Bought 10 R9 390s for $260 each (after selling copies of Civ 6 I think it was for $40) and mined Monero when everybody else was doing X11

Sold Monero on it's first run up for BTC - made more money than I would have made had I mined X11 because Monero difficulty was so low because it was the unpopular coin

Mined ETH with R9 390s for 2 years at insane 31MH/s rates. Sure they were hot as hell sucking 250+ watts and required I buy Gold/Plat PSU in the 1000+ range but they paid themselves off pulling in over 10 ETH a day.

Sold the R9s when people went full retard and spent more on the cards then they could have realistically mined in a reasonable timeframe. 8 of my USED R9 390s sold for over $500 after fees.  I took that money and bought more crypto with it.

So other than wasting my time and associated electricity costs I was basically able to get free crypto by not trying to min/max the market. I probably could have done better if I had a time machine or mined 0 day coins, but it was passive income mostly.

I have said it before and I'll say it again - only mine a coin if you expect it to fail - in this case I expected Monero to fail and was pleasantly rewarded by excess crypto because I mined as insanely lower difficulty because WhatToMine sent all the "idiots" to the wrong. If you really think a coin is going to take off just buy it as soon as you can.

It's a scam. Plain and simple.

If the group actually does pay some returns they will only do so in the beginning to keep getting more users until they finally run away. This is how Bitcoin Savings and Trust and ever other HYIP/Pyramid/Ponzi has functioned.

Just settle for keeping your coins safe in a secure wallet.

Anybody who was hoping for a recovery - consider this: the thing that made ETH run up (because sheer exuberance itself cuz moon) was ICO purchases that tied up ETH. Now all those fake or weak project are dumping their ill gotten gains and trashing the market.  They still have a long, long way to go. They will keep liquidating as they too get scared. Hell if you scammed $100 million in USD of ETH out of stupid investors and it's now worth $10 million - it's better to cash out now and have $10 million than wait for it to become $5 million. Many of these ERC20 tokens will be cosbycoins.

I would be surprised at any sustained bull activity before Q2 of 2019.

Bitmain has been doing this for years and yet people keep running back to them. People received "new" S3s that had thick coats of dust on the fan blade edges and on the intake side of their miners back in the day and so many Bitmain devotees defended them.

Of course they're not the only ones. BFL (the kings of corrupt crypto ASIC manufacturers) was proven to be mining with their customer hardware in court and yet nobody got jailtime. Bitmain has no fear of reprisal.

Username/UID:    DrG/38450
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You would be surprised at the number of cloud mining "companies" that never even paid out users. Often times it was just one guy who would make micropayments for a few days to all users with no actual mining equipment. These scammers would simply make up a name and a website with a payment address, make a signature campaign, have a bunch of new users spam the forum with the stupid signature ad nauseum. New users would sign up and pay for a small contract only to find out there was no company in the first place.

Yeah if you look at it in a closed bubble. Sure the guy who holds 1k eth in a node will have 1.05k eth at the end of the year. The poor farmer in Republic of Congo has no opportunity to gain from this.

EXCEPT.

If these blockchains can actually be used as a currency (provided the emission rate is low). Right now it takes the equivalent of $50 USD to send $150 in Congo. Banks are just milking daily activities there.

The entire supply chain of this planet relies on moving electronic made up money here and there. Even most people in the US slave away at a job so that a few data bits can be sent each money into Dimon's chase mortgage operations account. Human manpower converted into digital potential.

The whole point of POW is that the W is something that humans can wrap their minds around.

Imagine if we somehow had some way of issuing 100 Dodo coins to every human on Earth based on their DNA signature and some alien forced us all to use Dodo coins as currency. The haves of this world would have a shit fit and the have-nots would most likely be pleased. But that's unlikely to happen.

Somebody already pointed out how messed up your reasoning is but let me explain it to you again because you "mine at a loss because moon" people are misguided.

I mined bitcoin at a loss back in 2011 and 2012 simply because I didn't have access to a reliable exchange. I mean it was pretty much MtGox or private sales on the forum here. Had I spent my electricity funds on purchasing the coin I would have at least 20% more BTC than I do now. But I was not presented with that opportunity - back then it took Dwolla 2 weeks to funnel bank account funds into MtGox.

