As of July 2017, is it too late to start mining ethereum? Based on personal experience

For the Steemians living in America, Happy 4th of July!

Today, I would like to talk about whether if it's too late to start mining Ethereum. I’m not a professional miner, rather, I only have one 5-way mining rig running for fun since earlier this year. So I am not trying to encourage nor discourage anyone from mining but rather I am here to give my personal opinions from my own experience. I am sure not many people are planning to start mining factory? Therefore my opinions will be targeted for individuals who want to run maybe one or few rigs at home :)

So is it too late to join mining Ethereum? With new mining dedicated GTX1060 graphics cards, more people are planning to join mining. But will it be all worth the money that is being invested? Let’s take a look at some factors and find out.

-Exponential Growth in Difficulty

Basically, the chart shows how fast the difficulty level has risen past few months. Ethereum itself is designed to have difficulty level grow exponentially but with huge number of new miners joining past few months due to the price skyrocketing, this growth has gone up soooooo much faster than what people have expected. And all the miners see daily decrease in number of ethereum their machines mine per day. Yes, the daily decrease is actually quite noticeable!! But at the same time, since Eth price has come up so much that majority of miners are making more money in terms of fiat compared to the past. Although, this difficulty rate could go down after hard fork, nothing is guaranteed in crypto world.

Simple explanations of difficulty growth can be found in the link below
EthereumIceAge

How Much Can Each Rig Mine?

As I’ve mentioned, I am currently running 3 rx470 Nitro plus ,1 470 pulse version, 1 rx580 and getting roughly about 125MH/s.

(This number can be much higher to about 140MH/s if overclocked. But I have only done under voltage and running it without overclocking since both overclocking and under-voltage sometimes crashes once in few days and I simply want it to stay on as long as possible without any crashes.)

Anyway, with my hashrate, as of July 4th, I am getting about 1.4 Eth per month(about$400). Using 6 cards and overclocking will probably give return of somewhere around 2.2 Eth per month at 170MH/s(overclocking). This is still pretty good return in terms of dollars which adds to about roughly $600. And depending on where you live, you’ll have to spend about 50-100 dollars on electricity. Monthly return of 500-550 dollars of income with just leaving one computer on is still pretty good right?

-Nasty Premium Prices on Graphics Cards
Not many countries have 106-100 Nvidia cards released yet. But for the countries that have released this mining dedicated graphics card, more AMD graphic cards have been back on stock. Yet, the prices on these cards are still so high, sitting at around ridiculous $350-400 while Nvidia cards are sold around $280 in where I live. This easily adds to, building a 6-way, above $2200+ each machine. If you want to mine, I personally recommend buying 1060 cards for now since it’s much cheaper though it will give bit of less hash rate. For the money spent, it will be worth it!
And hopefully there will be less demand for AMD cards soon, and prices will go down for people who want AMD cards for gaming!

Ethereum PoW to PoS and alternative coins

Mining with physical machine means proof of work which is what ethereum is at right now. But as majority of people know, ethereum will change to PoS(proof of stake). Then, no longer will people be able to use graphic cards to mine but rather, people with more ethereum will be rewarded transaction fees and possibly new ethereum depending on how the ethereum community plans it in the future. This PoS plan rumor has been around for more than a year now. And if I remember correctly, they were planning on PoS switch to happen within the first two quarters of this year. But the development of Ethereum has been delayed since. So people are expecting it to happen sometime in the coming months of this year. This could happen in September, or even later. I personally believe it might even be postponed to next year. But who knows? In case of PoS switch, people can either sell all their graphic cards back to make certain invested amount back. Another is that miners can also join other cryptoccurency mining such as Zcash( or other equihash), or other ethhash coins and more.

Summing it up

So what is your goal of mining? It’s true that people who were mining last year barely took profit while they got more than
1eth per day, or thinking about 2 years back, how many eth do you think they got per day? But they were the ones who
took the risks of maybe not even making profit at all back then. So I give mad props to them!

Anyhow, if you are simply planning to mine for number of ethereums you want to mine, I highly do not recommend joining ethereum mining at the moment because even just beginning of this year, 1 rig gave return of way above 10 eth per month. And seriously, when are you gonna mine 10 eths with this growth of difficulty level? But if you are looking for monthly return on fiat money, then, it should still well be worth the money because the time period to make money back on invested amount has decreased. Mining for 4-6 months(depending how price of eth moves) will get you your investment money back, and from there, you can mine other coins as well!

Lastly, if you want to join for fun and able to buy graphics cards at original price, why not?

Including picture of my very own miner working for me 24/7 :)