Crypto Mining Eldorado and how much money I’ve made so far 💵
Six months ago me and my dad decided that it would be awesome to make some sort of mutual investment. My dad told me that he heard from one friend about “crypto mining” (take into consideration that my dad is not technical at all, like zero, null). He told me to check it out. At first, I told him that yeah I know, but it’s no longer profitable. Little did I know how much wrong I was.
Research Phase
Like in any kind of investment, at the beginning you evaluate potential earning, risks, required knowledge, hardware options, you know basically all that stuff which have a part in the hypothetical end rewards AND risks.
1. Hardware costs
Obviously, you can’t start mining without hardware so it’s a required investment. At the time of creating our crypto miners, the most profitable cost to earning graphic card was RX 580 8 GB. When it comes to building full rigs, graphic cards are really the only thing you want to evaluate. The rest i.e. processor, motherboard, etc. are just some percentage of investment. Graphic cards hugely outweigh them because of one simple reason. For one hardware setup, you’ll need at least 6 graphic cards.
2. Potential earnings
It’s pretty straightforward, just type in crypto mining calculator in google and choose one from the options like minerstat, 2cryptocalc, or really anything else.
3. Time you’ll spend to set it up.
And trust me, you will. Unless you’re buying a fully configured and ready to mine mining rig (which will of course cost extra x $k, because somebody else is putting in the work, don’t be naive), you will need some time to set it up. And because you don’t have any visuals here i.e. you don’t have any graphic interface while turning your rigs on and off, hoping you’ll see them online on the platform of your choice, it can be troublesome. Especially at first.
Some pro tips:
- Instead of making your own mining rig chassis, just buy it. It’s cheap and will save you a lot of unnecessary headaches.
- Don’t set up on some super simple mining dedicated software stuff like nicehash. Remember, one of the crypto investing rules is: the easier something gets the less money you get out of it because somebody invested his time to abstract harder concepts out. If you’re building a mining rig and not just mining from your computer while you’re at work, you should really consider using a dedicated operating system for just that purpose. Personally, I’m using minerstat (yeah, 50/50 referral link, for me and you mate), another super popular option is hiveos.
- Stick to one mining pool. I know the percentage of given pool profitability changes a lot, but trust me just stick to one. In a longer period of time the biggest ones are strongly comparable, so why should you waste time. The other thing is after changing the pool, rigs need some time to start mining, and every change is error-prone. It’s not worth the effort.
- Always overclock your GPUs. Disclaimer: by overclocking I didn’t mean just setting up clock rate and memory rate higher, in mining we often do the opposite, which is underclock. If you’re interested in this topic, let me know, I can write a separate article about that.
Building phase
After we did our research and fell comfortable with our knowledge level, it’s time for a shopping haul. For the mining rig, we’ll need the following components, I’m also passing my choices so you can have some starting point
- Processor — AMD Ryzen 5 AMD Ryzen 5 1600 AF, it’s not really that important while mining. What’s important it’s to make sure it’s working steadily and that the fan is working.
- Motherboard — B450-A PRO MAX AM4 DDR4 HDMI/DVI/VGA ATX. When it comes to the motherboard it’s pretty essential. It depends on the motherboard how many graphic cards will we be able to fit into one mining rig. The one I’m using allows up to 7 graphic cards connected. You’re connecting them through things called PCI-e risers which are basically adapters from big graphic card inputs to the smaller ones.
- Power supplier — ATX 1000W LC-POWER LC1000 80+ GOLD MOD. You can calculate the power supply needed for your mining rig by multiplying individual card usage and incrementing it by +/- 200 W for the rest of the components. Power suppliers should just be stable and always above enough, so your cards can always work for 100% of their capabilities.
- RAM — GOODRAM DDR4 8GB PC3200 CL16 IRDM X Black. RAM does not have to be anything fancy.
- SSD — SSD Kingston A400 120 GB 2.5" SATA III. SSD is not really required, because you can use USB for that, but for the passivity sake, don’t go with the cheapest option. Go with the most stable one, you really don’t want to stress yourself that you’re mining rig stopped working while you on your child's wedding.
Earning Phase (What everyone was waiting for)
We have 18 GPUs, divided into 3 mining rigs, which sum up to 549 MH/s hash power. For 6 months, they’ve generated 2.17 ETH so far, which at a current ETH price can be translated to 8.5k $. The cost of the investment was around 16k $. As you can see, for now, it’s a pretty solid investment, scoring an average of 100% APY per year (right now). If you’re more comfortable with thinking in dollars instead of percent, if you’ve invested 10k $ then you will make an average of 1000 $ per month, passively. It can vary a little due to your electricity cost, but after all, it’s an amazing opportunity. And let’s not forget that GPUs cost is also going higher and higher, and due to the overall practice of undervolting the GPUs in order to maximize earnings, you’ll probably be able to sell your hardware pretty easily.
Drawback and potential risk
- For now, the most dangerous threat is ETH finally transforming to ETH 2.0 which will mean change from Proof of Work to Proof of Stack and therefore disabling ETH mining at all. Of course, you can mine different coins but with GPUs the pool is limited, e.g. there’s no sense in mining bitcoin with GPU because of the ASIC-dominated community, and on bitcoin algorithmic hash, trust me, GPUs have no chance with ASICs. It’s estimated that after ETH 2.0 release, the profits from mining will be cut down by 2, so if you’re making 1000$ per month right now, you’ll make 500$ afterward.
Yeah and that’s really all when it comes to the drawbacks.
Summing it up
- You can start mining with little investment, build a mining rig, buy two cards, and then slowly build up the rest.
- Always use a dedicated operating system instead of mining e.g. on Windows.
- Right now on ETH mining, there is a pretty good APY for a long amount of time. It’s individual (due to some variables, like electricity cost), but in my case, it reaches an average of 100% APY.
If you’re curious about other aspects of crypto mining, let me know in comments, discord or twitter.
Discord: Szymon From Poland#6093
Twitter: Szymon Kolber
⛏ Happy mining ❤️ Lot of love
