So I bought a couple of days ago a 40TH/s contract at Genesis Mining. Of course I did some basic research before, which included doing a profitability calculation. At a first glance, this looked very promising and it said that I could earn as much as 4 BTC in a year!
However, soon I've gotten a bit disappointed, when Genesis Mining sent the first couple of payouts:
19/08/17: 0.0081580 BTC
20/08: 0.00805528 BTC
21/08: 0.00804606 BTC
22/08: 0.00795503 BTC
As you can see, the payout has been rapidly declining and I started to fear, that I won't even be able to reach the break even point, which is at 1.26 BTC. As I've learned later, the reason for the decline is the growing mining difficulty. I didn't consider this, when I'd bought the contract and the profitability calculation that I've made, didn't take this into account. So, shit happens.
But the day after, I've observed something curious: the payouts were slowly growing again.
23/08: 0.00797867 BTC
24/08: 0.00816733 BTC --> I even never had such a high payout before!
What has happened? Maybe this has something to do with the relative lower mining difficulty of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which causes BCH to be more profitable to mine than BTC. This had the effect, that many miners stopped to mine BTC and started mining BCH instead. We can observe this in the decline of the Hash Rate of the BTC network
Consequently, the mining difficulty has also been adapted:
However, I'm afraid that this is going to change soon, as BTC and BCH are now almost on par again
What are your thoughts on this? Is mining profitability going to decrease again or is it to stay on a high level, thanks to the persistent growth BCH?
If you've enjoyed this article, I'd be glad if you'd upvote or resteem it :)
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UPDATE
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It seems that the decline in profitability is plateauing out by the time (https://cryptograph.me/2017/08/24/the-real-data-behind-genesis-cloud-mining-no-bull-shit/). However this analysis was made with ETH; maybe BTC will be another story.
