newbies guide to coin mining?

DuronClocker said:
1stminingrig.com is another pretty decent resource.

In all honesty, I'm fairly new to the mining thing myself. I only started throwing machines together over the past couple months. I'm going to be putting the 4th 7-gpu machine together over the next few days, and then I'm probably done. Basically at the limits of the power available in my garage, and it is damn warm out there. Its only going to get hotter over the next few months (central Florida). They put out a LOT of heat. Do not underestimate what 1000-1200 watts (per machine!) 24/7 feels like.

Still seems profitable enough to me to throw it all together. Power here is 12-13 cents/kwh, so it isn't too bad. Not quite as cheap as some places though. Revenue varies, but each card generally makes $2+/day after electric, so its $400-500/mo (after electric, before taxes) per 7-card machine. Each machine ends up costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500 including all of the small bits and pieces, so they'll take a few months to break even. Then it is just electric, broken parts, and taxes.

I'm not really well-versed in anything other than eth and zcash, and honestly I'm still quite the novice with those. I use Nicehash on Windows for my GTX 1080Ti (that thing changes between 4-5 different algo's several times a day), and I have ethOS running on the 7-gpu machines. They are running Claymore and connecting to Nicehash's daggerhashimoto pool. As I've mentioned before, it might not be the most profitable way of doing it (Nicehash's pool fee is 3%), but it is convenient to have everything going to one single Nicehash account and automatically dumped to a BTC wallet. One of these days I'll do a little more research and switch to a cheaper eth pool.



If I had to give starter advice to someone who has never tried it before:

1. Go to Coinbase. Set up wallet. Opinions vary widely on the best way to go about setting up a wallet. Coinbase to me was easy, and I don't intend on leaving enough BTC in there ever to really worry about.
2. Go to Nicehash and download their miner.
3. Put your BTC wallet ID in the tool.
4. Benchmark (if you're running AMD hardware, uncheck all boxes other than DaggerHashimoto just to get through the benchmarking faster.. none of the other algos are generally nearly as profitable on AMD hardware).
5. Start mining.
6. Install MSI Afterburner and tweak settings for best power efficiency & performance. If using AMD hardware, look into BIOS modding. Changing memory timings has an immensely positive impact on eth hashrate on AMD cards.
8. Deposit money from Coinbase to bank account.


That's it. Those steps work for both AMD and nVIdia. You just get to skip some with nVidia. You can literally be earning money within 10-15 minutes.
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So I finally got around to this. Looks like I'm up and at it. Don't know what I'm doing, but I followed your advice. Created a coinbase wallet. Downloaded NiceHash, disabled Crossfire, kicked off the standard benchmark, and started mining. It appears to be working. Any other tips you've discovered as you've spent more time with this? So I have to wait until I get X amount of value added before nicehash pays me right? Any idea how long that is?

What's the best way to cash out of this stuff, I don't intend to keep the digital currency - I don't trust it. Just something to try and see how it works.

Mining in action.JPG
 
Also, is there a graceful way to shut this down if I want to game? What do I lose if I stop this on occasion to play a game? Are there like intervals it's safe to shutdown and not lose work progress -- or is it just anytime?

Also - since I have two cards, could I potentially game on one, and mine on the other? Or is starting and stopping the mining client detrimental to productivity if I were to switch back and forth between one card and both cards? Maybe I could run two instances of Nice Hash Miner one for each card and just kill the GPU 1 when I want to play a game?

Also when it says share rejected in red - is that anything of concern?
 
Just stop it whenever you want. I like to restart after mining before playing any games.
 
Archaea said:
So I finally got around to this. Looks like I'm up and at it. Don't know what I'm doing, but I followed your advice. Created a coinbase wallet. Downloaded NiceHash, disabled Crossfire, kicked off the standard benchmark, and started mining. It appears to be working. Any other tips you've discovered as you've spent more time with this? So I have to wait until I get X amount of value added before nicehash pays me right? Any idea how long that is?

What's the best way to cash out of this stuff, I don't intend to keep the digital currency - I don't trust it. Just something to try and see how it works.

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0.01 BTC for external wallets IIRC.

To cash out, just sell them on Coinbase for USD and then transfer to your bank account.

Also, no need to mask your public Bitcoin address, you can share that wherever. It's your private key (in your case Coinbase holds this) that you have to keep secret :).
 
wolfofone said:
0.01 BTC for external wallets IIRC.

To cash out, just sell them on Coinbase for USD and then transfer to your bank account.

Also, no need to mask your public Bitcoin address, you can share that wherever. It's your private key (in your case Coinbase holds this) that you have to keep secret :).
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Do you cash out or keep in?

