Topic: Beginner hobby miner wannabe - BTC or ETH? (Read 1209 times)

Thank you everyone for your advice, especially Darthmaul for that detailed insight.  After thinking it through, I've decided that at this point I will give up on the idea of mining.  It still seems very attractive to me in the long term, like over the next 10-20 years but with only having enough resources for one rig and not a great place for it, I'm putting it on hold.  Maybe I'll just buy another bitcoin with the money I have left over, or maybe further explore carlfebz's suggestion and focus on ETH mining (although I have no idea what a GPU even is at this point, so it'll take some more educating on that front:) ).  

Thanks again.

If you are just having a budget of $2600++ then you are just going to buy 1 antminer s9 which an asic miner and you cant really mine ETH on this miner. If you are really interested on mining BTC then you should do medium-big scale mining because i would say its not really ideal to make solo miner specially on seeing the current rate of electricity on your place then roi would really be longer.I would suggest mining ETH would be a good choice since on the price of $2600 i can say that you can already build a gpu mining rigs.

You should get a used ant miner r4. And a pc with a gpu.

You should mine btc on the r4 and eth or Zec on the pc.

I would shamelessly plug my used ant miner r4 since I would sell it with a psu .

And I would tell you it was repaired once and does 6.7th at freq 475.

It is fairly quiet and since is under performs you could get it with a discount.
I could also advise you on a pc build for eth and Zec but it would be in alt coins I have a thread.

From my point of view, BTC

You have got almost everything up there. But the thing is you are mining for getting profits, and just a single S9 won't be profitable as long as your are awaiting for your ROI in 2-3 years! Plus the difficulty will keep increasing as more and more miners like you will be jumping in to mine the bitcoin or other coins. So you may end up with no profit sooner or later. So you must consider yourself setting up more than 5-6 miners together working on a pool. This will just increase the odds of finding a block in the network.

Yes miners are very noisy, but it won't penetrate the wall of your garage upto the neighbours house, and you can put in sound absorbing curtains over the wall to reduce the noise. Secondly due to increased advancement in technology, new type of models will come out faster but it won't make your S9 obsolete it will just make it slower in competition and you can always buy new models and add them to the current rig to balance the investment.

Pools can be selected manually all the times. And it is always advisable to switch your pools every alternate day as you may end up with finding a block into another pool if it saturated. The rate of bitcoin will not affect your ROI because you will not always find the block every other day, it can can take few days to months with single rig. It is not that profitable as I mentioned already.

Thats all from my side, and one more thing, try to talk with your neighbour about mining technology, who knows they get interested and you can expand your rig with them and share big profits. (Just suggestion  )

Hi all,
since I'm brand new to bitcoin and all other currency, yet have question about mining, wasn't sure in which topic to ask this, but here it is:

Let's say I've sufficiently educated myself on most of the issues regarding cryptocurrency and such.  I created a wallet with Coinbase for now, bought 1BTC and 3Eth to hold for a while.  Now I'm maybe interested in mining.  By all accounts, Antminer S9 looks to be the way to go but at the price tag of about $2,200 + power supply thingy, it's not the easiest of decisions to make.  Since I'm mostly interested in BTC and ETH right now (because that's all I've read up on, so far):
 can one rig mine for both of those "currencies"?
 Can it join multiple pools?
 Do you just set it and forget it, pretty much?
 My understanding is that ROI of just over 1 year is to be expected (California electricity rates).  Is only one rig even any profitable? (Let's assume exchange rate stays constant at what it is today, about $2600ish - I know, right, but for simplicity).
 I understand it's quite a bit noisy, so the plan is to keep it in the garage.  But, I live in a duplex, and my neighbor shares a wall with my garage. Would it still be too loud? I don't think I could keep it in my little apartment, even though the temperature is ideal, I can't have that constant noise.  If it is indeed that loud...
 How long do you think before the S9 becomes obsolete? I was planning of just letting it run for 5-10 years, or however long it will last, but is that even realistic with all the technology changes nowadays?  Would I be better of just buying another Bitcoin instead of investing in the equipment?
 Anything else anyone would like to throw in.. (I did read a large number of posts on this forum, tho probably not nearly enough, but got a bit tired now and had this idea I wanted to act on).
Thanks.