Chris Sokolowski wrote:excelerator wrote:Also FWIW, with the enormous influx of A4s into the market, even with profit switching pools, these machines will never ROI at current pricing with just mining. I've linked to an LTC calculator and adjusted coin price to reflect today's "coin price" for switching. Scrypt coins are loosly linked to LTC price overall as LTC is loosely coupled to BTC (halo effect). The purchase price excludes shipping or a PSU and assumes $0.1KwH.
This calculator assumes the difficulty will keep growing (in line with A4 sales) and thus insures the inability to fully recapture the investment. Your best bet to is mine until you have captured your "profit", then sell the machine to secure your return on investment.
People forget that without a growth in the price of scrypt coins, this is a zero sum game.
http://www.vnbitcoin.org/detailcalculationltc.php?name=LiteCoin_Mining_Rig&startdate=2016-12-09&costperunit=1800&wattperhour=1100&gigahazarate=280000&daytoincrease=3&testlopfirst=1&diffincrement=0.9756&bitcoinperdollar=4&electriccostinput=.1&begindifflevel=68988
I'm not advising reckless investment, but I disagree with your assessment that A4 miners will not even pay back their electricity costs after November 2017. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any more efficient scrypt miners coming out, and without any more efficient hardware, the profitability of an A4 will not go negative. That doesn't mean it will ever pay back its initial price, but on the other hand, over the past three years scrypt profitability never even came close to the point where the most efficient hardware with moderate electricity costs would lose money day-to-day.
These calculators can spin whatever ROI story you want as they are imperfect models, but the basic crux of my argument is that as long as new A4s continue to ship, difficulty will continue to increase and profits will decline if there is no increase in the overall price of scrypt coins regardless if there are other newer scrypt chips entering the market. Additional and new miners will just make the situation worse (including obsolete scrypt miners used temporarily as winter space heaters).
Also, we haven't had any new entrants for large hash rate scrypt miners since 2014 so we've enjoyed a period of largely slow growth in difficulty and steady profitability. that has come to end, evidenced by your own charting.
Check out
http://poolpicker.eu/table for scrypt - you'll see there's a been a ~27% drop in profitability for both Nicehash & Clevermining since just November 10th. I don't have data for Prohashing going back that far.
What could sway all of this to the positive is a very large influx of new scrypt coins during the A4 production cycle to mine and a growing demand for those new scrypt coins (or just have existing scrypt coins increasing in value).
