Hey Okelidokeli,

I tend to recommend following technical members in the community. A better understanding of the overall technology often leads to a more reliable understanding of price projections and whether or not a cryptocurrency has merit. For this reason, I  actually find that a lot of Medium blogs to be helpful. Preethi Kasireddy, Noam Levenson, and Linda Xie are three bloggers that I swear by. Most of them actually work for companies like Coinbase and contribute code to different blockchain projects. For actual news sites and time-sensitive content, I'd suggest The Merkle and Coin Telegraph. Additionally, if you'd really like to dive into the inner workings of blockchains, mining, smart contracts, and more check out a youtube creator named Siraj Raval. His videos are amazing and very educational! I hope this helps, and here are some sources:

https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy
https://hackernoon.com/@noamlevenson
https://medium.com/@linda.xie
https://themerkle.com/
https://cointelegraph.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A

Hey Phriend,

One option worth considering is using a service like changelly.com or Shapeshift.io to obtain Ripple. I personally found this method to be the most convenient option, but not always the best exchange rate. Essentially you could buy Ethereum through your regular exchange and convert it to Ripple with their website. Occasionally this might actually be cheaper than exchange fees, but more-so this option is usually much faster and doesn't require signing up for another hefty exchange account. Hope this helps!

I tend to recommend sites that are focused on the technical end of cryptocurrencies. A better understanding of the overall technology often leads to more reliable content and price projections are. For this reason, I  actually find that a lot of Medium blogs to be helpful. Preethi Kasireddy, Noam Levenson, and Linda Xie are three bloggers that I swear by. Most of them actually work for companies like Coinbase and contribute code to different blockchain projects. For actual news sites and time-sensitive content, I'd suggest The Merkle and Coin Telegraph. I hope this helps, and here are some sources:

https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy
https://hackernoon.com/@noamlevenson
https://medium.com/@linda.xie
https://themerkle.com/
https://cointelegraph.com/

Unfortunately, this sounds like an issue with ZERO coin and not your particular rig. A segmentation fault occurs when a program tries to read or write illegal memory, suggesting that there's a bug in their code. Whenever programs segfault, they usually dump the content of their memory at the time of the crash into a core file. This information could be useful for fixing the problem. I would suggest that you get in contact with the developers over at https://github.com/Zerocoin/libzerocoin, to see if they can pinpoint the issue. You could also reach out to @imichaelmiers on twitter. For the time being I would suggest setting up a script that automatically restarts your miner if a segfault occurs again. Are you mining on Linux or Windows?

Cheers! I definitely would agree that SIA has a great product, and at a great price. Filecoin is a very interesting product as well. Protocol labs has a brilliant team of developers with a lot of funding. IPFS is a great tool for developers, and Namecoin supposedly will follow in its footsteps to compete with SIA. That being said, I think that SIA has made significant leaps and bounds to win the market. I also think there's room for both, as they provide slightly different services.

Hey thegreenturtle,
Have you attempted adjusting the voltage from your bios? I prefer to have everything done at the BIOS level, in case there's ever any problems with the software configuration. It's possible that the voltage change to revert your settings back from Polaris isn't persisting. Modifying the BIOS and giving it a reboot could potentially help. Additionally, setting everything from the BIOS will keep you from worrying about software configuration down the road, and makes it easier to move GPUs around. If this doesn't work let me know and I can explore a few other ideas!

For instructions on how to make these changes, see step 6 of this blog post: http://www.cryptobadger.com/2017/04/build-ethereum-mining-rig-optimization/

Hey mmbingo,
While Proof of Stake is a very promising consensus mechanism, it's also a very complex system to fully implement. Casper involves a long and drawn out process of consensus conversion. While the goal is to completely switch to PoS down the road, implementing such a mechanism has to be done gradually to sustain a healthy blockchain. While there's no official release date, Casper is currently in Alpha and only supports Pythereum. Before it can ever be implemented on the main net, they'll have to build support for Geth and Parity. There's a lot of obstacles to overcome still, and mining should be safe for some time to come. The best way to stay up to date would be to follow several of the developers on Twitter. They post regular updates on Casper, sharding, and other technical achievement. I hope this helped!

If you're interested in mining, SIA is a great coin that's currently ~$0.059261. You can dual mine Ether + SIA with most GPU mining rigs, and the technology behind SIA is very promising. SIA is a decentralized storage marketplace that's gaining a lot of industry adoption. The project is similar to Filecoin but has arguably gained larger industry adoption. I would argue that Ethereum has found a fair amount of success from the community's belief in the technology itself. SIA is very much similar in this regard. It's always good to invest in technology that you, and others, believe in. Check out their website! https://sia.tech/

I would simply recommend purchasing a hosted rig farm. You will pay an upfront cost for your rig and then a small monthly fee, but the hosting center you purchase from will maintain your rig and you can have truly passive income

I would say that typically, NVIDIA cards are better than AMD cards in general (my opinion, please don't destroy my hopes and dreams), but regarding mining, I like AMD cards for the option to BIOS mod them for greater hash rates. NVIDIA doesn't allow for firmware modification so if the two types of cards were to have a mining power showdown that's why I'd pick AMD. If you don't want to learn how to BIOS mod your card, there are plenty of users on multiple forums that would be more than happy to help or have already posted the modded .rom file somewhere and all you need to do is download it. Miningstore.co has some BIOS modded cards for sale but I'm not here to be a sales rep, just here to help out.

