The mining landscape changed after December 2017 cryptocurrency rally with BTC all times peak at 20K USD. A lot of mining gears was bought during last ex-rates unprecedented growth. Now the ex-rates went down and new connected miners leads to hashrate (and mining difficulty) increase. These two factors cause of mining profit drop. Hard time for mining begins.
Mining profit, March 2018:
Only S9 SHA256-miner for BCH and BTC could return investment in a year.
In order to show the change, I add the diagram from my last report from December 2017:
Bitcoin network hash rate doubled (2x) in last 3 months:
I've used following parameters for mining profit calculation:
| gear | cost | alg | rate | units | power | mine | maint |
|----------+------+-------------+--------+----------+---------+-------+----------|
| GPU-1060 | 457 | Ethash | 225 | 100 KH/s | 90 | 2.03 | 0.000682 |
| GPU-1060 | 457 | Equihash | 270 | 1 H/s | 90 | 1.69 | 0.000569 |
| GPU-1060 | 457 | Cryptonight | 430 | 1 H/s | 70 | 1.06 | 0.000277 |
| ASIC-D3 | 1742 | X11 | 15000 | 1 MH/s | 1200 | 0.117 | 0.000136 |
| ASIC-L3+ | 2728 | Scrypt | 500 | 1 MH/s | 800 | 5.45 | 0.00273 |
| ASIC-M3 | 2112 | SHA256 | 1150 | 10 GH/s | 2000 | 1.83 | 0.00296 |
| ASIC-S9 | 2904 | SHA256 | 1400 | 10 GH/s | 1370 | 2.07 | 0.00167 |
| GPU-1070 | 704 | Ethash | 300 | 100 KH/s | 120 | 2.34 | 0.000682 |
| GPU-1070 | 704 | Equihash | 430 | 1 H/s | 120 | 1.63 | 0.000476 |
| GPU-1070 | 704 | Cryptonight | 500 | 1 H/s | 100 | 1.40 | 0.000341 |
Columns:
cost - Approx. retail price per gear, USD
rate - Unit rate for calculation
power - Watt
mine - Daily mining cost per unit rate, USD
maint - Daily maintenance fee per unit rate, USD
Now the prices for ASICs are decreased compered to December, because demand is less than offer. The GPU profitably is even in worth situation than with ASICs. If you could find gears cheaper, it will increase profit.
Cloud mining profit went down as well. All Genesis Mining contacts were sold out, and only pre-sale for April 30 available. HashFlare (HF) LTC contract calculation looks not bad, but actual payout is smaller.
Mining profit calculation (BTC: 9965 USD):
return percent
BCH-ASIC-S9 11.3 7.7
LTC-HF 11.5 5.7
BTC-ASIC-S9 11.7 3.8
Columns:
return - Return of investment (ROI), months
percent - Annual profit, %
We could compare some values with a real payouts from Hashflare mining:
usd_100 usd_rate roi
BTC 0.307 0.368 10.8
ETH 0.238 0.0523 13.9
LTC 0.0921 0.0124 36.1
Columns:
usd_100 - Profit per each invested 100 USD per day, USD
usd_rate - Profit per each unit rate per day, USD
roi - Return of investment (ROI), months
As you could see, the BTC profit and ROI are comparable with the calculated above values, except LTC.
The calculation was done with assumption of constant price and difficulty level. Be aware that cloud mining providers could change voluntary contracts rules (Hashflare did it at Sept. 1). This is just my personal research and not an investment advise. I'm not affiliate to any mining company.