Mining For Beginners

BTC mining requires very expensive ASICs, most mineable alts are mined with GPUs which are now hilariously expensive thanks to crypto-mining.

Depending on currency/algorithm the preferred setup will be AMD or Nvidia or a mix of both to mine multiple currencies/algorithms.

So you'll probably need a PC anyway - or do you have a gaming PC already? Good GPU?

Just stop now, itll be a terrific money sink.


2K is basic gaming territory, a single effective mining rig is more like six, going smaller just eats your profits. Also, electricity is stupid expensive here which eats you too.

oo7tk wrote: »

Nope I would need the full setup starting from scratch, looking to invest circa €2k.. Well really wondering would it be a good investment out of my crypto profits..

Not really a good investment, especially if you're choosing fairly well-known and well-mined currencies.
Most likely you'd do much much better splitting profits into undervalued projects currently being developed or into an ICO that really looks appealing and has huge room to grow with a great use-case.

oo7tk wrote: »

I have just gotten board with Crypto investing and looking for something different, if I could get something that would be set up and plug and play for that money I would be pretty happy..

I wouldn't trust a rig that was already built and mining-ready right down to the mining software being set up - it wouldn't be hard for a slightly knowledgable miner to change the software so they get to skim a percentage of your take. You have to set that stuff up yourself or you're taking a risk.

oo7tk wrote: »

From the very small bit I do know it would not be Bitcoin mining more like Litecoin or ZCash..

LTC requires ASICs too nowadays, GPUs too inefficient.
The best money to be made in mining is if you find a good project relatively early on and it's being developed but their hashrate & difficulty are still low, but you expect the value to rise massively.

oo7tk wrote: »

Can get VAT back on electricity which also helps..

Extremely helpful.

As ED E says though, I wouldn't specifically spend 2k for a single or double GPU miner, waste of funds and too many other parts of that build reducing your ROI.

I disagree. For €2k you could build yourself a very well performing 6 card rig based on 6 * RX570 / RX 580 4GB @ GBP 200 each and now and then available. The rest of the money will easily cover the rest of the rig. A big mistake is to overpay on the GPUs

At todays ETH rate, this will generate about €10 per day (after electricity costs), or a full pay back of well under a year, which is an amazing return on a low risk investment. Even if all crypto was worthless the day you started to mine, you could break up your system and sell on for a total loss of a few hundred EUR (worst case scenario)

Don't kid yourself though. It's a steep learning curve and it takes up a lot more of your time than you'd have thought. Their is also quite a bit of downtime unless you carry loads of spare parts. The bigger your operation, the more profitable it is

Why don't you just buy one GPU (GBP200), stick it into any old €50 PC from adverts (if you don't have one lying around) and give it a go?

smacl wrote: »

Not sure any old cheap 2nd hand pc will do the job, crappy psu may not have connectors to suit card, bios can be problematic too

Fair point on the PSU, but you can buy a £0.99 incl shipping double molex to 6+2 pci-e cable on eBay that will do the job even if your PSU is a crappy 300W one that came with your Dell / HP etc. An RX570 4GB will not use more than 160W stock (less if you tune it for mining) and the rest of the system maybe 50W.

Also the BIOS will not be problematic if the crappy old PC is less than about 10 years old. I have a test rig based on a S775 Conroe mobo from early 2008 just sitting in bits on my desk. Literally under €300 can get you mining if you own nothing to start with. You can just use the GPU in the case, no need for any open air frames for just one card.

Would mining something like groestlcoin or vertcoin with a normal rig yield better returns?

smacl wrote: »

Prices are all over the place, but the GTX 1050ti gets a decent review for mining and can be got for £156 from Amazon.co.uk. I Picked up a SAPPHIRE Radeon RX270 Nitro 8GB for £217 ex VAT from Amazon a couple of weeks ago but none left at anywhere near that price.

Thanks, just ordered one using the £10 off voucher that's valid just for today, good timing on that

Tinder Surprise wrote: »

If someone say had access to 35 computers is there any mining software that could be run on each and farm them all? - WIN7 i3 machines with a couple GB RAM each.

The machines in question have no one operating them and have plenty of redundant CPU power as they currently just run an instance of RDP and that is it

CPU only scripts aye.

Dades wrote: »

I'd love to get into but this my time is full already with much less interesting stuff.

Just wondering... if you're mining a particular coin and it doubles in value - does it automatically become twice as lucrative to mine at that point? Or does it become harder to mine or have other factors affect it...

Similarly if a coin drops through the floor I assume it becomes unviable...

Yes and yes. You're mining the current value of the coin.

