Mining For Beginners

Liamo_mu

unkel wrote: »

Blatant plug: I have a mining rig for sale for €755. It has just one GPU in it at the moment, but you can add up to 2 more. If this is not allowed, mods please remove the link

Linky



Above rig currently (checked today) makes $3 per day in Ethereum and at €0.13 / kWh (Energia, isn't it? ) it costs €0.48 per day in electricity



Exactly. I've had my biggest mining rig in the living room, which is north facing and the coldest room in my house. I have saved hundreds on my gas bill this winter because of cryptomining with rigs in strategic places in the house, basically in the 3 biggest rooms.

Sound for the info. How does adding a gpu work? Would it up the power consumption and electricity cost by much? I'm thinking short-term it might make a small bit of cash but if Crypto keeps increasing in Value maybe that's where the money would be made.

DO the GPUs or components in these rigs need to be replaced often?

unkel

Components should never have to be replaced unless you are unlucky, or i.e. if you picked an unsuitable (cheap) power supply.

To add a second similar GPU, switch the rig off, just click the GPU into a second riser combo and supply it with power from one of the leads coming from the PSU. Switch the rig back on and it will start mining immediately. Plug and play.

Electricity costs will go up by about 70% from €0.48 to €0.80 per day, mining revenue will double from $3 to $6 per day

Liamo_mu

Was looking at 3060 TIs as apparently they are efficient ( Not too high power draw)

It kind of sounded too good to be true though.

NiceHash have them as making 4 euro a day per one NET. 13 Euro Net with 3 cards.

So for about 1500-2000 investment you'd make just under 5k Gross in year 1. 3k Net

After 2 years you'd have approx 7k Net. Those numbers on NiceHash can't be right. Sounds way too easy.

That said Nice Hashes estimates where close to spot on for my current PC

Ryaner

I'm nearly positive you can't write off the cost of the hardware against the income from the mining, even when selling. You get to write down the hardware via the depreciation rule over 8 years which can be offset against CGT gains only best I can tell.

unkel

Liamo_mu wrote: »

Those numbers on NiceHash can't be right. Sounds way too easy.

Yes it is that easy. And payback periods / return on investment are extremely good. Don't go nicehash though whatever you do. They grab a huge part of your earnings, and for what.

Obviously the value of crypto can go up and down. And the more people join the bandwagon, the higher the difficulty gets, so the less you get paid. This difficulty has not been increasing all that much over the last few months as there simply aren't anywhere near enough GPUs being produced. And when they are, gamers and miners fight over them and pay top dollar

The main risk of getting into mining now is that you pay top dollar for hardware, coins might go down, difficulty will increase, and at some point supply of GPUs will get a bit better. And also Ethereum mining won't last forever. That said, what other non-leveraged investment pays you these sort of returns?

If things stay as they are my above rig will pay for itself in under a year. Or a return of 100% per year. Much quicker if you buy another GPU and stick it in. Much quicker again if ETH goes up (what a lot of people reckon is likely)

With the above caveats as well about mining difficulty, coins could go down, cards could become available, etc.

JibJabWibWab

Liamo_mu wrote: »

Was looking at 3060 TIs as apparently they are efficient ( Not too high power draw)

It kind of sounded too good to be true though.

NiceHash have them as making 4 euro a day per one NET. 13 Euro Net with 3 cards.

So for about 1500-2000 investment you'd make just under 5k Gross in year 1. 3k Net

After 2 years you'd have approx 7k Net. Those numbers on NiceHash can't be right. Sounds way too easy.

That said Nice Hashes estimates where close to spot on for my current PC

I bought a mining rig 2 weeks ago.

It has 8 RX5700 cards in a nice tidy closed case.
It's running HiveOS and puts out 442mhs at around 765w.

Today is day 16 of running it and it has 0.373 ETH in the wallet.

At that rate it should produce around 8-8.5 ETH in a full year.

It cost €8,500 + VAT.

