Mining CryptoCurrency

When my son was 7 years old we both fell in love with Minecraft. We built entire worlds and he showed up to be quite a genius around computers. It didn’t take long before we had four game servers running in my living room. Three of them running Team Fortress on Linux and one running Minecraft on Windows. During the years we had thousands of players on these servers. Most of them playing Minecraft.

Later we went on to Grand Theft Auto Online, but this game demanded a lot more from our computers – especially the graphics cards. So we both got hold of a GTX 1070TI Nvidia graphics card which we still use today. With this card, we really got value for our money! He later bought a 3070 at three times the price of 1070 but returned it as the performance wasn’t remarkably better!

At some point, I decided to try mining Bitcoins. Not because of the money, but because of all the nerdy stuff involved.

I also wanted to sign up for a platform to learn more about Digital valuta.

 

Crypto Currency Platforms

So I tried to sign up at Binance.com, Crypto.com, Coinbase.com, Coinlist.com and Coindesk.com. Awful!

It took three months to get validated at Binance and it would be a crime to say they have great support! Actually, this goes for all of them. They are NOT interested in supporting people. Their MAIN interest is to make money! DON’T FORGET THAT!!!

REMEMBER to check your chosen platform on TrustPilot. Pretty much all of them have a lot of bad reviews!

Binance has chat support. But it doesn’t always work. And when it does work it can be hard to tell if you are talking to a robot or an Indian supporter with an IQ around 25.

Coinbase was the same. In general, the support STINKS big time on most of these sites!

Nicehash has a mining part AS WELL AS a trading platform! They have both!

So I ended up at Nicehash and installed a mining device on my computer, which was easy. I also did some research and it looked like the founder of Nice Hash was a wanted cyber-criminal…

Nicehash also got hacked. But on the other hand, almost every bitcoin platform online has been hacked at some point. But unlike other platforms, Nicehash covered the loss for their customers. It took a year to do that and the price of Bitcoin dropped significantly during this period. So if Nicehash had their money in dollars the loss was only half the original value for them. But the bitcoin owners got their Bitcoins back and they only lost the same they would have lost because of the drop in exchange rate.

Some say that Nicehash planned all this in advance and hacked themselves when the exchange rate was at the highest…

Besides, I’m not in it for the money. I just want to learn how it works.

The most inexpensive way to transfer money to most of these Bitcoin platforms is to use SEPA transfers. They are often free except your bank will charge you a very low fee. Often around 1 or 2 %.

BUT transferring money away from these sites is way more expensive. 20-50 dollars is not uncommon. This means you have to transfer an amount that is larger than the fee or you will lose your coins.

 

Controlling the temperature on your graphics card.

Silicon IS affected by temperature and the hotter the graphics card is the shorter it will live!!!

Usually, 80 degrees Celsius is recommended but I am VERY happy with my card and want it to last very long so I installed GPU Tweak from ASUS. If you use MSI you can use MSI Afterburner. If you have an Inno 3d graphics card click here. These utilities can overclock your graphics card as well as underclock them.

I use them to set a temperature limit at 70 degrees Celsius. And of course, the outcome is slightly lower with lower temperatures. But do your own research and choose a temperature that works for you!

 

Mining is somewhat stupid in most countries.

You need electricity to mine and you need a computer and an expensive graphics card and it will take you several hundred years to mine money enough for this. BUT let’s assume you have the computer and the graphics card anyway (because you are a gamer) – only hi-end graphics cards can be used.

Then the only thing we need to worry about is the cost of the electricity.

I bought a Wattmeter (approximately 50 dollars) and I calculated that I wouldn’t be able to make money until the exchange rate reached 262,435 dollars!

So once again – I am not here for the money! I am here to figure stuff out because I’m a geek! It would make a LOT more sense just to buy the coins!

But who knows… maybe one day the exchange rate will pass 262,435 and then I can sell these 100 Euros I have mined. Yes, mining with only one graphics card takes a looooot of time. I can mine 0,02$ every hour – if my computer is available…

If I turned up the temperature I would make a little more but one thing is for sure:

You won’t get rich by mining this way!

 

Getting rich by mining?

You need a dedicated mining rig and you need to get it for peanuts! You also need to live in a country where electricity is cheap. Maybe you would consider solar power as the prices have fallen a lot on solar hardware. You also need to make use of the heat developed from your rig(s) to save money on warming up your house. And in a way so you don’t need to buy extra cooling equipment. It is way better to use the heat and direct it elsewhere.

In some countries, it won’t pay to mine. The taxes are too high and the electricity is too expensive. But if you happen to live in a low tax country with cheap electricity it’s beginning to look good!

In the US the price of electricity is 7-11 cents per. KHW. In some Scandinavian countries, it is 40 cents! In India and China, it is 0.8 cents which makes a huge difference!

 

Nicehash got hacked explained here.