Topic: What is the weekly time investment required for an optimized rig? (Read 141 times)

Hey Pat_tato,
Great question! The time miners spend tending to different operations largely depends upon the environment they've established for themselves. I'd highly recommend looking into projects such as ethOS, which automate a fair chunk of the mining process. with ethOS, you receive overheating protection, easy and automatic updates, web-based analytics reporting, and a lot more helpful features. It also allows you to mine multiple coins at once, which can help you hedge your bets and worry less about which cryptocurrency to support. It takes care of mostly everything, but you'll still have to decide for yourself when to sell, and how frequently to monitor prices. I hope this helps, and check out http://ethosdistro.com/!

Thank you undefined, and DJminer!

Excellent question.  I think the answer is directly proportional to whether or not it is a hobby and how strong your OCD is! 

I'd suggest if you want the lowest time investment, point your miner to something like MiningPoolHub (or others) where you have a selection of coins, profit switching opportunities, and all wallets are in one spot (my est 1-2 hours/week to monitor/restart rig when it gets stuck and to count your money!). 

The next level of time investment is setting up core wallets for specific coins... this takes a little more time to manage not just the wallets but the mining software.  (my est 2-5 hours/wk).  Other tools (like Awesome Miner) help with the mining software management and monitoring.  It takes a little time to set it up, but once you have it configured my est is 2-3 hours/wk.

I personally put in a lot more time than that because I find it fun and always find something to tweak! :-)

If you're brand new, it's best to take your time and read through this forum before investing in a mining rig.

Usually, I mine the most profitable coin of what I consider *relatively* stable coins (but I still check it multiple times per day), until I make enough selling (or holding and then selling) to pay back the initial cost of the specific rig. After that, I sometimes play around with more speculative options. Simply being an active member of this forum can show you some promising new coins that may be worth mining, but I don't usually spend lots of time actively looking for the best coin of the day to mine, since that's a lost cause. (For example, WhatToMine's rankings change multiple times per day, so trying to follow the most profitable coin will almost certainly end with you holding small amounts of several shitcoins.)

Generally stick with major, reputable exchanges, and I would strongly recommend not storing your coins (long-term) in an exchange. Only mine to a wallet where you have exclusive control over the private keys, then send them to an exchange as-needed.

Troubleshooting after the rig is successfully up and running is usually not a big problem. Sometimes components fail and need to be replaced. However, there are steps one can take to help make the rig stable. (Keep it in a safe area, use quality components, keep core temperatures at safe levels, etc.)

Optimizing your hashrate is mostly a matter of finding the best mining software for your hardware, finding the right drivers, and the best clock settings. How much time you want to spend fine-tuning or researching the last one is entirely up to you.

Overall, running one or more mining rigs does not require a consistent time commitment once you have them running stable, but you may see better results by staying up-to-date.

Hello,

Excuse my ignorance, but I was hoping someone could briefly elaborate on the time investment needed to run a successful 6-8 gpu rig once it is fully operational. How much time do you spend on a daily basis to research what coins to mine, when and where to transfer the value of the coin, troubleshooting software/hardware, optimizing hashrate, and anything else that I am likely leaving out?

I am capable of doing the research to make this happen, but only if my sparse free time is not completely consumed in this complex system. I can't say that building computers is my hobby, but I can say I am excited for the future of this technology.

Thanks to anyone taking the time to read this.