Yet another person with older cards trying to be greedy by hoping a miner is not updated to optimize current gen cards lol.  It's a bit comical to me, especially because your whole premise is flawed... well, at least the way you state it is.  Claymore updating this miner to get more out of rx 470-480s will not result in a ton of new XMR miners flooding the XMR market and skyrocketing the difficulty. XMR has already been the most profitable coin to mine for close to a week for those of us with 470/480, so improving this miner may only result in a few more in that boat jumping over to XMR, assuming the gains are notable.  What you should and probably are more concerned with is that your "piece of the relative pie" is going to shrink.  I get it, and I know i will be in that boat eventually myself, but this is the way of technology.  Suggesting that Claymore not update this for current gen GPUs so that you can keep your "edge" with older cards really comes across as sour grapes.

This tax issue has been on my mind a lot lately so nice to see it brought up here. There doesn't seem to be a lot tax info specifically about cryptocurrency, but seem like it is fair to treat like similar types of businesses... so as several have mentioned here, stock investment would be a key benchmark, at least for the cash-out of coins.

For miners, we should certainly be able to write-off the cost of our equipment, as well as the incremental electricity cost of mining, which can be deducted from your mining income to arrive at a net income to report to the IRS.  It does get a bit tricky here but from what I understand, you should use the value of the coin on the day you received it to track and report its value.  This is also known as your "basis", in tax terms.  Since you acquired this coin as part of a business venture, the net income results must be reported to the IRS.  You also need to keep track of that basis should you ever sell to USD or convert to another coin, which is where things really get convoluted, because in the case of converting to another coin, you then have to deal with adjusted basis and other things.

Now, as for actually buying a coin outright, I am pretty sure you do not have to report that on your tax return.  However, you do need to record the rate that you bought that coin at (your basis) so that should you sell it in the future, you can calculate that profit or loss and then claim that on your tax return.

As for the appreciation of coins you are holding, there should also be no reporting necessary, again, until such time as you decide to sell those coins. This is how stock holdings are treated... meaning if you hold ABC stock at a $50 basis, it goes to $70 in 2017 and $90 in 2018 and $110 in 2019 when you decide to sell it... there would be no tax impact in 2016, 17 or 18, but in 2019, you would be taxed on $60, which is the profit from selling price of $110 less the $50 basis.

What gets really confusing is if you are constantly swapping coins because that make it very difficult to track basis, which you will eventually need when you sell to USD or even use the proceeds to buy goods.

I was getting the same errors right after switching over from mining ETH with Core/Clock speeds set at 1150/1950 (strap-1500 modded 470s).  After seeing this, I went it and changed from 1150 to 1200 and have not seen that LowDiffShare error since... over 24 hours ago.  Of course, upping to 1200 sucks more wattage but also gives a bit more hashes and no errors... and still my 6-card rig is at 830 watts, but 2 of the GPUs are not strap modded yet so after that and a bit of tweaking, pretty sure I can get it back in the mid 700's wattage wise.  So, bottom line... try upping your core speed a bit and that should get rid of that error.

Yeah, that's along the lines of what I was thinking too ps_jb.  Mainly because at least most of my rx 470's get right around 21 on ETH right out of the box. Sure, this could be coincidence but I would at least take a crack at reflashing them with original bios then reflashing with the strap-1500 mod to see if that helps. Also, are you 100% sure that you modded these GPU's bios (were they ever running at 27)?  I learned first hand that trying to flash bios with multiple GPUs attached can be a bit tricky, so maybe you re-flashed a GPU that had already been modded instead of modding the intended one(s)?  Just a thought.

lol... if its GUI is not available in English then I guess that will tell us all what we need to know about this company 

Just wanted to update the status my move to Windows 10 on my 2nd rig, in case someone already here or who finds it in the future was grappling with the same issues as I was.

Firstly, I decided to go with the "add each card incrementally" approach instead of swapping out 1 by 1 to mod the bios then replug them all 1 by 1... and this worked, at least for the most part.

After upgrading to W10 (took a bit over an hour), the main thing I did differently from the W7 build was start with the x16 slot #2 on this mobo.  In fact, I did this even before updating windows (had only 1 card plugged into the x16 slot) and it actually worked for the first time on this rig!  So, after installing W10, just left it there and it worked fine.  From there, I just added GPUs 1 by 1, testing with Claymore ETH miner, then flashing bios, then rinse and repeat.  Was really worried before turning it on with GPUs #5 & 6 plugged in, but W10 had absolutely no issue with this whatsoever! So, I now have MSI 470 4GB Gamings in slots 1-5 and the Sapphire Nitro 470 8GB in slot #6.