I was reading the original, first known bitcoin purchase was 10,000 bitcoins for a couple pizzas. Now the coins are worth $2600 each. That guy paid 26 Million dollars in today's currency for a couple large pizzas. :0

I cant help but thing this is all funny money and illegitimate somehow? I guess any monetary system is only worth the trust and confidence that the buyer holds, but it still seems weird to generate money literally out of nothing? There is no intrinsic value? The system of checks and balances is not fleshed out. All of these varoious alt-coins? Who is even validating the legitimacy of these different crypto systems. The whole thing has a air of corruption and anticipated consequence about it.

I'm now mining at a rate supposedly going to generate $550 ish per month. That seems crazy to me.
 
Well, I will say that I'd be rich had I not cashed out my bitcoins (and then litecoins! double d'oh!) during the early mining days but at the time I needed the money for bills and had no way of knowing they would be worth anything. Sure, BTC is ~2600 now but it could have easily been worth $0. It is a risky thing to hold onto and I would not advise holding any money in BTC that you can't afford to lose. With that said, if the $550/month you are making now covers the electricity and hardware costs and you have some BTC left over if you don't need it to live it might be smart to hold onto at least some of it long term.
 
another noob here.... is BTC the most profitable to mine right now? Is there anything that takes advantage of CPUs well? What was this I heard about plotting hard drives...?
 
mnewxcv said:
another noob here.... is BTC the most profitable to mine right now? Is there anything that takes advantage of CPUs well? What was this I heard about plotting hard drives...?
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You cant mine BTC anymore unless you are Tony Stark.
Yes, Verium is a great coin to mine that utilizes CPU.
The hard drive plotting is related to Burst Coin - there is a setup guide posted in this forum.
 
The estimate per day has dropped pretty strongly this week. In my screenshot above it was estimating $10.56 per day, now only $7.19 on my pair of Fury X cards.

That's a 30% drop from Monday night to tonight. (less than a week)
Anyone else seeing that? What do you make of the drop? Is the difficulty ramping that high that fast?
I've done some undervolting of about 17% but it only dropped my hash rate from 59,000 to 57,000. Seemed like a good trade off for the power difference delta but doesn't explain the 30% drop in daily mining value.

It looks like profitability for cards is going down? I've noticed the same trend on the 1080TI card this week. It went from $8.50- a day to like $5.50 a day. I'm too new to mining to know what this really means? Is it a trend? or a temporary blip?

If it trends like this -- in a week or two it won't be worth mining at all with power costs.

profitability in the last week.png
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^ All alt coins are down on the exchanges. Nobody knows if this is temporary or a trend. Confusion and uncertainty means fewer people are buying hash power, thus the miners are competing for scraps and the price of your hash power goes down further.

All kinds of factors affecting prices, and the massive influx of basement rig noobs certainly isn't helping.
 
DPI said:
^ All alt coins are down on the exchanges. Nobody knows if this is temporary or a trend. Confusion and uncertainty means fewer people are buying hash power, thus the miners are competing for scraps and the price of your hash power goes down further.

All kinds of factors affecting prices, especially now with the massive influx of basement rig noobs trying to make a quick buck.
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Thanks...interesting.
 
DPI said:
^ All alt coins are down on the exchanges. Nobody knows if this is temporary or a trend. Confusion and uncertainty means fewer people are buying hash power, thus the miners are competing for scraps and the price of your hash power goes down further.

All kinds of factors affecting prices, and the massive influx of basement rig noobs certainly isn't helping.
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IM GONNA MAKE SOME COINZ!

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lilbabycat said:
My blockfolio is down 25% since friday :mad:
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Me too. I got out of Ethereum and bought about 25 other coins, all of which are down just as much or more. Of the 200 coins on Bittrex, 8 are up, 11 are flat, 181 are down. Bitcoin itself is also down.

Hopefully this rebounds, else everyone is screwed unless they got out of every coin entirely or were holding one of those 8 coins that are up.
 
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I bought around $5k worth of Eth near the height, now it's worth only $3.5k. I guess I could sell and cut my losses but I'm hoping for a rebound. I think if it drops to half what I paid I might have to sell but I'll wait a big longer and see what happens.
 
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cybereality said:
I bought around $5k worth of Eth near the height, now it's worth only $3.5k. I guess I could sell and cut my losses but I'm hoping for a rebound. I think it it drops to half what I paid I might have to sell but I'll wait a big longer and see what happens.
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You can do just as bad in the real market. Ha.

