Prologue
Hello everybody!
My name is Mickey, also known as Tezkatlypoka from Reddit,
and as you all know, I write only about unique projects, gold medal owners, great leaders, ways how a man can earn some money and about small Afro-American ladies who look the same as Heidi Klum and the topic of today's story won't be a bad fit for literature topics mentioned above. If I could leave you with something today, then it would be the cryptocurrency mining. In this article, I will quickly guide you to the whole problem with a help of brilliant mining minds I was lucky enough to meet and extract. I will provide you with a story and know-how of professional ones as well as non professionals miners. I will also give you a leads to complete mining manuals content of which has been written by a friend of mine, the excellent writer EvilMonkey.With the help of these manuals, you can setup step by step your mining industry and finally let it work for you a little bit. Let's do some digging into the problematic of the mining, shall we?
Mining of cryptocurrencies is getting more and more popular, and it is a hard, but possible way of making some coffee money (well depends on a size of your initial investment) and I can promise you, my readers, you will be able to start mining business on your own after reading this article and all its leads.
Manual to this article: You have to read this article from front to back and show your grace. After all, that is how literature works, right? (unless it is instruction manual, in which case no one reads them at all)
Introducing
Intermezzo
Mining of cryptocurrencies is getting more and more popular, and it is a hard, but possible way of making some coffee money (well depends on a size of your initial investment) and I can promise you, my readers, you will be able to start mining business on your own.
So what we need for mining you may ask, right? You definitely need some IT/hardware/Unix-Windows background to be efficient. Then you need a quiet place (or an ordinary room in your house with heavy doors able to prevent as many uninterested women in everything crypto related as possible to enter and examine your little noisy heat generating machines), cheap electricity, powerful pc with an x64 bit version of any current Windows (7,8,10), Bitcoin and ERC20 token friendly wallet (for obtaining all that gold), mining software and if your intention is to play this game on higher levels you will have to add some specialized plumbing called Riggs to your shopping cart as well (suitable in cases where you decide that you want to also pour some Gold dust on the top of your Laté macchiato). Then You can force your PC or this special hardware into the blockchain equations solving process purpose of which is the validation of generated crypto-related transactions (the blocks mining).
Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions (and a "mining rig" is a colloquial metaphor for a single computer system that performs the necessary computations for "mining." This ledger of past transactions is called the blockchain as it is a chain of blocks. The blockchain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Bitcoin nodes use the blockchain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.
But It's not only for bitcoin though since you can mine lots of coins with different algorithms. Your system helps to confirm the transaction of others, its called PoW (proof of work) and by doing this, you mine new block for specified coin or an algorithm. Regular miner and even for pro-miner, don't have to know this theory in brutal details to mine successfully. More important is to configure your hardware correctly.
Welcome to the Blockchain world again where the trust can be a part of peer to peer relationships. Welcome to the world where trust can be coded up, and it can be computed to be true or false by a way of mathematically-backed certainty, that is enforced by powerful encryption to cement it down. The blockchain is a world where trust is replaced by cryptographic proofs. This trust is there for free, but still, it has to be earned. Since you are tuned in, allow me to take you on this little journey to get done the basics and decipher a problematic of mining for you a little bit!
Pow, Pos
Pay close attention now, next two paragraphs are very important for the fluent flow through this article.
Before we move a little bit further lets recap one-two, essential things. PoW and PoS.
Pos, as well as a Proof of Stake, has nothing to do with mining at all. This principle works like you are the accumulator and your task is to hold as many coins of current cryptocurrency as possible. By doing this, you are rewarded by coin provider because you help with stabilization of currency price, and also you help to create the effect of the decentralization (unless you are Chinese democracy institute and your task is to protect the freedom of all the Chinese people by taking their coin into your custody where it could be safer). This is how MasterNodes work. You hold 10 000 coins in your wallet, and you are obtaining dividends for doing so.
PoW is a Proof of Work, and that's the area when mining does its KUNG-FU.