I would suggest thinking about what cards you are most likely going to use and find the hash rate of it. Just simply google "sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 8gb hash rate" as an example. Then, follow this link: https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=&HashingUnit=TH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=&CostPerkWh= to see how much that card makes every month and if you type in your power usage correctly as well then it will also tell you how much your energy cost is and will take it out of your profit, so it does the math for you. DIY can be difficult as far as sourcing GPU's goes... Everywhere is always sold out; plus if you can't get any discounts, you could pay a small fortune. You also have to decide what coin you want to mine and your software. Some software, like ethOS, works very well mining ETH. But you have to figure out the intricacies. If this sounds like more than it's worth, many users would simply suggest buying the coins and save them. However, I would suggest otherwise. Having a rig is a perpetual stream of income, and instead of buying coins all the time and trading to get higher, you could just let your rig rake in the tokens and then day trade them for better profits. Also, many places sell GPU miners, and they are much easier to find in stock than ASIC miners. If you are interested in purchasing miners, then use promo code "Chancer" for $50 off your next miner purchase at https://miningstore.co/. Happy mining!

These guys may be able to help you with that:

http://excavate.solutions/index.html

I would say the most difficult part is choosing which coins you want to mine. I would recommend getting ASIC miners that are available and using GPU miners for altcoins like ETH and diversifying your farm so that if one coin tanks, you won't lose tons of profit. Also, something I see many people fail to mention when talking to people looking into getting into mining, be very careful when selling the coins you have made on your miners, and re-invest. What I mean by this is, sell when the coin is at its highest for the day, or trade with someone who wants your coins and is willing to pay a little extra in whatever coin they may have, meaning you make additional profit. Then take that profit and reinvest in the market, buying a token that is low and is expected to come back up, and sell out high. Continue doing this until you can afford another miner. Then as this process continues, you will be gaining exponentially more rewards than just letting this process run passively.

Crypto mining is not like that... Crypto mining is just your miner taking data from the blockchain and converting that data into a "hash." Basically, a hash is an advanced form of the zip file, and it cements whatever information that is so that if anyone ever tries to tamper with it, then the system will know immediately of the falsified transaction. The blockchain is the string of transactions from all over the world that trade whatever coin it is that you are mining. Blockchains are not exclusive to crypto but are used far more often by crypto than any other program. So him using your account to transfer funds in and out of doesn't make sense because that isn't making him any money. Also, you don't need to 'configure' a whole lot when setting up your wallet. It's pretty straightforward, so that's fishy. Where did you even meet this guy?

If you guys are looking at basically a mini miner I will check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJSITD0sPVY

He also has a follow-up video on software, so I thought this was pretty cool

Hopefully, we all just watch the market and see a bunch of mining rigs from China go on sale $$$

But I did hear recently from a couple of forums and an article that the Chinese government was toying with the idea of licensing out Crypto traders and miners. Just like in the US, to carry certain firearms, you have to have a permit; in China, you would have to have a license to trade or mine crypto. This idea seems like more of an attempt to keep the money from illegal use rather than ban the coins outright. Excellent idea down the road, but as of right now it's a bit frustrating

Has anyone had any interaction with Hminers.com? They have really low prices and their miners' profit margins are through the roof. Too good to be true, through the roof

Making everything easier, I would just invest into ASIC miners. The resale value isn't there if you can't use it to mine anymore, but that won't be an issue for years. Also the return on investment for ASIC miners, if you can get them at list price, is 2-3 months, which is insane. Here's a short list of ASIC miners and how much they make a month compared to Miningstore.co's GPU miners:
Antminer S9: $262.32 (BTC)
Antminer T9: $203.87 (BTC)
Antminer R4: $163.71 (BTC)
Antminer S7: $16.92 (BTC)
Antminer U3: $-3.73 (BTC)
Antminer C1: $-41.93 (BTC)
Antminer D3: $2,177.31 (DASH)
Antminer L3+: $510.57 (LTC)

Miningstore Imperium: $229.41 (ETH)
Miningstore Nexus: $195.55 (ETH)

Income Rates set for the market prices at 11:05 EST 9/19/17

I would recommend ASIC miners over cloud mining every day of the week. Cloud mining just has to go through so many middlemen for you to make a profit. Everything just takes so much longer cloud mining. Especially considering the D3 miner makes about 2k a month mining DASH and the miner can be as cheap as 1450 (lowest I've seen) or closer to 3k, but still, the return on investment is there

I've seen ASIC chips with PCI contacts. Would it be absurd for me to postulate a DIY ASIC miner with a modified OS or some type of special mining software with the PCI ASIC mining chips or does that sound insane? I'm still learning a lot about the ASIC chips and miners