I have it running in a quiet part of my workplace.
There's electric heaters in the building so it should cut down on heating there.

It's fairly noisy so I couldn't imagine having it running in my house.

unkel

JibJabWibWab wrote: »

It's fairly noisy so I couldn't imagine having it running in my house.

Crappy Chinese power supply? All the mining rigs I have built are virtually silent.

JibJabWibWab

unkel wrote: »

Crappy Chinese power supply? All the mining rigs I have built are virtually silent.

The noise comes mainly from the 4 cooling fans mounted on the case.

The advertised spec for the miner is 460m/hs at 1100w but on HiveOS it's showing 442m/hs at 765w.
The actual power consumption is way less than the advertised spec. Is that normal?

unkel

The only actual power consumption is at the wall. I bet it is far higher than the 765W you mention (that HiveOS is reporting). Put a wattmeter on it and report back

In other news, I hope to build a wee Ravencoin miner today with a GPU I'm picking up later. The card only has 3GB of VRAM so far too small to mine Ethereum, as the DAG is well over 4GB since late last year.

Liamo_mu

So what's the best way to mine Ethereum then?

I built a test setup with what I have at home.

Only a 3GB 1060 at the minute but am get an 8Gb card soon.

Will I be able to run a test so it's all good to go and then I can just swap out the cards?

Also does RAM type matter? I have a load of spare DDR3 ram but have no extra DDr4.

unkel

There's no "best way", any old motherboard / cpu from the last 10 years is fine and just 4GB of RAM will do. The graphics card alone determines how much coin you make (hash rate). For Ethereum you need minimum 6GB of VRAM (memory on the graphics card). You can do a test run with the 3GB VRAM card no problem, but the hash rate will just be 0

thunderdog

unkel wrote: »

The only actual power consumption is at the wall. I bet it is far higher than the 765W you mention (that HiveOS is reporting). Put a wattmeter on it and report back

In other news, I hope to build a wee Ravencoin miner today with a GPU I'm picking up later. The card only has 3GB of VRAM so far too small to mine Ethereum, as the DAG is well over 4GB since late last year.

What’s the mining plan for when Eth fully migrates to Ethereum 2.0?

On a separate note, I picked up a minebox there relatively recently as the psu on my open air rig died. Really handy, the gpu temps are kept low and no need for risers etc. The delta fans are pretty loud though so it might not be suitable for everyone.

On the 4gb DAG limit, I’ve seen videos online of people using lolminer to mine ethereum (in zombie mode), by plugging the gpus directly into the motherboard. It doesn’t seem to work for gpus connected to risers. I might try giving it a go over the next week or so to see if I can get that working

unkel

thunderdog wrote: »

What’s the mining plan for when Eth fully migrates to Ethereum 2.0?

You can't mine a coin that's proof of stake

When I started mining 4 years ago, people were saying ETH would be going PoS within months. And yet here we are, I'd say ETH2.0 is still a year or two away.

thunderdog

unkel wrote: »

You can't mine a coin that's proof of stake

When I started mining 4 years ago, people were saying ETH would be going PoS within months. And yet here we are, I'd say ETH2.0 is still a year or two away.

Ha yeah I’m presuming most will initially just move to mining ravencoin.

unkel

thunderdog wrote: »

Ha yeah I’m presuming most will initially just move to mining ravencoin.

I'm having a first go at mining ravencoin myself right now

Akesh

Looking to get into mining. Is it possible to get started for €500 and break-even after a year?

Are people still mostly mining ETH? Will ETH 2.0 impact the rewards for mining?

unkel

Akesh wrote: »

Looking to get into mining. Is it possible to get started for €500 and break-even after a year?