PoW rests on the popular Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm that allows transactions to be safely committed according to given state. An alternative to PoW is PoS, Proof-of-Stake. THere are other consensus protocols such as RAFT, DPOS(Delegated PoS), and Paxos, but we are not going into that slippery slope of comparing them to each other, because they will be seen as standard plumbing over time. One of the drawbacks of the Proof-of-work algorithm is that it is not environmentally friendly, because it requires large amounts of processing power from specialized machines that generate excessive energy.
Easy way how to deliver a principle of PoW is when you imagine a man who wants to send his money from one bank to another bank of his choice. To make this happen, bank A has to create a communication order, and servers of bank A will take care of this transaction. But there are no servers like this in the world of cryptocurrencies, and that's why this issue is taken care of by “miners” who help by providing their hardware computation power to make this transaction happened. The more computation power you grant to BTC/ETH or any different network (blockchain) the more significant reward you obtain. You simply need some work to get done to get your money from point A to the point B.
A strong contender to to PoW will be the OIS algorithm which relies on the concept of virtual mining and token-based voting, a process that does not require the intensity of computer processing as PoW, and one that promises to reach security in a more cost-effective manner (This know-how has been used in a book “Business Blockchain” and I really recommend you to read it if you want to get some serious blockchain education).
You all know that I could write about mining for days, but since I know shit about it, I would instead choose a better edge cutting solution in our situation. I will give you two interviews with stable miners, and you can make your own picture from here very quickly. Hmmm, lets the doc see...
Our first hero is a brave boy from Lithuania, who turns his gaming PC into carnage coffee money-maker machine. His name is Iparado, and he is a really bright lad, great meat cook and also a loyal friend of mine who always helps when a man needs some goddamn help.
Mini-interview With Iparado - Level One - Gaming PC mining
Hey Bro! Please, describe briefly the beginning of your mining journey.
I made money with sub and qsp, wanted Xstmas gift for myself and I justified buying mining gear so that I can also game on it... justifying was mostly needed for my wife.
Yeah, that was brief enough. Where do you see mining going in next year or two?
I see it becoming obsolete as PoW is changed with PoS, which is more efficient and more ecological way to do it.
How do you look at an ecological aspect of mining?
It sucks because it burns resources by using electricity...unless you manage to heat your house with mining gear, especially if you live in Siberia.
Would you recommend people interested in mining to start with it these days?
I can't recommend or not, it's their personal preference,all I can say is that current ROI is around 8 months, which means for all this time you will be mining to get your investment back...after 8 months nobody knows what difficulty for mining we will have,so it's all speculations at best.
How would you describe mining process to your mother?
I have a huge heater in my room, and it's also making me money.
What kind of cards are the ace of space in this area and why?
Ace cards are 1080ti or 1070ti, or 1060. The best bang for a buck although all of these cards are way overpriced now.
What can you say about “algo” mining?
There is no such thing as algo mining...as everything you mine is based on algorithms...it's not a form of mining, it's the core idea.
What investment would I have to do if I would like to mine my money back in one year and then be able to do 50 dollars per month as my regular income?
You need about 1.5k euro gear for that with current prices and difficulty.
Do you have to be IT/hardware expert to become a miner?
Not at all.
What can you tell me about your mining/gaming PC?
It's awesome :p
Haha, I hate you ;)
So as you can see here, you don't need to be an IT expert or Stephen Hawking to earn few bucks by mining. Just try to get a good deal with your local electricity provider, do few aggressive swings with your favorite crypto (NEO to be precise) and buy your first gaming/mining graphics card and you are ready to start your mining journey.
Oke, now we can move from peaceful areas and beautiful forests of Lithuania a little bit more to the west. We will travel not far away. Our next stop is my homeland. The Czech Republic. Here we take a look on one of my good friends Vladimir (Morgi) who is one of the most progressive miners of the town of Ostrava, the third biggest City of the state. Life in Ostrava can get a little bit nasty from time to time (somebody sits on your favorite seat in a bus without even asking you...).The reason for this brutal behavior is coming from an intention of every little gypsy boy to become a second 2pac (or GTA 5 main character), but there is nothing that could fear our hero away from something he is so passionate about last few months.
