Mining

Hello everyone

Well, I wanted to bring the subject to the table really as I've become interested in mining as a source of passive income, even beyond the current ethereum craze.

Some people who were mining the most profitable alt-coins before this ethereum craze have been greatly benefited from the ethereum boom. People who went in ahead while the solving difficulty was as it lowest also were greatly benefited. Somebody who begins today may still be greatly benefited from mining in a year from now. While Ethereum may die down new currencies aresure to pop up and less-popular ones won't see a surge in mining difficulty as bitcoin or ethereum have in recent history so I've become interested in bulding a mining rig and hope to have it running or at least bought by the end of the year

I thought about mining with my current PC as I have a 1070 bought before the craze and it's one of the most efficient ones (Zotac Mini, 1 8-pin plug ) but it isn't the most rugged in VRM or cooling (and the cooler is rather noisy), and it's my personal card so I'd rather not shorten its lifespan as it's my first really high end component (coming from a HD 6750) and was bought as a long-term investment, as the rest of the rig really. But I still ran the numbers and this is what showed me this has potential, potential to at least help me pay the bills.

My numbers with this rig aren't really bad at all. My GTX 1070 is capable of 32 MH/s as per some youtubers, I'm new and I don't know how good I'll be tweaking so I estimated I could get it to 30 MH/s as in stock it gets about 29 I think. Power cost for me is $0.14 per KW/s and according to an online calculator, running my rig at current spec without optimization draws 268W from the wall. I ran a calculator and these are my results:

Not too shabby I think, specially considering this is a gaming rig.

To get started I plan on getting a RX480 from the local used market, they tend to go for $260 so we're good there and get either a new kaby lake pentium and mb or AMD APU, whichever comes out the cheapest and offers the best platform generally and for the rest of the system get a solid brand new PSU and source a hard drive from the local market and maybe a case which i'll strip down for max airflow. If I manage to mine nicely on my own or in a pool for some months and the card pays for itself I might just reinvest in another one and keep them milking that ether...

What do you guys think?

Beware, many mining programs are filled with viruses that steal your hashes... It's incredibly common. Make sure you have a clean mining program before you start mining.

I was initially interested in crypto mining when I first started hearing about it in the news and on various websites, but as time has gone on it's left kind of a sour taste in my mouth.

We're reaching sort of an unpleasant threshold where people who were initially interested in trading crypto as a profitable venture and hobby that they hoped they could share with other people, now gradually but uncomfortably mingling with the kind of people who design software to mine crypto on a computer in secret.

I was very interested in Ethereum until the last year where it's been used in things like NFTs- I highly dislike non-fungible tokens and I feel like they're setting people down a bad path. Essentially a copyright gray-area where people can create a replication of someone's work without owning the actual work. It creates a lot of problems and I predict we'll start seeing court cases about it in the near future.

Not trying to bump a really old topic here; just felt like it might be relevant to talk about crypto as it's come back in the news as a huge thing recently.