Yep. I'm this evening building a plug and play beginners rig running Windows 10, that I plan to sell for €395 which mines 3-4 Ravencoin per day and uses very little electricity (about 80W). This would include my time for helping you get started and mining into your own wallet. If it weren't for the big hit most coins took over the last few days, that would pay for itself in about a year (quicker if the coin goes up in value, slower if the coin goes down in value)

If you buy the parts yourself, and you buy well (which is not easy, it involves either luck or lots of time spent looking or both), you could deffo build a cheap rig yourself for less than that, that will pay for itself in well under a year

The beauty about Ravencoin is that there are no plans for it to go PoS like Ethereum (which ends mining) and that it is ASIC resistant, so you can only mine it with graphics cards. You can also mine it with graphics cards with 3 or 4 GB VRAM (unlike most other coins). And it is quite profitable, close enough to Ethereum.

Akesh

unkel wrote: »

Yep. I'm this evening building a plug and play beginners rig running Windows 10, that I plan to sell for €395 which mines 3-4 Ravencoin per day and uses very little electricity (about 80W). This would include my time for helping you get started and mining into your own wallet. If it weren't for the big hit most coins took over the last few days, that would pay for itself in about a year (quicker if the coin goes up in value, slower if the coin goes down in value)

If you buy the parts yourself, and you buy well (which is not easy, it involves either luck or lots of time spent looking or both), you could deffo build a cheap rig yourself for less than that, that will pay for itself in well under a year

The beauty about Ravencoin is that there are no plans for it to go PoS like Ethereum (which ends mining) and that it is ASIC resistant, so you can only mine it with graphics cards. You can also mine it with graphics cards with 3 or 4 GB VRAM (unlike most other coins). And it is quite profitable, close enough to Ethereum.

Thanks unkel.

Just doing a few quick figures (assuming everything stays the same):
Running 80W unit producing 4 RVN per day. Potential income - $285. Running costs (1.92 KwH x 13c x 365 days) $91.10.

Are there other factors I need to consider? I note you mention before not to use NiceHash. I had a look at 2Miners but it doesn't seem to mention cost anywhere.

Apologies if this is a stupid question

unkel

Akesh wrote: »

Are there other factors I need to consider?

The developers behind the mining software usually take 1% of the proceeds, and so does the mining pool. Also there will be downtime. All these eat a bit into your revenue (but not much)

Then there is potential maintenance costs, although it is rare that hardware goes wrong. And of course even taking that into account you are talking a very, very high expected return of what maybe 70% or so? Where else do you get that on a relatively low risk investment? I get 0.5% on my savings account and near half of that is taken by the tax man

I just wouldn't use nice hash unless you really had to. They take a large chunk of your profits and the transaction costs are high. You're better off either figuring out how mining works and DIY, or buy a turnkey mining rig where all this is already working

circadian

Any recommendations for Eth pools? I've been hitting Nanopool the last few days and I'm about a third of my way to the first 0.05 payout. It's been years (I mean, 2012) since I've done any mining and the landscape has changed a lot since then.

unkel

circadian wrote: »

Any recommendations for Eth pools? I've been hitting Nanopool the last few days and I'm about a third of my way to the first 0.05 payout. It's been years (I mean, 2012) since I've done any mining and the landscape has changed a lot since then.

Nanopool is sound. I recently tried HiveOn pool as they have zero fees (part of the HiveOS family) but I just found the whole interface not as good, also came across some downtime, which quickly eradicates any savings you might have from the no pool fees.

unkel

Akesh wrote: »

Looking to get into mining. Is it possible to get started for €500 and break-even after a year?

I've just built another miner based on an RX470 4GB card and put it up for sale for €645 - it's been running 100% stable over the last 12 hours.

Just outside your budget, but it mines about $2 per day at the moment and costs about €0.35 in electricity, so will break-even after just over a year at current crypto prices (down significantly on last week), quicker if the values pick up, slower if they go down

Linky

djan

unkel wrote: »

I've just built another miner based on an RX470 4GB card and put it up for sale for €645 - it's been running 100% stable over the last 12 hours.

