To answer your question Nicehash pays out daily if you meet the minimum payout amount, or they also do a forced weekly with a lower payout amount. The problem with the forced weekly payout is you are subject to a 4% withdrawal fee.

While Nicehash may be ok for real beginners, once you been mining for more than a few days I would seriously consider moving to a real pool with reasonable fees. There are many to choose from, and then learn to transfer your funds to an exchange to convert to BTC yourself. You can even use an exchange wallet address to point your miners at on many pools, so one less step for you. You will end up saving in fees and have more control over your coins so that you can convert them at the most profitable some, and not randomly. Sure, it is more work but then again you learn a lot more about how to entire ecosystem works.

Also, before blindly taking advice from these "Nicehash supporters" take a look at some of their post histories. User yerfei for example, almost every post he has made recently is in reply to similar threads where is one line answer is "You can start with NiceHash or Winminer", along with a link. Who's to say he is not an representative from Nicehash/Winminer promoting their product? It doesn't take much to make an account on this forum and level it up, so you need to research more than just the pools when relying on information found on here.

I would suspect this is the problem as well. Your little gridseeds are so old that even finding a default pool share might take quite a bit of time. As wavelengths said, if it is possible to adjust your difficulty on the pool you are using I would start with that.

The problem is if someone did take you up on this offer, who's to say that since you also know the private key you wouldn't just claim the XMR yourself once they finished mining the 0.1 XMR minimum amount, or more. Even at today's validation the 0.003XMR is only worth about 30 cents USD so it is basically a throwaway amount. Even if XMR were to one day go to $1000 USD, that amount would only be worth $3.00 so again basically not even worth it to worry about.

Your last sentence is the only one that I agree with as I do not consider any cloud mining operation as legit. While they may not have blatantly closed down and ran off with everyone's money like Auroramine did, they are a far cry from a good investment.

For one, they got lucky that the coin prices have risen as much as they have in the past year, thus making it appear they are profitable. I suspect in many of those cases if people who would have instead invested that same amount directly into a coin would have came out much further ahead.

Another is that almost all of them have some clause in the cloud mining contract that states the moment a coins profits drop below production (mining) costs, they have the right to terminate the contract and consider it as having been fulfilled. This means that if the coins profits had went the other way instead, you would be at a net loss. Again the general increase of the market in the past year helped avoid this, but if you look back to the 2014 and 2015 years many people bought cloud mining contracts and never even ROI'd on their investment.

A lot of sins (crimes) can be effectively hidden from sight during an uptrend in the market, as the profits are not coming so much the cloud mining as they are from the general appreciation of the market. I expect the same is true for many exchanges and other investments such as ICOs. I believe if Bitcoin and Alts were to experience a violent and sustained downtrend, on the order of a 70-80% correction lasting a year plus similar to the 2014-2015 years, many of these fraudulent practices would be exposed for what they truly are. Think Mt Gox times 100 as such an event could very well spell the end of Crypocurrecnies as we know it.

I am sorry to say this, but as others have said your Bitcoins are lost and you are unlikely to get them back or even be able to trace them to the hacker.

I agree that wiping your computer is probably prudent, as well as changing *all* of your passwords.

Since you do not know what type of virus or Trojan you had I would maybe even go so far as to suggest installing to a new hard drive. A low level format of the hard drive might clean it, but this is more technical and not to be confused with the quick high level format often performed when reinstalling a OS.

If you are extremely paranoid, which you probably should be as you have already be targeted, I would even suggest re-flashing your motherboard BIOS with a new clean version. Of course you cannot trust your current PC to download and write the image to a flash drive, so you will need to do this on a known clean computer.

Finally, do not store Bitcoin, or any Cryptocurrency for that matter, on your main computer that you use for your daily activities. Get a hardware wallet instead, such as the Ledger Nano S. They are less than $100 and well worth the price as even one Bitcoin is now worth $6000.

The newer motherboards support more than 6 PCIe slots, and indeed they already have board configurations with 8, 12, 13, and higher PCIe slots which is what this post is about. Also, Windows and AMD/Nvidia drivers have recently been modified to allow this many GPUs to run, where in the past there were software limitations.

My point is while it is now possible to run this many GPUs, at which point does it still make sense to do so. The motherboards typically cost more and from what I read you also need to increase the physical memory and SSD sizes to accommodate the increased memory/swap file requirements of supporting so many GPUs. It is possible you may even need to use a more robust processor that the typical Celeron often used and you definitely need extra PSUs to power everything. So when you add up all these costs as well as the extra headaches of trying to get it all working, is it really better to run a 19 GPU rig versus 2 or 3 smaller rigs?

Sometimes it just comes down to the Silicon lottery and perhaps you just got stuck with one of the losers. I know I have a few cards that for whatever reason cannot hash at the same rate as their exact same model siblings. At first I didn't worry about it too much as it was often a small percentage, but now I test all of new cards that I buy and if the hashrate deviation is too great I no longer hesitate to return them within the 30-day window which most retailers allow.

The bigger worry than breathing the air is the fire risk involved when running miners in your house. That is way more likely to kill you than breathing the air. Dust/dirt build up, loose connections, overloaded components, excessive heat, placing miners too close to flammable materials, all far greater concerns than the air quality. The air quality issue (if there even is one) can be alleviated to a great extent by simply cracking a window or two to vent in fresh air, but the fire hazards are a lot harder to mitigate.

Yes, the difficulty will again start to decrease as more new miners will come on-board and old miners add more rigs due to this temporary increase in profitability. After a few months the difficulty will rise enough where profits are back down to what they were just prior to the fork and continue the trend down. People considering getting in to mining now need to factor this in when they run their profitability calculations as what the calculators show today will not be the same in 3 months.

