On building a mining rig

So a lot of us missed the boat on mining bitcoins. I remember it vaguely when it started and I thought about installing the software to do it. But I never did.

Then about 3 years ago I thought about why not build a small machine to start mining Etherium (Bitcoin was already too prohibitive to start for a normal human). Based on estimates I figured it would only take about 6 months to make the investment back. Instead, we just bought bitcoin and etherium.

Then a few months later, crypto crashed. In some ways I was glad I hadn’t spent thousands on a rig. I still “lost” money though not as much.

Fast forward three years and our coins finally came back up in value and then we cashed out just before it started to drop again.

And then I thought, is it still worthwhile to try and mine etherium or ZCash or something else? Turns out it is, but it might take a year for the investment to pay off. And thats assuming the coins don’t crash further. But if they come back up…

If I had been mining coins for the last three years I would have made money. Not a ton, but worth the investment.

Now that I have moved up north to Spokane, the electricity is cheaper and I have a huge garage to build a rig in. I also have spare cash. And at least in the winter, its cold and so the rig will be easier to keep cool. It seems like the perfect time to do it. I don’t want to think in three years why didn’t I at least try?

Oh, and, I wanted to build a server for development purposes anyway. I don’t like paying monthly for a cloud server if I am not making money on it.

So, here goes nothing…

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