Calculating profitability is VERY difficult for ETH as to say something like BTC. BTC is easy because the fees are mostly low and BTC doesn't do any type of burning. The ETH burning is what makes its difficult to calculate how much you should be making.

If you look at,
https://etherscan.io/chart/dailyethburnt

Here you see the total ETH burnt, so when the fees goes up you should be making more however more fees get burnt. So its difficult to calculate. I actually think a couple of days ago we had a true deflationary day where we burnt more fees than total ETH rewards so the supply actually went down that day.

Can you even undervolt GPUs which are inside laptops? Been a while since I had a gaming GPU but when I wanted to do it in the past the option wasn't there. Because the GPU is not inside a PCB where you can adjust the voltages, the GPU is just added to a socket on the laptop motherboard and it has less components so the undervolting option might not be there. One reason why they don't include this option is because if they did, many gamers would probably overvolt the GPU and cause the laptop to overheat.

An external GPU which is what we all use is different, its much larger and there are more space for components, there is also a huge amount of space to put alot of copper/aluminum heatsinks to discipate the heat as fast as possible, they are also very heavy which is something laptops can't be. Hence why its not ideal to mine with a laptop, whether its a gaming laptop or not.

My advice to you is to build your house first and provide a roof under your head and your families. What is going to happen if you spend all your $20K on GPU rigs and all of a sudden the profitability drops because ETH crashes under $1000, difficulty doubles, or POS is announced in 6 months. Then you can sell the GPUS, however nobody will want to buy GPUs then because the profitability is there.

Selling GPUs to gamers is not always easy, trust me. Most gamers are not dumb and they know which GPUs were used for mining and which werent. If you make a Craiglist ad and you got like >3 GPUs for sale, they automatically assume you were mining with the GPUs. And many gamers will message and you say stuff like "I know you mined with this GPU, so I will give you $30 CASH for it, today!, nobody else will buy your mining GPUs, this is the best deal you will get and its only valid for the next 24 hours". Trust me its a headache dealing with some buyers.

I think what most people are doing is buying the equipment first and doing research after. Most people I know who asked about Crypto I told them, that you can buy the GPUs it will take maybe 6-9 months to get ROI on the GPUs and most people don't like that timeframe and they invest their money elsewhere.

I know many people who bought some GPUs, wanted to mine Bitcoin with it, and then they realized that you couldn't mine BTC with GPUs anymore. So I told them to mine ETH and they were upset that they only make like $2/day. They were expecting to make like $100,000 because after all "Crypto is a get rich quick scheme".

Like I commented earlier on another similar thread. Mining is just way too competitive right now. Your investment is going to take much longer to pay out say compared to 2017/2018. You got more issues right now with GPU mining. You got the covid which resulted in supply shortages and chip shortages. You got new high tech ETH ASICs out there that are being deployed on the ETH network everyday.

So yes, in the past. Mining always paid off. And if ETH goes to $10K or BTC to $100K then your investment will obviously pay off. However keep in mind that you are entering very  late in the game. Maybe there will be another cycle, maybe there will not. But right now its difficult getting GPUs at a decent price. And its impossible to predict ETHs difficulty in a few months or its price.

Mining right now is EXTREMELY difficult compared to late 2013 and early 2018. I remember back in late 2013 you could get a R9 280X for like $400-$450 CAD, and the GPU made around $7.50CAD a day, so your ROI was like 2 months.

Later in 2017 early 2018, it was the same story with the RX 4xx/5xx GPUs, they cost like $250 CAD and you made like $5/day/gpu with them, so your ROI was 50 days.

Now the ROI times are crazy high and I think most people are either betting on the fact that ETH goes to $10K or that their $1000 GPU will depreciate slower than their revenue. However nobody knows what top ETH will hit and who knows how much these GPUs are going to be worth when ETH goes POS sometime in the future.

Now is not the best time to start mining really.

I think it matters what type of gaming laptop. There are some gaming laptops that are heavy duty and you can game or mine all day and you won't get issues. They got big heatpipes and fans that can easily disicipate most of the heat that is created by the CPU and GPU.

