Yeah, well I think we all know that Bitcoin BTC will remain the leader, but what I worry about is the longer term effect.

This will end up being the same scenario as the ETH and ETC split where in this case BCC is a fraction of BTC's value, possibly around $200-$400 or so depending on how much the future's market price is being manipulated by the powers behind BCC.

So while I am not worried about BCC's effect, which will be temporary and I am sure two chains can co-exist, but does this set a precedent? Up until now most alt-coins have pretty much left BTC itself alone, but now with actual forks off the BTC chain if this were continue, say in 2 years we have dozens of forks that split off, how long can BTC survive that type of indirect attack?

On your problem rig, yes go ahead and start removing the cards as it is either heat as you suspect, or possibly one of the cards is acting up.

You could start by removing two cards and, if you can, adjusting the spacing between the remaining ones and let it run for 24 hours or so and see if that was the issue. If that doesn't solve it, then continue to swap out the cards until you can narrow it down to either a card, or if they all have been swapped and the trouble remains, the system.

Another common thing is to remove and re-install the drivers, which I could not tell from your post if you tried this already. I assume you did since you suspect the problem is heat related, but if not it could be easier to try just to rule it out.

Yeah, I am in the US and have thought about someone come knocking on my door too for the "excessive" electrical usage I have compared to my neighbors.

I don't think being registered as a business would make much difference in that regard since I have most of my miners at home. If it ever did happen, and they were somewhat cordial about it, I figure I would just explain what I am doing and maybe offer to have a small tour just to dispel any other notions they may have.

Yeah, I kinda seen this coming too and actually invested a little in both AMD and Nvidia at the beginning of May when the cards first started to go out of stock. Made a little profit on each company and now thinking of cashing out.

Funny thing is, though I did make some gains, after playing in the Crypto market they seem pretty tame by comparison.

Yes, I believe EWBF codes the mining fee much the same way as Claymore, in that you are free to remove the fee but the program will run a little bit less efficiently. Thus in the end you are better off just paying the small fee and letting the miner run at its most optimized levels (as coded by the programmer). There are a few open source software implementations out there that come close, but you are usually on your own to try and get the same level of performance out of them as the fee based ones. After all, there is a reason people are willing to pay the fee.

Exactly this, in one word difficulty. Even at today's reduced profitability, as fanatic26 pointed out, it is still a lot better profit than many traditional investments. This means people are still going to be adding rigs daily.

You can expect some people to continue to add rigs even after the profitability is gone for you paying 15 cents, as there are a lot of people paying as low as 2-3 cents a kwh. Then there are also the 1000's of the smaller miners who pay no electricity from either still living at home with their parents, living in a utilities included arrangement (college dorms or some types of apartment rentals), people on some type of government assistance, etc. It is essentially pure profit for these types of miners as someone else is basically subsiding their income by making their electric payments for them once they ROI on hardware.

Many long term miners have been trying to warn people to not get in right now. With hardware prices still at well above MSRP and difficulty continuing to skyrocket, I am afraid a lot of recent newcomers will eventually be burnt. So while at this point in time the calculators are still showing decent profit, the next couple of months this will change for the worse. The only way out will be for coins such as Ethereum to not only return to $400, but keep on climbing so as to outrace the climb in difficulty. Plus sooner or later Ethereum is going POS, so at that point any miners left will be looking to jump on the few remaining mine-able coins thus repeating the whole process until we are back to making sub 25 cents a day per rig.

In the US you could register as a sole proprietor with one miner, or none actually, if you wanted to as there are no specific requirements to register a company.

The main reasons to register your mining operation under a company name is due to tax issues and/or liability reasons. Since you are planning to only self mine, liability probably isn't much of an issue unless you plan to sue yourself (is that even possible?), so it comes down to taxes.

I am not a lawyer or accountant, but I believe the IRS treats taxes for sole-proprietary's and LLC (Limited Liability Companies) much the same as it does individual taxes. Short of getting together with other people to form a partnership or an actual corporation it is hard to get around the tax issue if you are the sole owner/employee. Anyway, there are good reasons to form a company, but you haven't really given any reasons yet as to why you would need to. Your statement "just to be safe" doesn't seem like a reason, and further, safe from what?

