Anyone else mining crypto?

In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :

While your points are absolutely valid, that is a lot different than what I am doing, and at the scale some of those people are doing, completely and utterly incomparable.  I also never once said it was beneficial to any city.  Personally, I would love to see the bitcoin warehouses go away, and for it to go back in the hands of "regular" miners like me, but sadly that time is long since past.

One of the reasons I like coins such as Vertcoin is that it's ASIC-resistant, meaning those massive warehouses full of miners can't physically happen with Vertcoin.  It helps keep it in the hands of regular people.

tester (Forum Supporter) said:

Just put this in some sort of normal business frame work...

Up front Capital investment $1200

Current gross top line $200-300 ish

Reoccuring expense $30

Expected gross top line per month $300 at first. 

It will take about 3-4 months to break even on your capital expenditure before you make a profit. That assumes the mining rate is stable. If I understand this electronic mining business, the rate of crypto mined will drop over time. I would try to extrapolate that curve to make sure that this is worth pursuing. 

To put this another way; In 6 months, will this rig still be making $270ish net or more like $60? 

Your numbers are pretty spot-on, although my current monthly gross is $334 and it will increase this week to close to $400 as I'm getting a couple cards in the mail (although that adds to my up front capital investment as well).  As for the decline over time, there's a lot more to that than simply a 10% decline each year (recently read an article that said that.)  From what I've read and from everyone I've spoken to, as long as you take care of your GPUs and keep the temperatures in check, they don't really decline noticeably over time, with a few exceptions.  The rate that they mine at will slowly decline, but it's more measurable over 5 years than 6 months - I have a card that used to get 27-28mH/s back in 2015.  Now it gets about 24, not due to the card getting worn, but due to the difficulty rating increasing over time as more people start mining.  However, the value of Ethereum is massively higher now than it was in 2015.  So it's a mixed bag.

The difficulty of Vertcoin has actually gone down over the past 6 months, so I'm mining more now than I was whenever I started (I really should look that up, somewhere around 4-6 weeks ago I started seriously mining.)  Ethereum is the big daddy; the most profitable crypto to mine, and it will stay so until December, when it becomes no longer mineable.  The difficulty will increase, so I'll mine less Ethereum, but the value of Ethereum will likely increase, so whatever I mine will be worth more.  I've already seen this during the time I've been mining.

It's a very multifaceted issue with no simple answer.  Planning for a 5-10% decrease each year is a safe bet, absolutely.  However, I am currently mining Vertcoin primarily with GPUs from 2013, and aside from using more power than modern cards, they perform extremely well; better than modern equivalents in fact.  I hope that sheds a bit of light on it.  I tend to ramble so please let me know if I need to focus more on something specific.

infinitenexus said:

In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :

While your points are absolutely valid, that is a lot different than what I am doing, and at the scale some of those people are doing, completely and utterly incomparable.  I also never once said it was beneficial to any city.  Personally, I would love to see the bitcoin warehouses go away, and for it to go back in the hands of "regular" miners like me, but sadly that time is long since past.

There is nothing wrong with what you are doing with a few computers in the back room. 

There is something seriously wrong with bringing a big operation like a bitcoin warehouse into an area that is experiencing exponential population growth and has serious problems with their electrical grid already. It's not like coming to a small town in the Pacific Northwest with an oversupply of hydroelectric power. 

If they want to do something that big, they could go out into the middle of East Texas where they get a lot of wind and sunshine and set up their own solar arrays and windfarms to power the whole thing. 

In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :

I agree with you completely.  

So I was dealing with a pretty interesting issue over the past day and a half or so that really frustrated me.  I wanted to switch one of my rigs from mining Vertcoin to mining Ethereum Classic, since it's a bit more profitable and because I want to make sure I diversify my mining.  The dag file for Ethereum Classic is about 2.7GB so I figured I could mine it with my 3GB cards, as the interwebs says I can, but I ran into an issue where all the mining pools require you to have a 4GB+ card.  Annoying, but whatever.  So I started mining Ethereum Classic, using Gminer and some AMD cards (R9 290 and R9 390) and was getting about 37-38 mH/s.  I kept getting errors and my WiFi kept dropping the signal, probably every 30-90 seconds, which would restart the mining process, so I essentially wasn't mining anything.  I finally shut down the rig out of frustration.  I even tried three different USB WiFi adapters, and nothing helped.  I spoke with a friend of mine that started mining about when I did and he told me that he had a LOT of problems mining with AMD cards using Gminer, and he finally switched to Phoenixminer and it worked great.  So this morning I switched to Phoenixminer, and after a good amount of time configuring it (a real pain in the rear getting all the commands right) not only does it work great, but my WiFi suddenly works again and my hashrate with the same cards went up to 49mH/s!  I don't understand why running AMD cards with Gminer would cause my WiFi to become unusable but I'm just glad switching to Phoenixminer fixed it.

