Topic: Mining in 2019 (Read 420 times)

On the second question.... YES!!! Its nothing compared to knowledge you need to mine.
Question about paying off should be only you to answer yourself based on your electricity price, coin you mine and scale of operation.
This is professional business with huge players and amateurs have to be REALLY prepared well to have any chance in that market.
Easiest is to just buy and hodl or trade.

You are right I made a mistake it was one Antminer S7 and two S3, not D3. I got them for free from my friend Crypto Mania and started to play with it.

They are still mining because I handed them over to another crypto enthusiast who wanted to start his mining journey  .

As for now, they are running and my friend still counts to find solo BTC block, but I rather doubt that this is possible.

I think if you shift your question to Mining speculation session or read thread of that session to will get better idea. And reading the threads in that session can give you broader perspective about the prerequisites and challenges of mining.

Here is the link of the session:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=81.0

Antminer D3's can't compute SHA-256, it's designed for X11 algo of coins like DASH and copy-cats/forks
Forget the chance to mine a block, can it even mine Bitcoin at all?

Perhaps, flashed with some sort of a special function altering firmware, nah...
or sold your hashes to Nicehash to mine earn Bitcoins?

Our old good BTC of course  .

I know that everybody will tell me now that I had literally no chance to find a block when mining solo because of the difficulty but that wasn't important to me at this time because it was an experiment and I wanted to gain more knowledge about mining when using dedicated miners (never did before only mined with laptop backin 2010) and maybe to win something when doing this.

I have read a lot of times that mining solo is like playing lotto and that is why I did it. I think in reality the odds to find a block solo with the miners I had are a lot smaller as chances to win the jackpot in Lotto  . I just don't believe there is any chance to find a block in that way today. You will only support the BTC network and even if mined for 100 years, still would not find a block.

This is just not true that this is like a lottery because let me say it one more time, in my opinion, there is NO CHANCE to mine a block solo using old dedicated ASIC miners today and in the future.

It depends on the coin you're experimenting on.

For @Jet Cash, solo mining Bitcoin with a single "old ASIC" (say Antminer S9) with 12TH actual hashrate... much lower for older models.
Bitcoin network currently have a total of 90,000,000TH, do a simple division and you'll get the rough estimated chance of winning the mining "lottery".
The chance is still higher than playing actual 6-ball lotto, but much more expensive.

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@wwzsocki 9 months using D3 miners, that's awfully unlucky
What coin did you mined?

I already did such an experiment and mined for 9 months solo with a couple of Antminers D3 and one old ASIC miner.

Wasn't able to find a block because if I would then, of course, the experiment would be still continued  .

This is a really great way to gain experience and knowledge about cryptocurrencies mining, when at the same time we can win a really big award, which is worth the efforts.


To check the probability of latest miners I like to use this service, which shows in real-time the latest ASIC miners income estimation.

The service I am talking about is: Asicminervalue.com



Asicminervalue.com - not only shows the last profitability for every miner out there but also shows currently opened purchase offers from the manufacturer or trusted resellers in the Buying Opportunities directory.



Asicminervalue.com has the Vendors Directory with all details of official distributors, legit vendors, trusted resellers. Additionally in Manufacturers Directory you can find all companies producing ASIC mining hardware.

Running a single ASIC would not be profitable.

If you are doing this just for trying out and seeing if you can end up mining a block then it would be time consuming and frustrating. If you want to set up a mining rig, which you would need if you want to mine taking advantage of the free electricity, you would have to invest money in a large number of ASICs, PSUs, Cooling equipment and a building to store them in. Internet connectivity is not an issue here.

As far as experience goes, many people who had wont a single mining device on some random giveaways (there used to be such a time), had actually sold them off on some other site. In this current market using a single ASIC is no longer worth it.

The simplest is if you work or get money from I dont know where and you buy them. All you have to do is to properly secure them.   If you plan to trade you will lose all sooner or latter.   For mining check miners part of forum, there is a lot informations for you. For sure it is longer procedure. But if you like playing with hardware you will love it.

I'd quite like to try solo mining Bitcoin. I know that I have about as much chance of finding a block, as I have of winning the lottery, but with free electricity in some of the locations I use, it seems to be worth it for the experience and knowledge. I was given an old ASIC miner some time ago, but I haven't had a chance to test it, as I need to build a power supply for it.

Trade and Mining are certainly two different things.

Trading: means that you are buying cryptocurrency that you know today is digital coins, by conducting virtual transactions you can hold such as Bitcoin, etc. in your wallet then there is a sale and purchase.

Miners: this means that processed digital / crypto money verifies Crypto transactions, to transfer Coins from your wallet. which is done by processing existing computers in maintenance for the blockchain (block chain) and verifying the transactions of people all over the world.

The intent is: Notes in the transaction list for each block, which is related to encrypted,
This means that the blockchain continues to grow open to anyone in a block in the blockchain.

The conclusion: if you understand about trading, it's better to trade, but on the contrary if you understand about mining, it's also the same thing, of course there are differences between these two things.

Capital:
1. Trade the capital that you have prepared.



Mining Equipment:
2. Mining the mining equipment that you need to prepare.

Usually, you wont find an easy/safe way buy a newly released coin in any exchange, if there's any, it's on a shitty exchange/P2P.
By the time it get listed to a reputable exchange, the network hashrate had already been at the unprofitable level.

