Ether and other major cryptos spend much of the weekend in the red to cap off a turbulent week.
Hello. Here is what happens:
Prices: Bitcoin spent much of the weekend in the red and below $19,000; other cryptos are also falling.
Knowledge: The “most profitable” mining GPU will not offer many rewards; investors would do better with a bitcoin mining stock.
Prices
- Bitcoin (BTC): $18,870 −0.5%
- Ether (ETH): $1,307 −1.1%
- CoinDesk Market Index (CMI): $941 −0.8%
- S&P 500 daily close: 3,693.23 −1.7%
- Gold: $1,652 per troy ounce + 0.4%
- Daily close of the 10-year Treasury yield: 3.70% −0.01
Bitcoin, Ether, and Gold prices are taken at around 4 p.m. PT. Bitcoin is the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index (XBX); Ether is the CoinDesk Ether Price Index (ETX); Gold is the COMEX spot price. Information about CoinDesk indices is available at coindesk.com/indices.
Bitcoin Sticks Near $19,000 as Most Cryptos Spend the Weekend in the Red
By James Rubin
With a few brief detours higher, bitcoin remained below $19,000 throughout the weekend.
The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was recently trading at around $18,800, down just under a percentage point in the past 24 hours. The decline capped a turbulent week of sharp interest rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks and declining economic indicators that increasingly point to recession.
“Bitcoin remained under pressure due to the macro environment, and we maintain that below $20,000 there remains strong opportunity for medium to long-term accumulation,” said Bitcoin manager CEO Joe DiPasquale. BitBull Capital crypto fund.
Post Merge Ether had a similarly dismal weekend almost entirely in the red. The second-largest crypto by market value recently changed hands at around $1,300, down more than a percentage point from the previous day at the same time. ETH traded lower in the 10 days following the merger, the technological shift from the Ethereum blockchain to a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake protocol. Other major cryptos were largely in the red with SOL and the popular memecoin DOGE each down more than 2%.
The CoinDesk market index, which tracks the performance of 20 major cryptocurrencies, was largely unchanged at around 940. The Fear & Greed crypto index measuring investor sentiment fell again from fear to fear territory. extreme.
Shares
The crypto price declines coincided with stock markets and other – riskier and safer – assets closing on a dismal Friday. The tech-focused Nasdaq and the tech-heavy S&P 500 fell 1.8% and 1.7%, respectively. These indexes have plunged five of the past six weeks amid lingering investor fears about inflation and the economy. Cryptos have largely followed stocks this year.
After chewing the Fed’s hawkish 75 basis point rate hike and deteriorating housing counts, markets will eye US durable goods orders for September, the latest US Conference Board consumer confidence index and new home sales in August. Economic watchers generally expect durable goods orders to resemble last month’s total and a decline in new home sales. On Friday, the University of Michigan releases its next index of consumer sentiment, which measures, among other criteria, consumer attitudes towards economic conditions and personal finances.
Meanwhile, the recent surge in the dollar has suggested that cryptocurrency prices may continue to languish, although CoinDesk’s Lawrence Lewitinn also noted in a Sunday column that cryptos, similar to stocks, have been more nuanced in their response to events.
For example, in the seven days following the release earlier this month of a disappointing consumer price index, the CoinDesk Smart Contract Platform Index (SMT), which includes ETH, ADA, and SOL, fell nearly 20%, while the CoinDesk Culture & Entertainment Index (CNE) – filled with NFT and metaverse related coins like ApeCoin’s APE and The Sandbox’s SAND slid “just” 6.9%. (Lewitinn noted that the fall in the smart contracts index stemmed at least in part from the decline of ether post-merger)
“Crypto is still in its infancy compared to other asset classes,” Lewitinn wrote. “It has its own idiosyncrasies and prices move for reasons other than, say, the strength of the dollar.”
He added, “For traders, thinking about crypto in terms of segments means, among other things, finding more sophisticated ways to trade in an environment of rising rates.
Despite Bitcoin’s choppy behavior over the past week, BitBull’s DiPasquale noted optimistically that “the $18,000 level continued to provide decent support.”
“If BTC doesn’t break down in the next few days, we could see upward movement in October with $24,000 and $26,000 being the initial levels to watch,” he wrote.
The biggest winners
Asset | Teleprinter | Return | DACS sector |
---|---|---|---|
Cosmos | ATOM | +3.7% | Smart contract platform |
Chain link | LINK | +3.3% | Computing |
XRP | XRP | +1.5% | Currency |
The biggest losers
Asset | Teleprinter | Return | DACS sector |
---|---|---|---|
Earth | LUNA | −7.3% | Smart contract platform |
Solana | FLOOR | −2.8% | Smart contract platform |
Dogecoin | DOGE | −2.4% | Currency |
Knowledge
Mining GPUs won’t generate much
By Sam Reynolds
The Ethereum merger happened 12 days ago, writing the obituary for GPU mining. A few days after The Merge, a graphics card maker took the glut of upcoming cards (which are already not that profitable to produce) to exit the business altogether.
Despite this, there are still proof-of-work tokens on the market. These are not exactly top tokens on the front page of CoinGecko, but rather altcoins like BitcoinGold, Neoxa (which has a market cap of $4 million), or Cortex.
AMD/Nvidia (Whattomine)
But the numbers won’t work for miners looking to source the now plentiful GPUs used for mining. In the best-case scenario, using the GeForce GTX 1060, which goes on the used market for $100, the value of the card is recovered in crypto mined in 35 months or almost three years.
And it’s based on a lot of assumptions. There is no stack with the token. The card doesn’t fail – a possibility with months of constant use – and the value of the token stays the same or increases (that’s a lot to ask in the crypto world).
Electricity costs are absent from these assumptions. Adding them to the calculation is beyond the scope of 2cryptocalc’s tool capabilities.
But what if you wanted to mine a semi-useful token? For this, consider WhattoMine, which gives us the possibility to calculate the profitability of mining based on the hashrate and the cost of energy.
Our trusty GeForce GTX 1060 has a hashrate of 23Mh/s for Etchash, the algorithm used for Ethereum Classic.
ETC (Whattomine)
Run the numbers, and it’s pretty dark. Using a single card and an average cost per kilowatt hour in the United States of $0.17, the card makes a profit of $1.80 per month. That means it won’t break even for 55.5 months, or 4.62 years.
If this were multiplied by one hundred, where the hash rate was now 2300 Mh/s, 100 of these cards would generate $182.6 in profit per month.
ETC (Whattomine)
Even with ASICs, specialized silicon designed for mining, the calculations aren’t any better unless you have extreme scale. Data now shows that the most profitable ASIC miner for retail miners, the Bitmain Antminer L7, generates $8 profit per day as part of the Nicehash pool.
It is more profitable to only own shares of listed mining companies.
Important events
08:30 HKT/SGT (00:30 UTC): Jibun Bank Manufacturing PMI (September/preliminary)
1:35 p.m. HKT/SGT (5:35 a.m.): Speech by Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda
3:30 p.m. H1HKT/SGT (7:30 UTC): Speech by Luis De Guindos