Also got my first payout in Ethereum Classic, so now I'm $2 richer.  Getting closer to Lambotown erryday!

Also after seeing me do this for a while, my boss now wants to try some mining so he had me raid the basement and get anything usable before it's sent to the electronics recyclers tomorrow morning.  So I have a pile of good motherboards/CPUs and some power supplies, and also managed to find three working monitors that are just missing their stands - which is fine because I'd rather wall mount it or bolt it directly to my mining rack at home anyways, to keep the area more tidy.  So a good day, all around.

I think I am going to give this a try, just need to go through my basement and see what I can put together.

Are you using WiFi in a mining rig?  I would definitely recommend and Ethernet cable off of your router for reliability purposes, even if you're not transferring a lot of data. 

In reply to Aaron_King :

All you really need is a decent modern graphics card.  Whatever card you have, just google the hashrate of it for specific crypto coins.  All of the information is out there!

dj06482 (Forum Supporter) said:

Are you using WiFi in a mining rig?  I would definitely recommend and Ethernet cable off of your router for reliability purposes, even if you're not transferring a lot of data. 

At home I'm using a wired connection, but at work I use the wifi as mining on the company domain is a no-no.

I finally got around to really trying HiveOS, which is a version of Linux made specifically for mining, and I absolutely love it.  Over the next week I'll be switching all of my miners over to HiveOS.  Being able to monitor all of my mining rigs via my cell phone is awesome.  I also learned that those R9 280Xs that I'm fond of that are 10-11 years old (because they're essentially a rebranded HD 7970, which came out in 2011) still get 27mH/s on Ethereum Classic, although they're also pretty good at being space heaters.

I don't know how many others are watching, but crypto is moving up again.  When I started mining somewhere around two months ago, Ethereum was around 1800, if memory serves me correctly.  Today it broke $3,000.  Ethereum Classic is up as well, as is Vertcoin so I'm plenty happy.  Even Dogecoin is moving back up again (I don't mine any but I bought some back in January/February).

I'm having to estimate a bit, but looks like once I get one more GPU in the mail (GTX 1080) and get everything switched over to HiveOS and mining, I should be doing pretty well.  Using some online calculators, my hashrates will be around 150mH/s on Ethereum, which works out to $331/month at current Eth prices, and 153mH/s on Ethereum Classic, which is $243/month if I maintain those hashrates for a full 30 days (which I won't, I'll increase them.)  

Quick question Nexus, do you know how much the processor's cache affects Monero mining? Mine will be mining off an E6600 from a free lenovo, and the only upgrade- and spending $55 on a free computer turn crapcoin miner- is to the QX9770 which gets me only ~0.15GHz of processing muscle but more than 6x that cache.

Also, good to know about HiveOS, I'm gonna try that since I've really liked Linux Mint so far.

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

You need essentially 2mb of L3 cache per processor core in order for the miner to use it.  So if you have a quad core processor with 4mb of L3 cache, then the miner will only use two cores.  A quad core processor with 8mb of L3 cache will use all 4 cores.

I wouldn't bother spending money on upgrading something to mine Monero.  That's one of those coins you just go ahead and mine while your GPUs are mining ethereum or whatever.  Unless you have a Ryzen 5 3600 or newer AMD processor, don't worry about making profit from Monero (unless you're fine with setting up your miners and leaving them for a year to hit your minimum payout in your mining pool!)  However, Monero is an excellent coin to mine to help learn more about mining.  It's how I started.  If you're using XMRig, always make sure to run as an administrator in windows, or sudo in linux so you can enable huge pages.

HiveOS is awesome.  I would recommend watching a couple good how to videos to help you set it up, but once you get the hang it's fantastic, and easy.  You flash it onto a solid state drive, create the worker (your mining rig) on your HiveOS account online and it gives you the config file, you put that on the SSD with HiveOS, plug that SSD into your mining computer, turn it on, and it might ask for a rig id and password (which it gives you when you create it) and then that's the last you touch your miner.  From then on you set up your overclocking, your mining program, everything in a web browser.  And I can make changes and monitor my 3 mining rigs from my cell phone.  It's really fantastic.

In reply to infinitenexus :

Hah, the E6600 has two cores at 2MB Cache. One whole core! Maybe I'll make 50 cents on monero a year lmao

Thanks for the info on HiveOS. In the next day or two I'll plug everything together and see what dumbassery I get.

