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This is for the better over the long term and the FUD over this announcement is just that.

What these platforms are banning is mainly the ICO advertisements, and for every 1 legitimate ICO there are probably 20 scam ones. If your first exposure to crypto is getting scammed by a fraudulent ICO you will probably walk away with a negative view and may leave the space completely. So from this viewpoint getting rid of some of the bad aspects of the crypto space is a good thing long-term.

However, like most such announcements the spinsters will try and make this look all bad to serve their agenda, which lately seems to be to spread as much FUD as possible to drive coins prices further down.

This seems to imply that there were previous superblocks. Can you give a list of them by block number as I seen no mention of this in the OP.

Username/UID: Za1n / 529727
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While it may be technically possible it is not recommended.

CPU mining is all but non-existent and even if your laptop has a decent gaming GPU in it, it is still not ideal due to the heat it will produce.

As far as earning free coins, no you will burn your laptop up long before you would earn enough coins to replace it.

This pretty much sums it up, ASICs are designed for maximum performance so they need maximum airflow to cool the unit. When designing them they do so for large industrial miners who will install 100's or 1000's of them in a data center type of environments where noise is not an issue, they do not take into consideration the home miner who is looking at putting a few in their basement, or heaven forbid their bedroom.

I would argue that the mining difficulty was going up all along, but no one is arguing that the run-up in coin prices did not massively accelerate this process.

That is the fine detail everyone overlooks now, is that they assume the difficulty will eventually start to fall in order to match the lower coin price. It may, but there will be a long lag time as there are too many people expecting this to be a temporary pullback before the good times are back. I don't think reality is going to set in for most people until they get a couple of months of break-even profits, meaning mining revenue == electricity costs, or even experience a slight loss.

There are now too many large players who no doubt are getting the lowest electrical prices they can find who will continue growing until the break-even is just about at neutral. This will keep pressure on the difficulty from going down, and if the ETH ASIC rumors are true then look out as all GPU coins will suffer the fallout. So if you have access to cheap power you can probably ride out the dry times ahead, but I think anyone paying much more than a couple of cents/kwh for power is going to be driven out within the next 12 months..

You are correct in that it is still somewhat profitable, but as I said it will not be the same going forward as it has been during the past 12-18 months.

The run-up in coin prices helped to mask the corresponding run-up in network difficulties for nearly all coins. This will have the effect of decreasing profitability by a great extent, even if the coin prices were to recover to their highs. Using my 18 month figure, I was able to mine 5 Ethereum a day with one rig back then, but then ETH was only selling for around $10, so $50/day gross for one rig, or about $1500/month.  

Now it takes nearly 10 rigs a month or more to produce those same 5 ETH. Assuming identically sized and configured rigs we have 10 rigs x 30 days or 300 times more effort put in to mine the same 5 ETH which (today) is going for around $700 each, or $3,500 for all five. Dividing $3,500 by 300 we get about $11.66/day per rig, so about 1/5th that when the run-up first started. However network difficulty continues to go up daily and the price looks more likely to go down than it does up, so this is what I meant is that we are now approaching the same point we did about 18 months ago in terms of profitability, but this time it is going down and not up.

So any calculations or metrics one used during this last 12-18 months will no longer be valid going forward as difficulty is not going down, but the price likely will, or at the best stay stagnant. So while you may still may be able to eke out some small profits in the coming months, it is not likely to be anywhere near the levels we just lived through.

One of the biggest factors is with the high difficulties you just cannot accumulate any significant amount of coins. Using my previous example back when you could earn 5 coins/day on a rig even though the profits were about 5x better (assuming you sold as you mined) you would only need to sell maybe one tenth of what you mined in coins to pay your electric bills, as 1 rig doesn't draw a lot of energy. Now that you need to power ten rigs, you expenses went up 10 fold, while your profit is already lower than it was then, but also there is the reduced "potential" for future profit to consider.

Setting aside 50 or 100 ETH per month back then was no big deal, now it will be impossible for all but the largest miners to accumulate such amounts for future speculation. Holding on to that excess production and selling at 100x price is where the majority of the big profits came into play. Even if you did everything you possibly could do wrong in mining 12-18 months ago, if you managed to hold even a few coins and sell during the highs you came out on top.

I won't even go into how even building a rig now is almost 2x as much as it cost back then so the payback period is hardly even feasible, but that's another argument.

So no matter how you want to look at it, the profits going forward will not be equivalent to those we just witnessed. The price of ETH would need to jump to $70,000 each for such a future potential to exist in today's environment.

Note I just used ETH as an easy example, but most coins went through the same stages so their figures would be similar.

