A couple years ago, I bought 10400 Cardano coins at a price of 4.2 cents apiece for a long term HODL.

Last August, when prices jumped up a bit, I figured it was as good as it was going to get for a while and sold them at 15 cents each for a moderate profit.

Then in early January, the next time I looked at Cardano, it was at 34 cents.  Well, this is a high price for it, it's topped out now, it'd be crazy to buy at this price.

Then by early February, it rose to 90 cents!

Well, this is a high price for it, it's surely topped out now, it'd be crazy to buy at this price!

Mid February, it's floating around $1.05.  Well, this is a high price for it, it's topped out now, it'd be crazy to buy at this price.

Late February, it popped to $1.40!  And buying now seems more insane than ever, but how much more can it really rise?  I mean REALLY?

Cardano is causing me stress.

Bitcoin price is dipping!  Sell into cash now!  When I got up this morning I noticed all coins were starting a dip on Coinmarketcap, so I went to my trading accounts and sold all my Bitcoin into cash.  When the dip bottoms out I will buy back in, but I'm not about to lose my profits I have gained this past month!

SELL NOW!!!  Help the prices crash the PHOQUE out so my gains may be even greater!!!  And yours too, I guess.

I can remember doing random searching on ebay just a few months ago, and S9's were under $100, and even then I wasn't sure it was a good deal. Now they are up around $300 again.  I should have grabbed a few cheaply!

Good news since yesterday.  I downloaded the Nicehash Linux operating system (NHOS) to 2 flash drives and got 2 of my 3 mining PCs up and running on it.  It took a little while to figure out the details, and what to read and look for in the config file, but before long I was able to go in and adjust overclocks with no problem.  My main PC is setup with a second hard drive, so I can restart it and boot into Linux Mint easily by just hitting F12 and select the other disk, so I only had to do that to put the flash drives in and read the files and adjust them as needed.

For anyone who hasn't done it, you need to know the algorithm ID numbers so you know which parts to modify for overclocking.  Since I was mining Kawpow, it was ID #52, and it lists each GPU separately.

With the cpu power at 103 percent, cpu clock +50, and memory clock +700, my P104-100s are all right around 17.3 MHashes each in Kawpow.  I cleared out my Nicehash wallet right about midnight, so we'll see how long it takes to get back to $100 in it.  I've had 3 payouts since last night of $2.87, $2.83, and $3.05 .

But I still don't understand why I can't make the Windows 7 PC mine anything other than BeamV3.  This is my main everyday PC, so changing it off Windows isn't an option.

But things are going better.

For my mining PC with 3 104's in it, it showed 622 watts draw before I applied the overclocking and 640 watts afterwards.

I know that the coin prices can't go up forever, but I sure hope they stay at their current level (or go up, that's okay too) for a few months.  I'm cranking some decent cash out for myself right now.

I'll be prepared to convert my BTC to dollars when the price starts to tumble, then keep mining for a while then offload my GPUs to some noob on ebay.  Since 2013 I've gone through 3 cycles of buying GPUs, mining and selling.  And 1 cycle of ASICs.  My biggest victory was buying 3 Avalon 741s for $2000 in late 2017, mining with them for a little over a month, then selling them on ebay for SIX GRAND shortly before the prices crashed.

I've looked for ways to steal a bunch of GPUs (yes you read that right, I would if I could), but opportunities to do so aren't common around here.  At least not in enough volume to make it a worthwhile risk.

So enjoy it while it lasts, save money, then wait for the dip and buy back in at the bottom, and HODL again!

I think a key metric to watch is ebay prices.  When any average GPU is going for crazy money, time to sell your hardware.  The price dip isn't far away.

Okay, here is a good update.  I downloaded the Nicehash OS to a flash drive, and put in my wallet ID, but no worker name yet.  I shut down my mining PC that had 3 P104-100s in it, disconnected the hard drive, and booted it up from the flash drive running Nicehash OS.

Well they were right, it certainly is a lightweight client!  It has barely enough text on the screen on a black background to let you know it is running, and that's about it.  

Under the list of the 3 GPUs, it says "WARNING!  Onboard GPU detected. Please disable onboard GPU in BIOS.".  Well, I need that onboard graphics turned on so I can see the screen.

So it got all 3 GPUs mining, and my Nicehash stats screen was showing each GPU cranking 17.2 to 17.3 in Kawpow (a dumb name, Kapow would be better).  Is 17.2-17.3 a good speed for these GPUs in Kawpow?  With no stats on the monitor, I have no idea what I have for rejects or invalid shares.  BTC per 24 hours is about double what I was getting in BeamV3.  My Kill-a-watt meter is showing 622 watts draw, compared to 617 with the same pc at stock clock speeds and tunings under Windows 7.

