After trading crypto over the last year, several months ago I decided to "invest" some of my profits into building a mining rig mostly out of curiosity, speculation, and profit potential. This was my first rig. Not very pretty, but functional none the less.
After trials and tribulations and admittedly not being the most tech savvy guy; I finally got it to run correctly with optimized settings for my cards for maximum hash and energy efficiency. I want to thank all the contributors from the various forums for troubleshooting and optimization tips. The completion of the rig, in hindsight; began my journey into the cryptocurrency space beyond trading (and ultimately here to steemit. Which I will elaborate on in another post). I began to dig deeper into the technology and the power and importance of decentralized networks / organizations and the paradigm shift that is underway. But most importantly I could get paid and profit. So of course I decided to expand!
This is my current rig(s). They will be maxed out to 8 cards per rig over the next few weeks and I will post an update in the future including hash rate, electric cost, and software/miner ext. I currently spend minimal time up keeping the rigs probably less than 2 hours per week. This will change over the next few weeks as I expand the rig and test it but once everything is up and running the maintenance time should fall back in line.
Financially, the rigs have paid for themselves, pay my entire electric bill each month and have also given me flexibility in my daily life and routine. The first few months mining, I mined currencies to build up my BTC and ETH positions essentially mining and trading the pair for accumulation. Afterwards I did the same thing for projects that I am interested in (KMD, ZEN, UBIQ, ETC, SC, DIBX) mining and trading for accumulation (a very risky thing to do which I don't recommend but encourage if you want to build up your stash of crypto). During this current downtrend I've been mining and exchanging/trading directly into BTC to take advantage of this Bitcoin Cash fork.
Mining has become an integral part of expanding my crypto portfolio primarily through mining / trading for accumulation.I spend a few hours per week researching new projects and what to mine next. I have a deeper respect and appreciation for miners who secure the various crypto networks and the "work" we do because mining is truly a rewarding/fruitful endeavor. Mining is a hobby that pays and I love it. Can that really be considered work in the traditional sense?
Please share your thoughts.
I'm right there with you with the idea of miners being the guys getting the network alive. Problem is, this is big money. Big mining plants is not helping the network completely, but rather being a potential risk for the network. While many newer cryptocurrencies with PoW have a low re-target difficulty, others might be stopped or halted for very long if a big "miner" goes offline. While this has not really been the case for bigger currencies yet, you see it all the time with small ones. They die because a "big miner" leaves the network.
I like the whole community miner aspect but, imagine what would happen even for a short while if one of the big Chinese miner facilities went offline.. hours, days or weeks before the blockchain would be re-targeted. Kinda makes me wonder. As I see it, the more smaller guys mining or helping the network the better. Great setup, thanks for sharing!
Very excellent points and I agree. As this space and ecosystem develop I think these issues will begin to be addressed and solved as governance, smart/asic resistant algorithms, and emergence of different/ hybrid consensus models evolve.
I tend to agree, ASIC resistant algorithms is one way, but I don't think "we" yet have found the ideal solution yet. New coins comes along all the time with the answer to this problem, who knows, the ideal solution might already be out there :)
Pretty decent setup.
I am looking forward to your updates on mining. I am looking into building a rig with my boys. A learning experience for all of us.
Thank you and it definitely will be a good experience.