What is mining?
Mining is the process by which Ethereum transactions are verified and added to the public ledger, called “blockchain”. The term indicates also the means through which new coins are released. For each block of transactions, miners use computers to solve a sort of “puzzle” until one of them wins. The winner will be awarded Ether (both the transaction fees and the new released Ether) and broadcast the block across the network. Puzzle-solving method is called “proof-of-work” and there’s no way to cheat: the only way of giving the correct puzzle answer is making your GPUs running.
Is it worth?
If you’re planning on starting Ethereum mining right now in July 2017, think twice: difficulty is steadily rising because more and more people are getting into mining. The difficulty is basically the rate at which you will be rewarded for the amount of power your GPU is putting into the network. The more the difficulty, the less the reward. As you can see from the graph the difficulty doubled in just 5 weeks (late May-early July): this means that if you want stable earnings you should constantly update your hardware and build new mining rigs.
Of course, there is another fundamental variable: Ethereum price. If the price increases steadily as the difficulty, earnings will be constant. However, if the price drops too much, mining won’t be profitable anymore for new miners because of very low returns compared to the initial hardware cost.
Keeping this in mind, if you already have a couple of GPUs and the electricity cost in your country is low, you can start mining today without buying new hardware. You can just try and see how much you can mine. Click here to check your potential earnings
Instead, if you don’t own any GPU and are planning to buy the hardware for building a mining rig, be careful. Use the calculator linked above to see how much you could earn today, keeping in mind that the increasing difficulty could make the investment not profitable.
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