I mine cryptocurrency and make about $110/day. I have two L3++s, an AvalonMiner 1246, six RTX 3080s, an RTX 3090 and a couple older cards. It more than pays for the mortgage, and after electricity (residential rate) my profit is about $100/day.
I also have the GPUs in a grow tent (designed for growing marijuana) with an 8 inch in-line fan hooked up to the supply of my home’s HVAC system. I’m heating my whole house with cryptocurrency and saving about $80-100 per month on gas (furnace has been off all winter).
I hate what you do (the very idea of all those KWs going to solve sudokus to get monopoly money) but at the same respect you. In the end if someone buys, why not sell.
You could say I’m “wasting energy” for “monopoly money”, but that monopoly money gets converted to fiat dollars, which I use to pay taxes and feed my family passively while I’m at my actual job, or sleeping. If instead of mining I were to work a labour intensive job as a side-gig, moonlighting, driving there, how much more or less energy would that “waste” on gas? At least I’m recycling my exhaust heat into heat for my home and not using the natural gas line of my house in the winter.
You’re not wrong, and I’m not saying other actual side jobs waste more energy necessarily, but the gap may not be as large as you think.
Oh I’m sure I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time total on maintenance, trial and error, watching videos, reading, etc. The thing is it’s my hobby, I have fun doing that stuff. I work with my hands and use my brain, and the output is money. It’s pretty great!
The people in my house use space heaters in their rooms. 1500 watts of electricity produces 1500 watts of heat whether you do it via a space heater or a computer.
The only way OP's method is worse is the capital costs of the processors. The energy spent on the actual heating is converted with 100% efficient either way.
This is a common opinion but I think many miss the purpose of proof of work. You get compensated for making the network more resilient. Other systems do this to a lesser extent with a combination of proof of stake and validated, but at a tradeoff of being less decentralized. Ultimately this is a necessary cost for developing the technology, and cryptocurrency & tokenization are necessary to facilitate a more decentralized internet. It’s unfortunate this has begun to take off while we are still in the process of transitioning to green energy, but that will happen soon and generally speaking miners are doing it faster than the rest of the economy. Negative environmental impacts of crypto are because of bad government energy policy, not the technology itself.
As far as it being “Monopoly money”, >40% of US dollars were created since the start of the pandemic. Yes, there’s a lot of technical details there and most of that money isn’t “in circulation” and many would argue that the way this is being done shouldn’t be inflationary, but it’s never been done at this scale and we do have the worst inflation in 40 years so it may be a contributing factor. Contrast this with Bitcoin which has a fixed known supply, or other crypto currencies or tokens which may exist primarily for their utility, and IMO “Monopoly money” isn’t a fair characterization. Even BTC which has little in terms of “utility” can be used to move money equivalent to billions of dollars a far lower cost than the traditional financial system so it has its advantages.
At least blockchain related technologies enable new use cases, IMO it would be more fair to blame something like Electron and inefficient web technology replacements for native apps for being inefficient and wasting energy. But I wouldn’t do that either, it’s silly. The people making software don’t control energy policy and that’s the real issue.
That’s a $30,000 rig at least. So 300 days of mining before you just break even. I’m sure that in 300 days it will only be able to mine a fraction of what it does now due to increasing difficulty. I’m not seeing how this truly works out.
You are grossly overestimating the depreciation of mining hardware. It’s pretty common to have well maintained mining rigs and farms that last several years. Also, it’s a common strategy to sell mining hardware at or near ROI time to essentially double your initial investment.
Coincidentally my GPUs have not only paid for themselves and then some, but I could sell them used now for more than I bought them for. I’m lucky in that respect.
It shouldn’t really matter, my understanding is that generally you’re running software that automatically mines the most profitable coin for a pool and get your profits in BTC. So as long as there is demand for GPU miners for something there’s profit to be made.
For me the question is how to get comfortable with the mining software stack and the pooling services. I poked at it a bit earlier this year and, possibly just due to my own paranoia, I felt like I needed to take a shower afterwards. I don't know why, I just felt like there was no ground truth from which to build a framework of trust in the tooling and the services and I was suspicious of everything.
In the world of cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency mining you really have to wade through the mounds of sh%# and scammers. In terms of trustworthy sources here are a few trusted YouTubers that are very experienced, they taught me a lot about mining, mining safety, and general crypto knowledge: ChumpChangeXD, Red Fox Crypto, Red Panda Mining, brandon coin, Son of a Tech.
