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I’ve been mining ETH for a long time now and have seen a lot of people ask questions about getting started mining. Here’s my short opinion.
UPDATE: Read my latest thoughts on why not starting is still relevant here.
Don’t start! If you’re already mining, keep at it. If you’re looking to start, don’t. Buy crypto instead or build a gaming PC and have some fun.
For this read, I’ll be using one of my smaller rigs, which has 4x AMD 8GB 580 hashing at ~117 MH/s in this article.
Difficulty
Difficulty is steadily increasing. Always. If Benjamin Franklin were alive today his famous quote would be “… but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and difficulty increases”. Which means anyone trying to stand up a rig today will not actually mine that much ETH. Right now with my aforementioned 4 GPU rig, I’m lucky to mine 0.05 ETH in a 7 day span. Each of my cards are hashing at a respectable ~29Mh/s, with almost zero downtime except for nightly reboots.
So what does this mean, well you earn almost jack-all nothing. At the current price of ETH you’re lucky to earn about $4 USD a day in ETH with 4 GPUs. That barely covers your hardware cost if you mined uninterrupted for a year!
