Against the advice of well-meaning friends, I have been researching getting into crypto mining :)
Now, don't worry, I am not aiming to do this full time, or even be massively profitable. Turns out my electricity costs are such that I can come out ahead if currencies are chosen carefully. My goal, though, is to learn* as much as I can about the topics I mentioned previously.
*My hope would be I would get coins that rise in value of course!
My VR rig is on the way (Occulus Rift and a cheap PC with AMD RX580 GPU) but ideally I will build a machine for this.
I looked at ASIC machines. My friend Jamie is ordering these bad boys. Terrific specs, but I worry they will never arrived and be out a LOT of money.
Bitmain seems to be a crapshoot if you can actually find inventory, and I don't trust the used sales in terms of getting what you order.
The nice thing about building a rig, other than the fact I like building things, is a lot of the gear has a healthy resale value.
So looks like I will probably build a rig based around GTX 1070/1080 cards, and build an OpenBeam frame like this one on thingiverse.