularly if ETH price starts rising again (like it did). There are a finite number of GPU's on the planet, but there's still a lot that haven't been put to use on ETH yet...
I did an analysis on my mining production since January to present to see how much difficulty lowered production. If difficulty had continued at its near-exponential rate due to the number of GPU's being thrown at it, mining would come to a near halt in only 2-3 months.
Here's the equation I fit to my 2.5 months of mining production, from Jan-March:
y = -0.0038x² + 1.1821x
R² = 0.99959
y=ETH, x=days. My 40MH/s was producing 1.18 ETH/day on average at the start, but because of the parabolic increase in difficulty it had the inverse parabolic effect of decreasing production by .0038 ETH/day. After 50 days, instead of having 59 eth I only had 49.
Had this continued (and you can plot it), production would have essentially ground to a halt in about 3-4 months.
This model does not apply over the past two weeks because difficulty (and global hashrate) have stagnated, but if it does ramp up again like it did, the model will apply again.
On the other hand, if that crystal ball that you're looking into is giving you all the sure fire answers and how ETH mining will be handled due to the events that you are certain will happen, how about giving out the winning lottery numbers!!