I hopped on this for a day or so with about that amount of hashrate and earned about 18 coins. Based upon my results, you should have accumulated about 3 coins in 4 hours.

One thing to note is that it takes awhile for the coins to confirm before they are paid out. I do not think my first payment reached my wallet until about 4-5 hours in, so you might want to go back and check your pool to see if you have a balance there.

The other thing to check is that some pools require you to set the password field to in order to properly credit the coins, so you can check that out too.

Most of these scenarios turn out to use old refurb PCs from office type environments, where you may get a tower case and a motherboard with a few spare PCIe slots. To run 8 GPUs I suspect the OP will also use the 3 to 1 PCIe adapter board and an additional PSU (as he admits to later).

While not necessarily a bad way to go, you got to consider that the gear is often 3-4 years old and was designed for office use, not necessarily 24/7 mining, so you may end up troubleshooting more that just using new equipment. There is also a high chance of getting some duds that slipped through the refurb process, so you may have shipping to deal with unless you can source locally. I would say if you are just deploying a few rigs, buying new components might be the best way to go, but for those who plan to scale big it may be worth the hassle of dealing with the headaches.

If you instantly destroyed a brand new new riser as well as the original, that tells me something is indeed shorted, most likely on your video card. I agree with your instincts to NOT test it out on the motherboard directly, as you will most likely fry that too as you said, instead I would just RMA the GPU and let the service department look at it. If it turns out nothing is wrong with your card (doubtful) then the most you will be out is shipping costs, as they would send you the non-defective card back. If it is bad, they take all the risk further testing it and will repair/replace it for you, assuming you are still under warranty.

If your motherboard has built in video output, you can remove all the GPUs and test it by itself to make sure it is not the cause. I would also recommend picking up a cheap PSU tester, such as a Thermaltake Dr. Power II if you plan to have more than one or two rigs, so you can easily eliminate a bad PSU when these type of issues arise.

Yeah, I used those pools too, but I think I started at Bitclockers or 88BTC (or something similar) both of which eventually got hacked and a lot of miners, myself included lost a lot of coins. Since they were probably worth < $10 each back then, we didn't get too worked up, but man thinking back on it now makes me sad...

Yes, I agree that differing viewpoints are the best and also simply pointing my own out there, I am not necessarily just disagreeing with you.

I mined through the downturn 4 years ago as well as the good times in early 2013 and again in 2017, so I can offer the experience of seeing the bad times as well as the good. I am not necessarily endorsing a gloom and doom viewpoint and like everyone else I hope the market and mining conditions do improve, but I also think that simply having everyone say "wait it out things will be back to normal in no time" is also not in everyone's best interest.

Most likely reality is going to be different than any of us can predict with any certainty, but by offering up different viewpoints hopefully the OP, as well as others, can make the best decisions by taking into account even the worse-case scenarios.

Well no matter what the means, ASIC, POS, high difficulty, all that GPU hashrate will be looking for a new home, and if you think all the non Ethash coins will be able to adsorb it and continue to make profit, well I have a bridge I would like you to look at.

You are correct in assuming that the GPU prices will not instantly drop, as many people will continue to hold out hope and some will even mine at a loss for awhile expecting the market to miraculously correct, but given enough time even the hard core holdouts begin to give up. The more recent entrants to mining will be the first to go as they have the most to lose and are looking at the longest payback period.

Those with paid for gear can hold out longer only concerned with their electrical costs staying below their mining income, but slowly the people with higher electricity prices will also start to leave. In the end it will only be the large centralized miners with sub 3 cent power who are left, like always. Sure, there may be a few hobby miner holdouts, but by that time even with a rig like the OP has, it will be lucky to mine a couple of ETH in a year, eventually getting to the futile point as trying to GPU mine Bitcoin right now.

I agree with this sentiment, at the very least don't look into buying anymore new GPUs, but it very well might be a good time to short your GPUs so to speak. Sell them now at a premium and you will be more than likely be able to buy them back at a steep discount in a few months time.

We got a second wind with mining late last year with prices shooting up to ATH's to keep things profitable, but that scenario going forward seems to be less and less likely to repeat anytime soon as the market continues to go down. Looking back on history we could be looking at another 3 years before things pick up again, but even under the best conditions it will be several months before the market recovers to the point of making mining attractive again.

With all this going on the mining difficulty continues to shoot up on a daily basis, either due to new GPU miners coming online or maybe the Ethereum ASIC rumors are true. In any event, it all adds up to mining profitability continuing to stagnate and it may as some have predicted start to turn negative for those with higher operating costs.

