Bitcoin Forum

Hello Everyone,

I just moved into a home office to cut down on ridiculous commuting costs but have a rental agreement for the old place until December 2020. It costs me £500 per month so a friend suggested I set up a few low cost devices to mine crypto to claw something (anything!) back. I know, I'm very, very late to the party but without an option to sub-lease the office, its doing nothing and I cant see anything in the lease agreement about fair electricity usage that suggests I cant do this.

Having briefly researched the market, I see that, among the sea of sharks promising $$$ per day, most sensible people suggest this is not the best of time to start this. My goal would be to build up any funds that would cover ROI + a little to take the sting out of the £6K loss. I have only ever invested in crypto before, never mined.

Would anyone be willing to suggest a few ideas of reasonable ( :D ) equipment to get started with? I see many of the altcoins have taken a battering recently so would appreciate what the experts in the community suggest about what to start with. Open to any suggestions.


Thanks for taking the time to read this!


Cheers!  :)
  

20/08 - THANKS EVERYONE WHO HAS RESPONDED. I AM TAKING IN YOUR THE FEEDBACK. THINK I WILL SET UP BOTH ASIC AND GPU'S - NOISE COULD BE AN ISSUE FOR THE LATER. JUST LOOKING AROUND THE $5k MARK TO START OFF.

if the electricity is free - then pop in a few asic's and you will make ROI easily

if you have to pay for the electricity - then it really depends at what rate you are charged for said electricity.

Asic are probably the way to go indeed. Hookem up and your good to go, no wasting time setting up mining rigs.

Thanks - any suggestions of a good ASIC to start with?

depends on what your budget is - you can get Bitmain's S9's for a few hundred bucks easy - and with free electricity and depending on which S9 you get (they can have speeds from 13 Th/s up to 16 Th/s) you can make about $100 per month for each S9 --- make your ROI on the miner in 2-3 months but as you have the place for at least a year, you will make your money back easily.

get 5 of them and make $500 a month - well, it does change based on BTC value and difficulty, both change constantly - and the rewards will half around May 2020 as well, but if BTC value goes up the halving will not hurt as much.

take the s9 or the watsminer m3. m3 will be cheaper almost 3 times. even though they are greedy but are stable

You can let me have all that free electricity. I really need it.  ;D

If you decide to go the GPU route then go for some old RX 470 or RX 570 GPUs which are dirt cheap now second hand on craiglists or eBay.

You can buy them for like $75 and in a year or so probably get back the entire $75 or at least $50 or so, so it's the safest route if you decide mining is not for you.

ASICS are easier to manage but keep in mind that they can go down in value very quickly if the markets turn and become doorstops.

If you go GPU's just point them to Nicehash. 1060's 6gb's or R470 8gb.  They can mine 95% of all minable coins and like it was said before. Cheap as durt. But remember your landlord most likely will realize something is up at some stage so you might end up paying for past power or face criminal charges for stealing.

So let say you have 20A CB limit and the office is paying $0.19/kw(Inc VAT) or £0.13 ex VAT. if you play it right you can use 18A at 230V.  That is 4140W or 4.14 Kw continually. Or £0.646/h.

So it will cost them £465pm. The nice thing about GPU rigs are they can be silent compared to an ASIC that screams. 7 rigs with x 6 GPU each. (600w at the wall each)

But then you will need to fork out about £1000 per rig give or take. That is a lot of money that you are putting up with the risk of getting caught and having it impounded. And most likely you will not get  £465pm from that setup. If you are lucky that will net you half of your rent in mining income.

You also need to remind him about the power consumption, noise and heat of an Antminer S9.

---

Each consume more or less 1,400W, 5 of them might flip an ordinary home office's breaker.
The ASIC's Fans are really loud (more or less like an old vacuum cleaner), it's not suitable for living areas with non-soundproof walls.
Heat isn't much of a problem for a single ASIC, but with 5, you wont be needing a heater.

If free power then "all in" :)
Latest Bitcoin miners would be the most profitable like Antminer S17 , M20s, T3....etc . Only because that Bitcoin has been a good price pump, also you have to know that these miners are lot more expensive and in some cases overpriced as it was when BTC price was hoovering around 3-4k.
GPU  miners could be faster ROI if the tide changes direction as they are still very cheap compare to latest BTC miner.
The easiest way to calculate is price per hash if free power, that way youll get the fastest roi.

