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This year I am no longer focusing on what gear to use.
But how to expand my cheap reliable power.
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The above caught my attention from Phil's post because as I mentioned before,
1. 2018 and beyond will be very bullish for cryptos and a clear turning point - with wall street money coming into cryptos, expect BTC price to be above $25k very soon. Therefore, you need to be invested in BTC when that peak happens, and justify why we are in mining.
2. GPU vs ASICs - this game is impossible for us miners to chase - this game is well above us sad to say and in the hands of manufacturers like Bitmain, Canaan, Baikals, Halongs etc. I buy ASICs when they are on sales ...
3. The critical success factor for profitable mining is POWER - access to cheap power. If you are home mining and limited in scale, then may not too big of a problem. But if you operate a mining farm or have a few dozen rigs or ASICs, you need to have affordable power... like hydro, geo-thermal, solar etc.
4. Crypto trading - for those who are strictly only mining - start a investment portfolio (in exchange or Trezor/Ledger). This is good strategy to diversify your mining operations (ie. some coins to sell and some to keep short & long term).
My group has some similar views like Phils -- the gear doesnt matter anymore - otherwise we will going in circles. My group decided to focus on "coins/algos" to leverage, in particular Scrypt and SHA256 -- we believe these 2 algos has best bet in the short and long term. Using pools like zpool, Nicehash, esp. MPH, Prohashing enables us to use whatever gear we have and get coins that we want to accumulate (BTC, ETH & LTC).
My group's mining operations now spans 3 countries (to leverage cheapest power on earth) and I have access to all of them via MRR, VPNs and Teamviewer. Its been a great ride so far, and we are far from giving up mining for good.