As the ethereum network difficulty increases, the profit decreases. As you can see from this chart below, I generated 1/4 ETH in around 20 days when I first started in late July. Now, in September and October, it took almost 40 days to generate that same 1/4 ETH (between the second and third rows in the table).

Days Mining	Total Ether Mined
21 days	0.27746 ETH
52 days	0.59466 ETH
91 days	0.84914 ETH

I purposefully didn’t include any mining profit numbers in the table above because I haven’t traded in any of my mined ether for money, and I also didn’t calculate power usage – I do have my energy meter hooked up and over 90 days I have used 389 kWh of electricity.

If we were to calculate my mining profit so far based on the highest possible price between July 21 and now (which was back in August so I wouldn’t have had the .849 ETHER mined then to cash in, but hypothetically), back on August 31, Ether hit a high of $383.

We also have to factor in my power usage at a cost of $0.10 per kWh, so total of $38.90 of electricity.

Total Max Potential Income on my GPU Ethereum Mining Rig: $325 – $38.90 = $286.10

So, after mining for 90 days, I haven’t quite paid off one of my GPUs. I have 2 – GTX1060s and bought them for $318 each. If I lived somewhere with free electricity (if I was renting, or if I lived with my parents and they didn’t care), then I would have made $325 which is $7 more than the first GPU cost.

However, remember, that was using the highest possible sale price for Ethereum. If I was to sell the accumulated Eth from my mining rig build now, I would only get $260 minus electricity costs.

If I had sold my accumulated ether at each of my data collection points, it would look like this:

Days Mining	Ether Mined	Ether Price at that time	Sold For
21 days	0.27746 ETH	$310	$86.01
52 days	0.3172 ETH	$275	$87.23
91 days	0.25448 ETH	$310	$78.89

Selling in that method, total income would be: $252.13

Holding all of it until today would give me mining profit of: $263.23

Mining vs Investing

Something that keeps coming to mind is the whole discussion on whether mining is profitable or if one should just invest the ethereum mining rig cost straight into buying ethereum.

If I had used the GPU costs on July 21 to buy $636 of ethereum, at approximately $225 per coin, I would have 2.82 ETH. At today’s value, that 2.82 ETH would be worth $874.20. In addition, I wouldn’t have had to spend money on the rest of my mining rig (everything needed in addition to the GPUs), and I wouldn’t have used $38 of extra electricity.

If we want to calculate Ethereum mining profit versus investment profit, it looks like this:

	Mining	Investing GPU only cost	Investing Full Mining Rig Cost
Investment	$1186	$636	$1186
Profit	$263.23	$238.20	$448.05
Return on Investment	22.2%	37%	37%

From this chart, we can learn a few things about mining ethereum or investing in ethereum. First, you’ll notice that no matter how much you invest in Ethereum, your ROI will be the same – duh! Embarrassingly, I only realized/remembered this once I had added the 3rd columns numbers.

This also shows that with only a mere 2 GPU ethereum mining rig, I’ve already made a 22% return on my investment, in just 90 days! No traditional investment, or business venture for that matter, can easily match that.

Please remember, however, this is during the previous 90 days when cryptocurrencies on a whole were in a bull market. I’ll be publishing some charts shortly that will compare the ROI for mining and investing based on the price of Ethereum staying flat, or even declining.

After all of this ethereum mining and ethereum investing calculations, I hope to be able to come to a concrete decision on whether I should invest in more GPUs or whether I should simply invest directly into the coins themselves.

What about you? Are you an ethereum miner or a crypto currency investor, or both? Let us know in the comments below: