In the current market, what is the investment return of 30 series graphics card mining?

Popular Science About Ethereum

Introduction to Ethereum

According to the definition of Wikipedia, Ethereum is an open source public blockchain platform with smart contract functions. It provides a decentralized virtual machine to process peer-to-peer contracts through a dedicated cryptocurrency, Ether.

The concept of Ethereum was first proposed by programmer Vitalik Buterin between 2013 and 2014 after being inspired by Bitcoin. It roughly means "the next generation of cryptocurrency and decentralized application platform" and began to develop through 1CO crowdfunding in 2014.

Ethereum's token ETH is the second largest cryptocurrency by market value. Ethereum is also known as the "second-generation blockchain platform", second only to Bitcoin.

Figure: Market capitalization (Feixiaohao January 21)

Differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum

Bitcoin's vision is to become a decentralized financial system, while Ethereum's vision is to become a blockchain platform for smart contracts.

A smart contract is a program that can run automatically according to pre-set rules. This program can be used to implement various functions, such as running games, issuing other tokens, online insurance, lotteries, etc.

Running these smart contracts requires ETH, which is the relationship between the Ethereum system and ETH. Compared with the traditional centralized program operation method, Ethereum smart contracts have the advantages of open source, automation, fairness and justice. It is precisely because of the existence of smart contracts that Ethereum has unlimited possibilities.

Introduction to GPU Mining Machines

The graphics card mining machine is similar to a home desktop computer (without a display screen). Each machine has 6-10 graphics cards. The hardware of a graphics card mining machine is divided into: graphics card, motherboard, hard disk, power supply, memory and chassis. This article introduces the graphics card part in detail. Click to view the specific graphics card mining machine hardware disassembly?

Figure: Graphics card mining machine

30 Series Graphics Card Introduction

Graphics card brand and model

Currently, graphics cards on the market are mainly divided into A cards and N cards. A cards use GPUs designed by AMD, and N cards use GPUs designed by Nvidia. The 30 series are N cards from Nvidia.

Figure: Incomplete statistics of graphics card brands and models

After the public version was released, manufacturers purchased chips and designed their own PCB, cooling solutions and appearance. The major brands that made N cards included Zotac, Colorful, Gigabyte, MSI, Asus, etc. Different brands determine the differences in graphics card memory frequency, computing power, cooling, service life and price .

Zotac 3070

Colorful 3070

30 series graphics card market situation

Graphics card consumers are mainly in the gaming market, and the value of the gaming market determines the residual value of graphics cards after mining. Due to the architecture problem, the "energy consumption ratio" of A cards lags far behind that of N cards, so in the traditional gaming market , N cards are more popular with consumers. From the perspective of mining, the residual value is also more guaranteed.

Image source: Sanma Hanzo: Graphics card ladder chart updated in January

Among N cards, the 30 series is currently the most advanced graphics card. The graphics card grades can be distinguished by the prefix of the graphics card. The code name of the 2004 series is " GT ", and the code name " GTX " was introduced after 2005. The RTX series supports ray tracing technology, so NVIDIA changed GTX to RTX, symbolizing the most advanced graphics card currently. (RTX＞GTX＞GT)

The 30 series uses the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, new RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and multiple stream processors. Compared with the previous generation Turing architecture products, the performance is increased to 2 times and the energy efficiency is increased to 1.9 times.

Analysis of mining revenue of 30 series graphics cards

Data changes according to market conditions

①High residual value

Insufficient chip production capacity and the rapid growth of mining demand have led to a shortage of graphics cards in the market. High-end graphics cards still have huge market demand after 1-2 years of mining, and can still be sold in the gaming market with a residual value of about 30%. The price varies depending on the graphics card model.

②Static payback period

The static payback period refers to the payback period of the mining machine based on the current income level, assuming that all conditions remain unchanged. At present, the static payback period is about 200 days, and the residual value of the graphics card is about 30%, so miners only need to recover about 70% of their investment, and the investment risk is relatively low. Adding the residual value static payback period will shorten it by 30-50 days.

FAQ

Q: What is the difference between a graphics card-assembled mining machine and an integrated mining machine?

Answer: Integrated mining machines may have an advantage in efficiency, but they have no residual value after mining and cannot mine currencies other than Ethereum. Graphics card mining machines require high professionalism in machine assembly, have a higher residual value, and are more flexible in mining currencies.

Q: Where is the room for Ethereum to appreciate in value? Will it be the next Bitcoin?

Answer: Many bigwigs have mentioned in their views on this bull market that the market value of ETH is likely to exceed that of BTC. Currently, the market value of BTC is about 6 times that of ETH.

ETH2.0 will be a bigger benefit. Higher TPS will further improve efficiency. Applications running on ETH will be more likely to become phenomenal applications. At the same time, participating in 2.0 lock-up will reduce market circulation and increase coin prices.

Another perspective is: from the perspective of stock market valuation, the valuation of specific application-based targets will generally be higher than that of value storage targets. If ETH truly becomes the leading target of large application-based platforms in the future, then ETH will have better room for growth and will have a good development next year.

Question: I don’t dare to buy a graphics card. I don’t know when Ethereum will be mined.

A: ETH 2.0 is a major innovation for Ethereum, but it is also a gradual process. Ethereum will go through Phase 0 beacon chain, Phase 1 sharding, Phase 1.5, which is to merge ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0 through sharding and optimize all aspects of Phase 2, and finally realize ETH 2.0.

In the previous live broadcast of Waiyi, Uncle Miao, the product manager of Spark Mining Pool, shared the current progress of Ethereum 2.0: The possible impact of Pow is that the current Pow chain will migrate all data to the newly launched chain. The launch of this chain may be in the next year. The official answer is that even if all technical and engineering preparations are completed in February, it is still inclined to wait until after November next year, leaving this period to tell all Ethereum miners, coin holders and Ethereum ecosystem participants that this will happen.

*Data source for this article: Wabi.com, Shanghai Wayi Market Research