I'm not sure I understand why you guys are recommending ASICs over GPUs if efficiency isn't a factor (free electricity)?

GPU rigs at the same price will make just as much and will arguably be profitable and retain value for a much longer timeframe.

are you sure? i see people trying to sell gpu rigs for 2-3k that make less than $5 per day. I wont argue that they can retain their value longer and they are more versatile when it comes to switching coins but for overall profit I havent seen a single gpu rig that can make roi as fast or faster than an ASIC

By the time you get said ASIC, the profitability figure you see on the comparison sites is usually already cut in half. Getting some cheaper ones on eBay is always possible but don't fool yourself: these aren't making good money at all, and are only another way to take a punt at rising coin prices... which also works for GPUs.

i am running 12 gpu's and 20 ASIC's -- now I know I have considerably more hash rate on the ASIC's the GPU rigs were more expensive but they do use less power but they also make me way less per month than the ASIC's after electric cost. The only advantage I see to using gpu's is their versatility - something ASIC's have very little of. Can only switch coins if its on the same algo and if they do a hard fork that ASIC becomes a huge paperweight.

in the end though - if the electricity is free, anything will make him money - it becomes a point of which will make ROI first then.

i am running 12 gpu's and 20 ASIC's -- now I know I have considerably more hash rate on the ASIC's the GPU rigs were more expensive but they do use less power but they also make me way less per month than the ASIC's after electric cost. The only advantage I see to using gpu's is their versatility - something ASIC's have very little of. Can only switch coins if its on the same algo and if they do a hard fork that ASIC becomes a huge paperweight.

in the end though - if the electricity is free, anything will make him money - it becomes a point of which will make ROI first then.
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I totally agree. crypto is very unpredictable and it is a gamble in either gpu or asic. You just dont know which direction it will go, as there is times gpu is more profitable and time where asic is more profitable. The easiest way i would say is calculate by current profitability , for example take 5000usd and calculate which equipment will be bringing the most returns and if asic would bring only 10% or less then gpu i still would choose gpu. Just cause of longer life cycle. Also if went for asics then only Bitcoin, as these miners are so advanced now, that new and much more efficient miner is unlikely.

For people who do argue between ASIC and GPU, it doesnt really matter yet we are talking free electricity here and neither way you would always be profitable excluding the talks on resale value or future use.The question is,on where on this world do have that free thing?  ;D

true lol all miners need free electricity... could you imagine the difficulty if electricity for all was free?

I'm reading this thread with great interest--I've never mined bitcoin and don't plan to, but from everything I've read I was led to believe that it's no longer profitable, even with free electricity.  If what you wrote is true, it looks like I'm wrong--I had no idea it was still possible to make that much money mining these days.

Maybe it's GPU mining that I've heard isn't profitable anymore, but I've seen videos on Youtube of miners giving up on ASICs as well.  Could be that their electricity isn't free, however. 

OP, whatever you decide to do, it'd be good if you updated this thread and let us know how you're making out.  I know I'm curious as to whether you're going to turn a profit.  Good luck, bro.

oh for sure, some that pay 12 cents or more are definitely shutting down. I was close to that point when BTC was in the 3k range - I was barely in the black and my electric is 5 cents.

just don't overload. control greed  ;)

Bitmain is locking down latest asics, so not possible to install hiveos on them. But they do have great software for the Antminer S9 i did a review (https://mineshop.eu/2019/05/29/bitmain-antminer-s9-hiveos-firmware-how-to-overclock-antminer-s9/) on my channel.

the only thing I dont like about HiveOS is the dev fee's Seems to me that most of any gains made using custom firmware is lost when you have to give them a percentage of all your profits vs a percentage of the gains.

You still save more if you would use original firmware. Reduces your power usage with asicboost and increases hashing speed. 2% from for example 18th = 0.9TH is for hive. Do you know is there any firmware without dev fee for Antminer s9?

yep - manufacturer firmware has none.

Just my thoughts.
If your electricity really is free.
Why not buy a bunch of really cheap multicore, preferable multi cpu servers, and cpu mine.
The older cpus are no where near as efficient as the current ones, say 1/2 as efficient, but generally anywhere between 1/4 and 1/10 the cost.

I think it is possible to use any equipment with free power, just calculate cheapest price per hash and fastest return will be your best option :)