With the sheer number of exchanges and some countries openly accepting BTC as legal tender there is no reason to mine at a loss unless you want to hide your coins (privately generate your own blocks).

You act as if greed is a bad thing. Or at least the fundamental virtue beneath greed - being self sufficient. Crypto revolution has a chance at breaking away from the large world bank cartel that basically employees all of humanity into a manipulated slavery (manipulated because of all the price fixing and artificial supports). If the ETH devs did not support GPU miners greed then should we assume they caved to ASIC miner greed? Shall I just call you Jihan?

ETH needs to go POS to see itself as something viable other than the massive environmental mess that it has become in the media's eyes. The devs insist they are focusing on POS and can't be bothered to do minor forks to support decentralization (it's easy to stick 100 ASICs in a room, not so much 10K video cards).

Here's a little secret. It's not a free market. In isolated bubbles it is, but the world is filled with laws that goes against fair play. One not need to any further so see Bitmain's China exodus to see that. Had ETH never seen POW and just created everything from thin air like ripple I doubt MSFT and many other techs would have even bothered jumping onboard. The capitol flow would not have been there (as paltry as it has been thus far). ETH would have been just another ripple also-ran.

If every coin would end up becoming ripple then I for one would just sell all my crypto and just cash out now and write it off as the failed experiment of my lifetime.

Well people ask for the insane prices because they get lowball offers of 1/3 their asking price. Post a 1080Ti for $600 and somebody will offer $200 cash in hand if they can pick it up today lol.  I don't bother with craigslist of eBay - I sold everything through Amazon but that is filled with scam buyers now.

I can see the logic in selling a built rig at MSRP though - it does take a lot of time to build a rig cleanly and correctly with proper spacing, wiring, and good cable management. But seeing as how almost all coins are mined at a loss right now I don't see a hurry to get going with any rig except maybe a Vega Monero setup.

Yeah not disclosing mining behavior is just shady and scammy. It's about what I would expect from the general populace at large. No decency. I always ran my cards in the last 3 years with good thermals by undervolting so I have no problem reporting my mining and even boast about how low the voltage will go at stock speeds. Only thing I see bad with well kept miner cards are the fans.

Oddly the only card I have had die in the last 2 years was a 750Ti that I never once mined on. It only played games and killed the HDMI output so I got a 1050 out of it thanks to MSI.

Good catch. Both those guys are registered back on May 20th +/- 8 hours from each other and both have same time zone. Too conspicuous. This topic is a farce.

For those sitting on hardware bought in 2016 or early 2017 this is not a big deal. It just cuts down on the eth inflation.

For all those new adopters who ran to mining and bought rigs financed at 21% APR on a credit card this is the death blow. The ETH hashrate only dropped about 10TH/s today. It needs to drop another 80 or so to reach equilibrium with the new emission rate.

This is just like LTC crashing from $50 to $4 back in 2014. It took 3 years to recover from that.

This recovery should be faster, but I see the first 1/2 of 2019 being in the red.

Bye bye moon lambo dreams. Chikun has crashed.

VOSK - I dumped most of my farm early this year. I am working hard to acquire more capitol to outright buy crypto when the times presents itself (probably Thansgiving or Christmas time).

I'm not sure where you live, but the tax code in the US has changed for cryptos this past year. Now the sell event is considered any time a crypto is changed forms like from BTC to LTC not just when you liquidate to fiat. They don't treat crypto as real property like a 1031 exchange, they treat it as a currency transaction.

Also it is not stupid to stop mining at a loss. In fact it is stupid to mine at a loss (unless you have some need to hide your coins). This has been discussed by myself and others ad nauseum on other posts - you should do some reading.

Most people assume mining hardware is a fixed sunk cost when it often can be converted back into operating capitol - although at a value lower than acquisition price. As far as I can tell - the only hardware that absolutely becomes trash after 1 year is an ASIC miner. USB risers, motherboards, CPUs, RAM and of course video cards all have some value after 6 months or 12 months of mining.