Dades, you can switch coin every minute if you wanted. You just have bat files ready with scripts to start mining different coins (in Windows). Stop one bat file running and just click on the next one to start mining another coin

The only thing is that you mine to a pool (mining on your own means it takes months or even years before you make some money and it is very risky) and the pool only pays when you have gathered up a certain amount of coin. In case of ETH this is usually minimum 0.05ETH. So if you mine 10 different coins and none has yet reached minimum payout, then you have got not a single payout of coin into any of your wallets

If you switch regularly, it's probably clever to switch straight after a pool payout

And electricity in Ireland is relatively cheap. Provided of course you pick the best deal every year (most people seem to never do this :eek:)

24h (day/night) meter is free of charge with free installation. Typical cheapest day rate is then 14c and night rate 7c. The night rate applies for 9 hours a day, so 14 * (15/24) + 7 * (9/24) = a bit over 11c incl VAT per kWh on average

I'm interested in mining on solar energy myself

Following on from my post above:

Rig build and cost:
GBP EUR
Intel Celeron G3900 35 41
Kingston SSD 120GB 45 52
Palit 1070ti x 2 840 979
8GB DDR4 73 85
Asus Z270A motherboard 115 131
EVGA G2 850w 130 151
Aero 1070ti x 3 1357 1593
GPU risers 6 pack 21 24
Voltage meter 5 5
EVGA GQ 850w 111 130
1 to 4 pci extender 23 26
GPU risers 6 pack 26 30
Additional PCI cables 21 24
Motherboard standofffs 4 5
Triple PSU cable 3 3
Shipping 36
Timber for frame 30
3345


The cost of the rig was split 3 ways between myself and two friends so 1,115 each. One of whom has a large house in the country with cold rooms, ideal for the rig. Another did woodwork for the leaving so was tasked with the frame. I provided the tech knowledge.

The above rig contains 5 GPUs in total but I have all of the equipment needed to expand it up to 12 which is the maximum that this motherboard can take if I get the cards and a third power supply. Each power supply has 4 VGA ports so can support 4 cards and with the additional pci cables I have split each 8 pin to an 8+6 pin to so that the cards take the 8 pin and the riser takes the 6 pin. The risers come with PCI to sata cables but these are not recommended. Use a dual or triple psu cable to connect up all of the power supplies so that they turn on and off in sync with each other (or just use the paper clip trick on youtube which works fine). Everything was bought either on amazon.co.uk or ebay.co.uk using the parcel motel UK shipping address to get them to Ireland.

I took initial inspiration from a guy on youtube called iMineblocks and his '13 gpu rig' (he ends up just using 12). I used the same frame design as him (each frame supports 6 and they can be placed beside each other). He gives out the exact measurements in one of his videos. I also used another video from Cryptomined 'Asus z270-A 12 GPU rig' which shows how this motherboard can be used for 12 cards. And one other video that explains how best to set up the bios for this motherboard.

We chose Nvidia 1070ti cards as they are new and efficient and will have better resale value over AMD. They were also reasonably priced at the time but have since release increased dramatically from 420 GBP to circa 530 GBP. Advice would be to get the cheapest version of whatever card you get, which is usually the blower style. Minimal performance difference between different versions.

Software and coins mined:
The rig runs on Windows 7 and the gpu drivers are just downloaded from Nvidia. I use teamviewer to remotely access the rig, awesome miner to control the miner and send me email notifications if something is wrong and the actual miner I use is EWBF's Cuda miner. Different cards are more efficient at mining different coins, AMD generally good for Ethereum, Nvidia generally good for coins on the Equihash algorithm such as Zcash or Zclassic (ZCL). Use whattomine.com to see. MSI Afterburner allows me to under volt the cards to save electricity and overclock the cards. The cards are undervolted to 135w from 180w. Sounds complicated but is actually very easy. If you push it too hard, the screen will start to show artifacts or just crash the miner and/or system. Reddit/bitcointalk.org generally is good for getting other users' undervolt/overclock numbers.

Revenue and operating costs:
This can be quite dependent on fluctuating prices and fluctuating mining difficulty which can go both up and down. But in total, this 5 card rig produces around 2580 sol/s when mining ZCL. I'm still waiting on the voltage meter to arrive so am not sure exactly what it is pulling at the wall in terms of electricity but I predict around 900w (135w * 5) + 150w for motherboard/hd + 15w for each riser. The pool mining fee is 1% on suprnova. Electricity is 16.2c per kw. 900w for 30 days = 648kw * 16.2c = €105 monthly cost.

Coinwarz calculator shows income currently at 2580 sol/s = $618 = €495. So net income each is €132 a month on an investment of €1,115 = 8.4 months return on capital. However ZCL is currently trading at 131 dollars and peaked at 231 dollars earlier this month. This can greatly affect the return. We are holding the currency in a wallet and obviously hoping for price increases. I am a converted believer in crypto and I think most of the main coins will continue to rise in 2018. So in my mind it will make the money back much faster and even if it doesn't 8.4 months is bloody awesome for making a 100% return by anyone's standards. Added to that is the fact that hardware is currently appreciating not depreciating in value. Added again to this is the fact that we have already invested in a second PSU which is only 25% utilised at the moment and the motherboard is only 42% utilised. So scaling up will increase profit. But for now, Nvidia cards are a little pricey.




