It’s been a while since I’ve written a post and I wanted to come back by talking about some of the things I learned when I embarked on the mission of mining cryptocurrencies using GPUs.
I’ve been involved with cryptocurrency since 2014 and have seen the change in trends over the years. The first article written on this site is titled “Most profitable way to mine with your GPUs“, it was written back in April of 2014 when all the hype was about purchasing GPUs, setting up mining rigs, and mining obscure altcoins with mining algorithms for which no ASICs existed.
In a way, the trend of mining with GPUs has never really died, but it reached a point where there were so many different cryptocurrencies to mine that finding the right coin to mine was like finding a needle in a haystack.
I remember checking CoinWarz obsessively, trying to figure out the next best coin to mine. While I was able to turn a profit, the time it took to constantly fix crashed rigs, change mining pools, research what altcoins to mine, and change the miners themselves turned to be a big hassle I didn’t want to spend my time on.
Furthermore, because I had so many mining rigs (I believe it was 9 R9 290s), I had to run extension cables from different rooms of my house (which had their own circuits) and wire all the electricity to a single room. Those cables ended up getting extremely hot and I didn’t want to risk a fire.
In the end, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk for such an unpredictable income. Most of my profit went to paying the electricity bill which was in the thousands every month. The lesson is, if you decide to run a mining operation don’t run it out of the place you live in, instead rent out a warehouse.
I moved onto a better alternative – cloud mining. If you are thinking of cloud mining sites like Josh Garza’s GAW Miners (which turned into a big scam) where you simply buy a contract and let the cloud mining company do all the work then you are wrong.
The cloud mining sites I used were more like miningrigrentals or nicehash, where you rent a mining rig with your specifications for a certain amount of time and get to point it to a mining pool of your choice.
This way you still get to technically mine with GPUs, but you don’t have to worry about rig maintenance, electricity bills, or risk burning your house down. You also don’t have the overhead of purchasing all the components and messing with the set up of the rigs – which is way more trouble than you think.
This new method of mining turned to be much more profitable as my strategy was to keep a close eye on bitcointalk’s altcoin announcement section. When a new coin would come out I would rent some rigs from the above mentioned sites and mine as much of the new coin as possible. When the coin inevitably ended up on an exchange I would wait for the right time and sell the bag, turning a profit.
If you are looking to get into cryptocurrency mining I suggest the method I described above. If your methods prove to be profitable, only then should you try and purchase your own mining rigs. I will leave you with these two youtube videos I made 4 years ago when I first got into mining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFgkNCbrRWg
Image(s): Shutterstock.com
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