Crypto currency mining

[moltuae]

Originally Posted by ainarssems

It's shipped now. so hopefully will get it next week.

Great

When it arrives, the accompanying instructions will insist that you inspect it thoroughly before powering it up and, in particular, that you gently shake it to ensure that no heatsinks have fallen off in transit (unlikely I think unless it's been thrown around a lot). Bitmain will not honour the warranty if you power it up with a loose heatsink.

Just to pre-warn you, each of the hashing boards sit loosely in an aluminium channel, so don't be alarmed (as I was at first) if it rattles a little -- that's normal. If you put your fingers on each of the hashing board's power connectors, you should be able to hold the boards still while rocking it side to side. I would imagine that any loose heatsink would be heard tumbling as you rotate the unit.

The Antminers seem well built and well packed so hopefully in-transit damage is rare.

[moltuae]

Some interesting and fun cryptocurrency realtime visualisation tools ...

BitBonkers: https://bitbonkers.com/




CryptoMaps: http://cryptomaps.org/




Bitcoin Globe: https://blocks.wizb.it/




BitListen: http://www.bitlisten.com/

[ainarssems]

Not sure what's happening but payouts from NiceHash have been all over the place in l last couple of days. Ethereum payouts have been in steady decline since July and it has brought down the appeal of AMD cards. I have also seen my 2x GTX1080Ti to go over £7/day for the first time today even if it was for a short while. i think i will disable all but CryptoNight on AMD cards for now as they bring in similar money as Dagger Decred or Equihash but consume less energy.

S9 profitability have gone up so that at some points during the day S9 was bringing in more money than L3+. Some people might be looking forward to possible hard fork in November with a chance to have 2 currencies for the price of one like it happened with Bitcoin Cash as the payout on Nicehash has changed from +6% of ideal to +30% ideal. Makes me to be tempted again to buy S9 as they are still available for end of November batch for $1265 +$105 for power supply.

[ainarssems]

Just as I finished post and went to change settings DaggerDecred payout have gone up again by 30%. So like I said lot of changes going on, most of them short term, I guess I will just leave all enabled.

[ainarssems]

Another thing that got me thinking is power consumption. If we take the max hashrate of Bitcoin network on 28/09/2017 at 9,708,513TH/s, and assume that everybody was using S9 which is obviously not the case as many will be using less efficient hardware and possibly few will use more efficient prototypes, it's equivalent to more than 690,000 of S9's or over 800MW of electricity consumed which while it is high if my calculations are correct, it's still not as bad as I expected. I wonder what the banking sector consumes. And also equivalent of 700k S9 -wow!!! It's probably more profitable and less risky to design and manufacture S9's than it is to mine.

[moltuae]

My NiceHash payouts have been quite low throughout the latest China FUD related crash. It's recovered nicely in the last few days though now that confidence in the markets seems to have returned.

It is astonishing when you consider the amount of energy worldwide that is being used for cryptocurrency mining ... and it'll probably increase greatly as time goes on. Although hopefully developments in technology will continue to bring more efficient GPUs and ASICs.

That's a very good point about the traditional banking sector too. Hadn't thought of that. I bet that's an astronomical figure, if you add up the energy consumption of every bank and financial institution.

Algorithms such as Poof of Stake (PoS) have of course been developed as a replacement for Proof of Work (PoW), aka mining. In many ways though I think PoW is still a better solution, despite the increasing amounts of energy it requires. It means that every mined coin costs hundreds or thousands of pounds to make, giving it real value, which is more than can be said for most fiat currencies.

[ainarssems]

I think it's time for a update.

First about GPU's, -it's gone downhill a lot since July, mostly Ethereum mining but others a bit as well. Amd cards were making about £1.50 per day in July/August, now only about £0.80 but still consuming the same £0.40 in power consumption. The price of cards have also dropped on e-bay as well, looks like many are jumping off bandwagon and selling cards but not me, at least not for now. I guess it's hobbyists with 1 or 2 cards deciding it's not worth it and getting rid of them. I hope payouts will return when hashrate drops.

My Antminer L3+ has arrived. I tried calling UPS and paying import duties while the Antminer was still in transit in India on Tuesday and they would not accept payment until it landed in UK. 2 hrs later UPS man shows up at my door with invoice to pay, I explain him I already tried to pay without success. He says just keep once checking tracking status and landed in UK I can pay. So I paid over phone Wednesday morning about 9:30 and goods arrived around 10am. Checked it out, all looked good plugged in and started mining, all good so far. Wish I have bought more of them.

Also have been looking at getting S9, decided to go for it but Bitmain only accepts Bitcoin Cash payments for it at this time so I bailed out. I guess they have personal interest in Bitcoin Cash and are trying to promote it.