So all is good and after about 10 minutes... the whole PC rebooted.  I'll watch and see if it keeps doing that.

A few new questions:

1. Why does the Nicehash OS have no problem using Kawpow, but I couldn't get it to use anything other than BeamV3 when running under Windows 7?
2. How do I tune the GPU clocks and voltages for better performance?  I don't think MSI Afterburner will work on this Linux OS install.  EDIT - I read the online guide for Nicehash OS, I see how I have to make clock changes.
3. Tell me more about this whole disabling the onboard GPU thing it is warning me about.
4. How do I do.... ANYTHING in Nicehash OS?  Is there a list of key commands somewhere that will display other things on the screen?

If it is successful, I'll reflash the USB drive with worker names, as it is, I just put in my wallet address and nothing else.

I didn't choose Beam for the GPUs to mine, that's the only option I get.  I'll look again for the Kapow benchmark in Nicehash.  And yes I do use the Nicehash mining client on all 3 PCs.

I've read up on the process to flash P104-100 GPUs to 8gb, and no way can I handle it.  Even if I could, there's so many convoluted little steps that I'd screw it up somehow, plus I just don't want to.

Can anyone flash an MSI P104-100 to 8GB?  I've got 6 that need it.  In the USA only, of course.

How do I do kapow mining?  Is it available on Nicehash?  I guess I'd need to use only a certain miner program to force it to use kapow?

They were for sale for a reason.  You're phuckt.

P104-100s are 4GB.  They can be BIOS updated to 8GB, but I read through the whole proceedure and tried it on one, but it just wasn't working.  So I left the GPUs at 4GB.

So you're telling me that even though the P104's are good, they will never mine at their potential if they aren't BIOS updated to 8GB?  They will be essentially crippled and limited to lesser algorithms unless updated to 8GB ?

I see.  How do I force them to mine Eth on Nicehash, or am I just better off going to Slush's Pool or another GPU pool?  I didn't request that my GPUs mine Beam, that's just what Nicehash gives me to mine.

I have a chance to buy 8 GPUs and get them mining at a fair price.  A price even I'd pay.  Well, I'm not exactly PAYING it, it'll go on the credit card.  The good old American "buy now pay later".

Assuming prices stay above $30K for BTC all year, the GPUs will pay for themselves, even when counting for electric, but damn, all the monitoring, all the checking, all the frantic work in case the miner goes down, etc.  Is it worth the hassle, or should I just keep the cash available on the credit card in case I need it for something else?

Even if I bought them, mined for 6 months, and quit, I'm sure I could sell them for at least 2/3 of what I paid.  I just can't decide if it is worth the frickin' hassle.

$50,000 per Bitcoin would be a whole lot better if I HAD BITCOINS!!!!!!!

Imagine being a CPU miner in early 2009. Your PC dings a block.  Who could have ever guessed that it just created 2.5 million dollars, just like that?

I raised the temp limit back to the stock 83 C setting.  No change.  On my Gigabyte motherboard running 2 P104's, at 16.3 Sols, in the BIOS, under Miscellaneous settings, instead of "Auto", I used Gen 1, Gen 2, and Gen 3, none made much difference.

I've mined on NiceHash for a couple years off and on, and currently have 6 P104-100's and a 1060 mining for me.  According to the calculator I should be getting around $24 a day.  In reality, my payouts to my NH wallet are right about $10 a day.  I believe it is taking into account my electric cost, but even so, it's guess as to what I should be earning is WAY off.

All 7 GPUs are always mining BeamV3 through NBMiner 36.1.  

Is it the miner program and algorithm affecting my profits, or is the calculator just plain wrong?

Ready for the new scam site?  I found BITCOLOAN while watching Vosk youtube videos today. 

It is clearly a scam, I'm sure they will make some money for a while then bail with the funds like Bitconnect did.

Their site has little videos, and everyone has a foreign accent, so they really expect us to trust them?

Minimum deposit is about $25, or 0.0005 BTC, I might do it just for the hell of it and see how it goes.

Thanks for all the useful answers so far.

I did some more troubleshooting.  In my main PC I have 2 P104's, each was hashing BeamV3 at 16.3 to 16.4.  In a separate mining PC with 3 P104's, they were all getting 20.3 to 20.4.  Same NBMiner program.

I had the bright idea to swap one P104 from one PC to the other, to see if the low hashrate problem follows the GPU.  And it didn't.  After exchanging one GPU between the 2 computers, each PC has the same hash rates it did before. 

So in these 2 PC's, something is messing up the hash rates.  But what? They're all 7 Pro 64 bit, same drivers, same mining programs on Nicehash, etc.

These 2 PCs are each running 16 GB of RAM, and the third has 10 GB.  Intel CPUs in all 3.

Forgot to mention, all the GPUs are running driver version 461.09 .