Ethereum Mining Reward Goes Down, Rewards Go Up: Mining is Still Profitable!

A few days ago, Ethereum hard forked.

One of the main results of the hard fork was to decrease the mining reward from 5 ETH to 3 ETH. I originally thought this would decrease my payouts to the point of unprofitability, but the opposite happened.

Due to unexpected errors, I'm only running 2 GPUs right now. Let's just say I don't want to talk about it :)

Before the fork, I was at about .095 ETH/month in expectation while running my 2 GPUs. Now I'm at .14! The reason? The average block time has decreased.

Average block time went from roughly 31 seconds to about 13. A quick calculation: 3/5 * 31/13 = 1.43x. This is roughly in line with my increase in mining rewards.

It incentives me to get a properly working mining rig. Here's an optimistic calculation for how much a perfectly working rig would make: 6 GPUs hashing at about 32 MH/s = 192 MH/s, this is roughly 7.7x my rewards, or 1.09 ETH per month. Assuming a building cost of $3200, and monthly electricity increase of $55, looking at about $275 a month in profits and a recoup of investment in less than a year, which is better than the cloud mining contracts on genesis or other sites.

It's still not worth the time spent doing it over just buying cryptocurrency, but good to know mining is still profitable!

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My name is Ryan Daut and I am a professional gambler. My interests include dogs, poker, fantasy sports, football, basketball, MMA, health and fitness, rock climbing, mathematics, astrophysics, cryptocurrency, and computer gaming.