Adventures In Crypto Mining #1: Lessons To Learn

rt395 (65)in #cryptocurrency • 7 years ago (edited)

Adventures In Crypto Mining!

This is my series documenting my mining adventures. It is not intended for the experienced miner, but those who are new or lack any experience, unless of course the experienced miner wants a good laugh.

I started CPU mining back in April 2017 with Minergate so I could better understand crypto. I like getting my hands dirty and wasting time and money, ask my wife! CPU mining is not profitable though unless you have the latest, top of the line I-7 or AMD Ryzen, but it's a fun learning experience.

While I don't recommend Minergate, it is a good starting point before moving to buy your first GPUs and getting into real mining. Look, it even told me what a POS my MacBook was! I've upgraded since then and of course never mine on my MacBook.

After few weeks of getting nowhere I decided to pick up my first GPU, a 2gb GT 710 for $30. I knew it was crap, but again I wanted to learn without dumping too much $$ in as most of my spare cash was going straight into $BTC and alts. I also had to pick up a Windows machine to put the gpu in. Luckily there was a Dell on sale for $89 with Win 10, but I was going to find out buying a Dell for mining is a VERY bad idea.

Dell uses a lot of proprietary parts. One such part is their crappy power supplies units. Not only are they the bare minimum to run a PC, they use larger and smaller PSU connectors for the motherboards. So "IF" you can upgrade the PSU you have to make sure it fit's their socket or you have to buy an adapter. AVOID using Dell's at all costs. I considered this all a learning experience though so, even though buying a Dell was a mistake, now I know and wouldn't fork out even more $$ for a larger, more modern machine.

You might be asking why I didn't just build it myself, two reasons:

I needed a Windows machine. I haven't used Windows in over 10 years so I wanted to familiarize myself with them again. They seem to have improved on some things, but it still seems like a hodgepodge of shit. It's good for tinkering though, that's about all I can say.
I wasn't sure this was the right thing at the right time. Crypto was booming and I thought my money would be better spent in BTC and alts, rather than paying a couple hundred dollars to build a small rig. I could always re-sell everything too. This will be key later down the road.

So, I popped in the gpu and fired up Minergate. I was getting about the same hash rate as the CPU, about 25-30 h/s. Absolutely ridiculous, but fun! I was mining Monero just after Fluffy had pissed all over the investment community at Consensus.

I let this run for another month before breaking down and buying my first real GPU. I'll get into that in the next post in this series. Stay tuned...

Here are some useful links to help you better understand mining:

https://bitcointalk.org - The hardcore crypto hangout.

https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency - Coinwarz tells you which coin is the most profitable to mine at the moment.

https://www.nicehash.com - Site for pool mining, also has a useful profitability calculator at the bottom of the page.

https://www.cryptocompare.com - A good site for mining and all things crypto.