Can you ELI5 how making small amounts of money in crypto works? I thought it was a "winner take all" kind of arrangement where whomever solves the "puzzle" (for lack of a better word) first gets all the bitcoin as a reward, until the next block is up and ready to be solved. You're talking about making $100 a day - a very tiny fraction of one bitcoin - how does that work?
Back in the early times, 'solo mining' was trying to find actual block target values and would yield the full reward, winner takes all. Mining pools were invented, that aggregate a whole bunch of miners all working on the same thing. Although there is only one true winner a block, the rewards are shared among all the miners, prorata their submitted hash rate. Care was taken by miners not to use one big pool, and keep the number of blocks produced to be <50% to any one pool. Came close a few times over the years!
The pool accepts 'shares' of 'close but not quite' values to prove that the client is actually doing work.
Then, you had the emergence of marketplaces of hash power -- you could bid on or sell a specific number of hashes a second for a given time. The highest bidder would be able to point your mining hardware at their choice of pool with their payout credentials.
One of the problems I have been thinking about, people can still solo mine when they have lots of capital to buy hardware. Now, most crypto miners are using pools that reward them for their hashrate. However, there are only a handful of pools that the majority of miners use, which means centralization.
It is in the interests of the miners to prevent a situation where one pool takes a majority of the hash rate. Miners will migrate to smaller pools if one is getting too big.
Bitcoin is highly divisible. When I say $100/day what I really mean is something around 0.0016 BTC per day. This number fluctuates a lot so it’s best to look at the average over a week or month.
The best way to learn IMO is to try it yourself with your gaming computer. I personally use a platform called NiceHash (not sponsored, nor am I advocating for them, there are alternatives) which pays out in Bitcoin. Try it out yourself, depending on your GPU you could be making $3-10 per day. Run it for a month or two, or longer. Transfer that Bitcoin to an exchange of your choice (Coinbase, crypto dot com, etc.) and sell it for cash. Then use that cash to buy more hardware (or beer).
You can contribute mining power to a large network of miners and get a percentage of the profits. They are called mining pools. These exist for virtually all currencies. Here's a list for bitcoin: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/
Barely anyone mines alone. You join a mining-pool, so your hashrate gets added to that pools hashrate. When the pool finds the next block, everyone gets a share proportional to their contributed hashrate
I started small, let things pay for themselves before buying more. My initial investment was about $10,000, and that was just for a handful of GPUs, some parts like motherboards and CPUs, an electrician for the 240V 30A line, PDU, etc. Once I made that money back I slowly bought more. My most recent purchase has been the AvalonMiner which will pay for itself in another six months or so. If I include the revenue from all the mining hardware though, the AvalonMiner will be paid for much sooner. It’s funny how that works :)
My 3080 paid for itself, but I stopped once I hit that threshold due to the ethical concerns I have about the negative environmental impact of proof-of-work mining.
The community is not very trustworthy, but the software is actually really straightforward once you figure it out yourself.
That’s the plan! But I’m already at 80% maxed out on a 30A 240V breaker. Sure I could add more breakers, but I really don’t want to turn my basement into an industrial mining zone (not to mention the HOA might have a thing or two to say). I’ve already used some soundproofing (Rockwool) in the room that all the mining equipment is in, the noise is real!
Also I need more airflow, I’m exhausting extra heat out a small basement window. If I want to expand I need to consider intake fans from a second window to keep airflow moving seamlessly.
I’m in a peculiar position where if I lease out a warehouse for $3000/month I literally deplete all the profit and break even until I expand more. I’m not sure where to go from here, suggestions welcome! So far the best plan I have is just wait until I can afford a bigger house with a big backyard, so I can build a mining shed out there.
I recently bought a house in Canada that's heated with all electric baseboards, I am not looking forward to my electricity bill. I'd love to partner with an experienced miner who was willing to pay for the rigs up front and do a lot of the fetch-and-carry in exchange for the waste heat. I have no doubt there are plenty of other homeowners who'd feel the same way. Waste heat's a valuable resource, at least for half the year.
My ASICs mine Bitcoin directly, while my GPUs mine Ethereum but I'm paid in Bitcoin, which is a function of NiceHash. More often than not mining Ethereum directly using something like HiveOS is more profitable, but I opt for NiceHash because the convenience is more valuable to me than the fractional benefit of mining Ethereum directly. Also, I personally would rather hold Bitcoin. But that is just me.
