Mining datasheet

[DrugAdvisor]

Antminer lifespans ultimately works out much shorter than gpu setups.

They do come with sorta warranty but it takes a month to send back to china and another to come back. After that your warranty is mostly void.

Do check your yields before purchasing though, some wont return your investment before the warranty runs out.

 

[king bast]

I've been meaning to update this thread for a while.

I'm still mining, and it is still profitable to do so, but it's pretty hard to determine exactly how profitable, for a few reasons.

First, when I started mining , ETH was at something like $3 or $400 (AUD) whereas now it's about $1200, so while I was making about $50 a month early on, it's closer to $200 a month now. It depends how you calculate your profit - on immediate or future value? If you believe in a particular crypto, or the market in general, mining at a loss now might eventually become profitable if you HODL.

So the price fluctuations make it difficult, but another issue is that I don't really care to calculate in depth anymore. A few hundred worth a month is nice, and gives you a steady stream to consolidate or take new positions, but it's barely significant in comparison to trading gains. When your portfolio can increase by $1000 in a day, it's hard to dedicate much time towards acquiring $200 a month.

Thankfully, I don't need to dedicate any time to it. it just runs, and periodically gives me a bit more funds to sink into crypto, which has now taken the place of DCA. I haven't put any money into crypto for months, and have even withdrawn my entire principal (plus a bit more) while my balance continues ticking upwards.

It won't last forever though - the amount of ETH I could mine was steadily decreasing, which is why I switched to ETC a few weeks ago. It was just lucky that ETC happened to pump soon after, and if that trend continues, mining it will be profitable for a long time to come. And when it's not, I can switch again to lower difficulty coins, or turn the miner off and use the powerful PC I've built for what it's meant for - gaming and VR.

 

[BURNΞR]

@kingblast

Surprised you are mining in Australia. Electricity is mad expensive here compared to everywhere else I've ever lived. Something like 34kw/h. I guess it's still profitable regardless?

 

[king bast]

26c kw/h where I am, so yes, power is a significant consideration, but I've based the design around keeping it pretty efficient.

I added a used 280x and found that it drew almost as much power as the other 3 cards combined. Decent hashpower, but it wasn't worth the power consumption, so I sold it again (at a profit) on gumtree.

AMD cards aren't really suitable for mining where power costs are high. I've got a current-gen one which isn't too bad, but anything earlier just drains the juice. The other 3 cards I've got are Nvidia ones which don't generally have as much raw power on most algorithms, but are miserly on power compared to their AMD equivalent.
I've also got solar panels to feed it, at least during daylight hours.

If I didn't have the panels and/or if my rig was all AMD, I could very well be losing money.

 

[BURNΞR]

I've actually thought about buying cards and bringing them to Eastern Europe where electricity is 4-10kw/hr but then I remembered the import taxes on the cards

 

[Sidney Crosby]

Do you guys have tiered pricing for electricity in Oz? Like for example the price electricity cost goes up 50% or whatever after a certain threshold?

I don't plan on getting into mining but for some reason find it surprisingly interesting.

I guess if you lived in a colder climate you could easily just bring in outside air to cool the your mining room, I also remember seeing some article about a guy heating his whole house just with the heat generated by mining.

 

[Glaucon]

I am trying to put together my first rig, but the video cars shortage is ridiculous. Currently I am waiting to catch some good deals, not happy.

 

[BURNΞR]

I hear you Glaucon. I was planning on buying 6x Vega rig but realised nobody had them for sale except at punitive prices 3-4x the retail price. I found that alibaba has good prices but you need to order in bulk to get the better deals. By buying in bulk you get better deal but you will still get shafted by import taxes. Can't catch a break. This why miners keep their mining operation in China, no import tax and electricity is cheap af from what I've heard.

 

[Glaucon]

I hear you Glaucon. I was planning on buying 6x Vega rig but realised nobody had them for sale except at punitive prices 3-4x the retail price. I found that alibaba has good prices but you need to order in bulk to get the better deals. By buying in bulk you get better deal but you will still get shafted by import taxes. Can't catch a break. This why miners keep their mining operation in China, no import tax and electricity is cheap af from what I've heard.

Yeah. I am hoping that the current stagnating crypto prices and the VGA shortage flush out those who are not in this in the long run.

6xVega rig? I can not even find basic gtx 1060s for good price I gave up for now finding 1070s for the next few months...

Crazy times. I have a bit of a tulip mania feeling tho.

 

[Gas]

I've got an old computer here with a decent gfx card. Just booted it up and it still works. How can I find out which coin I should mine for the best return? As painlessly as possible.

 

[king bast]

Go to whattomine.com.

It doesn't feature a full range of coins, but it will at least give you an idea of which algorithm is most profitable for your card. Once you know that, you can look into finding new, low difficulty coins using that algorithm that might pump in future.

