The difficulty right now for ETH is huge, go to etherscan and look at their difficulty chart they have posted. Right now it's 3000Th/s so your 44th is only around 1% of the actual block difficulty. So maybe after 99 more tries you would hit a block.

So this is why you need to use a pool because the variance is just too high to solo mine right now. If you still insist on solo mining to save on fees then just mine ETC which has a much smaller difficulty and you aren't wasting your time.

Here is the issue with eBay. A wise miner once said "The best time to sell mining equipment is usually when its the highest chance of getting screwed" it might of been phil if I recall correctly.

The reason why is because they usually side with the buyer and what happens is people buy ASICs or GPUs on eBay. Then shortly after the difficulty can go up or price can go down and it might not longer be profitable and they will just open up a Paypa dispute saying "GPUs are not as described" and you will have to accept the return and sometimes they bill you for the return shipping.

Best is to just sell it on FB marketplace or Craiglist and get cash instead. Hence no refunds possible.

Yes you can use them to mine altcoins however ASICs are fixed in terms of the algo that they hash. So they can only hash double SHA256 which is what bitcoin uses. So there might be some alts which use the same algo but guess what? There are tons of newer Antminers that can also mine those coins. Hence the profitability will be exactly the same.

You can mine those coins in hopes that one day they will go up in value, however this is speculation and its no different than just mining BTC and selling that BTC and buying that altcoin and hoping it goes up in value. But to answer your question. Yes you can mine other altcoins but will you make more money than mining BTC? No you will make the same.

Never heard of people ordering cards off Aliexpress. Aliexpress is good if you need some iPhone LCD replacement screens but for actual computer parts I rather just use eBay or Craigslist.

Last I heard you need to becareful ordering high end GPUs on Aliexpress like the 1080Ti because they might be fake. Do some googling and there is a thread on some hardware website about some gamers getting scammed.

Just go to Craiglist and search for any RX 470/570 GPUs which are 8GB and pay no more than $125 for each. They are pretty efficient even today and you can always resell for gamers in the future.

Nobody knows where its going to go next month, next 3 months or next year. Your guess is as good as mine. Covid19 is still with us and unemployment levels are still a problem. So eventually the stock market can snap back to reality start crashing... and bitcoin being correlated can go down with it.

Remember how everybody assumed $6K was the low back in Nov 2018? People were doubleling down on their long positions because they assumed that it must be the bottom and has to hit at least $10K before resuming lower and look what happened. We crashed all the way down to $3K and nobody could of predicted that. We also spent a long time <$6K area after it crashed. Hence who knows history might repeat itself again.

It should work especially on Windows 10. Just plug in the HDD and windows 10 should boot right up. The only issues I ever had in the past was usually with the LAN and USB drivers. However this was with Windows 7 and W10 might handle this issue better.

The issue was that Win7 loads the wrong USB and LAN drivers even though its a different chipset. So basically if you don't want to re-install windows you have to manually find the CD that came with the motherboard and install whichever driver is not working.

It seems easy however its a pain because when the USB doesn't work, your keyboard and mouse won't work. So you will need a PS2 keyboard, lucky I got one from my Windows 95 days. If your LAN isn't working then you can just use another computer and download the LAN drivers from the mobo drivers section of their website. Reboot and all should work well.

Are your GPUs all undervolted to around 900mV or so? Because your PSU seems like it might be running out of current if you are running them on stock voltage. Also depending on the rail set-up there might not even be 850w in total.

If you undervolt to 900mV then the rig should use about 700 watts and it'll reduce the load and should run without any issues. Reason why I think its PSU is because it doesn't just crash or freeze. Usually when the PSU is over-current, it either shuts down or it causes PC to reboot.

Here is the thing. The people that bought at $1-2 or so most likely sold at $5 or $10 and are very happy with the profits. The people that bought at $10 or so, probably knew that there is no way it would make a 5-10x move because the market cap would be way too high and its not sustainable.

Since LINK is available on most exchanges and you can use margin, I think what most people did when it broke the $5 area is they bought it using leverage because they want to basically 10x their investment. So it rose healthy and pretty quick but its not normal for it too crash this much. You could tell the first few pullback were strong however when the selling accelerated and we dipped to the $10, look how large the bearish candles were. I think most of those was cascade upon cascade of liquidations from people who bought in too late.

I think either $10 was the dip or we might go further and maybe retest the prior high of $5 or so. Basically the price action lately of LINK shows that many people are trading on high leverage and hence why we went down so fast from $20 to $10. We were the #4 market cap and that is pretty impressive.

However I think that way too many people are getting greedy and instead of buying it on spot, they are buying it on margin and its these 50% losses which makes people lose their entire accounts. Sure it looked like it would go to $25 or so at least before pulling back, but all it took was a stock market sell-off and an ETH DeFI sell-off to cause all this panic and selling.

One reason why there are no "smartphone miner" type of algos is because it would be WAY too easy for someone to just emulate 1000's of fake phones on their PC using their i7 intel processors. It would basically be unfair since there would be a centralized entity.

Another issue is that smartphones unlike PC or GPUs or servers can't run on 100% CPU usage due to heat. Most phones even if plugged into the wall, they run off the battery. Hence why many of them don't start unless the battery is a little charged. Hence most of the power would need to come from the battery and with 100% CPU usage it would constantly be hot and eventually it would bulge and explode and cause injury. Its not safe to run a smartphone miner.

