[ianai]

Quick, rough calculations suggest to me that the RTX 3080 is about what you need to turn a profit - based on 200k annual revenue you need 600k in hardware. Three years to pay itself off - about the lifetime of the hardware, my guess. That's if you could find the hardware - and I didn't include stuff like motherboard/rack/etc.

If it's that hard to make a profit on the RTX 3080 then I doubt the M1 Mac Mini was ever in the running.

[dcolkitt]

You're not taking into account the higher block rewards in the current environment. The base reward is 2 ETH per block, but the the gas fees have been averaging near 3 ETH per block. Most of the mining calculators don't take this into account.

To be fair EIP-1559 probably turns on in July. So that's going to cut block rewards by a lot.

[judge2020]

Maybe i'm misunderstanding you, but if a 3080 costs 700, and it makes $8 a day, with an electricity cost of $0.10/kWH or roughly $0.60 a day (which is possible in many cities, and this can be improved by overclocking the memory and underclocking the core), it's making at least $200 a month. That's an ROI of three and a half months at worst, and then it can be flipped on the used market to nearly recoup that initial investment (or recoup more if supply issues are still a thing at the time).

[RL_Quine]

Really? A 1080 TI still produces a few dollars a day easily.

[gruez]

It depends on what his assumptions are. Currently a 3080 produces $7.71/day in revenue[1]. If you extrapolate that out for a year you can break-even on your investment in less than a year, even if you pay scalped prices. However, this doesn't factor in difficulty increases, and depending on your forecasts it can vary from never breaking even to breaking even in less than two years.

[1] https://whattomine.com/coins

[christoph]

Can confirm. I’m mining on 2x1080s and 2x2070 Supers, and definitely and easily turn a profit after electricity costs, however, it seems like profit is starting to drop rapidly to the point where I seriously question if it’s worth it. The GPUs run at 56c/120w avg. so it’s not too taxing, but it’s still putting wear on all the hardware, fans, etc.

Selling the cards (at above MSRP) now and putting that straight into BTC would probably turn a better profit long term, albeit, very much a gamble. The mining is definitely getting harder/less profitable and at some point soon (2021?) ETH is changing from PoW to PoS.

[ianai]

I'm just doing rough numbers here and I claim to know basically nothing about mining outside of a simple calculator off google. Hardware wise (more my knowledge base), I imagine the older hardware might have interesting economic characteristics - like if you could stock a fleet of company vehicles with really super great 20 year old Toyotas versus newer Toyotas. Problem is, finding that many 20 year old Toyotas of that reasonable quality, etc.

Edit - "quality" not "quantity"!

[scottlamb]

With free power? iirc the RTX 3080 draws 200+ W.

[OldHand2018]

I mined Ethereum about 3 years ago using the Nvidia 1060 and they never drew max power. Conversely, you could use nvidia_smi to limit their power draw without making much of an impact on hash rate.

I’d be surprised if it was any different with the current lineup of cards.

It would be really interesting to see what the M1 draws doing this. Probably not much. But then it’s not doing a whole lot of hashing either.

[ianai]

Was there any critical reason you stopped mining?

[OldHand2018]

I didn’t like the noise and the price had collapsed. I sold the cards for a very good price. I would have made 5 or 6 figures if I had just left them on. Oh well, it’s not the worst financial decision I’ve ever made. Hell, I bought TSLA at $15 and sold at $30. F me.