CryptoCurrency Mining with GPUs *spawn*

Yeah, I did some profit-taking this week. Between some lucky trades, a mined coin or two and this weeks big rise in BTC and ETH I'm actually up slightly over 100% notwithstanding my hardware "investment." So yeah, I pulled some out to cover a GPU or three.
 
You should get 25-26 mh from 290... running at 950/1250, and 330-350 sol/s for equichash
There are mem strap mods @techpowerup forums give'em a try
2 weeks ago i sold my last 4 290s for 250e each and bought 4*1060s
Almost same eth speed , much lower power usage, 3y warranty and better value in case of crypto meltdown :)

2 mize, small miners usually need the profit (or part of it) to reinvest&pay bills.

I notched down the power in watt man by 20 and it only droped from 25-26 down to 21-23 however thats when i'm using the pc like now. When i go away to work it goes back up to 25-26 . So not bad at all.

I don't really want to go through the trouble of selling the 290 i bought it used for $200 and its doing a bang up job for the last year / year and a half so i will ride it down the road. I will look at the mem strap mods after i get the vega 56 .
 
Yeah preferably you should buy new cards without selling the old ones... Power inefficient they may be, but they still bring on some profit.


In other news, sold off all my crypto today and ended up with 900ish $ in the almost two months i've been mining. Although tempting to hold on, I decided I should give it my best shot to try to pay off the investment first. The prices are quite acceptble now..

LE : Oh and btw, found some 1070s @ 370 EUR (and bought .. oups :) ) and rx 570s @ 240 EUR on stock somewhwere in Germany . Donno if it's a recovery sign or just a special shop
 
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Some of this was already know, but, OUCH anyway. If a lot of people move from eth, Zec will be flooded and the difficulty will rise too. Anyway, I guess a lot of cards will flood the market after august 25th...
 
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Good info Rufus.

I figure I'll switch to managed profit mining come 8/25 rather than participate in the GPU bloodbath. Ohio has cheap coal power (<0.09/kWhr residential) so I'll be able to eek out some eth for a bit before doing the alt coin shuffle. Good chance of >500usd eth come September.
 
Depends on your hardware and exchanges. Check whattomine or coinwarz and input your hardware to find out what had the (spot) highest profitability. For 1070s HUSH and ZEN are currently looking good but not beating ETH yet.
 
I've been mining on NiceHash with my 1060, hexacore Xeon CPU and a re-installed 270x and am (now) getting about a $3.00 daily return in Bitcoins (around .00085 bitcoins). I know I'm losing out on fees/efficiency, but I'm happy to let the software and the service worry about turning my mining into Bitcoins without me having to micromanage. I also sold a pile of 200 Vertcoins I had from prior mining adventures for Bitcoin a couple of days ago and so far that's working out quite well! It'll be interesting to see how long this latest spike continues.
 
There's no way too tell now is there? Limiting ETH inflation may as well cause price to climb further, making it still quite profitable. And that's just one of the variables.
 
Any "cryptocurrency for noob" ?

im confused how do i

* transform ETH to BTC
* transform LBRY to BTC
* transform BTC to fiat currency (it seems i can use coinbase?)

actually, how do i access my ETH and LBRY?
it seems i only can see how many i have using ethermine.org and lbry.suprnova.cc

but cannot find a way how to use it to "buy/pay" anything.
 
Don't really know at which level to start, so I'll try at a most general overview.