The one unexpected thing I did run into was this... when copying the ROM from my newest MSI GPU (just opened &received a few days ago), I noticed that under memory type it actually showed Samsung, not Hynix as my other 8 MSI 470's showed.  The other interesting thing is that this GPU actually got about 2 Mh/s more on ETH out of the box than my other MSIs.  But, since I wasn't sure if that Samsung vs Hynix memory could affect the 1500 memory strap, I just left it un-modded, so it is running about 4 MH/s slower on ETH (over-clocked & under-volted) compared to the other MSIs on this rig. Does anyone know if this will affect the memory strap mod at all?

So... bottom line is, testing on ETH miner, I switched over to Claymore XMR 9.6 and actually getting almost exactly as expected, a bit over 4Kh/s (~700 each from the 4 modded MSI and ~600 each from the un-modded MSI and un-modded Nitro). So, very happy with this so far and maybe a bit of room to tweak for further improvement.

No, all totaled with 10 GPUs and 3 i7 K's, I am getting about 7.6 Kh/s on XMR, using about 1,260 watts total. At current rates, about a bit over $10 profit/day (not counting BurstCoin mining). This is the best it's been in the 3-4 months I've been involved in mining so hoping it lasts a while  

I had the same issue at first... getting the black screen/freeze-ups/etc after starting it a couple of times. But, once I backed off my undervolt settings a bit it was fine. Been running smoothly for close to 24 hours now and even with a bit less undervolting, the rig is still consuming about 110W less then mining ETH, so no big loss there.  Hoping that Claymore releases a new version of this soon as I suspect there is at least slight room for speed improvements with rx 400 series cards.

Is their any resource that explains the main contributing factors to the difficulty of a given coin?  My impression as a newbie to all of this is that it is either solely or mostly driven by the volume of miners pointed at a given coin.  For example... price of XMR goes through the roof, everybody and their brother switch their rings to mine XMR in the last 2 days and bam! difficulty rises 20% in that time period. Similar thing when ZEC came out and most people started mining it... both XMR & ETH difficulty bottomed out.  Is this the only main driving factor or are their other things to consider?

Agreed Hotmetal... for speculation purposes there are other/better ways to do things than using the existing profitability calculators... but, you can still leverage some of the data to get what the OP wants i think.  For instance, both WTM & CW provide estimated shares mined per hour. So, you just extrapolate that times what you think the target price of your coin will be and you can easily calculate your hourly income. Then, just subtract either your own calculated electricity cost or the one provided on either of those sites and you have your target/future profit per hour.

Sorry about the issues with that evga mobo, Phil.  But a big thanks for reporting the problems here so that the rest of us can avoid that board in the future. I am personally locked into ASRock BTC Pro R2 for my next build since i bought 2 of them a few months back. So, really hoping I can get 6 GPUs running on that (gonna spend most of today on it) and then just repeat the process for that 2nd board.  really hoping that 1200w Rosewill PSU comes down but may consider going with 1000w and just dedicated that rig to XMR only since it sucks so much less power than ETH and even ZEC.

Sorry, but this is simply not true. Certainly XMR is quite profitable mining with a good GPU now that the price has jumped like 50%, but even before that, when it was at around $8 at the time of this comment, it was still reasonably profitable. Here are my stats to prove it:

-i7-2600k hashes 210/s
-i7-4790k hashes 310/s
-i7-6800k hashes 360/s

So, a total of 880 H/s using a total wattage of about 120.  That is a daily profit of about $1.50 at current rates, but was close to $1 a day before the current rise in price, so XMR has been profitable to mine via higher end CPUs for quite a while.

Now, of course, there is a big kicker here... this "profitability" is based on existing CPUs in existing systems.  Meaning, you already have the system running and aren't using your CPU for anything else, so you wanna try a bit of mining to make $.  In this scenario, you most certainly can make a bit of profit as I have shown above.  However, if you are talking about justifying the purchase of a brand new higher end CPU like a 6800k at full price vs say a g4400 or something like that, then it really probably won't ever ROI for you, or at least not for a very long time, inless XMR really goes through the roof. If you assume $400 for that 6800k, it would take close to 2 years to ROI fully at current rates. But, I think most people are asking this based on PCs they already have, so those are very good candidates for CPU mining XMR.