The high difficulty mainly has to do with miners jumping over to Bcash when it is more profitable, but I agree with your stance that this is leading to a centralization of the network. This all goes back to when BTC became ASIC mine-able and one company took the lead in production of ASIC miners. Now they barely sell to the general public preferring instead to mine with their equipment until such point the profits start to sink. Then they will sell off this older equipment passing it off as new to the eager public, who then may only get a few months useful life out of it. It is almost the perfect racket, yet everyone seems fine with it.

BTC developers had a chance a long time ago to switch to a more ASIC resistant algorithm but for some reason chose instead to centralize this power into the hands of a few which is frankly causing most of the current day problems. GPU mine-able coins, such as Ethereum, do not see such sudden losses of hash power. Indeed, people do switch to more profitable coins, but since the hash power is more even spread out the swings are not as sudden and violent as they are with the more concentrated mining power of Bitcoin.

Don't listen to half these people as most don't even take the time to read through the post.

4.6 BTC really isn't that much no matter what people on here try to tell you. If I were you I would take some of that BTC and start growing it by trading. Start with small amounts at first but try to grow it to 5 BTC. Then aim for 6 BTC and so on until you get at least 21 BTC. Why 21? It is a nice psychological amount to have and represents 1/1millionth of the total amount of BTC total cap. In practice it would represent slightly more since all BTC hasn't been mined yet and some are lost or locked up.

Other than the coolness factor do you really need to run more than 13 GPU's off of the same motherboard? I know there is economics of scale, but these motherboards cost more as well, offsetting the savings gained. Plus you need extra PSUs, more memory and a bigger SSD. So adding all this up the cost savings really isn't a lot more than say 2 smaller rigs.

Also, a point that has been argued before, if the rig experiences issues, then you have 19, 21, or however many GPUs you manage to get running down at once versus with smaller rigs you would have maybe 8 GPUs down while the others would remain running. While these videos are nice to watch for the geek factor, it seems to be pointless after a certain limit.

You can check online for a BIOS such as the TechPowerUp site. Here is a list of BIOS candidates for your Sapphire card you could try: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=&manufacturer=Sapphire&model=RX+580&interface=&memType=&memSize=8192&since=

You can click on details link at the right of each card's listing to get more information and try to match up your card.

Well November has been known in the past as a good month for Bitcoin, so anything is possible. Myself, I am on the side of the fence as the people who think hitting $10K this year yet is too fast of growth and would simply lead to a massive correction shortly afterwards. It may not be as exciting, but I will be happy if Bitcoin just holds above $5k for the remainder of the year and worries about going higher sometime in 2018.

Sadly some people will probably take them up on the offer, especially those who "invested" (were scammed out of) a lot of money.

It's a lost cause folks, if you invested I know it sucks, but don't give in to these scum and make them even richer by hoping you will somehow get your money back.

I find it interesting that the most stubborn critics are the ones who already made their fortunes on the old economic model so they really have no reason now jump on the bandwagon of something they probably have a hard time even understanding. For example, Warren Buffet is in the news again saying he still believes Bitcoin is a bubble that is going to end badly, similar to someone else we know.

Well there is no doubting his investment skills for much of the last century, but now both technology and the economy are rapidly changing. He is getting up there in years, so he doesn't have anything to worry about, as the fundamentals of the "old" economy isn't going to change overnight, but young investors taking advice from people like him need to consider the current environment we live in. While you probably won't go broke investing in companies like Coca-cola, Procter and Gamble, and other Buffet favorites, you aren't going to make huge returns either. One thing he did say and was (is) probably right about, is only invest in things you know. Well I am not too sure how much he knows about Bitcoin or Crypto's in general, so he is probably right to avoid investing in it and he really has no place advising others either for or against it.

My vote is used Cisco gear, especially switches as you can get good deals and they are pretty robust and reliable. If you want new equipment I also like the Ubiquiti brand as a few others have mentioned.

I recently purchased the Edge Router Lite from Ubiquiti as my old second-hand Cisco router wasn't keeping up when I recently upgraded 100+ mbps service from my ISP. The old router was limited to about 60 mbps throughput, while the Ubiquiti can go to 1 gig depending on how much traffic inspection and manipulation you intend on doing. The router is sub $100 and has a lot of nice enterprise type features. My main attraction though with the 3 port Lite was the ability to configure a secondary ISP for load balancing or just plain fail-over. I had an incident over the summer where my cable modem was down several hours various times over a week period before they fixed it. Let's just say I lost more in mining income that a secondary ISP would cost

For the switches I am still running the second-hand Cisco's, as they do what I need, but I may look into Ubiquiti's Wireless Access Points and IP camera lines as I want to build out some more. But in any case, I think stay away from the typical cheap home brands such as LinkSys, Netgear, etc., as while they are fine for a few computers/devices, once you start adding many mining rigs on top of your normal networked devices, things can get start getting wonky.

I don't mine with them but the Pi's do act as good mini-servers to run software that monitors my rigs. They also work well to drive wall mounted LCD monitors so I can keep track of not only my rig up-times, but select coin prices as well.

Most modern humidifiers have a replaceable filter you swap out each season to prevent anything like that. They also sell additives you can add to the humidifier water to prevent mold if that is an issue in your region. Usually Winter air is pretty dry so mold isn't a big concern, but I suppose if people didn't do regular maintenance on something, like periodically clean the water basin, anything is possible.

Well considering that you are a Financial Analyst you should be telling us.

Anyway, yes the general profitability trend will continue to head down as people keep building rigs and thus adding hash rate to an already saturated market. Even if the price recovers a bit, the hash rate is still growing so the days of paying off your new gear in just 60-90 days are over. A lot of newcomers don't want to believe in this however, so they come up with all kinds of ways to justify buying overpriced gear chasing profits that essentially disappeared months ago.