The difficulty in mining ethers is going up as more people bring online their miners and the price of ethers in the future is uncertain. The Ethereum network will be moving from the current proof-of-work to proof-of-stake where the GPU miners will all become obsolete, and the date of the switch is uncertain but may be in a few months.

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• For a complete list of rules and an Ethereum getting started guide,. Resources • & • & • • • • & • • • • • & • • •. Also I have my doubts of PoS the way it was described. So I suspect there will be some transition and issues with it at first which may delay its adoption. The way it was described is that it would require you to put your money in an account that you couldnt withdraw from with a 4 month waiting period and with only a 1% interest rate.

With a rate that low, coupled with the 4 month waiting period, I think they will find very few adopters will lock up any significant portion of their money. You can get a much bigger ROI simply opening a bank account. I know PoS can work, but they will likely need to tweak their ideas before you actually see it implemented.

This is why I am expecting it to take at least a year. Is there any reason you have to beleive PoS on serenity will be active before the end of the year? Everything I heard suggests its a year out. Do you have a timeline posted somewhere?

If I am to update my blog to reflect that I need to see some evidence of that which so far all Ikeep hearing is 'About a year'. Also you are assuming difficulty will increase, for the most part it has increased here and there but often stays level for a month or more. With the switch to PoS it is reasonable to assume few people will be building mining rigs so it is also reasonable to assume difficulty will not rise much. Also the price of ethereum has been rising rather significantly and fast. So if anything it is also reasonable to assume the pay off for having mined ethereum will increase rather than decrease as the PoS deployment approaches.

Finally electricity costs are 0 for me and for many people. If you are running a gpu mining rig in a house in a cold climate where a heater needs to be run your effective increase in electric bill from running a miner is 0$.

This is because a computer is as efficient as a electric space heater at heating your home. So by running a miner it means you simply divert some energy from your heater to your miner and get the same heat output.

So you do not need to use any additional energy than you normally would. Of course this will only apply for about 1/2 - 3/4 of the year. Can You Still Ethereum Classic ETC Mine more. There is a built-in hard fork that is going to happen around nov/dev. IMO, They are going to make sure its ready by then.

This is speculation, but I think they will do it. As for difficulty, its been increasing 10%+ per month on average. And going up much faster now that price is up. As for electricity, 1000W rig will use 720 kWh @ $0.15 = $108 per month. So over 1 year thats $1200 in electricity. So, instead of building your rig for $4200. You'll be way better off buying 1500 ETH for $2.40, and selling it at $10 at the end of the year for a $15,000.

First off from Sep 1st the January 11th there has been NO change in difficulty. Prior to Sep 1st there was a rise and now post january 11th there has been a rise.

But for the majority of the known record it has actually remained level. So that is speculation. Also keep in mind serenity is when PoS kicks in, that is 4 major releases into the future. About a year seems like a more reasonable timeline than what you suggest considering the past rate at which releases occured.

Also your electricity costs dont factor in the cold weather, as i mentioned. During any period where you need to run a heater to combat the cold weather (which is the majority of the year here) the electricy costs are 0$, so that point is moot for me. Also you are assuming a strategy where the end goal is to sell the computer after the mining period is over, thats fine for some people, but in my case im building it to actually be kept and be useful past that period, so again doesnt apply in my case, this was also specifically pointed out in the blog entry. That's wrong. Difficulty steadily climbed from ~6TH to ~9TH from September to January, averaging 10% a month.

Now the increase is much faster. The spike on Aug 31 was due to a bug. It was fixed and diff went back down to 6TH. Most people who own a house don't have free electricity. I've never heard of it.

Using your rig as a heater is very poor. It doesn't disburse heat nearly as well as a real space-heater. Also, that's a general excuse that people use to justify high electricity costs. Usually people have central heating and just make that up.

Buying a rig to mine ether will earn you less money than buying ETH on an exchange and waiting a year. Sorry I meant to say September 3rd to January 3rd which is exactly 4 months. On September 3rd mining difficulty was 8.355 and on january 4th (exactly 4 months later) it was 8.312. Indicating that in 4 months the difficulty actually went DOWN, not up 40% as you suggest. Go see for yourself:. Now if that was due to a bug, so be it, do you have a blog entry or something where they talk about that?

Also you are completely missing the point on why it is free to run a miner in winter. It is still free EVEN if you pay for your electricity. Think about it, lets say you pay 200$ a month in electricity to heat your home (based on how many kW hours you use).

Then you buy a ethereum miner that costs 100$ to run per month and also heats your home. That means you will need to spend 100$ less on yoru heater to heat your home and 100$ more on the miner. That means if you count your miner as a 'heater' you are spending exactly the same amount to heat your home as you would if you didnt have the miner. What you are missing is the fact that a computer is just as efficient as an electric space heater as a space heater is. So even if you pay for your own electricity a mining rig is FREE to run in winter.

