Years ago I was kinda bummed that I did not have the right hardware to get into mining. Bitcoin was young, and nobody knew what the heck to do with it. I thought about diving into the project myself, but...my machines were not se up for it. So as time passed I pretty much forgot all about it. Now, over the years I've collected a lot of misc hardware. The bad and damaged stuff I tear down and recycle. The parts and pieces that are not bad, or have some useful life left in them -get set aside and stored for "later."
After a while I got tired of seeing the piles of parts just collecting dust and not doing anything. I figured "why not put that all to work?" If it makes a buck or 2 a day....cool. If it's just pennies, that is fine too. It's like a digital piggy bank. It can add up after a while, and it's more than what you had yesterday. Besides, the parts were paid for and served their life already. And there are already 6+ PCs running in the house anyway. One more is not gunna tax the power bill any worse.
I ended up cobbling together a lot of old used video cards. I think the first version of my GPU mining rig was running ancient NVIDIA 720 series. I had 6 or more at one time. The rig has been running 24/7/365 now for a few years. I have upgraded the power supply a few times. Now it's pushing twin 1000 watt units. Those are feeding a couple of 3060 cards and a couple of older AMD 6000 series cards. Nothing is over clocked though. I mean, I could -but then I would probably burn up the cards. Long and steady makes the race any way. I'm not in a hurry.
I get asked a lot if my rig is "profitable." Like it has to make billions every day or something to justify that it's doing something. I don't see it like that. I see it as doing work, and getting paid for it. Sure, it's not going to replace my day job. But it DOES pay out every day. And it DOES put something in my digital piggy bank that I DID NOT have Yesterday. I don't spend or cash out the balance. So the value increases. Even when crypto get's tipped on it's head.
