Author: Aric Caley

So we did the crypto thing. We made money. I consider that a win! So, on to new horizons. We are now pivoting to doing 3d printing and have purchased a spiffy new Elegoo Saturn 3 12k resin printer. Stay tuned for development in this new area!

So after waiting what seemed like forever for the mail persons to deliver the stream of components, of course delivered in the reverse order that I needed them, so I couldn’t even begin to assemble the machine until the very last part arrived, I was finally able to construct my first mining machine.

We got two GFX cards for it. One, an Nvidia 1660 and another a Radeon 580. The Radeon was a bit tricky to get working as you have to use an older driver for it meant for mining instead of the latest versions. I also set up nsfminer instead of ethminer.

It works! The two cards produce similarly, in the range of 45Mh. The cash is rolling in so to speak.

So I’ve done it. As of this morning, I made my purchase of the components to build a mining rig. I haven’t built a PC of any sort in over 15 years, having lost all interest in such things, and relying solely on my laptops for development and entertainment.

The last time I built anything, it was a MythTV box for time shifting television (IE, a homemade TiVo). This used two video capture/tv tuner cards, a smallish mini PC enclosure, and a modest CPU and ram, and large at the time harddrive. It worked well until it didn’t. I only just recently got rid of it when I moved (it sat around for years).

This time around, I wanted two things. I wanted to mine crypto currency, but I also just needed a nice server for running development environments (probably mostly docker containers). Needing a server was enough to justify the expense. Crypto came essentially free (for one gfx card anyway).

Unfortunately, I waited just a tad bit too long. There’s another gold rush right now, and the prices and availability of the components went nuts just as I was trying to buy. I was lucky to get the one GFX card and the mining motherboard (specially designed with 13 PCI slots) for a few hundred more than I had planned. Afterwards I am seeing the mobo selling for 3x what it was last week!

So now, I wait for the delivery.

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…