I have a bunch of video cards and CPU's I can generate income from, though its far from a mining farm. So I use a strategy to get the most out of my mined coins. Just like Bitcoin had a halving last year, many have and are set to halve as well.
If you do not know what halving is, its basically a reduction in mining rewards every few years. This helps a coin before more scarce and drives more competition for mining technology.
This is not the first time I have brought up altcoin halvings, I wrote about how Horizen was set to halve in November of 2020. Around that time the coin was worth $11 and now fast forward a year and its worth 10x that.
@solominer/one-of-my-favorite-altcoins-is-set-to-halve-and-why-i-love-it
Observing this pattern of coins halving, then months later we see a jump in price seems to repeat in history. So I am now seeking new coins that will be halving soon.
I came across a website that tracks a few altcoins and their halving dates, see the link below.
Most of these coins are ASIC only, but one did stick out from the rest. Ravencoin is a GPU only coin and is halving in less than 2 months from now. I have heard about RVN for many years now, but never was impressed by it. It just seems like another POW altcoin, but with the halving coming up I may profit from it none the less.
Using my mining rigs, I start them in the morning when its quite chilly outside and run them into the afternoon. During the winters this helps heat my home and generates revenue (not much) while getting that heat.
Monero is another coin that caught my eye while looking for coins to mine. About two years ago XMR went from GPU/ASIC mining to CPU only. XMR is one of the few coins I know of (heard of) that allows CPU mining. XMR does not have a set halving by block count. But adjusted on the fly with every block produced. Though by May of 2021 the difficulty will stop going up and stay at a fixed rate for the rest of the coins lifetime. This is known as the "tail emission of May 2022"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/bs92r3/xmrs_tail_emission_vs_btc_reward_halvings/
https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/mrp6fu/what_will_happen_on_may_22/
At the current time the block rewards are 0.80 XMR, but will drop to 0.60 XMR by May of 2022 and stay there. So getting some XMR now may benefit before the difficulty changes and stays that way.
I may keep mining XMR even after the tail emission, as its the only CPU coin I know about. There are others, but very low volume. And in the past mining coins with low volume and very few markets is a huge pain in the ass.
TLDR: I am GPU mining Ravencoin until its halving in Jan of 2022, and CPU mining XMR until May of 2022 due to its tail emission.
Note: I do not endorse Ravencoin or Monero, but as for taking advantage of the halving timings I am willing to hodl some that I mine.
Though if you do indeed want to buy XMR I suggest you do some reading on the traceability of the XMR blockchain. If you are looking for a privacy coin with strong obfuscation I suggest Horizen (ZEN).
And as for RVN, the only pro I see is its ability to have multiple mining algorithms. If you disagree please leave a comment and let me know why.
Recommending Horizen, but POW mining that coin is not feasible due to the POS/POW reward differences. So buying and staking on a node is the best way to earn with ZEN.
If you want to mine a good privacy coin using proof of work, Firo is one I like alot. It uses ZK-Snarks like Horizen but is more GPU friendly due to their block reward structure. Also Firo has an ASIC resistant memory heavy POW algo called Merkle Tree Proof (MTP) and you can easily mine it using Nvidia GPUs.