Starting adventures in crypto mining
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Against the advice of well-meaning friends, I have been researching getting into crypto mining :)
Now, don't worry, I am not aiming to do this full time, or even be massively profitable. Turns out my electricity costs are such that I can come out ahead if currencies are chosen carefully. My goal, though, is to learn* as much as I can about the topics I mentioned previously.
*My hope would be I would get coins that rise in value of course!
My VR rig is on the way (Occulus Rift and a cheap PC with AMD RX580 GPU) but ideally I will build a machine for this.
I looked at ASIC machines. My friend Jamie is ordering these bad boys. Terrific specs, but I worry they will never arrived and be out a LOT of money.
Bitmain seems to be a crapshoot if you can actually find inventory, and I don't trust the used sales in terms of getting what you order.
The nice thing about building a rig, other than the fact I like building things, is a lot of the gear has a healthy resale value.
So looks like I will probably build a rig based around GTX 1070/1080 cards, and build an OpenBeam frame like this one on thingiverse.
Good Luck, keep us updated what you earn with witch coin! Even when I think the future is "Distributed Prove of Stake" and "Miningless" cryptos. The future is not yet here and i might still be wrong :-)
I'm sure the mainstream will move on but there are enough alts to make it fun for the time being I think :)
I mined with a couple antminer s7's back in the day. Ordered them straight from Bitmain. They were very LOUD and produced lots of HEAT. My electricity costs $.07/Kw/h so @ today's BTC difficulty and price one S7 would net me around $7 profit per day. I don't run them right now, however, for the above reasons. Hopefully soon I'll upgrade and get the newer S9's and dedicate a place for a proper set up (to deal with heat & noise) before I start mining again.
Interesting that they would still turn a profit :)
Yes, with the current price of bitcoin... they still do turn a profit. If prices went below $4k or so I think it's a break even and a loss if prices go below $2k. My plan in the future is to get some solar panels and/or wind generators so the only costs for mining is maintenance/repair of the electrical generating system (plus asic/psu fans which do go out on occasion) and then store the BTC for long term. I haven't checked the profit potential of mining BCH recently, I heard it was even better than bitcoin, but I could be wrong.
We are a lot starting new with cryptos!
Ive gone the 6 x Rx580 to mine eths! Asics are too much for an average humans house xD Looks to me that AMD will be caring about mining better than NVidia, they actually have a mining firmware, check AMDs site!
Goog cryptoluck mate! ;)
Awesome and thank you :)
My personal position on this is that you need to add in more than the cost of the basic hardware, you need to add in the cost of cooling. If you happen to live in a place which is below 70°F for most of the year, you have a pretty good natural thermal base to dump into – but if you live in most of the Western world, the cost of electrical power for the rig itself and the electrical power to cool it and the rest of the house nearby is probably more than you will earn at a plausible rate.
Depending on the amount that you're looking to spend on the hardware, I would definitely consider whether or not parking that money in a bond or other more traditional, more predictable financial repository wouldn't be a lot smarter.
The hardware may be re-sellable – or it may not, if bitcoin takes a serious dive or different proof of BLANK strategies become the norm, or any number of other unpredictable situations, which taken as a whole might be more likely than bitcoin continuing to go up and up and dragging the rest of the market with it.
As people have told me about both cryptocurrency and Vegas, "only take what you can afford to lose." But more than that, "only take what you can expect to lose."
I may be risk adverse, so take any financial advice I deliver with a grain of salt. And all the financial advice you find anywhere else.
Yeah it was -32c here a few days ago. Our electricity is $0.7CAD KWH, people are profiting with $0.10 USD. Hardware will be useful for my 3D/vr anyway which is why I got rx580 budget GPU. All of it has been run by the accountant so at the very least the business is buying and offsetting :)
Fair enough.
I know that people are profiting off of cryptocoin mining at relatively midpoint costs for electrical power, but their idea of "profit" for the amount of time and effort and overhead that goes into making it is very different from mine. People brag about making $7 a day on a multithousand dollar computing rig, and while that might be $7 a day of profit – it's $7 a day on a piece of machinery that certainly can break and will require maintenance, that increases the load on your air conditioning system, and that's just one more thing that you have to worry about keeping running all the time.
I'm pretty sure that I could shave $7 a day off of my personal expenses by eating slightly smaller portions.
Now, getting these toys because they're fun to play with – that is the motivation I completely embrace! Building yourself an extra box that you intend to be your tinkering system, throwing a VR headset on it and a nice graphics card, and first and foremost having it for the pleasure? Game on, I'm totally in. Occasionally running some coin mining on it because, after all, you've already got it and it's serving its purpose otherwise? Sure. That's cool.
I'm really hesitant to engage with the overall idea that "you can make money with it" is a good plan at this point, but "you can have a lot of fun with it," is a great plan at this point.
Maybe that just reflects my own particular priorities.
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