Just outside your budget, but it mines about $2 per day at the moment and costs about €0.35 in electricity, so will break-even after just over a year at current crypto prices (down significantly on last week), quicker if the values pick up, slower if they go down

Linky

Not to be too snide but the above is hugely overpriced.

Given that mining a mining rig is just a normal computer and is only GPU intensive, any old motherboard/cpu/ram combo will do with a half decent supply which are coming back down to normal prices.

Given that mining can be a technical enough thing to do, for which you will need to read up on stuff. Make your own "rig" yourself from second hand parts.

Having said that, there is value to be had from consulting with someone for set up etc.

unkel

djan wrote: »

Not to be too snide but the above is hugely overpriced.

Given that mining a mining rig is just a normal computer and is only GPU intensive, any old motherboard/cpu/ram combo will do with a half decent supply which are coming back down to normal prices.

Sure. Why would you buy a rallye car for €5k if you could just use any old €500 banger? Just take out the seats and the bits that you don't need, upgrade the suspension, replace the engine with a beefier one and weld a roll cage into it, then fine tune the whole thing for speed and safety, no bother

djan wrote: »

Given that mining can be a technical enough thing to do, for which you will need to read up on stuff. Make your own "rig" yourself from second hand parts.

Having said that, there is value to be had from consulting with someone for set up etc.

Exactly. If you are handy building PCs and you like looking into how mining technically works and you don't mind making a few beginners mistakes along the way, then my rigs are not for you...

unkel

For the hell of it, I just built what must be the cheapest fully working mining rig for sale in the world, selling for €195 if anyone is interested

Using left over parts I probably have no use for, including a GTX745 4GB graphics card and running HiveOS, mining RavenCoin. I guess it will mine about 2-3 coins per week. What is it that they say? Reduce, re-use, recycle... this obviously won't make you a lot of money, it will take a long time before it pays for itself. It's mostly for educational purposes. That said, you could of course replace the graphics card with something beefier and get it to make you some money!

I'll put an ad up on adverts in a bit

Peter T

Out of curiosity what kind of internet speeds are needed to run a crypto rig ? something basic returning a few dollars per day

djan

Peter T wrote: »

Out of curiosity what kind of internet speeds are needed to run a crypto rig ? something basic returning a few dollars per day

Internet speed is not important but rather latency and stability of connection. The amount of files sent is quite little as you are just sending results of the calculations made on your machine.

unkel

Aye, just a 1 mbps connection is enough for mining. You rarely hear of anyone having problems mining because of a poor internet connection. With mining in Windows (and some Linux setups too) you could use a wifi connection, but I would recommend always using a wired connection

Also in most mining software (and / or on the mining pool interface) you will see a summary of the shares found, if you see more than the occasional stale share, it might point to a bad internet connection

Danger Fourpence

I've been looking to get started mining some Nervos CKB. I've had a look at the Hashaltcoin Blackminer F1 Mini +. It's a cheap unit but I'm not too sure if there's any profitability in it any longer. I also looked into an Antminer K5.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some way to estimate how I could mine this coin successfully i.e. should I look at a GPU setup or go down the miner path? Also, is there any point in mining this coin or should I basically put what I would consume in electricity into an exchange?

unkel

Danger Fourpence wrote: »

Can anyone point me in the direction of some way to estimate how I could mine this coin successfully i.e. should I look at a GPU setup or go down the miner path?

I don't know that coin, but if you find out what algorithm it uses you can check out whattomine.com to see how much you will make mining it, given your GPU(s)

Danger Fourpence wrote: »

is there any point in mining this coin or should I basically put what I would consume in electricity into an exchange?

