Two good things happened in October 2017:  the price of Bitcoin grew insanely, and the crypto community voiced strong objections threat against the SegWit2x fork. Compared to a month ago, I now feel much more confident that Bitcoin will survive and thrive. Don’t get me wrong: the 2X fork will cause trouble and you must take precautions to avoid losing money. But most important participants have stated their position and the 2X crowd seems much smaller and isolated than what I originally thought.

The huge growth of Bitcoin price means that I was able to fully recuperate my investment in GPU mining hardware and begin making profits — but it also proved the point once more that GPU mining is not profitable. During the month of October, my rig was pulling a hair over 0.001 Ƀ per day and earned a total of 0.03219609 Ƀ. This makes a 17% drop month-over-month for a second month in a row, which is faster than the 15% decay I was expecting.

The accelerated decline in Bitcoin yield is probably related to the fact that hashpower sellers are paid in Bitcoins to mine other coins, and when Bitcoin gets more expensive, we get paid less. But on the other hand, had Bitcoin price level stayed at mid-August or early-September price levels, my rig would have been nearly unprofitable due to yield vs electricity cost.

Looking through the clean air from the top of Mt. Hindsight, it is easy to see that if I purchased Bitcoins in July and August instead of buying new GPUs, I would have more than doubled my money by now, and I would have saved a lot more still from my power bill. But this is not to say I have any regrets. I did learn a lot about GPU mining and now have much more reasonable expectations.

I am tempted to sell these GPUs and use an opportunity to buy more coins instead. But on the other hand, I want to play a little bit with Monero as it has some interesting properties, and I might need my rig for that. Decisions, decisions…