The "buy instead of mining" suggestion is applicable for "already months from release but still cheap coins".

I honestly think this shouldn't even be an option when mining(unless you just want to help the network). If you're going to mine at a loss anyway but you're just hoping or expecting a future price increase to make profit, it would make a lot more sense to simply just buy the coins straight off. That way, you'd have less monetary loss, and you're not degrading your hardware's lifespan. Probably just makes sense to do this if you want to purposely heat up your room lol.

Trade is different. There are investment for a long time, when in fact you need an entry and exit point and short-term trading (for example, intraday). The second for me is much more complicated than mining. The first sometimes too).

Further, there are two types of mining.
1. You are looking for the best offer in terms of current profit on your hardware and your environmental costs (maintenance, electricity). There are mining profitability calculators (without maintenance) for this.
But it's better if you yourself learn to calculate profit. In that case you can look for other coins that not listed on profitability sites. But in this case you yourself need to perform a large amount of work on the search and analysis.
Everything that you get as a result of mining you sell.
You can withdraw everything to fiat and spend it on yourself or expand the business, or you can leave a part and invest in promising coins (the bitcoin for example).
So, the main thing here is the current profit. And you should select coins for mining based on this.
2. You are looking for promising coins that are more profitable to mine than to buy. Mine, hodl, wait for the price increase, sell. That is, mining as investment. But here you need to process a very large amount of information, understand projects, and believe in the market growth.The risks are pretty big to get nothing.
Another bonus is that sometimes at the start mining software is not effective and you can create (or hire a programmer / buy) a more efficient software.

Of course it still pays to mine nowadays, if mining doesn't pay again then people would have run away from mining. No one can help you determine how much it will cost you to mine because no one knows the type of equipment you want to buy and the cost of electricity in your country.

you can crunch the ROI numbers on sites like coinwarz but accurately accounting for difficulty is a fool's errand.

my preference would be for short term gambles on newly launched coins---mine while difficulty is low, build a stash, and move onto the next coin. rinse/repeat. the coins that get listed on bigger exchanges and crack the top 200+ will pay off big time. and by focusing on low difficulty coins, your GPU rig won't go obsolete.


investing (hodling)? yes. trading is a whole other can of worms.

Yeah... Always gotta trust the newbie with 0 posts linking to some sketchy site.
Don't buy anything from there. All these pixelated pictures already prove that it's a scam to me.


If mining in general is still profitable; probably not (?), unless you either A. don't pay for your electricity, or B. do it on such a large scale that you get discounted on your electricity, (or if you perhaps generate your own).
Of course if you live in a country where you have low electricity costs anyway, you might very well be able to make money. You'll need to do your own calculations and decide if it's worth the risk.


It might look tempting/profitable to buy an ASIC miner right now, even with your electricity costs calculated in your earnings,- still you need to think about

- Your asic will deteriorate over time = less efficiency
- hashrate will *most likely* continue to go up
- Bitcoin will halve in a couple months (200 days?) = earnings cut in half.

So often the calculation for whenever you start to make profit is wrong, and by a large margin.

As far as mining Bitcoin is concerned it seems like currently you could get started with hardware for as low as USD 263,- (PSU and I presume various taxes and shipping costs not included):
https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020190911155155939FluJlFo406C8

In terms of efficiency the above ASIC miner is already terribly outperformed by other miners though so it'll probably be nothing more than an expensive doorstop. So if you want to have hardware that actually has a chance of making a profit you'll probably won't get below USD 2,000,- such as that one:
https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020190917150041561N918SAIe0626

There are other ASIC miner producers out there as well, but I presume they'll be at about the same price level.

Many alts are still mineable using GPUs, there you'll have to see which GPU is the most efficient for the currency you want to mine. In that case price is only limited by how many GPUs you can cram into something that remotely resembles a PC. For creating a dedicated mining rig with, say, 3 GPUs, you could probably get started with maybe USD 800,- upwards.

Hardware cost comes only second to electricity cost, however. Unless you have access to cheap electricity, it'll be hard to reach a return on your investment. Punch your electricity costs per KWh into a mining calculator and see how it turns out. Be aware that mining income diminishes monthly, with your mining rig being deprecated and non-profitable within 6-12 months.

So with that being said, mining can be profitable. But unless you want to commit to it or do it as a hobby it's probably easier to just buy the coins you are interested in.

mining cryptocurrencies is going to always be profitable unless that cryptocurrency has a gigantic drop (like losing 90% in one day) or drops to zero. that is how they continue living.
a better question would be "is it profitable for me?" and to answer that you first have to calculate your own costs. the biggest one is going to be your electricity cost. and that depends on where you live. other costs include maintenance, cooling, and the initial equipment cost. good news is that there are a lot of mining calculators online that you could use.
https://whattomine.com/
https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency


that depends! are you capable of trading? do you have any experience in trading and experience in trading cryptocurrencies?
if yes, then the answer to your question is also yes, trading is a lot simpler than mining but if you don't have that experience then trading is worse and you can even end up losing a lot of money.

The equipment you need depends on the coin you want to mine. Mining BTC or LTC, for example, would need special ASIC hardware, while Ethereum and Zcash it would be GPUs (cheaper).