Mining payback on video cards has grown to 150 years

During the bull market, when Ethereum was at $4,000, video card owners were getting a full payback during 4-6 months. During the bear market ETH dropped by 60-70%, which reduced miners’ income in the same proportion. But even during such periods miners could recoup their investments in the first year.

The transition of ETH to Proof-of-Stake changed game rules: miners can no longer mine Ethereum. Ethereum Classic (ETC), Ravencoin (RVN), Zilliqa (ZIL) and some other crypto have become alternative coins. Most of them showed good dynamics after the Merge (Ethereum's transition to PoS). 

Ethereum Classic rises before The Merge (TradingView)

But even the growth of the ETC price by 200% did not affect the situation too much. Mining on video cards has become unprofitable in the current conditions.

The analytical resource Minerstat provides statistics on paybacks of different video cards. The website automatically selects the mining pool, cryptocurrency, current hashrate (mining difficulty), device power, etc. The user only has to choose a video card and the cost of electricity.

We decided to organize the data by the most popular mining equipments in order to determine how profitable altcoin mining is now. 

Profitability of altcoin mining on video cards

Average market prices for video cards and electricity cost of $0.1/kWh were used for calculations. This is roughly the price of electricity for domestic and industrial households in China, the world’s largest mining participant. 

The study showed that the payback period of one of the most powerful video cards, the NVIDIA RTX 3090, is 5 years now.  Some other popular devices will not bring any profits even in decades. You will have to mine ETC and RVN during 153 years to get payback for the brand new NVIDIA GTX 1650 Super. 

Payback of mining altcoins on video cards after The Merge

At the same time, the mining of cryptocurrencies is generally unprofitable in the countries where electricity is more expensive than $2/kW.

Perhaps the price of crypto running on the Proof-of-Work algorithm will increase together with the  new growth of the entire crypto market. This can reduce the payback period of video cards and slightly improve profitability. But, globally, altcoin mining looks ambiguous and seems like a dead end.