For example I have an AMD card which does best with cryptonote algorithm (ie monero), but since it's only the one card, I'd be waiting forever for a payout at moneros difficulty level. So I found a coin which was in ICO stage called Graft that uses the same algorithm, and have been mining that for the last few weeks. If it stays at ICO price when it hits exchanges, It will be at least twice as profitable as if I had mined monero over the same time period.

 

[king bast]

I hear you Glaucon. I was planning on buying 6x Vega rig but realised nobody had them for sale except at punitive prices 3-4x the retail price. I found that alibaba has good prices but you need to order in bulk to get the better deals. By buying in bulk you get better deal but you will still get shafted by import taxes. Can't catch a break. This why miners keep their mining operation in China, no import tax and electricity is cheap af from what I've heard.

Yeah. I am hoping that the current stagnating crypto prices and the VGA shortage flush out those who are not in this in the long run.

6xVega rig? I can not even find basic gtx 1060s for good price I gave up for now finding 1070s for the next few months...

Crazy times. I have a bit of a tulip mania feeling tho.

It seems to be getting worse too. I bought a 1060 6GB just after christmas at $320 - I look now and see the same card on the same website for $500. It's not as if cards weren't in short supply at christmas time either.

 

[Glaucon]

I hear you Glaucon. I was planning on buying 6x Vega rig but realised nobody had them for sale except at punitive prices 3-4x the retail price. I found that alibaba has good prices but you need to order in bulk to get the better deals. By buying in bulk you get better deal but you will still get shafted by import taxes. Can't catch a break. This why miners keep their mining operation in China, no import tax and electricity is cheap af from what I've heard.

Yeah. I am hoping that the current stagnating crypto prices and the VGA shortage flush out those who are not in this in the long run.

6xVega rig? I can not even find basic gtx 1060s for good price I gave up for now finding 1070s for the next few months...

Crazy times. I have a bit of a tulip mania feeling tho.

It seems to be getting worse too. I bought a 1060 6GB just after christmas at $320 - I look now and see the same card on the same website for $500. It's not as if cards weren't in short supply at christmas time either.

Yeah... The only card that is not that overpriced is the 1050 ti...yet

I have seens rx 570 580's for decent price, it is sad AMD cards are only good for Ethash basically. Nvidia cards are much more usable.
I hope AMD next gen cards will be better.

 

[Gas]

Go to whattomine.com.

It doesn't feature a full range of coins, but it will at least give you an idea of which algorithm is most profitable for your card. Once you know that, you can look into finding new, low difficulty coins using that algorithm that might pump in future.

For example I have an AMD card which does best with cryptonote algorithm (ie monero), but since it's only the one card, I'd be waiting forever for a payout at moneros difficulty level. So I found a coin which was in ICO stage called Graft that uses the same algorithm, and have been mining that for the last few weeks. If it stays at ICO price when it hits exchanges, It will be at least twice as profitable as if I had mined monero over the same time period.

What if your card isn't on whattomine? They don't seem to have many listed there.

 

[king bast]

The easiest way to do it would be to download nicehash miner and let it run the benchmarks.

https://www.nicehash.com/

This will determine which is the most profitable algorithm for your card, and from there you can either continue mining on nicehash, which converts your payments to BTC, or set up your own wallets and miners and mine your choice of coins, for yourself.

 

[Gas]

I'm using Linux and Nicehash doesn't work on it. For ease sake I think I'll just go with Eth.

 

[Glaucon]

anybody tried AMD threadripper CPU for mining?

 

[Tex]

Is there anyway to find the addresses of existing bitcoin mining operations? I'm looking to price out electricity rates right now, then build the site, but that is the inverted way of usually going about this.

Energy companies are hesitant to give me accurate rates without being able to analyze an existing building to give a proxy quote. Anyone know any mining company addresses (where energy is cheap) that I cite? I can move anywhere in the country for this.

 

[ms224]

Venezuela , electricity is real cheap but there
Are a few snags though ......

 

[king bast]

In the last week I've switched off the miner and sold it off as parts. With fiat value of crypto falling through the floor and GPU prices remaining sky high, it was barely covering power costs, so I felt the time was right to make my run for the exit. I managed to sell the GPU's for the same as what I paid for them, and put most of the proceeds into building a brand new gaming computer.

I've got a nice new computer and a few thousand dollars worth (soon to be zero dollars worth if trends continue) of crypto out of the exercise, so it was profitable while it lasted. I predict a glut of GPU's in a few months time as manufacturers ramped up production to cope with the demand...demand which will have tapered off considerably by the time they get to the market, so we should see prices come back down to a reasonable level. Then if a bull market returns, it could be worth getting into again, but I can't see it being profitable for several months at least.