Being a Small Cryptocurrency Miner in 2018

I found an interest in cryptocurrency in November of 2017. I bought a few hundred dollars of BTC just before it went crazy and hit $20,000 USD. I bought in at $9,000 and sold it all at $17,000 and was immediately hooked. I almost doubled my small amount of money and got out before BTC started it's downtrend.

When January came around I started looking more into mining after my coworker told me he was using NiceHash with his GPUs when he was not using his computer at home. The ROI using NiceHash at the time and letting it do it's thing was only three months. I started looking for my own GPUs to setup a mining rig. It took me a month to find anything in stock and accumulate enough GPUs at a reasonable price. I ended up with four Nvidia 1060 6gb cards, one Nvidia 1080 Founders Edition and one EVGA 1080TI. The sketchy looking rig is below. The risers are of course powered by molex and not SATA!

As soon as I got everything put together and ready for mining BTC took a nosedive to $6,202 and NiceHash profitability took a dive with it.

(source: coinmarketcap.com)

This made me decide to start exploring altcoins and mining them myself hoping to make a better profit than NiceHash would have made for me.

The first coin I mined was Garlicoin, a coin made by a Reddit user for fun, and it was a blast. The coin was somewhat profitable at first and had a very active community which gave me entertainment all the time. The next coin I mined was Ravencoin, which is quite successful now, and this is what made mining a hobby for me and less of a pure investment. The Discord server for that community was super fun and grew rapidly. Discord was something that I never even heard of until crypto, but found out it is very popular among gamers. I mined it for one day and was getting 400+ RVN every few hours and thought the coin would have no value because I was getting so many so fast. I stopped mining RVN and then a month later it was wall the rage! I tried mining it again at that time and this is how I learned how difficulty works when mining a coin. I was barely getting any RVN per day and got bored with it. I did sell the few thousand that I had and turned a nice profit.

Right now I am still chasing altcoins that look to have promising whitepapers and just hoping for the best. I do lose money sometimes, but I am learning more everyday and having a great time despite the flat market we are in. Hopefully the market picks up and everyone that is keeping their rigs running, like myself, will have no regrets and BTC will "moon" once again!

I was also assigned my first position in crypto as a community manager for XDNA, a new cryptocurrency project, a few months ago which has been nothing but a great experience. The XDNA team is very professional and I am proud to have my name associated with them.