Just to add, if like most people when they first discover cryptocurrencies (myself included here) you think they're a fad or 'geek money', or you struggle to get to grips with how they can have any value, I'd highly recommend watching some of Andreas Antonopoulos' talks. He has a couple of books on the subject too; one that's aimed at everyone, called 'The Internet of Money' and one for much more technical readers called 'Mastering Bitcoin'.

Some talks/interviews I'd recommend watching:


Andreas M. Antonopoulos: Bitcoin is Punk-Rock, You Can't Control it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6kJfvuNqtg


Introduction to Bitcoin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1si5ZWLgy0


This is a very interesting interview with Andreas on London Real.

This is Part 1. Unfortunately it seems like you have to register with London Real to watch the entire interview but registration is free.

Andreas Antonopoulos - The Death of Money - PART 1/2 | London Real
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuoE5CXlIdY

I've just been reading about all this, pros and cons and I don't think it's for me, been interesting though, is it really that profitable overall though?

So the RX 480 is not available any more with RX 580 taking it's place. Would it make any difference to mining whether it's 4GB or 8GB version? Also can you recommend motherboard&CPU on how much RAM would it need?

You'll read a lot of info online that states the 8GB cards are better to mine with. We found that's not strictly true. It's actually the memory speed that makes the difference, it just happens to be that most of the 8GB cards have faster memory. The difference isn't massive either way. I think we were getting something like 25MH/s for the faster cards and 21MH/s for the slower (and cheaper) cards.

We've used various motherboards. You can really use any that's suitable (ie has enough PCIe slots). There are special 'BTC' motherboards that have 6 or more PCIe slots (there's even a new one due out soon with 13 PCIe slots). Initially at least, I'd recommend sticking to building rigs with no more than 3 or 4 cards. Not only are suitable motherboards for smaller rigs cheaper and more readily available but you'll have far less headaches getting smaller rigs working. With larger rigs you introduce problems like finding a suitably powerful PSU and you'll find that some GPU drivers have issues when running more than 4 cards. For smaller rigs 8GB of memory is sufficient, while larger rigs seem to run better with 16GB.

Here's what we have in one of our smaller (3 card) rigs that runs very stable:

Are you just mining bitcoin or other currencies as well. I understand that emerging currencies are less predictable but potentially could be more profitable.

Can you run more than one mining operation on the same rig either sharing resources or say one on GPU and another on other GPU?

I think I will test the waters with my current PC that I rarely use with GTX760, maybe upgrade GPU later. My currnt motherboard will take 2 GPU's but will be on x8 on each and gen 1 PCIe, not sure if it will affect performance. If it looks promising I might built a rig with 6 GPU's

We're using NiceHash so it mines whatever is most profitable. Also some GPUs are more suited to certain algorithms. When watching NiceHash running, I think most of the time it's mining Ethereum but occasionally other currencies too such as Zcash. Since we're only renting our hashing power to NiceHash though, it makes no difference which currency we're mining or how volatile the price of that currency is, since we simply get paid in Bitcoin for our hashing power.

Generally NiceHash pays more than mining directly, with the added bonus that you don't have to keep manually watching/switching algorithms to the most profitable one. It has been asked numerous times (on the Bitcointalk forums and other places) how it can be that NiceHash can pay more than the currency is sometimes worth. The answer, they explain, is simple: People don't always mine for profit. Think about this: Let's say you own a business and you want to get money out of the business under the tax man's radar. You could use company money to buy mining equipment and use the company's electricity to run it, OR you could pay to rent computing power (and put it down to business running expenses). Not that I'm suggesting anyone should use cryptocurrencies to hide wealth or avoid paying taxes, but clearly this sort of thing goes on.

Another thing to think about is that, if cryptocurrency prices continue to rise (and, considering the technology is still in its infancy, they should), whatever you acquire (be it by buying hashing power, mining or buying directly), could be worth far more in a few years time. Prices could also fall of course but you can insure against that to some extent by holding a few different cryptocurrencies.

That's precisely what I'd recommend doing and how we got started.

Pretty soon you'll get the hang of NiceHash and you'll be installing graphics cards in everything and building larger rigs.

I've even considered offering some of my customers 'free' computers, or rather rented computers that pay for themselves through mining, with the added bonus that they would double as office heaters.

So far I have set up bitcoin wallet now and Nice Hash mining but my Kaspersky Internet Security has gone viral. after pressing allow like 200 times it pops up again like every minute.
It only uses 5% of my old CPU na d about 50% of 8GB of RAM.

Rough calculations at this point show that I will be using £27 per month in electricity and getting back about £19. Decent graphics card should improves this but I have to run numbers first.

MikkiJayne how do you get business rate for electricity, is it as simple as registering company and then doing energy contract?