What's your reason behind wanting that coin? Is it purely to make money, then just buy the coin. If you want to actually support the network and have the experience of mining / staking / masternoding, then go do that. Friendly word of warning though: it will take up more of your time than you think

BTW I sold that super cheap miner almost instantly Might make another one with a P106-090 GPU that I have here (this is basically a GTX1060 3GB without graphics outputs). Will be sub €500

Danger Fourpence

unkel wrote: »

I don't know that coin, but if you find out what algorithm it uses you can check out whattomine.com to see how much you will make mining it, given your GPU(s)



What's your reason behind wanting that coin? Is it purely to make money, then just buy the coin. If you want to actually support the network and have the experience of mining / staking / masternoding, then go do that. Friendly word of warning though: it will take up more of your time than you think

BTW I sold that super cheap miner almost instantly Might make another one with a P106-090 GPU that I have here (this is basically a GTX1060 3GB without graphics outputs). Will be sub €500

The latter. Of course I don't want a hobby that eats electricity and would obviously want to make money from it in the long run but I like the project and would like to support it and be part of its growth. I don't particularly think it's a cheaper way of accumulating the coins and would mine to hold them.

EDIT: It uses the eaglesong algorithm. Also, just spotted that the Todminer C1 pro is the most profitable option at $16 per day, but at a cost of $24k!

Icyseanfitz

What are people's opinion on ethereum? Will it continue to grow in value or decline? Trying to decide whether to buy some on top of keeping what I am mining or just sell as I get

MentalMario

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

What are people's opinion on ethereum? Will it continue to grow in value or decline? Trying to decide whether to buy some on top of keeping what I am mining or just sell as I get

Personally, I think the success or failure of ETH2 later this year will make or break ETH. If it does what it's supposed to, ETH will grow in value exponentially over the next few years. I think it's undervalued right now.


Anybody got any thoughts on HNT? Helium. The idea behind it is good and they're adding partnerships regularly.

There's a few people in Ireland making a lot of money from mining over the past 12 months. It might be a case of being too late to the party now though.

unkel

Last Ethereum rig sold, I'm only mining Ravencoin at the moment

JibJabWibWab

unkel wrote: »

The only actual power consumption is at the wall. I bet it is far higher than the 765W you mention (that HiveOS is reporting). Put a wattmeter on it and report back

Just to report back on this.
I got a watt meter and it's been running with the rig for 12 days.

It's showing an actual power consumption of around 1070w, or around 25.7kWh per day.

unkel

Thanks for the update. Don't use the wattmeter permanently though, they are not designed for that and they will be a fire hazard with that much current going through them. They are just for testing consumption.

circadian

MentalMario wrote: »

Personally, I think the success or failure of ETH2 later this year will make or break ETH. If it does what it's supposed to, ETH will grow in value exponentially over the next few years. I think it's undervalued right now.


Anybody got any thoughts on HNT? Helium. The idea behind it is good and they're adding partnerships regularly.

There's a few people in Ireland making a lot of money from mining over the past 12 months. It might be a case of being too late to the party now though.

I was looking at HNT and it seemslike an interesting concept. I would expect the price of the coin to drop within the next 6 months and there's a massive lead time on the hardware. You could order a kit and get it 12 weeks later, while in the meantime HNT itself has crashed.

thunderdog

circadian wrote: »

I was looking at HNT and it seemslike an interesting concept. I would expect the price of the coin to drop within the next 6 months and there's a massive lead time on the hardware. You could order a kit and get it 12 weeks later, while in the meantime HNT itself has crashed.

Yeah I’ve also been looking at it-an interesting concept alright. From the map there looks to be approx 100 of these hotspots in Ireland. The lead in time is the concern, but the relatively low cost of these devices in comparison (Nebra is approx €350) to a standard mining rig in addition to the minimal running costs makes it a relatively low risk investment.

It seems like you’d easily break even well within a year (or 7 days as it is currently!)

randombar

Hi Guys,

Looking to get a couple of components, currently have an old proliant tipping away as my media server and I thought I might as well expand it to dip my toe in mining while I'm at it.