I had the same issue as you, I basically sold some of my 4GB models and added a few bucks and got the RX 470/570 8GB models instead. I looked at the newer GPUs or Nvidia and honestly its not worth it considering the long amount of ROI time you need to wait.

Most of the 8GB cards (except this month) were maybe $30-50 more than the 4GB models. So if you sold 5 of your 4GB cards you could of had an entire rig with 8GB models for only $200 more, rather than spending $500 on the latest and greatest GPU, not worth it.

In Dec when 4GB GPUs can no longer mine the difficulty will be half and it will pay itself off then. So the investment is worth it.

Its 2 things which caused the price to go down.

First is what is going on with DeFI on Ethereum. People were getting very greedy and plowing tons of money into it and the bubble blew. And now people are rushing to get out. They are dumping the tokens, dumping ETH and maybe dumping BTC and getting out completely to fiat.

Second reason is that crypto seems high correlated with stocks, especially during down-trends. So since the stock market had 2 horrible days where NASDAQ lost 10%, the crypto markets followed. Crypto is considered risk-on like most stocks on the NYSE. So basically many follow the stock market indices and if they see it crashing, they dump crypto assuming it will follow shortly after, which it did.

The red flag with DeFI was about 2-3 weeks ago when Arthur Hayes (CEO of Bitmex) started shilling it on Twitter to his followers. Why would the CEO, who is already some multi-millionaire talk about getting involved in DeFI. He was talking about all the profits he made and basically did it so people would get involved with it. So this is why ETH ended up rising so much because it lead to a huge surge of demand. Was good for miners and ETH holders but not for the people who actually traded these DeFI tokens paying $50 in fees.

Him and that Dave Portnoy are really on thin ice with regulators pretty much. Its all fun and games until the followers start losing money and they are going to get reported and some investigation is going to start. I remember when Portnoy basically picked a few tiles out of scrabble and bought whatever letters he picked out. So far most of his followers made money but eventually if the stock market actually topped eventually most of his followers will lose money and get mad.

Don't know if you heard but the Sushi dev apparently sold all his Sushi. There is a thread on twitter about it. He says he did it for the community however it looks like an exit scam to me. I think he made like $10 million dollars with about a week worth of work.

So I would becareful holding this token, today it looks like its -65% already and I won't be surprised if this ends up being another one of those -100% Defi token. So if you took some profits make sure to lock it in at least.

In general whenever something like this happens, its what usually ends up starting a bear market in the crypto market. Too much money is locked into this Defi and there are going to be too much investors that lose all their ETH.

I used to trade without a stop loss either in the past because I found that whenever I use stops it hits it and ends up reversing. It would sometimes to the $1 hit my stop and reverse. So I found stops were very annoying.

However eventually if you don't use stops, you will get a large loss. Because usually the market is ranging, similar to how almost all the CME gaps fill however eventually it will never return. And if you use leverage it's dangerous because you will quickly end up losing your account. Some people basically use a margin call as a stop loss and it's not smart. The secret is to enter where you would normally put your stops.

It seems that certain Defi tokens were scams and seems the fees are starting to get back to normal. Right now fees are around 100 Gwei or so while during the peak they were at 500 Gwei or so. Some of those food tokens like Hotdog or Sausage basically went to -100%.

Given the price crash our profitability is less than half of a few days ago. We will see what happens. Seems this sell off was at the same time as the stock market selling off. So it could be nothing more than a dip and continue. However if it was the top then most likely we won't get back to $500 ETH until election results.

Well that sure was fun while it lasted, basically profitability is less than half of what it was a couple of days ago. It's crazy how volitile has been recently.

Certain GPUs were pulling in about $2.50 and now they are pulling in a little over a $1. Hence why it's not always an easy decision whether you want to expand your farm or not.

These posts on bitcointalk and crypto twitter are proof that most of the people here are just in it for the money and are most likely over-leveraged. Same is happening on the stocks and wallstreetbets boards. Instead of buying stocks or crypto by spot, they use margin or leverage or buy options and its what wiggles most people out with moves like this.

I honestly think this is just another dip before calling it a local top but until we get confirmation then nobody knows for sure where the markets are headed. We are correlated with stocks and Covid19 and election results will play a deep role into how all of this will turn out.

You can hedge the price of ETHUSD but you can't hedge the difficulty. Which is a problem because if you hedge to early you will screw yourself because the difficulty will be much higher than anticipates and instead of earning $100/day at current prices you might earn $50/day if you hedged at half of ETH's price.

I though about doing this before but I got screwed a little back in 2017 because we all know what happened with ETH. Remember early in the year when we assumed $100 ETHUSD would be the peak? Well it ended up going 14x higher than that. The best would of been hedging at $1400 but who knew if that would be the top.

Right now honestly is not the best time to start trading. The markets are crazy erratic and make no sense. Maybe not Bitcoin or Ethereum itself but the DeFI tokens and any of the stocks on the stock market.

Basically its a pure bull market and pretty much "ANYONE" can make money in this market. And this gives false hope. Basically people make money, tell their friends, who also make money. Pretty soon they are all going to get greedy and take out loans and lines of credit on their homes because they all want to be millionaires. And we all know what eventually happens. Basically the dot com bubble repeats or the 2017 crypto bubble repeats. It won't be pretty.