Where we last left off around the beginning of this year, I had returned from China and had already sold some of my Bitcoin at a more-than-adequate price, and this is where my mind started getting busy.
My next step in the world of cryptocurrencies was also my first step into mining. I assume that almost everyone on Steemit has a degree of knowledge in this area, so there is no need for me to explain what mining entails. While in China, I had experimented (just for fun) with a mining app called Minergate on my mobile phone, and it became obvious very quickly that it is not feasible. Perhaps long ago, in the very beginning phases of some of the classic altcoins, it could have been profitable to mine on a mobile device and then to sell your tiny amount into the first big parabolic upward moves. But in fact, I would argue that mining on a mobile device today could actually be a liability, as it will likely destroy your mobile phone within less than a year as a result of the enormous amount of heat.
Now that I was ready to take the next big step and buy a mining rig. I made a somewhat impulsive decision to buy a high specification PC instead of a GPU mining rig or ASIC. After a long wait, my baby finally arrived at my doorstep, and after an operating system upgrade to Windows 10, I was now ready to start mining. I experimented with a handful of mining programs and pools until eventually I stuck with NiceHash, due to the program's no-nonsense ease and simplicity whereas Minergate did perform well at all with my AMD GPU's.
However, I did use Minergate for some time at the very beginning, before I realized that NiceHash is simply a better match for my setup. I mined around $30 worth of Monero at the time, which I promptly traded for Bitcoin via ShapeShift, a service for convieniently transfering between coins instead of having to work through a regular exchange.
NiceHash runs CryptoNight on my AMD CPU and either Decred, Pascal or Keccak on my GPU's. It automatically selects the most profitable coin to mine at any given time, and all payouts are made in Bitcoin which simplifies things tremendously. Keccak (which was only recently added to NiceHash miner), despite being the most profitable among those three, leaves me with a small percentage of rejected shares that I have been unable to resolve, and CryptoNight does not run on my GPU's at all. (Any advice on this from fellow miners would be much appreciated, by the way!)
Whenever I want to use my mining PC for something basic (such as writing a Steemit post or checking in on the charts on Coinigy) I can simply free up one GPU core and one or two CPU cores, although this often (understandably) leads to instability and many reboots! I admit that I have also stopped mining completely every now and then, as I just couldn't resist playing Skyrim on such high performance.
One problem that I often run into is that, since I opted to use a WiFi adapter for an internet connection for the time being, there is often not enough power for the WiFi card while mining and using the computer at the same time. Usually, stopping the mining processes for a minute or two is enough to resolve this. Experimenting with under/overclocking and GPU voltage has helped to offset this issue somewhat. Needless to say, when the PC is sleeping and mining, it is only smooth sailing!
I have yet to see whether I will achieve any significant returns on my investment. It may take up to three years, which is also around the time that I can expect the GPU's to reach the end of their lifetime. Electricity is very expensive at the moment in South Africa, and so the only thing that pushes me towards a profit is Bitcoin's value growth over the next 2 - 3 years. I have no current plans to expand my little mining experiment, apart from getting my old PC up and running so that I can use it while I have my baby mining full-time to increase my likely returns.
I have not invested in cloud mining services, though I have certainly considered it. I believe that the experience that I gained from attempting to mine on my own greatly exceeds the benefits that is were to be gained from using a cloud mining service. That being said, I will certainly be looking more closely at NiceHash cloud mining as I continue to learn, earn, and diversify.
The conclusion drawn from all this is that mining on a PC might not necessarily be enough to ensure a profit, unless skillfully coupled with the next big step: trading, which we will get to in the next installment of this series on cryptocurrencies. I hope that this post has been somewhat informative.
Namaste for now! 🕉