Looking at the following hardware:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-ROG-Z490-G-motherboard-Ethernet/dp/B08826PLTH/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2L2H3H8XKIMTN&dchild=1&keywords=asus+p8h61-m+le%2Fcsm+r2.0&qid=1621249547&sprefix=ASUS+P8H61%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Antec-EarthWatts-Cooling-Modular-Warranty/dp/B077G9V84S/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=antec+true+power+650w&qid=1621249595&sr=8-2
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-Radeon-Strix-Graphics-Card/dp/B07XH69LKM/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=RX470&qid=1621249636&sr=8-4

Does this look like the right direction? Does the mobo look ok?

ThomondBardamu

GaryCocs wrote: »

Hi Guys,

Looking to get a couple of components, currently have an old proliant tipping away as my media server and I thought I might as well expand it to dip my toe in mining while I'm at it.

Looking at the following hardware:





Does this look like the right direction? Does the mobo look ok?

What are you looking to mine?

randombar

ThomondBardamu wrote: »

What are you looking to mine?

Open to anything really, just dipping my toe in the water.

unkel

Did you try adding that GPU to your cart?

randombar

unkel wrote: »

Did you try adding that GPU to your cart?

In my cart ok?

JibJabWibWab

GaryCocs wrote: »

In my cart ok?

There's a worldwide shortage of GPU's, you won't be able to buy them easily...

randombar

JibJabWibWab wrote: »

There's a worldwide shortage of GPU's, you won't be able to buy them easily...

That's fair enough.

But if I could buy the above list would that be suitable? Hard to find the right answers.

ThomondBardamu

GaryCocs wrote: »

Open to anything really, just dipping my toe in the water.

Personally I'd mine Monero, given its inherent resistance to ASIC mining.


There are a number of pools you can join such as xmrpool.eu. (minimum payout threshold is 0.07XMR which is €21.3 at current market prices).



Tbh have been debating trying to set up a rig but given the cost of the components and the fact that the market will probably peak between September and January I feel I probably have missed out.

randombar

ThomondBardamu wrote: »

Personally I'd mine Monero, given its inherent resistance to ASIC mining.


There are a number of pools you can join such as xmrpool.eu. (minimum payout threshold is 0.07XMR which is €21.3 at current market prices).



Tbh have been debating trying to set up a rig but given the cost of the components and the fact that the market will probably peak between September and January I feel I probably have missed out.

With Monero it's all about the chip I guess, so the better the chip the more you can mine?

Re setting up a rig, I said I missed the boat 3 years ago and never started, I'll keeping missing boats the way I'm going.

Re the above card, can anyone let me know if that's a good one to order? Real newbie here at this stuff.

GaryCocs

GaryCocs wrote: »

With Monero it's all about the chip I guess, so the better the chip the more you can mine?

Re setting up a rig, I said I missed the boat 3 years ago and never started, I'll keeping missing boats the way I'm going.

Re the above card, can anyone let me know if that's a good one to order? Real newbie here at this stuff.

Looks like you'll get a hash rate of around 30MH/s according to this. That works out to around 3 dollars per day in my experience, not taking into account cost of electricity.

unkel

Apologies, I shouldn't have put up that smartass post. But that card would cost you €900 incl. shipping, which is insane. It will make a bit over $3 per day in Ethereum, but this could well go down after EIP-1559. And that's before all your other costs, mining pool fees, dev fees, electricity and depreciation

I bought several of those cards, even as recently as 4 months ago for around the €90 mark. The current second hand value of them is around €350. For crying out loud, don't spend €900 on one.

randombar

unkel wrote: »

Apologies, I shouldn't have put up that smartass post. But that card would cost you €900 incl. shipping, which is insane. It will make a bit over $3 per day in Ethereum, but this could well go down after EIP-1559. And that's before all your other costs, mining pool fees, dev fees, electricity and depreciation

I bought several of those cards, even as recently as 4 months ago for around the €90 mark. The current second hand value of them is around €350. For crying out loud, don't spend €900 on one.

Nice one, wasn't sure what your point was I see you're selling a few bits