There are however those tiny gaming laptops and those are not good. I think people get away with gaming with them because they game for a short while. They got small screens and not comfortable to game with them all day. So its fine for that. However if you mine with it constantely the entire laptop will be hot and eventually ill wear out all the components or swell the battery.

Like I said before, don't mine with a laptop, ever!

Bitcoin is rallying today because of the EL Salvador news which is that it becomes legal tender today. This was known for months but the President announced for some weird reason that they bought 200 BTC recently (200 BTC prior to this) and most likely will be buying more.

So given that there are 6 million people in that country and each person gets $30, thats $180M. However there is obviously not going to be every single person downloading the wallet to get the $30. And keep in mind that most likely, if someone is poor, they will sell that $30 almost immediately and cash out. So even though there is a large buyer, there is going to be tons of sellers at the same time.

I had this happen in the past and my conclusion is...

If you discover that you can mine some coin, and the profits are enormous, there is a very good chance that something is not right. I actually made this mistake in the past.

Most likely the coinwarz is providing wrong info. The algo could of changed a few times in the past for Verge. So the new algo is more hard to mine and if you use the old algo you might get an incredible speed and might make you huge profits. However after wasting a day of mining you discover its not profitable at all.

In the future use Nicehash calculator OR whattomine, they are usually more update to date and current.

You should look at the past transactions and see if the min was 55 Gwei for a few blocks. Because I've had that happen also, it would say the min fee is 55 Gwei I would send the transaction and it would never confirm even if the min fee was 55 Gwei. Then the gas fees would go up and up and it will not confirm for hours.

So look at the etherscan for the last 30-50 transactions or so and make sure the fee you want to use was included for many of them. And instead of 55 Gwei use like 57 or so. I don't know why they make it this complicated. I am guessing its so you lose the gas price and have no transaction and the miners know you will have to make another transaction with another fee OR a higher fee during congestion.

This is where I liked the BTC network better. Shouldn't get charged for failed transactions but I know they had to do it to prevent spam.

Botnets were an issue with Monero about 4-5 years ago, which led them to make a change to their algo. Botnets are almost NEVER used on Bitcoin or Litecoin because there is actually no point. The CPU of most retail computers is so slow compared to say the oldest ASIC there is no point. It wouldn't be worth the actual hassle of getting a botnet going for Litecoin or Ethereum or Bitcoin.

Litecoin has been out for a long time. There are many ASICs for it. The first one came out back in late 2013 even and who knows... maybe people are still using it to this day in some countries with cheap or free electricity. And after that there were many ASICs made by Bitmain and other manufacteurs. Even that KnCMiner TItan Cube, which is like from 2014, its inefficent in todays standards but who knows. Maybe in some countries they are still being used.

I had issues with ETH and low stuck unconfirmed transactions. Basically if you set a fee too low on Bitcoin, it'll stay in the mempool a few days and eventually it'll go thru once the fees go down. You can even do the RBF option and use a higher fee.

With ETH I found that is not the case. Whenever I sent a transaction with a low fee, usually within a few hours for some reason it gets REMOVED from the mempool. I noticed this because the fees would go down a few hours later, I go and check and my transaction is unconfirmed. I would have to resend that raw transaction to get it to get sent to the network.

Most likely the network is so congested that most nodes remove any unconfirmated transaction within hours and not days unlike Bitcoin. If you don't want a headache don't send any low fee transactions on ETH, just wait and broadcast the transaction then.

The GPUs found in the laptops will NEVER have any LHR type of GPUs because Nvidia knows that its not efficient to buy an entire laptop just to get the GPU out of it. Perhaps in some Dell gaming desktops they "might" add some LHR type of cards however I still doubt it. I don't think miners are going to be buying up entire laptops/desktops from computer stores just to mine with them. So these laptops and desktops are still going to be available for gamers.

The entire purpose of LHR was to limit the sale of GPUs from miners and more into the hands of the dedicated Nvidia gamers. They probably did some analysis and realised that not too many laptops are being hoarded by miners and they decided it wasn't worth the hassle of including LHR type GPUs inside actual laptops.

