I was running a 2 zeon server for a few months at the end of last year.  32gb of memory and the CPUs were 3 generations old, it was yielding about 1 XMR every week and a half if I remember correctly.  Unfortunately the electricity and waste heat cost made me realize it wasn't worth it.

To worry about quantum computing at this point is pure conjecture.  GPUs will advance FAR beyond where we are today on silicon before quantum computing becomes useful enough to impact this industry.

That, and there's techniques that I'm sure will be integrated into the algorithms that can delay quantum computing's effect on the field too.  Indeed it may be possible to even develop cryptographic techniques that are quantum proof, or at least difficult.

Our currently biggest challenge is the growth in the field as others have mentioned already.  As more and more miners come online, the profitability declines for all, unfortunately.

Short answer: if you're thinking of jumping in, the sooner you do, the more likely you are to hit ROI and profit.

IIRC Bela is Scrypt based, so mining with a PC CPU or GPU is going to be pointless.  It's in ASIC territory.

Check out whattomine.com and compare your current GPU to the specs/recommendations on there.

CPU only, Monero and Magi are among your few options.  GPU opens up many more, anything Scrypt or SHA256 or X11 is going to not be worth mining with an ASIC rig.

Interesting mix of responses, I tend to be an AMD fan too.  My eth rigs are on extreme 6+ boards as well.  Have an nvidia 1070 rig as well and all seem to work fine with risers, etc...

I'm going to look more at those APU uses since they all have one.

Thanks for the input.

It seems there's an overwhelming preference (even for 4 card rigs) for intel based motherboards.  I've been using a few FM2+ rigs for a few months now, since that's what i had handy as spare parts and they're working fine as best I can tell.

I'm curious if there's any particular reason most people tend towards Intel based motherboard/chipsets rather than AMD?

Is there something I'm missing?

What they said.

Although if you're really chomping at the bit, I'd say look into Nvidia and equihash/Lbry.  The cards will have higher resale, so there's less capital risk, and if/when Ether goes POS Nvidia cards will still have a hashing advantage, even though the pools will saturate with former AMD eth miners.

I don't think this is very far fetched at all, since they outright call they're transaction fee "gas money".  Wondering what everyone thinks on this.

It seems clear that Ethereum (and it's derivatives, Expanse, Ubiq, ETC, etc...)  are positioning themselves as the blockchain equivalents of the oil/fuel economy of today for the future tokenized economy they hope to develop.  Ethereum was never really intended to be an asset in itself, and their desire to keep ASICs out of the game for them to have it more equitably distributed in mining/staking all appear to add credence to that. 

I could see 5-10 years from now have ERC20 tokens as burgeoning economic vehicle for knowledge/wealth/work transfer with ethereum serving as the Exxon of them all, thus never removing it's necessity in the marketplace regardless of the token startups success or failure (as long as they don't all fail).

If that reasoning and long-term planning is valid, than I think it's safe to say that you'd be hard to find someone who made themselves poor buy buying into oil companies in the early 20th century.

I think we might see it go lower in the short term (6 months) but I suspect that LTC will move up to a 10% counterpart to BTC long-term UNLESS bitcoin starts to implement some of the changes to reduce costs of transfer.  Looking at these as reserve currency I think it's reasonable to view BTC as gold and LTC as silver. 

There's A LOT of money behind LTC, both in mining and development.  I think it's a hard bet to say any coin that fostered ASIC development will ever completely flop.

Wow, so much FUD.  Wait till after the first scheduled dividend payment at least before proclaiming total loss.  Bounty hunters should be paid, but it's also not a contract or full time job to get forum bounties.  The scrabble for "free" money i'm seeing on threads lately is crazy.

There's a lot of promise in TAAS still, but even if it's a complete sham, you should never spend more than you can afford to lose.

Trey restarting the computer, and also make sure you're not on a network that has any firewall/ports blocked.  I've seen this activity mostly when I'm travelling and not on my home network, a lot of wallets hang at roughly that point because many off-the-shelf firewalls block blockchains.

If that doesn't work.... I dunno, could always try restoring from the backup on a separate computer.

Not as yet, it's still all OTC.

Well put.  I think a good example of this at the moment would be something like Bela.  There's a fund and developers trying to monetize it and create a useful platform for it to extend beyond just trading.  That said, if you watch it's charts for the past weeks it's getting artificial support during dumps to keep the price from dropping below a threshold limit, and hence has been very stable.  It's probably a safe bet that Ambia is ponying up much of those BTC to do so. 

With that in mind though, it's POSSIBLE (perhaps not plausible) that some of these new ventures (for Bela their instagram competitor) will gain some level of adoption.  It will be in common adoption of these coins that money could be made outside the spec trading markets.  There's definitely very real opportunity for long term profits, and it's also very likely that blockchain currency will play a major role in 21st century economics, but right now it's pretty much blind horse betting.

With the amount of big backers and money behind it in mining, I'd find it hard to believe we won't see at least a few more significant pumps in the next few months.  How high it goes and what it's resting price will end up at are a little sketchy, but I'm sure $30 won't be it's ATH.  There's too many whales with a lot of money at stake to let it slide with no recovery.

There's also the new one: Wyvern, and Wyvcorp that are just starting out.  Not 100% what they're exact model/plan is, but it does look to be picking up some steam.

WPSaWLxGqJyHwN4zZAF2ntTKsxLmMiBKyA

Feel free to test it out

Lol, they get antsy, guessing these are the folks that'll be dumping.  Which is GREAT, let the price drop so I can grab some more GB cheap

To clarify, this "card" is speced for AI and deep learning development.  It's going to be I N S A N E L Y expensive.  This is NOT a consumer grade product, yet.  Volta will be the basis of the next gen Nvidia cards, but the specs on this thing aren't what we'll see in desktop GPUs for some time.

You said what I was thinking 

If you're in the US, Newegg has a sale on a 4U rack mount case for 40 bucks after rebate right now that's really nice, I got one a few weeks ago and am considering getting a few more.  It's really designed as a data server with lots of hard drive bays, but those can be removed and it has space for 4 1070s with no modification, with a small mobo and good layout, it could hold 6 GPUs.

I would suspect with oncoming ICOs / Airdrops / unique distributions (byteball??) that there may already be "free" assets added to the fund since closing as well.  So they are appreciating not only in general market trends, but there's inherent growth in managing a large crypto pool because of these other offers.  This has an immense possible upside if it's managed responsibly.