Even for a brand new card I think that price will be very high in a few weeks time. Wait a bit and see if market turns around and if the Ethereum ASIC rumors are true.

You may point some of this information out to him and see if he would consider selling closer to $200 since it is used, but even then if the market continues to deteriorate while the difficulty continues to climb you will never pay off that card. Don't think you will be safe mining another coin besides Ethereum either as if a Ethash ASIC does indeed hit, all the GPU power will saturate all the other mine-able coins making profits non-existent for all but those who have sub 3 cent electricity.

Welcome to the wonderful world of mining.

The same thing happens to a lot of new miners, they do their research by looking at all the rosy projections of a GPU doing x amount of hashrate and earning y amount of profit per day, then they extrapolate the data out to a year (or two) figuring they can breakeven and make some money, so they go ahead and plunk down $2-$3k on some mining gear.

It is at this point the hard reality sets in that at almost every step of the way the rosy predictions seem to be off. The card everyone else claims gets 150 hashs or 2200 sols turns out to only produce 140 hashs or 2000 sols, worse the pools show even less.

Also, between the time you ran all your calculations and purchased, built, and tweaked your rig the price calculations have gone south and mining difficulty has risen resulting is less coins per day and the price has dropped. The result is your payback period has gone up even further than your originally anticipated.

Getting back to your particular issue, pools estimate your hashrate based upon the number of valid shares your miner submits to them, whereas your local display is simply showing you the guesses per second.

Most of the time the pool will reflect a lower overall hashrate as many inefficiencies creep into the equation. First, your miner may have a run of bad luck, where it sucks at guessing and submits a low number of shares. Your miner may guess correctly, but send the share right as the pool is moving on to new work, thus your otherwise valid share a few milliseconds ago now becomes a stale share so isn't counted by the pool. This can be compounded by a high latency between your miner and the pool and in extreme cases packet drops on your connection can result in lost shares.

On top of all this, the pools themselves are competing against other pools, so they too can have a run of bad luck, so even if you are hashing properly the pool itself may run into a period of reduced profits.

In the end it is not unusual to see a difference between what the pool shows and your miner displays. As has been already poitned out, over a longer time period the running average can even out some of the bumps, but on the whole your pool hashrate will normally be a little under what your local miner is displaying.

Yes, people have been saying it for awhile now, and while the timing may have been off the advice is still sound. The problem is that last June we were still in a strong bull market with a lot of upward price potential to look forward to and the mining difficulty was quite a bit lower than it is right now.

Now 9 months later the mining difficulty is still at stratospheric levels and continuing to climb, hardware prices are easily 2 to 3x what they were last June, but coin prices have plummeted 50% from their highs with no real signs of reversing. Indeed, coin prices may very well continue to drop some more.

I fully expect we will drop below $1 per day a GPU in profit very soon, and may even drop down into the 50 cent/day range. Trying to pay off a $600 video card that should only cost $200 with a 50 cent/day profit is going to change a lot of opinions on the feasibility of mining in short order. Even with free electricity, taking 1200 days or 3-1/4 years to payback your GPU investment is not too attractive of a prospect, assuming the GPU even lasts that long while 24/7 mining.

The problem with that assumption is do you really believe that difficulty will not change and that the ETH price will remain stable for 12-14 months?

This is the problem of all those calculator sites in that for them to even work for predicting much more than a week out they rely on those two assumptions to hold true, when in fact the reality is often the exact opposite, or that difficulty will continue to rise and the coin price will not be stable, probably go down during the next 12 months. This is much akin to weather forecasting, where short-term 2-3 days they have a good track record, but expecting a forecast a few weeks out to match up with what they say it will be today is very unlikely.

I would seriously consider holding on to that money for now and be ready to buy up the coin(s) you intended to mine directly in the next few months. The rig you are contemplating will probably cost you well over $3,000 right now due to the highly inflated GPU prices. The coin mining difficulty levels are all at all time highs and showing no signs of slowing down, meanwhile most coin prices are continuing to go lower, also with no signs of reversing any time soon.

Using ETH as one example, I expect it to retest the $500-$600 range within the next month or two, and possibly even go much lower. Even using the $500 figure as a low you could instead buy 6 ETH directly and hold with that money. A 5x 1070 rig will currently mine 0.0117 ETH per day, meaning it would take you 512 days of mining to earn those same 6 ETH coins. This of course assumes that difficulty does not rise anymore which we all know will not be the case. Also, this does not factor in the electricity required to mine those 6 ETH over that time period, so you would likely be looking at a much, much longer payback period probably on the order of 800+ days.