Today I am going to take a look at the future of Ethereum mining and the expected hashrates as we progress further. As most miners are aware, every 10 epoch we tend to see a pretty major difficulty spike. This is a result of the size of the ever expanding DAG files. Approximately every 45 days we complete 10 epoch and as of the time of writing this post we are on epoch 130. I will be giving current hashrates of UNMODIFIED GPU's and benchmarks for the next 5 major epoch changes (e.g. 140, 150,160). All of these hashrates are taken from my current mining rigs running on ethermine.org. I did benchmarks out to epoch 180 which is approx. 225 days from now. It is my belief that by this point in time we will see more PoS being implemented. I do not believe we will be fully switched over to PoS but we will be in a hybrid consensus at least, at that point. So with that lets take a look at some hashrates.
Epoch 130 current hashrates:
AMD RX 470 4gb: 26 mh/s
AMD RX 570 4gb: 22 mh/s
AMD RX 470 8gb: 27 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb: 18 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1070 8gb: 26 mh/s
Benchmark epoch 140 (45 days from now approx.)
AMD RX 470 4gb: 23 mh/s
AMD RX 570 4gb: 21 mh/s
AMD RX 470 8gb: 25 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb: 17 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1070 8gb: 25 mh/s
Benchmark epoch 150 (90 days)
AMD RX 470 4gb: 20 mh/s
AMD RX 570 4gb: 21 mh/s
AMD RX 470 8gb: 22 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb: 17 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1070 8gb: 24 mh/s
Benchmark epoch 160 (135 days)
AMD RX 470 4gb: 19 mh/s
AMD RX 570 4gb: 20 mh/s
AMD RX 470 8gb: 20 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb: 16 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1070 8gb: 23 mh/s
Benchmark epoch 170 (180 days)
AMD RX 470 4gb: 16 mh/s
AMD RX 570 4gb: 18 mh/s
AMD RX 470 8gb: 18 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb: 14 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1070 8gb: 22 mh/s
Benchmark epoch 180 (225 days)
AMD RX 470 4gb: 15 mh/s
AMD RX 570 4gb: 17 mh/s
AMD RX 470 8gb: 17 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1060 6gb: 13 mh/s
Nvidia GTX 1070 8gb: 21 mh/s
As you can see the difficulty is going to make it less and less profitable to mine. On the same respect I believe that it is still definitely worth our time to continue mining away as long as Ethereum is still running PoW. I would give a word of caution to anyway considering building a mining rig for the first time. With the current prices of GPU's (if you can find them) has made it much harder to justify building and starting into mining. I am not trying to turn someone away from building a miner I am just simply giving you a breakdown of hashrates/time. I will say from my benchmarks that the pascal cards (nvidia 10 series) seem to perform better into the future than my amd cards. Just something I wanted to point out. I wish everyone the best of luck and keep those GPU's running my friends!
The Last Sage