What am I missing here?

Yesterday, I got myself a nice new GTX 1080 Ti for gaming. My friend mentioned it would be nice for mining with and suggested NiceHash as a start. I had checked it out before but my old GPU was AMD, the new client didn't work and I couldn't be bothered with the legacy client. NiceHash claims I can earn around £5 a day (when the card isn't in use) so I decided to look into setting up a small rig.

For a small initial outlay (ASRock H110 Pro BTC+, cheap CPU, RAM and SSD, a couple of beefy PSU's, 13 GTX 1080 Ti's - ~£9k), it would pay for itself in 5.4 months and then I would be left at £1600 profit per month after that. I could then re-invest, and grow exponentially.

The problem is, this seems all too incredibly easy. I get that the money you make will depend on the value of BTC, if it goes up you'll rake it in quicker, but if it plummets, you're income will drop drastically. You would still be left with a fair amount of hardware you could sell off though if you needed to.

So what am I missing here? If mining is this easy, why isn't everyone doing it? If everyone is doing it, why don't BTC prices drop? Is it that risky to invest £9k in to mining right now?

Submitted December 29, 2017 at 08:20PM by _SeventyNine http://bit.ly/2zMpW82