I bought 8K worth of TBSI (a small international shipping company) they went belly up and I lost all.
I bought 10K worth of JCPenny at their peak back in about 2007. Now it's worth 10-15% of what I paid for it, and at this point I'm going to ride it into the ground before I sell it in hope they come back. My 1K remaining is not much incentive to jump out considering over 9K lost. (not to mention lost investing potential over the last 10 years).

Investing is like educated gambling --- it's not as much based on luck, but the other patrons participating are just as intelligent, or moreso than you/me.

Risk is not another word for opportunity -- I've had to learn that hard -- over and over again. Risk is Risk.

I hope you can earn your money back. Don't do like I do and ride something into the ground because you get emotionally attached and can't stand to lose the money. Then you end up with a TBSI or a JCPenny.
 
I started messing with stocks last year and made a dumb luck $6K bet on AMD that turned into $24K when I sold. Did buy a few other stocks, some loss some gain, but those about evened out.

This year I got more AMD, Nintendo, and a few index funds. All are up, but Nintendo is doing really well. All in all I'm up around $6K but both AMD and Nintendo could have a good year so I expect some nice returns.
 
cybereality said:
I started messing with stocks last year and made a dumb luck $6K bet on AMD that turned into $24K when I sold. Did buy a few other stocks, some loss some gain, but those about evened out.

This year I got more AMD, Nintendo, and a few index funds. All are up, but Nintendo is doing really well. All in all I'm up around $6K but both AMD and Nintendo could have a good year so I expect some nice returns.
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I started investing in 2003 when I got my first white collar job out of college.
I was making money hand over fist with Intel, AMD, ATI, and Nvidia. I knew their product cycles, read up on them on the forums and followed the engineering samples. The stock charts had big swings and dips based on product cycles. I made big money. 20k one year, 24k another year.

When that slowed down to a less peaky/profitable/easy money I started diversifying. Frankly, diversifying is where I lost most of the money I gained. I didn't know the markets well, how to read financials, or basically anything outside of technolgoy, so I relied on picks my friends recommended or my antecdotal thoughts on good brands. TBSI was international shipping at a time when online stores were booming -- Seems like a solid pick right?. 2008 happened and they went bankrupt. JCPenny was meant to be a safe investment in a retail store that had been around 100 years and wasnt' going anywhere -- at least that's what my nearly retired investment junky friend told me. . American Eagle lost popularity, Boeing (Dreamliner delayed), Chipotle, when they actually went down!!! I bought them at 95, sold them at 80, (after they'd recovered from like 40ish, and then after I sold they swung up to like $400 -- -dumb). Stuff like that - in many different areas in attempt to diversify -- I lost almost every time. I took a HUGE hit in 2008, and never really recovered. I think if I hadn't invested anything at all, or had just taken my money out of the market after I'd been dealing so successfully with tech I'd have been better off. As it is - I basically came out more or less even in the end.

Now I try to invest in things with dividends, or index funds and mutual funds. They seem safer and steady. I've realized I don't know more than the guys that do stock trading for a living (even though I now have a bit better understanding of the balance sheets and financials after an MBA class) - even so -- at best I'll probably do 50/50 picking my own stuff. A logical strong sector right now is healthcare as the large Baby Boomer generation retires, ages, seeks medical attention, nursing homes, hospitals, dies -- etc. I think that's the sector I'm trying to learn more about now.

As far as coins and crypto markets! Good luck is all I can say.
 
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I allow myself 5 to 10% fun money to invest in individual stocks, but everything else is in index mutual funds and well diversified. So far the 401k is doing very well after a meh first year where it was down a lot. Invest early, invest often, and invest with an IPS based on your need, willingness, and ability to stomach risk. (I'm very much a boglehead/clark howard kind of investor heh). I would limit my exposure to crypto to no more than I could afford to lose. There is definitely money to be made, but there's also money to be lost.
 
80% in long term hold
20% in medium risk
10% in poo poo coins.

for me its LTC, VRM/VRC, and then LBC,PTOY, MYR, QRL, and VIA

the issue I see with my friends who get into crypto lately is they will buy then refresh blockfolio over and over. No bueno.
As soon as you make the buy, set your conditional sell at 90% your buy to avoid significant loss. Making some money is easy at the moment; trying to make the 80 yard hail mary for a 1000x gain is rolling dice.
 
rehab said:
80% in long term hold
20% in medium risk
10% in poo poo coins.

for me its LTC, VRM/VRC, and then LBC,PTOY, MYR, QRL, and VIA

the issue I see with my friends who get into crypto lately is they will buy then refresh blockfolio over and over. No bueno.
As soon as you make the buy, set your conditional sell at 90% your buy to avoid significant loss. Making some money is easy at the moment; trying to make the 80 yard hail mary for a 1000x gain is rolling dice.
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When Eth dropped to 10 cents momentarily last week did it trigger conditional sales? It should have right?

https://www.google.com/amp/www.cnbc...exchange-after-multimillion-dollar-trade.html
 
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Difficulties are going up with all the increased mining. Please be aware that todays profit WILL NOT be next weeks profit (up or down) before you guys drop thousands into mining hardware. If you calculate that ROI is 30 days as of today, it could be 3 months next week...