Yes, here is the link to the difficulty bug. As you can see, it never hit 8.5 diff until november. It was 6 sept. Thats about 10% increase per month, which is now going even faster. 2) The miner is not an efficient way to heat your home. It pales in comparison to a real space heater.

Maybe you have a small portion of one room slightly warm with your rig. It also runs when you're not home which is a waste. Space heaters are turned off when people leave the house. Also, Heaters only needed 25% of the year. 50% as most if you're 1% of the population living near the arctic. I live in philadelphia, we are no where near the arctic and we typically use heaters about 50% of the year or more depending on how sensitive you are to the cold. This year however it has been warmer than most.

While yo uare correct that a rig running 24/7 is less effieicent than running a heater only when your home. Most people do not turn off their heater every time they leave for an hour or two to go grocery shopping.

Even if they did it would have to run double duty for atleast an hour or two when you get home to re-heat. Only time that advantage really shows up is if your talking about leaving your house for a few days, like on a vacation.

In which case you are effectively only paying the electricity cost on your miner during the periods when you would normally have your heaters off for 24 hours or more. Othertimes it is still free. I myself, like many people run my heater 24/7 regardless, at least untill I got a server farm and stopped needing to run my heat at all. As for the bug thanks for pointing that. Seems you are correct that there have been small gains in difficulty since the project started. However, as to be expected you can also see that the difficulty increases in correlation to the price in ethereum. If the price goes up more people mine, when it goes down many people stop mining, just as expected.

So in the end it is still a moot point. If the difficulty at the end of the year would be double what it is now, but the value of ethereum also double, than the ROI remains unchanged. Also space heaters are considerably more effecient than central heat (assuming both are electric), and a gpu miner is equally as efficient as a space heater. The reason being with central heat you must heat the whole house and get less control over focusing the heat in the areas used by the house. Even when you close vents a lot of heat tends to leak into unused rooms. With a space heater you can place one in every room and only heat the rooms you care about, or occupy at the time. In that way you use MUCH less heat with a space heater or mining rig than you would with central heat.

Even if you want to heat the whole house it will be almost the same since you'd presumably also have your mining rigs spread out throughout the house to heat it effectively, one in each room. Effectively they should be treated and used just like a space heater. And in that usage they are equivalently efficient. ' With a space heater you can place one in every room and only heat the rooms you care about, or occupy at the time. ' Soo, you move your rig around with you to each room? Or did you put a $4000 rig in each room instead of a $25 space heater from walmart?

Space heaters have strong external fans to blow the air outward from the heating elements. GPUS suck air into their intakes to blow onto the heatsinks. They don't work as well as space heaters. Most homes already have heating already built into them.

Using a rig to heat your home would be useful for probably less than 1% of people interested in mining. This is a classic line from miners looking for reasons to justify the high electricity costs which usually result in non-profitability compared to just buying Ether/other crypto outright. Again, maybe it makes sense for. I can only assume you didnt study physics very much in school (this isnt meant as an offense, only that your lacking some basic understanding of thermodynmics). The main facts here are that 1) all energy consumed eventually winds up as heat 2) dispersion of that heat doesnt matter as it will naturally disperse, it will just take a little longer to do so. Now do I move my rig around with me, no. But do I put it in the one room I spend 80% of my day, then yes.

Meaning keeping it always running, and my heater turned down is the end result. Second, not sure where you get this notion that all space heaters have strong fans that blow on them.

The VAST majority do not. In fact many homes here have water type radiators that simply pump hot water into a metal block and it radiates heat, no fan needed or involved. While I totally see yor point that most people might not want to invest 3,000$ in a space heater that you could spend 25$ on, that is not really adding anything to the point as to whether it costs electricity or not. It is a valid point in its own right, but completely outside of the scope of the current discussion. You keep talking about higher electricity costs. My electricity costs are 0$.

I've been running server farms out of my house for over a decade, enough to heat my entire home. I have not had to run my heat once in that decade and my electric cost in winter is EXACTLY the same as it was before I started running a server farm.

I think you should learn a bit more about physics and how thermodynamics work before you bring up any more patently false information. Something along the lines of X ETH created every block, then proportionately split up according to Casper's reward structure. How much you have staked wouldn't matter so much as what proportion of the total amount staked is personally yours. If someone staked with lots of accounts then they'd only end up with the same reward split into more places. Risks mainly being currency volatility for the duration of the bond and incorrectly betting on the stability of consensus at the timescale where Casper serves to resolve it.

The exact mechanics of the betting are something I still need to go deeper on.