  • First, you need a Windows or Linux PC with a recent GPU for mining to make any sense.
  • Second, you need the mining software for the currency you want to dig in to, alternatively, you could use a service like nicehash.com where the client software switches between multiple currencies based on profitability
  • Third, you need a virtual wallet for each currency that generates you individual wallet adresses to store the mined CC. Here you generate passphrases which, thanks to the decentralized nature of CCs, are IRREPLACABLE. Losing them means losing your money.
  • Fourth, you need to find stores where you can buy with CC directly. Usually, you're best of with Bitcoin, because it is the most widespread. But still, there are comparatively few.
  • Fifth, you need an account at a CC exchange like the infamous MtGox (which went south) or coinbase you mentioned or kraken.com. Only there you can exchange your CCs for fiat money if you desire to. You can convert from one CC to another with some wallets already, but beware of bullet point 6.
  • Sixth: BEWARE of fees. At every step anyone involved wants to have their share. Starts with some mining programs, where the fastest ones freely available collect a 1% share for the developer (Claymore, with Dual-Mining feature enabled 2%). Most pools have a minimum payout, so they gnaw on interest rates of your CC shares until you reach that minimum amount. And of course when you transfer CCs, there's a deduction as well (so think ahead and look which currencies your exchange of choice supports and mine only those to avoid more fees) and of course traditional banking fees when you convert into fiat money.
  • Seventh, be mindful of electricity and it's respective cost. I almost cried when I read a couple of postings below about 9 cent US per kWh. Here, it is more than 3 times as high.
Does that help in any way?
 
Nice write-up.
A couple additional tidbits:
- Awesome Miner is another simpler was to get started. Not quite as simple as Nicehash, but cheaper as there's no fee other than Miner+pool.
- If you don't use Nicehash or Awesome Miner then you need to be comfortable with editing batch/bash files and cli.
- Stay away from ethpool or any pool that doesn't allow low value ~0.05 ETH auto payout
- The largest fees are between fiat currencies and CC with 4% being typical.
- I leave a sum in my exchange account (I use gdax/coinbase) so I can act on changes in the market. My paper wallet (ETH) is safer but transferring back to the exchange takes time. Bitcoin is horrendously slow to transfer so I tend to keep ETH as my primary cc asset.

Myetherwallet is the starting point for a "paper wallet" for eth. This is the most secure wallet. You wind up with a public address, which is where you point your miners and how you check your balance, a private key (this must be protected) and a keystore file. The keystore file, when combined with your passphrase, can unlock your wallet. The private key unlocks it without a passphrase. Anyone with that private key can drain your wallet.

So the idea is you write down or print your private key and put that in a safe. You can then use it on a non connected PC to generate transactions that you then transcribe to your connected PC. I cheat and use a virtual machine with networking disabled.

Another key point for both miner machines and virtual transaction machines: you can install W10 and use it indefinitely without registering or buying it.


EDIT: Bitcoin wallets are totally different. I'll explain later or maybe Carsten can elaborate.
 
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I cannot really add anything wrt pure bitcoin wallets since I've never used one. I let my kraken-account generate a BTC adress and pool-mine directly to that account or use it to manage-mine via nicehash. I am not a good source for financial intricacies, I mine on a very small scale (grand total of two-digit euro range on a single GPU at a time) out of curiosity, not for profit. Did I mention horrendous electricity costs here in germany? :D
 
I OTH do not see how BTC and ETH wallets are totally different : Aren't all wallets are just an address and a private key ?

For BTC I'm using Elctrum, btw.
 
No they're quite different. Bitcoin wallets after meant to be swept when an outflow transaction occurs. This is why Bitcoin transactions include a change wallet fort the remainder left after. Lots of online exchanges manage this transparently, but if you create a paper/backup wallet is meant to only have one withdrawal with any remainders going to a new wallet.
 
Hi, has anyone tried running AMD and nVidia in the same system? Specifically one not purely used for mining? Will having both driver sets conflict? Will games always pic the correct card? I would only want to game on one card the other would be only be used for mining.

I'm thinking of consolidating my rigs and after getting rid of my Xfire 480s the possibility of mixing vendors in my main rig might be an option, if it works...
 
Hi, has anyone tried running AMD and nVidia in the same system? Specifically one not purely used for mining? Will having both driver sets conflict? Will games always pic the correct card? I would only want to game on one card the other would be only be used for mining.

I'm thinking of consolidating my rigs and after getting rid of my Xfire 480s the possibility of mixing vendors in my main rig might be an option, if it works...

I mine with a Fury X and a 1060 (under Windows 10, both cards are connected to my screen). Games take my Fury X by default, but to be honest I don't know why. The only problem I had is with OpenCL device number. My FuryX became 1 instead of 0 when I installed my 1060. I had to reinstall them both in a specific order (driver wise) to have my Fury X be the primary OpenCL card again.
 
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