Crypto currency mining

[moltuae]

Originally Posted by ainarssems

I am not sure how long the payout prices will last with several high performance x11 miners hitting market. Network hashrate has already gone up from 15TH/s to 40 TH/s in last month and profitability gone down from nearly £6k to £3.5k per month in last 2 weeks. There are several powerful X11 miners hitting the market Antminer D3 15 GH/s, Innosilicon A3 30GH/s, iBeLink has 2 coming out 11GH/s and 22GH/s, Pinidea 17GH/s.

By the time I get one at the end of November it might be earning just £300 per month.

That is the big risk with ASIC miners of course. You have to hope that the price of the cryptocurrency you're mining continues to increase ahead of the difficulty.

My S9 investment has paid off now, but only because the price of BTC continues to rise. When I received it back in March, it was making over £300 per month. At times the return has been lower than £200 per month but now it's back over £300 and the unit is still going strong and has more than paid for itself. It's a gamble of course; had the price not continued to rise, I could've been left with an expensive (and rather large) paper-weight.

Having said that, one of the interesting things about cryptocurrencies is that they're generally fairly self-regulating. If mining becomes unprofitable, miners will either stop mining or stop selling (and wait for prices to rise), which reduces the supply (and exchange selling/dumping), pushing prices up and improving mining profitability. Of course other factors, such as FUD, can dramatically (though usually temporarily) affect the price, but I think the general underlying regulation that drives the upward trend is the balance between mining difficulty and mining profitability.

From that perspective, as long as nothing else drastically affects the cryptocurrency prices, I think we can expect L3/D3 mining to follow the same path. So, while the high-profitability opportunities might be missed by all but those lucky few who manage to get their hands on such miners early, I think profitability will quickly fall and then recover to a level that produces an ROI of around 10-12 months.