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Made my first $50 mining this week, after about 3 days with the rig on so estimated at $500/month (if things stay steady). I spent $2,400 on the rig, plus electricity, I probably won't see a break even for 6 months.

Looking at it, it's probably not a great investment, but it was a fun little project and you never know what could happen in the future.
 
cybereality said:
Made my first $50 mining this week, after about 3 days with the rig on so estimated at $500/month (if things stay steady). I spent $2,400 on the rig, plus electricity, I probably won't see a break even for 6 months.

Looking at it, it's probably not a great investment, but it was a fun little project and you never know what could happen in the future.
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I did the same thing with litecoin during its first bubble. Tons of fun but unless you already have hardware paid for before the upswing its not going to make you rich most likely
 
cybereality said:
Made my first $50 mining this week, after about 3 days with the rig on so estimated at $500/month (if things stay steady). I spent $2,400 on the rig, plus electricity, I probably won't see a break even for 6 months.
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The only thing you can be sure of in mining is that things won't stay steady. Difficulty increasing exponentially on the most profitable coins, while profitability gets more dilluted every day with everyone and their mother jumping the bandwagon with noob friendly 1-click tools. Hell, profitability is less than half of what it was a mere 10 days ago.
 
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What's the best way to utilize these parts?

4x 2tb 3.5"
3x 1tb 3.5"
5x 4tb external
Ryzen 1700
2x rx470 4gb
750w psu
 
My gaming rig is idle most of the day, so I threw NiceHash Miner on there (super noob friendly 1-click tool lol after setting up coinbase, which took all of 5 minutes). Currently making $6/day on average.

What is cool in my situation is that my electricity is free since I installed a 20kw solar system and have net metering with the POCO. I make about 750 kWh more each month than I use and currently have a "bank" of over 6000 kWh. So mining seem the perfect way "burn" this bank. :)
 
pclausen said:
My gaming rig is idle most of the day, so I threw NiceHash Miner on there (super noob friendly 1-click tool lol after setting up coinbase, which took all of 5 minutes). Currently making $6/day on average.

What is cool in my situation is that my electricity is free since I installed a 20kw solar system and have net metering with the POCO. I make about 750 kWh more each month than I use and currently have a "bank" of over 6000 kWh. So mining seem the perfect way "burn" this bank. :)
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hah -- setup with "goberment" cheese incentives?

Glad my tax dollars could help fund your little mining operation. :)
 
haha yep. Got 30% federal tax credit and did the install myself, including all the electrical work, which involved a 400A safe disconnect and 400A automatic transfer switch, and of course paid myself a decent hourly rate for all the work that was part of what I submitted to the IRS. ;)

I must say I'm impressed with my 2 980Tis:

miningspeed3.JPG


Might as well fire up the HTPC with a 1070 in it, since it sits idle most of the time.
 
That's not a bad return actually. I'm getting around $16/day (6x 1060s) with Claymore but it looks like NiceHash would give me a better return. Hmm...
 
cybereality said:
That's not a bad return actually. I'm getting around $16/day (6x 1060s) with Claymore but it looks like NiceHash would give me a better return. Hmm...
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Return is relative and depends on goals. Nicehash is an easy enough 1-click tool for newcomers, but there are two layers of fees (the algo/miner programmer takes his fee - ie Claymore (dude's made tens of millions), and Nicehash takes a fee - up to 4% for transfers to external wallet, blech) - but Nicehash isn't direct-mining your own altcoins. All you're doing with NH is renting your GPU hashing power to someone else. Running Claymore via Nicehash just means you're effectively immediately selling mined ETH at the low price of today and forfeiting the potentially higher price of tomorrow.

Some people only see the short-game "gimme free money from my gaming PC, i don't want to learn or care about cryptocurrency" and that's fine. That's just grinding your GPU for the going rate of the moment, and being paid in BTC for your GPU time. But people playing the longer game are mining their own altcoins and holding onto them. I prefer the latter.
 
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i think im going to go after decred, havent tried it but like the project.
 
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