Should You Sell Your Ethereum Mining Rig ASAP?
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Everybody knows that the cryptocurrency market is volatile and unstable. Some days ago, the price of ETH reached a critical low mark. It went from 400 USD/ETH to roughly 200 USD/ETH. According to experts, this trend will continue and while this does not mean the end of ETH, there is little chance for it to get back in value in the next weeks.
Many miners posted their mining GPUs on eBay and other online shops in attempt to get back their money. It might seem a wise decision since as for today the price of good GPUs is still above the clouds.
So my question is: should we do the same?
In this article, I will try to analyze the pros and the cons of selling your ETH mining rig. In order to do that, we will first need to take a look at what is really going on with ETH.
Why Is Ethereum Falling Down?
Most people that are new to cryptocurrencies are talking about a certain “bubble” that was formed over the years. According to them, the unbelievable rise of ETH price, which went from $1 to $400 in only 2 years, is enough proof that the coin is not a trustworthy investment. They usually believe that this steep uptrend was caused merely by the fact that cryptocurrencies are the new black. According to them, once the freshness of the coin wears off, its value will decline.
However, according to Joseph Young from Coin Telegraph, ETH remains a good investment despite the rollback. He believes that the fall was mostly due to the number of successful ICOs which achieved their financing goals, “[…] but since the completion of their ICO campaigns, none of the large-scale ICOs and Blockchain projects are yet to present viable products and tested software.”
A number of successful ICOs used ETH to raise funds. In a matter of months, millions of dollars were raised for ICOs like Status, EOS, Tezos and Bancor. This raised ETH market cap to up to 36 billion USD, which was too much for the coin to handle.
The Ethereum development team still has to find a way to solve the scalability issues of the coin. ETH has to achieve a decentralized application with at least 10 million of users in order to handle such elevated market cap.
Ethereum Prospects
In his review, Joseph Young clearly states that “Ethereum price and market cap can still increase in long run”. There are several reasons for that:
- Most products from the ICO market will be available starting from late 2017 and early 2018. Once the products come out, they will add value to and backup the coin.
- The Ethereum team is working to solve the scalability issues. Quoting Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of Coinbase, “Large apps can’t run solely on chain and likely never will. They need off-chain scaling solutions. While it’s tricky to make accurate estimates when combining scaling improvements, it’s conceivable we could see a 100x improvement by the end of 2018, which would allow a 1–10m user app.” He then adds: “I am not an Ethereum maximalist, but I think Ethereum is the furthest along and best suited for thinking about scalability right now.”
- It is very probable that Ethereum will eventually scale and will continue to grow. Analysts agree that ETH market cap won’t decrease any further — The current market cap is more likely a stable plateau since it reflects rather realistically what the coin and the market around it are.
Selling Your Mining Rig: PROS
If you decide to sell your mining rig, then you might want to post it on eBay as soon as possible. There is growing tension in the gaming community because many gamers can no longer access the GPUs they want thanks to the mining boom. Therefore, with such huge demand on GPUs, you might be able to sell yours quickly and for a good price.
News sites such as Coindesk already noticed how a load of second hand GPUs appeared on big sites like eBay. Once the demand is fulfilled, it will become harder to sell a second-hand GPU that was used for mining.
Selling Your Mining Rig: CONS
The falling price of ETH directly affected the ROI of every single GPU in our rigs. This is indeed bad news. As miners, our profit is hardwired to the crypto market; sadly, this kind of price fluctuations is part of the job risk.
However, does that mean that mining GPUs are no longer profitable? Well, not really. Here are some reasons why:
- If you’ve been on the forums, you surely noticed how people are going crazy about ETH. They don’t look for other alternatives. zCash? Monero? No way man! While it is understandable why people chose Ethereum, it is still unwise to associate GPU mining with one coin only. In brief, even if ETH is no longer a gold mine, you still got decent alternatives to choose from.
- ETH price is now stable and will probably remain stable until devs switch it to PoS. While I would not recommend you to assemble a brand new rig to mine ETH, I do believe that it is still profitable to mine ETH with the existing gear you’ve got. Say, if you got a GTX 1070, you can still make about 85 dollars a month.
Finally, it is expected that ETH price will be slowly moving upwards. Even if what you mine today cannot be sold for a big sum of dollars just yet, you are still investing into a cryptocoin that has good prospects for the future. What you mine today might pay off really good in a year or less.
In Conclusion
I hope this analysis helped you to get a better outlook on what is going on in the world of cryptocurrencies. I am not blaming people who are selling their GPUs, nor am I saying that they are wrong. Everyone has their own expectations when it comes to mining.
However, I came to realize that big share of those who sell their mining GPUs are the kind of people who do not really understand or trust cryptocurrencies. They were persuaded that they can do a quick buck by mining ETH. Once circumstances changed, they put their cards on sale without even bothering to look for alternative coins to mine.
There is also the group of people who misunderstood the news about ETH and came to the conclusion that we are witnessing the end of Ethereum as a cryptocurrency. Again, only time will show what is really going on. However, as analysts say, Ethereum is here to stay, so I am keeping my RX’s for now. What about you?
If you’re a believer/true long-term investor into cryptocurrencies, mining for the long haul is a no brainer.
If you’re just mining because you think you can “get rich quick” then move along, this isn’t the hobby for you.
Crypto is here to stay so im keeping my rig.
Hello sir, I want to make a new mining rig and here is 0 electricity cost for me…so is it good idea to make a new rig.
Thanks
If you have no plan to cashout right away then mind and hold my friend.
Fewer people mining better for us!
Claymore mentioned that AMD is working on new drivers which will fix the slowdown in hashrate for RX cards, and therefore, the profitability will improve in coming few weeks.
Btw…I modded BIOS for my 6x RX 570s (Gigabyte: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125966); however, I am unable to undervolt them. Can you guys please advise how to do that properly? I’m using MSI Afterburner, and increasing Memory for all 6 cards at the same time. Should I underclock core, overclock memory and undervolt one card at a time in Afterburner?
use the software from asus strixx
Are you referring to GPU Tweak software? Is it better than MSI Afterburner?
Hold your RIGS and hold your ETH. The price had to drop, becouse too many miners come, difficulty is grow much faster than it has to, but now its stopped, so happy mining!
sell me your rig for 50% off retail and ill buy
What is the best way to cash out to PayPal if you mine Zec or ETH? Is there any article on this subject?
There is no way 🙂
Then how do you convert ETH/Zec to USD/EUR?
Via kraken and and then to bank account 🙂
What about this one? LINK REMOVED
I am not using that 🙂