Interview with Morgi - Level Two - The house shitfull of stuff
Hello Vladimir! Please, tell us something about yourself and also something about your mining business. Tell us how hard was your start of this mining crypto journey and in what situation are you now and how difficult it was for you to convince your wife that mining is a fantastic thing to do and you can run it in from the comfort zone of your living room. Then you can give us your opinion on the question: "What future holds for mining in next two years, and how profitable mining could have been when a man knows how to do stuff?". Please don't forget to mention some juicy details about your toys (that mining hardware I think :) )
Hello mate,
quick intro, my name is Vladimir I work as IT consultant for huge corporate and I’ve been mining enthusiast for about 11 months now. Truth to be told, so many things happened during these 11 months, that I don’t even remember what my life was like before I started mining, lol.
It all began during one of those lazy days at work, we were reading some news online with colleagues and stumbled upon an article saying cryptocurrencies are profitable to mine again. I missed out on earlier booms. So I figured I might as well give this ‘’mining’’ a try.
To my initial disappointment, I couldn’t even start mining with a GPU I had in my desktop, because it was old Radeon card having only 1GB memory and you needed at least 3GB for Ethereum mining. I was making some money on a side reselling IT HW at that time, so I just started buying older GPUs. First ones I got my hands on were three pieces of R9 270X 4GB. They were doing initial 30 MHz while mining Ethereum until I figured out how to overclock them and they were making about 37-38 MHz. That was getting me about 2$ a day, and I was incredibly excited by it. 😊
That was the breaking point for me, and I got hooked on mining. I started buying all the cheap GPUs I found on Czech reseller portals and eBay. I bought my first power meter, a bunch of random motherboards which could take in more GPUs. By the time August arrived, I had about 15 GPUs, scattered across 5-6 rigs. Keep in mind, I had all of these in my living room, so temperature-wise it was hell on earth. Because I was mining entirely inefficiently, didn’t undervolt or optimize power draw. I even built a rig from low-end RX550s, because there were no higher models on stock anywhere. I’ve spent hours and hours bios modding, optimizing, using Windows 7/10, server, Ubuntu, etc.… I couldn't get rigs to be stable, manage to overheat. So many times I went to do some optimization, hoping my hash rate would increase. But after hours of trying, it was actually worse, I was quite desperate, but luckily if you refuse to give up and keep going, results will come. During this time, my ‘’mining goal’’ was to make about 25$ a day, so naturally, when I reached that point, I wanted about 10times more per day…
(haha, what a fucking classicMickey - addon)
But then trouble came. In September, when the first batch of ASIC D3 miners came out, I ‘’bought’’ one of these miners on eBay from a guy who had about 3000 positive reviews, so I was kind of trusting him. The thing was, he wanted payment done via cryptos, which was not that abnormal thing, but in this instance, he was a scammer, and he managed to scam me out of 1 whole Bitcoin. Which was priced little over 5k$ in those days. I was devastated by it and found myself presented with two options, either to give up on mining entirely or over-invest heavily, to make that 5k$ loss look insignificant.
So naturally, I took a Game of Thrones ‘’You Win, or You Die’’ approach and boomed heavily during Q4 2017. All the money I had, I invested into mining, on top of this I secured a loan of 30k$ and bough RX570s/RX580s for all of it. I rented three small ‘’offices’’ (eventually I got a lawsuit from one of the landlords, but I don’t wanna bore you with details), where I placed these miners into and was paying all expenses from my regular salary so that I could reinvest everything I earned.
By the time BTC was gently stroking 20k$ mark, I was making over 400$ a day, and just like everyone else, I thought I was going to be rich. But then things went south, difficulty skyrocketed, new GPUs became unavailable worldwide, and profitability was slowly but steadily declining until it became essentially unprofitable to mine. (On top of this I sold one miner to some guy in the US via eBay, and so naturally, I got scammed again… you can’t really make this sh*t up)
These days we are in a much better spot in terms of mining, but I’m not too keen on buying new rigs as I try to adjust for PoS and repay the loans I took. Not to mention I’m waiting for the new generation of GPUs to come out. For the moment I’m saving up to get few Master nodes up and running, current one that I’m saving up for is PIRL. In parallel, I have new mining location lined up for September, where I will have about 100 kWh capacity for mining equipment and funny thing, it's inside a power plant. Out of this reserved 100 kWh, about 40% will be my own equipment and rest is going to be hosted miners. People who thought they were going to get rich quick with 1 or 2 miners slowly realized, that maintaining miner is sometimes severe pain in the but, especially during summer season. On top of this, most households in the Czech Republic have really expensive power, and that’s where my new location comes in. Because average miner will actually save money by moving their rig to my small farm and won’t have to lift a finger to keep his miner running 24/7.