Most likely something like Polaris Bios Editor. This allows you to load your GPU's bios setting and modifying. The "Strap-1500" method that people talk about is copying the long string of numbers under 1500 timing and pasting them over the existing values for the higher speeds then saving that nd flashing your GPUs with it.  BUT... timings are only 1 field of many in this bios editor, so yes, he has likely made changes to other fields to achieve the extra speed.

The other thing to be aware of is that mining is not 100% about speed.  Most smart miners work to achieve the best possible speed per watt ratio. There may be some exceptions to this but for the most part, you will make more profit by fine-tuning your rigs to get the best ratio, which won't necessarily be the highest speed.

Furthermore... yes, when you hear someone talk about a "custom mod" and they don't volunteer any further info, then it is very likely that they simply don't feel like sharing what likely took them many hours to figure out for free. Nothing wrong with this IMO but you will find others in this forum who don't mind sharing their settings and such.  Bottom line, you can drive yourself crazy trying to match the speed of others. There are so many factors involved and sometimes you can have the exact same hardware and setting but still not match someone elses speed (maybe you got a bad batch of GPUs or they got an exceptionally good one, etc, etc).

My recommendation would be to mod your cards with the well-known/tested method first and that will get you most of the way there.  If you have the gumption, you can play around with settings, bios, etc but be forewarned that it can cause tons of downtime and messing with bios could brick your card, especially if you are experimenting.  You have to ask yourself if it's worth it.  If you are already getting like 700 and maybe could get to 750 but trying to get there causes days of downtime and possibly bricks 1 or more of your GPUs, you could make a very good argument that the extra 50 likely isn't worth it.  But of course, everyone has their own thresshold for things like this, so good luck with yours .

Thanks Phil... sounds good to me since we are running mostly the exact same GPUs.  I can't remember... are you on Windows 7 or 10?

What is the best, proven AMD Crimson driver version to use for mining ETC/XMR/ZEC?  I see that 16.12.1 has been out a few weeks and 16.12.2 out just about a week, but are these recommended yet or would a more proven 16.11 be better for mining?

So, I got my 6th 470 for rig #2 so will probably take a crack at moving to W10 and rebuilding this thing today.  This is my plan but I wanted to ask for opinions as to whether or not this is over-kill.  Note that current status is W7, max of 5 GPUs, 2 unsuccessful attempts to strap-mod bios on 2 separate GPUs (exact ones that I have done 4x on my other rig).

1- Power down and unplug all but 1 GPU. Sole GPU will be plugged into PCIe slot #2 (x16), monitor plugged into GPU via HDMI cable.
1a- I suspect this might not work given the issues i have had with slot #2, so will plug into slot #1 initially if needed, then try slot #2 as primary again after W10 install.
2- Boot up and upgrade to Windows 10 before doing anything else
3- Load Crimson drivers from AMD site for 1 plugged in GPU
4- Test GPU in Claymore miner, probably ETH since it shows individual GPU speed, unlike XMR miner
5- Flash that GPU with bios strap-mod, overclock & under-volt, then re-test in ETH miner to ensure speed increase
6- After ensuring all is working correctly, power down, unplug GPU from slot #2 and plug in another GPU into that slot
7- Repeat all of the steps above except for #3 since the drivers will already be on the machine
8- After all steps done for all 6 GPUs, start adding GPUs 1 at a time until up to 6 (hopefully)
9- If I get the error 43 code at GPU #5, install the 6xGPU registry mod app

This is obviously going to take the better part of a full day.  The thing that could save significant time would be to skip the 1 at a time method and add GPUs incrementally after getting the first 1 to work. This would make bios flashing a bit tougher, but I am under the impression that windows should add GPU's device numbers in order, so maybe this could save some time. Meaning, get GPU#1 working after flashing bios mod on device #0, then add the 2nd GPU and flash device #1, etc, etc.

At this point, I am no planning to mess with the bios on the orphan Nitro. If I can get 6GPUs and the 5 MSI's bios modded on this rig, I will be very happy.

Anyone see anything wrong with this approach or have any suggestions?

Yup, based on my sporadic checks of both sites, ETH has been atop the profitability list most of the time over the past week or so. ZEC was at top a few times when it was around $55 but not any more. Also, a few times when I checked on WTM, they showed ETH way down but it was incorrect because the difficulty they showed for it was WAY higher (like by around 10% or so) than it was everywhere else, so there seems to be a problem there.  Also, I noticed that the USD values for all 3 of these coins are usually quite a bit lower on the top bar at WTM then they are on most exchanges, so that also affects what that site shows.