• 05 February 2016 • • As many of you know for many years now I’ve invested in, and had an interest in, cryptocurrency. However until now I never owned a mining rig simply because it didn’t seem profitable enough to be worth the trouble. However recently a few things changed; first, with Ethereum entering the scene it became a profitable endeavor with a ROI that would exceed the initial investment in less than a year. So after running all the numbers to make sure it was profitable, and testing it out on genesis-mining.com to see some cash flow first, I decided to give in and invest in a top of the line mining rig. Since I also do a lot of R&D in Machine Learning and Parallel Processing I figured it could double as a useful tool for my day job, one that will pay for itself when not actively being used. Really in many ways it is a win-win proposition. Like so many other things I get into I had to take my endeavor to the extreme.

I wanted the best, most profitable, mining rig I could build; something that would be equally powerful for my professional endeavors as well. This meant top of the line AMD OpenCL compatible GPUs with a significant number of cores, memory, and memory bandwidth. Of course I also needed to figure out how to accommodate four double-wide graphics cards on any normal motherboard. I spent about 2 days surfing NewEgg.com and Amazon.com and finally arrived at all the parts to build this beautiful mining rig.

UPDATE: Added some velcro to secure that 4th card. Looks much better now and is a bit safer than before. The specifications are as follows: 4x Radeon R9 Fury X Graphics Cards 1x AMD FX 4350 Unlocked Quad Core Processor (4.2 Ghz) 1x Corsair RM Series, RM1000, 1000 Watt PSU 1x Thermaltake CORE P5 ATX Open Frame Case 1x ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z Motherboard 4x Kingston HyperX FURY 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 Memory 1x Samsung 850 EVO 120GB SATA III SSD Harddrive 4x PCI-e X16 Reisers In the end once it was all setup and configured this beast produced an impressive hash rate. 111,149,056 hashes per second (111 MH/s) With current network parameters; that means I mine about one block each day at about 5 ETH per block. Market prices fluctuate wildly so by the time you read this these numbers may change, but that is somewhere on the order of about 10$ per day. So the cost invested to build the computer should pay for itself in about a year assuming there aren’t any significant changes to the network in that time.

Not too shabby. Roadblocks It took me about 2 days to fully assemble the box and get it to the point where it was mining Ethereum.

I am an Arch Linux fan so most of that time I spent trying to get it to run under Arch Linux. While normally Arch Linux is a pleasure to work with, no matter what I tried i found it impossible to get it to get the C++ Ethereum client to mine successfully. There were a slew of problems, with xorg-server being the wrong version as a dependency, and OpenCL throwing segfaults complaining “PPLib wasn’t enabled”. In the end I gave up and moved to Ubuntu. While I’m not usually a huge Ubuntu fan for day-to-day stuff, in this case it really did make the setup much easier.

Once Ubuntu was freshly installed on the system I just had to add a few repositories and install a few packages. I which described the process pretty accurately. Only difference was I didn’t find i had to install AMD-APP-SDK or the C++ Ethereum code manually, all these were available precompiled in the repositories so I just installed them with apt-get. One thing did perplex me though; anytime I tried to run the miner using the eth command as described in the tutorial it would run for a minute and then abort claiming it was “killed” without any details. After racking my head for hours I found that if i ran it with the ethmine command instead it ran successfully.

Here are the commands I ran to get the miner going. Geth --rpc --rpccorsdomain localhost & ethmine -G Tweaking Never content to just leave things as they are, I wanted to try to find ways to tweak the settings to boost performance slightly. While I wouldn’t be willing to run a custom kernel, since security is still a major concern, that left me mostly with just the ethmine settings with which to tweak. Two settings in particular struck me as useful, as they effected how much work is sent to the GPU at one time. These were --cl-local-work and --cl-global-work.

Knowing I had a top of the line GPU I figured boosting these values a bit might increase performance. Indeed they did, but I had to play with a lot of different numbers to get the benchmarks to max out. Finally the max hash rate I mentioned above of 111,149,056 hashes per second (111 MH/s) was achieved with the following command. This was about a 10% improvement over the default settings.

Ethmine -G --cl-local-work 256 --cl-global-work 8192 I tried enabling the CPU too with --enable-opencl-cpu however that produced a segfault. So I left it out. Conclusions With an ROI that pays for itself in under a year, and the future usefulness of such a rig, it is really a no brainer for me to have set this up.

It was also a lot of fun, and profitable. Though I think a cost-analysis might be useful to compare different rigs and hash rates to ultimately figure out what is the cheapest rig for the output it produces. Sadly I don’t have the information on other rigs to be able to do this, nor do I have the time. Also it should be noted that while this rig works really well for Ethereum it would be far less effective on other cryptocurrency where the memory bandwidth isn’t as critical; so don’t expect it to be the ultimate rig for all cryptocurrency mining needs. I hope that helps you guys in setting up your own mining rigs, happy mining! Updates turns out the power supply is under-powered for the system. I advice upgrading to something with a bit more power, next model up should do it.

Clones Since I’ve posted this article there have been a few clones of the miner. I will add names and pictures here.

The following is from Rolf Versluis.