It feels like I’ve been talking for a year now, but as I mentioned in the beginning, there were so many things that happened, that I’ve been just highlighting bits and pieces. So last but not least, when I get time, I work on getting a book together about this whole journey, because I think it could pass on some decent experience and make people laugh in the process. I also enjoy making videos, and I made a few crypto-related ones last year on my youtube channel just to see how it feels and I got so many kind responses, that I’d like to continue with it and so I’m setting up studio where I’ll be filming crypto+gaming+tech related videos, which will hopefully happen next month. So since I’m currently moving to a new flat, sort of study to become a bachelor in Economics and still work full time as IT consultant, things are not moving as fast as I’d hope. But I can’t really complain, so far mining was extremely interesting and rewarding journey, but one mustn’t be afraid to make the crapload of mistakes.
For anyone who would like to get in touch with me, please feel free to reach out to:
vladimir.dubovy@techmoravia.cz
Ok, my dear readers, this was my buddy from Ostrava, and I have to tell you my friends one thing. I burst in Homeric laughter five times till I was able to finish the reading of this text full of melodramatic comedy mixture with computer science enhanced by life wisdom and balls of steel, till its very end. Thx bro for this epic story and I wish you good luck with your upcoming book and hoard you genuinely deserve.
Klaviaadus - Level Three - My own mining pool
Klaviaadus is an active member of a community I am also anticipating in, and he is known for his reputation as a man who can stand up for himself and for knowing his stuff.
How your crypto journey has started?
Like many others, I started my journey in the summer of 2017, when bitcoin had tripled its price only with six months. Some of my friends had already made a fortune, but somehow I thought that crypto is just for super-smart people who have a degree in mathematics and computer science. My background is in marketing, and soon I discovered that I could use my skills also in the crypto field.
What brought you to mining?
Since I remember myself, I’ve always had a mindset that when I discover something new, I want to find out everything about it in depth. I started with swing trading and day trading. Then invested into about ten different ICOs. After that came mining and master nodes.
How you do mining?
I was using five Antminer D3 and started mining Dash. I rented a small room in an old factory where there was cheap electricity, and the noise wasn’t bothering anybody.
What is the alpha and omega of mining with Antminer D3?
I was lucky enough to get miners at quite an early stage. But in the crypto rollercoaster, these miners still lost their value when the difficulty of Dash went up. After that, I started to look for different altcoins which were in really early stage and used the same algorithm (x11). And I found my gem; the only problem was that there weren’t any mining pools that I could trust. The solution was that I created my own pool and started solo mining. It worked out quite well.
How much mining changed your life?
I learned that I have to be creative when I find myself pushed to the corner. Also, it is important always to do a complete background check before jumping to the next coin.
Where are you seeing mining in next two years?
There has been a lot of talking that crypto will abandon PoW (proof of work) and will start to use PoS (proof of stake) because it is much better for the environment etc. I think that during next two years PoW is still the main force behind all mineable coins. If Satoshi Nakamoto had made bitcoin a PoS coin, nobody would know what cryptocurrency is in the present day.
How would you summarize your mining activity and successes?
I had 5xD3 (Asic x11) and they were running about six months (Nov-April). I squeezed 100 GH/s out on them in a good day and also I had my own pool (only my own miners where connected with this pool). I got my ROI and made about 3 thousand profit but that was it.
The end of the first half
That's all from me to you, my friends, for today. In the second episode of this mining masterpiece, I will let you read about the Mining whale and his methods, and I will also provide you with mining setups and manual which will help you to start your mining journey on your own. Till that release take care and stay around.
All the best, Mickey.