Every 2 months (or more frequently if the market is crashing) I evaluate if I am losing more in devaluation of my hardware than I am earning mining profits. In Vosk's case he's earning one tasty Chipotle burrito a day - and I'm sure tails takes most of that. But 50 cards may be losing 2 to 3 burritos a day in value.

I think the 1070 and higher cards will hold their value decently well, but the 1060s and 1050s are going to crash hard (4k and 144Hz monitors demand more than a 1060).

But it always must be considered how hard is it to liquidate a video card in a deflating market. Right now it's. In January I was selling 2 year old RX 470s with 1 year of warranty for $450 cash (the nice MSI Gamer X ones, not crappy blower ones) in Los Angeles. I posted them as mining cards and told the buyer the optimal settings I had found.

If you try to sell a card now you'll probably say "was never used for mining" and when they ask you what games you played at Ultra High you say CS:GO 

Dude, you registered 1 day ago and have 2 posts - both of which are promoting TerraCotta. You also have the same local time zone as TerraCotta poster. Do I really need to call in the mods to ban your ass with this shill account.


IT'S A VIRUS!

I know what you are trying to say but you are incorrect. People mine at a loss either because they are stupid or because they are trying to hide their acquisition of the tokens/coins (for whatever reason).

If they're gambling, they're doing it wrong. They are essentially tipping the power company for each bet they are making - it's a waste of energy and resources.  If the coin moons as you say, it's always better to have more coins (which is what would have been achieved if they bought instead of mined).

BOLD strategy? Like cutting off a couple of fingers? Or putting you tongue into a paper shredder? How exactly does earning less coin with a set amount of fiat (the amount used to pay for electricity and operating overhead) ever make sense? Please spell it out for stupid me. I want to see some math. You know, hash it out.

Hint - big miners are making a profit because they have 2 cent electricity and massive data centers. Their operating costs per card are often less then 1/5 what a residential home miner would pay.

Haters?  

Again, retarded emotional comments obfuscating math.

Looks like Hashflare gets thrown into the hot mess that is cloud mining. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4461608.60

I got into crypto way back in 2011. I've seen all kinds of circuses go on. I have been scammed and I fell for a ponzi mostly because losing 500BTC meant nothing to me (yeah now it hurts like a shotgun to the gut).

With hindsight and much more passive approach I can tell people that they need to really take emotions out of their game (especially negative ones) and they need to think logically.

I know my posts don't fall on deaf ears because I have noobs always asking me what to buy or thanking me for slapping sense into them.

I do have a vested interest in crypto both financially and as being a participant in the world economy. I would like to see the crypto revolution suceed. I don't like seeing noobs get fleeced. But if they read all the warnings and still lose money well then, that's just entertainment.

Here's a thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=739510.0 I did back in 2014 when I started seeing every single user spam cloud mining in their signatures. I'm sure it helped at least 100 people stay the hell away from what were most certainly scams.

I've always been one to help people who are willing to help themselves (that's why I became a physician). For those looking to destroy themselves crypto is just like meth. A diabetic hell bent on eating pounds of rice and tortillas is going to enjoy taste for a couple of years over longevity. Makes me really wonder sometimes if dolphins or elephants aren't more intelligent than humans 

Well it's great to see there's plenty of stupid people (yes, nothing better to call them than stupid) in the crypto scene. Stupid people make great fodder for scammers and ICOs and give legitimacy for government intervention to prevent stupid people from doing stupid things.

DON'T MINE AT A LOSS! SHUT OFF THE MINER EVEN IF IT IS PAID FOR. CREATING LOSS OF OPERATING CAPITOL IS NOT GOING TO HELP LOSS OF PORTFOLIO VALUE. IF YOU FEEL THE NEED TO SUPPORT THE COIN DURING A DOWNTREND CREATE SOME DEMAND AND BUY THE COIN ON AN EXCHANGE.

I swear no matter how many times the people who understand post this concept the noobs just keep disregarding it and then complain 2 years later