With my 4-GPU modded rig I get the following per coin:
ETH: 110 Mh/s @ 620W
XMR: 2500 H/s @ 550W
ZEC: 800 H/s @ 570W

Profitability on CW:  ETH = $2.71 / XMR = $2.27  / ZEC = $1.94
Profitability on WTM:  ETH = $2.61 / XMR = $2.41  / ZEC = $2.43

Difficulty for ZEC & XMR matches on the 2 sites but once again, the ETH diff is off... this time though WTM has their about 3T lower than CW.

Bottom line is that with the drop of ETH to close to $7, you wouldn't think it would be the top coin to mine right now, but if you look at how much its difficulty has dropped recently, it makes more sense. ZEC diff has spike up a lot (predictably after the price push I suppose) and XMR diff is also going up. 

Merry Christmas everyone. Just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you on this thread who have been very kind, patient and helpful educating a mining newbie like me over the past 2 months. I am still not where I want to be but have learned a lot and hope to continue that and leverage it into a profitable 2017.

Here's a quick update on my never-ending battle to get 6 GPU's running on my 2nd rig... yesterday, I took another shot at strap-modding the bios of my MSI 470s.  My first attempt about a week ago to mod GPU #0 didn't work for some reason and I had to flash it back to original settings.  This time, I unplugged my orphan Nitro, rebooted, and flashed dev #1 with the modded bios.  Reboot went fine but upon checking DevMgr, found the dreaded error 43 on presumably the card i flashed. Tried running the 6xGPU mod a few times but no dice, so I re-flashed it with original bios, rebooted, plugged the Nitro back in I'm back to "normal".

What i don't get is why the exact strap-mod I used on the exact same GPUs on my other rig (same W7) doesnt wanna work on this rig... 0 for 2 now. I'm sure I am doing it right but this rig doesn't wanna take it.  The only real difference is the Mobo between the 2 systems.  Anyway, I'm at the point where it probably makes sense to strip this thing down, run the driver cleaner, then re-install the GPUs one by one, maybe flashing each as I go.

But, then I got to thinking... if I'm going to basically re-build this thing, I might as well install Windows 10, since I have heard from numerous people that this is a better OS for anything over 4 GPUs.  And, it looks like I can still get an upgrade for free so probably worth the shot.  This time I am going to try plugging the 1st GPU (and monitor) into slot #2 (x16) since starting with slot #1 last time may have been causing some of my issues. Hopefully, W10 will let me get 6 GPUs running and modded. That should get me about 40% more hash-rate on XMR vs what that rig is currently doing.

Firstly, I don't think it's Claymore's responsibility to field your bios modding questions. If you have an issue with errors for functionality in his miner then sure, ask him.

Also, your question is worded quite vaguely so it's hard for anyone to provide truly meaningful advice.  For instance, you say your are "not even getting 700 H/s with 4BG 470/480s".  OK... that could mean that you are getting 690 with a 470, which is actually about the top I have seen being reported (confirmed), including myself, and that is indeed with the 1500 memory strap bios mod.

Generally, 470's will get about 570-580 un-modded and around 690 after that strap-mod. I have 1 rig in each case, and that is almost exactly what my 470's are getting under both scenarios. Granted, 480's should probably do a bit better than that but not my much.

If you have not modded your GPU's bios yet, you simply need to google or search this forum for your exact card brand and model, as this can make a big difference and if you mod it with the wrong one you will likely brick it.

Yeah, I really like that Rosewill too... also have the 1000W version running my 4-card rig. I really wish I would have bought 2 when they were at $120, since now the best price is $160.  That and the apparent rise in RAM prices are what is currently holding me back from completing my 3rd build.

Nice to see ZEC back up in a more profitable mining range now, even though i don't hold much of it and not currently mining it.  The dynamics of this situation are quite interesting to watch. Last night, I almost switched my ETH rig over to ZEC, but thought better of it on the off chance the rig crashed overnight and I lose all income from it. Was planning to switch today but when I checked first this this morning, ETH was actually atop the profit list. Even though the price is down, the diff dropped WAY off.  But when I check about an hour later, ZEC back on top but all 3 (incl XMR) were within a few cents of each other.

One thing I noticed though in comparing whattomine & coinwarez... they have the same diff for ZEC and XMR but are WTM shows WAY higher on ETH, which greatly reduces their prof estimates.  As of checking 5 minutes ago, WTM has ETH at 83.7 while CW shows it at 78.3.  Not sure which one is correct but would assume CW, since ETH diff is in freefall mode.  Bottom line is that I wish I had 3 rigs so I could have 1 on each