Between the two, I like ZEN a bit better as it has a more solid road-map laid out going forward. With that said, I also see no reason you shouldn't just mine both and that way you can hedge your bets. Just for the record I have mined and have a small stake in both coins.

I am actively mining over 5 alt coins as I write this, and have about 10-12 on my radar to mine if conditions are right. I do not necessarily mine for the day's highest profit coin but look for coins with a good potential and are maybe not so popular that day as I like to mine more coins when the hash-rate falls off. If you watch closely you can see a lot of the coins seem to go through a monthly cycle where the price and hash-rate are on opposite ends.

So basically the point is, crypto has a lot of opportunity and it isn't necessarily about holding one or two coins that will succeed. Myself I think there is plenty of room for several coins to establish niches and grow over the next few years. Of course a lot more will probably dry up and you will never hear about them again, so it pays to research, but if a coin has a good idea, a solid dev team and plan, take a chance and mine and hold a few.

It has already been said, network difficulty was and still is increasing. In essence, the higher the difficulty the lower your reward will be given the same hash-rate.

Difficulty was on a steady increase even before the price took off, it just wasn't as steep of a curve. But once the price of Ethereum really got going, everyone and their mother began buying graphics cards and became miner, thus the skyrocketing difficulty levels.

So getting back to your question, even if the price of Ethereum returns to the $400 level the mining profitability will still be quite a bit lower than it was before as the mining difficulty has increase so much in the meantime.

Unfortunately, price corrects a lot faster than difficulty does so you can expect to see diminishing mining profitability for quite some time. In fact, you can look around and see plenty of threads of people continuing to build new miners seemingly unaware of this fact, so the hope for quick mining profits returning will be just that, a hope for the next several months to years.

That is supposedly one of the reasons why there is a test network. In an ideal world these projects would spend several months in a public test environment with bug bounties and peer review to help strengthen their code before actual release.

Granted, you cannot test for every possibility even with the test network, but most of these ICO contracts don't even bother to go through that stage. Right now its just a money grab to hurry up and release a production contract to get their ICO going before the money train ends.

Investors really need to stop and think. If the project you are investing in just came into existence within the last few weeks/months and has offered no code to test or review, what makes you think they are going to do anything different with their final product or service (if there is even one)?

Personally I would be wary of any project that doesn't give at least 6 months (preferably more) of lead time before launching its ICO. Along with that requirement, there also should be plenty of opportunity to test the proposed production code in the Ethereum test environment well before said release to allow for as many eyes as possible to review.

Just a warning to those that think they can create a scam ICO, sucker some investors in, and then run off with millions. The long arm of the law may be slow to react, but it often does come around and when it does you could be looking at the rest of your life in prison.

Some recent examples:

https://www.coindesk.com/garza-pleads-guilty-gaw-miners-ceo-cops-9-million-fraud/

https://www.coindesk.com/indian-police-charges-onecoin-founder-ruja-ignatova/

https://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-ceo-mark-karpeles-pleads-not-guilty-embezzlement/

https://www.coindesk.com/former-dogecoin-exchange-ceo-faces-fraud-charges-uk/

So you may be successful and live the good life for a little while, but when the investors find out you scammed them, you will most certainly find yourself looking at some serious criminal charges, not including any civil suits that will not only take every last penny you have but will probably put a lien on any future earnings you make as well.

Now this is not to say you are looking to scam anyone, but it is not simply a case of write whitepaper, launch website, raise millions, retire. But when your stated goal is to come up with something just so you can have an ICO, it sure does smell scammy as that is basically the opposite of what should happen. Normally you have a great idea first, you flesh it out with some concepts, maybe prototype it, get others involved and develop a team, and only when you are at the point of launching it do you look for funding.

Think Shark Tank type readiness, you can't go before the sharks and say give me an idea and money and I may do something with it. Well it is the same thing here, you should already have a viable product or idea and just need some initial (ICO) funds to make it go big. The ICO is not your long term income stream, it is simply a way to get there, but I think that point has now become lost with all the recent hype.

To end with, I am pretty confident in 2-3 years time we will be seeing the same headlines as above except with some of the current ICO promoters names in them instead.

It may come down and it may not, depending on how much interest there is going forward.