This LHR in my opinion is only temporarily. Once the chip shortage is over... once mining is over .... no GPUS will be LHR again. This is only to satisfy some gamers.

Well it can reach $10K however what are the chances that it will stay above that level for a long time? I can see celebrities tweeting about ETH flippening BTC and with the NFT popularity it’s a possibility. However keep in mind this coin was <$100 not too long ago. So for it to go to $10k and stay above it is 100x.

If Bitcoin did something similar from its $3000 low then it would be worth like $300,000. Which is also a possibility however I don’t see this market cap holding for the long term. Maybe some fomo along with a short squeeze. However I don’t think either of these prices would be sustainable.

My advice to you is since you only got 2 GPUs, you should just use those linux distros which are designed for mining. Unless you really need Debian to work because you want to use the computer as your work computer at the same time. However if this is just a spare rig then just install those distros instead.

I had lots of issues initially getting Ubuntu to work. First it took like a day just to install the AMD drivers. Basially kept getting a black screen for some reason. Then I had issues getting the temperature to display. Then I had issues seeing what my clock rate/memory clock was. Then I had issues with undervolting and overclocking the GPUs. Even had issues after installing the software to get it to auto mine on startup and everything. Eventually I figured it out but it took like a week. Now I can do it easily however if I went back I would just use the distros.

I googled some photos of this laptop and even though its called a "gaming" laptop I would becareful using it for mining. The only gaming laptops used for mining are perhaps those Alienware laptops which are twice the height of a regular gaming laptop. They got much better cooling and can withstand all the heat. The one you want to buy seems like it doesn't have the best heatsink and fans to disicpate the heat.

If you really still want to mine with this, my advice is at least remove the battery when mining. Because the high constant heat will cause it to eventually swell and in the rare case it might explode or leak onto you like with those old Samsung phones. Like others have said, a laptop is definately not designed for mining and a bad idea. Try and get an old RX 580 8GB GPU instead if you want to mine.

This is proof how competitive mining has gotten. Most likely those miners with 4000 ASICS is obviously some large professional farm with great deals on electric, something that is difficult for regular home miners to get.

Lite coin is not the only one. Look at ETH hashrate. Basically GPUs are sold out, if you are lucky to get one it’s most likely the slower LHR one not meant for mining, costs an arm and a leg and you would think that the difficulty would at least remain stable, however it keeps rising and rising at a high rate.

Goes to show you how much money people are putting into mining and crypto.

Congrats on releasing a miner. I think this will be very successful given your reputation. I remember using ccminer back in the good old days.

My only suggestion is that in this topic you post some SHA256SUMs or some way of verifying the legitimacy of your miner. Even though its on your github, there were issues in the past particularly with PhoenixMiner which somehow got their github hacked and a few people including Nicehash ended up downloading fake software. Posting a simple SHA256SUM for all the executable would put alot of miners mind at ease that they aren't downloading something fake.

The thing with fires is this...

I had many wires melt in the past and many GPUs go up in smoke. However as dangerious as it looks, it never lead to an actual fire. Most of the time when the wires are overloaded and start to melt, what will happen is they will no longer be able to conduct and it will just cause the system to crash. Most of the time you won't notice this until it starts to happen frequently and you need to investigate.

Same with GPUs going up in smoke. In the past what usually happened was I came home and rig was down. So I turned it back on and "BOOM" very loud noise and GPU released a big cloud of smoke, also smelled bad for an entire week. What happened was the GPU shorted out... PSU shut everything down and then I didn't know and restarted it anyways and it lead to the GPU blowing up.

The temperature that components run is important and its true that the longer you run something at a higher temp you reduce its lifespan. This is particuaruly true with most capacitors, their life is shortened because on the temperature that they are operated at. However keep in mind that this is in the span of "years" and not "months". Most likely the GPU will be obsolete by the time that the capacitors start to go bad.

A bigger issue in my opinion when it comes to longevity of components are heat cycles. If you leave it running 24/7, I think you will have a longer life span from some gamer who plays a few times a day everyday. Basically the GPUs heat up and down multiple times and that is what shortens its lifespan. If you leave it running at a higher temp constantely then its better than heat cycling it on and off all the time.