something is really wrong

with almost 300 MH/s, i am getting paid $6 after 6 hours of mining ethereum (claymore with nanopool), i.e., $1/hr.
there are several different ways of calculations that agree with my numbers, implying that there is nothing terribly wrong with my hardware/software settings. $1/hr amounts to some $8k/yr. 1 ETH=$1k today.

1, etherscan.io profit calculator: at 285MH/s, with no electricity cost, i get $1.1/hr.
2, 2 years ago (from forums), people got about 1 block a day with the same hashrate. at that time, network hashrate was about 700GH/s compared to 200k GH/s today. so i should be getting 1 block every 200 or so days. so if i do solo mining, averagely, i will also get about $8k/yr?

to get the 285Mh/s, i use top of the line GPU nvidia 4x P100 at 71 MH/s each. such a system costs about $30k. if the mining difficulty did not go up from here at all, it would take 4 years just to get my money back! (in reality, it will take what? 10 years?)

i am pretty sure there is something wrong with my calculation. otherwise, who will be mining ethereum? if nobody mines, ethereum dies. where am i wrong? or is there a big conspiracy?

I don’t know the answer either.

Maybe that’s why so many sites sell mining power, because it’s better selling it / renting your hardware, than it is mining.

I must admit, I don’t have much knowledge about mining these days though, that’s just a total guess.

But I’ll be interested in the replies as well: there must be an explanation as you’re right - if it’s that hard to make money nobody would mine and the entire system would collapse right?

txholdem said:

to get the 285Mh/s, i use top of the line GPU nvidia 4x P100 at 71 MH/s each. such a system costs about $30k. if the mining difficulty did not go up from here at all, it would take 4 years just to get my money back! (in reality, it will take what? 10 years?)

i am pretty sure there is something wrong with my calculation. otherwise, who will be mining ethereum? if nobody mines, ethereum dies. where am i wrong? or is there a big conspiracy?

Click to expand...

I have no knowledge of nvidia P100s. But why would you want to use a $30k 4 gpu rig to get 285 mh/s? I think this is a case of utilizing the wrong hardware. I.e. my 6 AMD RX 580s cost me $300 each + tax and mine total ~182mh/s reported with Claymore and Nanopool. I went with high end power supplies and custom built my rig case, and have about $2800-3000 usd into it. This rig, with this cost, to obtain 185mh/s will have a payback in 4-6 months, after power costs.

I've attached my sample eth stats, based on the current rates. Bigger, badder, and more expensive GPUs aren't necessarily the best for this kind of thing. if a P100 costs $8000 to obtain 70 mh/s, your cost per mh/s is $114 per mh/s. If you bought a rx 580 8gb amd card for say $350 with tax, that gets 30.5 mh/s (overclocked and undervolted), your cost per mh/s is $11.47. In order to make mining viable with an $8000 gpu, it would need to have a 697 mh/s, to be in line with the same cost as a lower end rx 580.

Basically.....high end gpu's like that just don't make any sense when it comes to mining, at least as far as Ethereum is concerned.

I forgot to attach the stats page from my 6 gpu rig. Here it is.

I believe the only way to be profitable is if the price of ETH keeps rising.

OP you can't compare 2 years ago to now. Ethereum was worth a few dollars then, everyone mining it was called "crazy" in 2016, it was far too easy then.

Mining Ethereum now you're going up against whole farms of professional miners who are buying 100 gpu cards per batch.

If I were you I'd go to coinwarz and find a more profitable coin.

Your calculations are wrong. First of all a mining rig would not cost 30K, a powerful mining rig would cost around aprox 8K with optimal ETH Mining GPU`s. Which would result in return in investment in 5-6 Months considering the ETH price will remain the same or rise and with the current difficulty.

Again its still not profitable to mine with only 1 rig. If you want to make a decent amount monthly you will need at least 4-5 rigs to mine ETH, and to get your investment back in aprox 1 year, which after that you can still sell the hardware and get at least a 50% return of the initial investment.

You are mining the wrong coin my friend, dont mine the big market cap coins because you are competing against these kind of people:

Watch it completely you will be blown away!

You absolutely cannot compete with these kind of peoples, there are whales who bought hundreds if not thousands of mining rigs and they have people working 24/7 at these so called mining farms to ensure everything is running smoothly. This is why it is better to stick to low market cap coins because they are not mined by these big farms.

Go check out Vertcoin or groestlcoin for example I think they are profitable especially because they are ASIC resistant.