This sounds like my experience.

I was unable to get into the ICO as they had a lot of early outside interest that is why it was not publicized so much on the typical cryptocurrency promotion venues such as this forum. I did manage to invest some ETH into it when it first hit Bitfinex (scaled in from around 0.0024 to 0.0027) and have already cashed out my original investment plus some (had a standing sell order of half my investment at 0.006). So I now have a pretty good chunk of OmiseGo tokens for free basically. This allows me the luxury of not worrying about it no matter which way it goes, but I do have the feeling in a few months these prices will be looked back upon as incredibly cheap.

Myself, I think it is more promising than many of the other high profile ICOs out there and will buy in more if it drops down a bit in price again, say sub 0.05 or so.

A lot of uncertainty in the market right now, this could be a good time to buy in for the sleepers. Myself I think ZenCash is one of them and is also why I joined the signature campaign.

I do have a couple of miners mining ZenCash as well, so I am slowly building a position in it and a few other good prospects. Time will tell how it works out, but with coins like ETH and BTC, maybe they have another 3x or 5x room to grow in the next few years (potential of ETH $600-$1,000 and BCT $5,000 - $15,000), whereas these lower market-cap coins have much greater multiplier potential without the coins price having to hit astronomic highs.

For example, for ZenCash to reach a 5x return within 2 years it only needs to hit around $20 based on its current value of around $4.00. A 10x return would only mean a price of $40. To me this seems a lot more reasonable, as while one could argue 5x is 5x as it is a matter of scaling, once you start hitting $10,000 per coins it starts to price a lot of people out of the market. I know the arguments you don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin and such, but while this is a true statement human psychology is such that people like having whole unis of something.

Good strategy. A better one would be to sell enough to cash out of your original investment (in your example looks like about 60% at time you sold) and then let the rest ride as at that point it is essentially free money. With these pump/dump coins I think getting your original investment back first is a priority and holding for future gains the secondary goal. With better established coins such as BTC, ETH, LTC and the like you can have more confidence the coin will last long enough to get out at some future point, but with some of these coins you may end up bag-holding for eternity.

I would add some Equihash based coins such as Zcash, or Zencash too as I think they have potential but are fairly new to the market so haven't caught on yet. Although Zcash has has some recent run-ups, it is down again so now may be a good time to pick some up.

Since you obviously have some money to begin with to put together such a nice portfolio, I wouldn't exchange out of any of the coins you list but instead buy the new ones with new capital. Buy a few more BTC or whatever coin your exchange offers to get into these other coins.

You could also just look at a site like coinmarketcap.com, sort by top monthly trading volume ( https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/monthly/ ) and just take up a small position in each of the top 25 coins listed you don't already own. Even if a few coins turn out to be duds down the road, I am sure the rest of them will make up for it with good gains over time.

This is typical of a new trader who doesn't really have a plan, other than to make money. You need to come up with a trading plan and stick to it no matter what happens in the market.

What you need to do is study the histories of all the coins you own as well as a few of the more successful ones you may not own yet. Look at longer term charts (6 months, 1 year, 3 year) and look to see what kind of big moves can happen over say a month or two time-frame. You will see some coins that increase 3x or more, but most of the time a 2x or close to it (1.9x, 1.8x, etc.) rise is also common. Pick the gain that you are comfortable with and also note how long this usually takes, to make a complete cycle. Then buy into a coin, or hold ones you already have, until you reach your predetermined return then immediately sell without looking back.

You already indicated you were at one point up 2x or $20,000 from a $10,000 investment. If you would have had a plan at that point and the discipline to execute it, you would have had a nice profit going already. By just winging it, you start to sabotage your own efforts, as when the price of something rises you start thinking, wow, if I hold out longer I will make 3x, or even 4x and so on. Usually this does not come to pass. Also when you sell to early and the price keeps going up you may start thinking boy, I was wrong and now I am going to miss the boat, buy back in and bamm, a little bit later the price starts tanking.