Everything is mining away happily!  At least for the most part.  I was moving two of my cards to a new rig just to tidy up my computer desk and after plugging everything together (with my new power supply I had recently purchased from eBay) I heard a zap! sound and immediately smelled burning plastic/rubber.  I immediately unplugged the power supply and everything else and slowly checked parts one at a time.  Fortunately, my RTX 2060 is fine.  Unfortunately, my P106-100 seems to be fried.  So that's bad.  So I just ran the RTX 2060 by itself, and then last night I heard a strange sound and it was coming from that same power supply, specifically the fan.  I should have been smart and just unplugged everything then and there, but the sound went away.  This morning I checked it and the fan no longer turns on that power supply, so I shut that mining rig down and trashed that power supply altogether.  I bought another one (this time brand new and still in plastic) and it'll be here soon, then I can get that card back up and running.  I might disassemble my P106-100 and see if I can figure out what broke and maybe try fixing it.  I mean, it's already dead so I can't make it worse.

I also learned that I can use XMRig, what I use to mine Monero, and send that hashing power to my prohashing pool and get paid out in a different coin, so I'm trying to switch that over but the configuration is proving to be a pain.  It'll be nice to up my hashing power a bit though.

Other than that, I'm at 170mH/s on ethereum classic.  So that's good.

Stopped by Micro Center the other day and they had a factory refurbished RTX 2070 for $400 so I snagged that up.  It's getting 42.8mH/s at 115 watts which is pretty awesome.  4 month ROI.  HiveOS, the linux-based operating system I use, allows you to have 4 mining rigs for free.  After that it's I think $3/month, which is negligable but I'm still trying to avoid that.  I currently have 3 rigs and I'm trying to maximize that, so I'm doing some shuffling of graphics cards so I can put each card in the best place, mining the best coin, etc.  Once I get all my cards running together, I'll be at a pretty awesome hashrate - I forget what the exact hashrate was for ethereum and ethereum classic but it came out to $702/month.  So that's awesome.  It's only taken me around 2 months to get there, too.

I had initially set a goal of mining $500/month by the end of the year and $1,000/month by the end of next year.  I've blown right by that first goal and if I keep this up, I'll be at $1,000/month in about two months from now.  It's looking more and more like I'm going to be mining a pretty respectable amount in the near future so I'm really going to have to put some time and thought into exactly what to do with all this crypto.  Saving for my retirement in 20 years is the obvious answer, but I could also do something like pay off my mortgage early.  We'll have to see.

Ugh, with my gaming desktop just sitting idle maybe I should look into putting it to use as an ether mine. I haven't been mining since the days of sub $100 bitcoin.

So I had a big whoops moment.  Still not entirely sure exactly what happened, but I had three GPUs (fortunately older ones) die on me.  I had them mining happily away and I decided to swap some out and rearrage.  So I removed a card and added two different ones and booted everything up, and HiveOS kept loading until it got to the mining software, then it would reboot, and kept doing that on a loop.  I shut it down and made sure to zero out any overclock settings and tried booting it again and it wouldn't recognize the three GPUs.  I tried each of them on a windows rig as well and the fans spin and the lights light up but the computer doesn't recognize them.  Now that I'm typing this, I think what happened was I forgot to zero out all my overclock settings before I first rebooted it, so when I hooked up the two new cards it applied my then settings to everything - and with different cards that doesn't always work.  I'm guessing that did something to them.  So the bad news is, I'm down 3 cards.  The good news is, they're older AMD cards that weren't very efficient anyways, and even with this problem I can still sell them on eBay for probably $100 each in this insane GPU market.  If I can do that, I won't have lost any money, overall (factoring in sell price and the money they mined while I was using them.)  It still upsets me a bit though.  However much I get from selling them will be put towards a solid new GPU.

Other than that I've just sort of "tidied up" my rigs, so now going forth in the future I know exactly what to buy, to keep things working smoothly.  And I'm still at a pretty solid hashrate/monthly profit.

I've found that other than fixing little whoopsie moments like this, mining is very anti-climactic.  I love putting in all the work to pick out, purchase, configure, and set up GPUs to mine with, and once I get them going...  They just mine and mine and mine, and don't really need any supervision or tweaks or anything.  One of my rigs at home has been going steadily for I believe 19 days now.  I'd like to mess with it more but there's really nothing to do but let it sit there and make money.

In reply to infinitenexus :

That's my fear going with ASIC.  An ASIC whoops can cost a lot.

infinitenexus said:

 ... exactly what to do with all this crypto.  Saving for my retirement in 20 years is the obvious answer, but I could also do something like pay off my mortgage early.  We'll have to see.