One of the LEDs on the aero cards never worked as you can see but card functions fine. This picture was taken before I got the additional PCI cables.

smacl wrote: »

Great post Prezatch. Have you measured the bandwidth used for the above and factored that in to the running cost, or is it significant?

Bandwidth is minimal, my friend lives out in the sticks and can only get wireless broadband which is about 5-7mb. Ping is around 70-100 on speedtest.net and this works fine. The software only needs to send and receive small signals and responses not huge chunks of constant data. We used some spare AV500 homeplugs to get internet into the storage room where the rig is.

Dades wrote: »

Thanks for posting. Really interesting.

I'm guessing the radiator in the last pic isn't turned on much!

The house was originally built before electricity was invented so some of the unused rooms in it get pretty damn cold :pac:

unkel wrote: »

^^ I wouldn't buy a 1050ti, they have a poor hash rate for the money. It's no wonder they're still available



Good question. The higher the value of the coin, the more interesting it becomes mining it (this depends on the value of other minable coins too), so more people are going to mine it, the difficulty goes up and so the payout goes down. As it stands, the availability of decent graphic cards for reasonable money is poor, so the difficulty is not going up by much. All this can change of course!

Some people change what coin they mine all the time, based on the highest profitability. There are even websites that tell you what to mine, based on your hash rates and your electricity costs

I'm really just doing this out of interest in the topic, don't expect it to do much more than maybe pay back the cost of the card as the power is free as in somebody else is paying for it

unkel wrote: »

No I'm not. Have you read any of my other posts in this forum about my mining? I went into mining as a very low risk investment strategy. Mine and sell. Worst case scenario is if all coins become worthless overnight, my maximum loss is the depreciation on my hardware



Where do you get all this from? How could you get this so wrong? I've seen you posting on boards tech forums for numerous years and I nearly always agree with your posts, but you are very off the mark here.

For starters, I'm paying 0c per kWh used for mining. I'm on a fixed price contract with Just Energy. The second best deal at the moment is with Energia who offer something like 13c day and 6.5c night, so average 11c. I don't know where you get your 23c from???

I was unclear, using USD as the common currency, 23c US being about 19c. As an BEV driver IIRC maybe you're way more up to date on energy pricing. Seems like 17c is more typical. Is your fixed price one of the plans that's only good for year 1 until the "recalculation"?

smacl wrote: »

Ok, very new to this, but surely the risk isn't that the cost of mining a given coin such as ETH rises so much as the cost of mining and the value of the coin diverge. I had thought the cost of mining tends to track the value of the coin to large degree, so your ROI isn't going to be affected to the degree you suggest above.

Your direct costs stay the same, but your output decreases.
Say 500 kHashes produces 1 COINX per day
You pay €1/day to run that rig
Difficulty doubles over 3 months
You still have 500kH, pay €1/day to run, but you get 0.5 COINX for that same cost base and initial CAPEX.

So they only way to flatline that is for COINX to double in value in 3 months.


In my example of ETH that held roughly true but thats not a given. As circulating supply increases over time the artificial scarcity could lose weight.



@Unkel: Liquidating the hardware does protect you - unless there's a firesale/flood. 1000s of 1070s being suddenly sold off could tank prices.

ED E wrote: »

Seems like 17c is more typical.

More like 11-12c. Have a look for yourself on bonkers.ie. Changing to a night rate meter is free

ED E wrote: »

Is your fixed price one of the plans that's only good for year 1 until the "recalculation"?

Only 1 year. Then I'll switch to Energia and I will pay 11-12c. I'm also considering getting solar PV installed on my roof. Something I wanted to do for a long time, but if you don't always use the full production, it makes no financial sense. If you mine, it makes a lot more sense!

ED E wrote: »

@Unkel: Liquidating the hardware does protect you - unless there's a firesale/flood.

Indeed. I did not overpay for any of my cards though. If I sold them all today, I'd make a profit. In fact I sold 2 cards a few days ago that I bought for €220 and €200 second hand a few months ago. The both sold for €265 (after making me about €100 each in coin). They were inefficient old R9 390s - solid cards for mining though!

I'll most likely sell more cards when it will get warmer this summer. And probably end up with one large rig once I have to start paying for electricity again next September. By that time I expect to be well past full ROI

There is no other low risk investment strategy out there with returns anywhere near cryptomining, provided you invest carefully. I'm also saving about €300 on my heating bills this winter. An added bonus

smacl wrote: »

I've spent €249 and have running costs of 89c per day. Were current mining conditions and market value to hold, I'd have paid off my up-front costs in over 4 months and be in profit thereafter.

And don't forget, you will then own the fully paid off €249 GPU. Even if it will be worth only half what you paid for it (firesale situation / all coin worthless), it means you have made a 50% return on investment in only 4 months)

Which is an exceptionally good ROI for a low risk investment