By having a plan and setting up realistic profit goals, and realistic time-frame for this to occur, you will have a much better success rate. Sure sometime you can see coins rise 2x, 3x, or more in a day, but this is pretty much just pure gambling if you expect to guess these trades correctly. It is better to pick some coins with a good trading history, a lot of trading volume, and at least some type of plan, vision, and uniqueness to it as well as developer and community support behind it so its not just a copy/paste coin that may pump/dump a couple times before it disappears. Then look for lows to buy in, basically the inverse of your gain goal, so for a 2x goal look for coins that are down 50% or more from a recent high (and by recent I mean look for last couple months, not just the last two days). These will have the best chance of recovering and making you some nice profits.

Also you can adjust your plan somewhat as actually aiming for 2x is probably unrealistic all the time, so maybe make it 1.5x returns to start which is still pretty awesome if you think about it. Then when you make your target execute it and don't dwell on things like "if I held longer I would have made more". Over the long term you will only notice the times this happens but would not notice the times this would back fire on you by going off plan.

The last thing I will leave you with is just from reading your post I believe you are trying to rush into this way too much. You already indicated you made some gains, but are pissed at yourself because you feel lost your $10,000 profit. Remember, it is not profit until you execute the other end of the round trip, i.e. selling coins you bought low or buying back coins you sold high (shorting). We can all look at charts with 20/20 hind-site and kick ourselves for not doing this or that, but at the time it is not so clear. Be happy you walked away with some profit at all and not a 50% loss. Learn to be happy with a nice gain of 50% or so in a month or two time-frame. Anywhere but Crypto these types of returns in such a short time frame would be unheard of, so don't beat yourself up too much for only making 20-25% or whatever you made. Money sitting in a bank somewhere would only make maybe 3-4% a year!

Your comment echos my thoughts on these so call "mining" cards as well. The two big negatives, only a 90-day warranty and the lack of a way to hook up a monitor (i.e. deter resale to gamer's), would necessitate a deep discount on these cards to make it worth while. So far, the cards do not seem to be much less, if at all, lower in price from their gaming versions.

If these cards were available 3 months ago and for ~20-25% less than the comparable gaming versions, it would have been the go-to card for mining. Unfortunately, it is too little to late for the introduction of these, which undoubtedly will be viewed by the executives of these companies as a failed product when in reality it was simply bad timing. Down-turns in mining due to excessive capacity (network hashrate) usually take a couple of years to clear out, so these will probably be too outdated by the time the next big mining wave hits again.

I bolded the part of your quote above that always gets me with these counter arguments. If you guys believe so thoroughly that the price of coins are going up so much within 12 months, which is by the way the only way that your future mining profitability scenarios make any sense, then why not just buy the coins directly now?

The OP was talking about investing $300k in mining equipment in the hopes of a 17 month break-even, which by definition is relying on the coins he mines to increase in value. So in 17 months time his plan is to get his money back while in a parallel universe his alter ego is taking that same $300k and buying the coins he is interested in directly.

Since both scenarios require the value of the coins (either mined or purchased outright) to increase in value, the smarter parallel universe version of himself just sat back and relaxed and made a nice profit off of his investment.

The miner version of himself (this universe) meanwhile put in a lot of work, suffered through the heat, noise, rig lockups, changing software, drivers, and all the other mining headaches for a long 17 months and is maybe back to even. Also, since he paid for power and depreciation on the equipment, his investment in hardware is not even worth $300k anymore, maybe half that at $150,000.

image source https://coin.dance/blocks



This question should be resolved by the end of the day or within 52 blocks (~8.5 hours) as I write this. Right now the odds are looking good to be a green weekend, but you never know...

I think just by having a clear direction which way the scaling debate is heading will give the market tremendous confidence. There might still be a bit of uncertainty in the short term, but if this locks in I think we will start seeing some gains.

I think your zero key must have got stuck when you were typing this in.

A billion dollars per 1 Ethereum would be quite the feat, and I think all but the most fanciful of us doubt it will reach those lofty heights.

I could very well see it at $1,000 per coin within a year, which is well within the realm of possibilities since we just seen $420 not long ago.

I could also see $2,000, $5,000, or even $10,000 as possibilities, but that will take some time, perhaps as many years as the first digit (i.e. $2,000 in 2 years, $5,000 in 5 and so on).

I think by then (5-10 years) something else will probably come along and replace it, or at least supplement it to keep it from growing much further. But then again who knows...