In terms of ETH2, it is already quite profitable to mine ERGO or RVN or other proof-of-work GPU mineable coin algorithms (search for "what to mine" in your preferred search engine). The biggest question is, when ETH2 comes (whenever that is) will the profitability of ERGO and RVN increase or decrease with the influx of miners? Sure difficulty will spike massively, but in my opinion it is also likely that the value of these cryptocurrencies spike as well, however proportional.
The truth is no one really knows. I have an idea, but I could be wrong.
Thanks for the excellent response! I love nicehash and have been using it on a little 1080ti rig myself.
I'll probably stick with what they recommend once ETH changes. It does seem probable that the values of the new favorites will spike a bit once everyone jumps on board.
Do you think bitcoin-only asic miners are still a viable thing to set up as an ongoing thing? I feel like asic miners are currently a risky investment due to their nature of being linked to certain currencies.
Risk? There are folks doing just what you describe. Everyones capital and risk levels vary and so you get miners on gaming rigs with single gpu all the way to those buying fuking coal power plants. Where would you land?
Pretty typical $0.1/kWH (on average, there are peaks and valleys like everywhere else). A lot of folks overestimate the actual power cost. Sure I’m pulling about 24A at 240V from the wall (over 6 kW) which costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $320/month. But the actual BTC I receive is worth over $3000/month assuming I sell it as I get it.
What’s super nice about mining is that it’s quite resilient to market trends. For example if crypto crashes 50% the number of transactions on the blockchain skyrockets (everyone either buying the dip or panic selling) which results in more cryptocurrency actually received from mining. The value of the coin can go down, but I get more of it.
As a passive revenue stream it’s actually quite beautiful. Just don’t forget to pay taxes!
I was looking into just getting a 3060 Ti for starting on my main CPU, do you recommend that or going for whatever gets a bigger hashing rate in one unit like the 3080 or 90 it seems, they are hard to get!
I would personally aim for non-LHR cards like the founders edition 3080 which is hard to find these days, or any 3090. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what cards you buy, what matters is your ROI. For example at MSRP a 3090 can pay for itself in six months (or whatever it works out to these days) but at scalper prices that ROI time is more like a year. In the world of ASIC mining a year ROI is actually not bad at all because the big industrial ASICs can last 5-10 years. Then you have helium miners (HNT) that can ROI in 3-4 months. It’s all about the ROI.
Maybe a new 3090ti if I can snatch one at MSRP, but don't have the money anymore for it...
Was also looking into filecoin mining, but requires lots of HW (would have to buy at least a graphic card, 64gb ram, and lots of disks lol) and you've to pledge/stake money too for each block or tb committed to serve...
Looks like a hassle but high returns, so anyone with more budget than me and enough technical chops, might be inclined to look into that! Just saying
Thanks for all the info, got me into a lot of research, for now I'll keep on the build camp
- Where is the heat going? Are you exhausting it out the window? Are you going to burn your house down?
- How are you distributing power? Are you using a PDU and a 240V 30A breaker or are you maxing out several 15A 120V lines?
- Is the humidity dropping rapidly to dangerous levels, risking shock? Are you going to fry that brand new $10,000 ASIC miner because you dried out the air too much?
- Did you short out the GPU pins removing a GPU from the socket? Did you just cost yourself thousands of dollars?
Safety is important not just for yourself and family but you need the hardware to actually survive. If you have a bunch of 3090s that just finally reached ROI 9 or 10 months in but the cards themselves just died, you’ve effectively broken even after all that effort.
Surprisingly GPUs are quite resilient so long as you’re not massively overheating them, and you open them up every now and then to replace the thermal paste and perhaps thermal pads. I have a monitor visible at all times that displays all the temperatures, and I have one eye on a humidistat making sure I don’t suddenly drop below 30% relative humidity on an unseasonably dry day.
There are lots of resources available. If you’ve ever built your own PC you already have like 80% of the knowledge you need.
Thanks. This is actually what has put me off doing it. I don’t want an unsafe thing in my house! Also its the type of engineering problem i hate most - one where you meed to monitor 24/7 and all sorts of things can give you down time, but you cant really make it perfect because that would be too expensive.
I also have the GPUs in a grow tent (designed for growing marijuana) with an 8 inch in-line fan hooked up to the supply of my home’s HVAC system. I’m heating my whole house with cryptocurrency and saving about $80-100 per month on gas (furnace has been off all winter).