1. Mine crypto
2. ?
3. Profit

methinks there's a whole lot of hopes and prayers in that question mark.

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

Not really.  I have around $600 in crypto right now and I'm getting another $200 payout this evening.  So that's $800 worth of crypto, and if I sold it for US dollars right now, that would be $800 in dollars.  No hopes and prayers needed!  I could continue that way, selling crypto for dollars each time I get a payout.  Or, I could hodl the crypto a bit and let it increase in price, then sell.  I'll probably do 50/50 between those two.  Crypto, especially coins such as Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Ravencoin, and many others are expected to continue to increase in price pretty substantially over the next decade.  I'll sell half for safety and hodl the other half and enjoy the price increase.

In reply to Stampie :

I'm still too scared to mess with an ASIC miner.  The potential for profit there is huge - I could buy a handful of them and literally double my current paycheck.  But as you said, one whoops moment and I'm out thousands.  Fortunately my whoops moment involved around $500 in GPUs, although they had mined at least $200 by the time they did this, so selling them for parts on eBay will recoup most of the money.

In reply to infinitenexus :

Your posts have inspired me to try mining on some hardware I had sitting around.  I loaded up HiveOS on a usb drive, and booted it up:

I have an old desktop with a Nvidia Quadro M5000, which is of the same family as the GTX 1080, so I expected somewhat comparable results.  Instead, I am seeing only 2.4MHs hashrate mining Etherium on the Hiveon pool, which barely breaks even on electricity costs.  I have to assume I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, as I can't imagine this relatively powerful card isn't capable of at least turning a profit mining.  Any advice on what to check?

andy_b said:

In reply to infinitenexus :

Your posts have inspired me to try mining on some hardware I had sitting around.  I loaded up HiveOS on a usb drive, and booted it up:

I have an old desktop with a Nvidia Quadro M5000, which is of the same family as the GTX 1080, so I expected somewhat comparable results.  Instead, I am seeing only 2.4MHs hashrate mining Etherium on the Hiveon pool, which barely breaks even on electricity costs.  I have to assume I'm doing something fundamentally wrong, as I can't imagine this relatively powerful card isn't capable of at least turning a profit mining.  Any advice on what to check?

Overclock settings will improve performance and reduce power.  For the Ethereum algorithm, you'd generally want to reduce your total power, overclock your memory, and underclock your core clock.  I'm not familiar with that card but google tells me other people are getting about the same hashrate as you.  It might just be a bad card for mining.

Got a

Got a few bucks in my atomic wallet now.  On top of this I have around $80 in Vertcoin in a different wallet.  Also I took this screenshot I believe two days ago.  Today the same amount of crypto is worth $772.45.  I'm 10 days away from another payout of roughly $180 in Ethereum and a few days away from another $72 payout in Ethereum Classic.  I picked up two more inexpensive GPUs to help replace the three I accidentally fried, and they'll be installed Tuesday morning first thing.  I also put two of my dead GPUs up on eBay and have bids on each, both over $50 now so that's a positive.  

I'm going to pretty much be going all in on mining.  Now that I'm making a decent bit per month I'm going to save up a few thousand and use it as a downpayment on a house.  Once I have a house I'll have more room to safely mine (and won't have to worry about heating up my tiny living room) and I'm going to focus on building this up and doubling my hashrate.  My ultimate goal is $3,000/month in mining income, and I'll be saving it all until I retire.

In reply to infinitenexus :

Hey Nexus, got a big question for you, and I'm like one step away from doing the same!

So, the computer is actually working, and honestly it shouldn't because most of the parts are from clearance bins and a dumpster. Right now I have a 450w power supply powering the box and old 250GB hard disk, running that old processor I mentioned that BARELY makes it in terms of minimum requirements. I'm about to install HiveOS on it now, but I have a question.

I have several of these PCI-E to 16x cards meant for miners, that output the video card to USB3.0. Because of Serendipity, I have a perfect number of slots to max out HiveOS with 4 cards, one taking up each 3.0 slot and a final one taking the remaining PCI-E 16x slot on a riser. But i've never used these before- do they handle all the power the card needs to run, since its only doing spicy math? Or if the video card needs it's additional power plugs used, how should I go about doing that- like a second, separate power supply for instance?

And to add onto the video card issue- if I have enough that work and this thing begins mining away, what rig did you make to hold all the cards? I'm considering attaching them to the outer case panel, but I could also make just a much large box to hold it all in.

EDIT: Right now I only have the 1070 and I hope to add cards piecemeal. I have two friends with 1060 6GB that they could part with soon for less than $100 each, but I'd like to hear other good cards to use for good returns on a "berkeley around and find out" style of project.