I've built quite a few desktops, as well as my dedicated miner rack.  I wanted a laptop for the builtin battery redundancy and generally lower overall power consumption.  Plus it's not something I'll be tempted to cram some video cards into to get mining profits out of, so it should sit unmolested once I have it set up and running.

I've actually had a good range of laptops in the past and the Compaq/HP lines have always treated me well, not sure about a grade B refurb, but for $145 it's hard to expect less than I'll get.

I actually have some low level PCs laying around (core 2 duos) with 2-4 gigs of ram.  I'd considered setting one of them up with a UPS to accomplish the same thing, but I'm seriously skeptical of the switching failsafe on my APCs and worry that I still might get a hard reset.  Given that some of the coins I'm staking (PIVX comes to mind) that with my relatively small stake, I'm in the 2-3 week uptime range to get a consistent reward and any loss of connectivity/uptime potentially resets that.

I'd played with doing a VPS too, and even have an AWS trial account for the next 9 months but I'm just generally not a fan of the cloud, especially if it involves entrusting them with a fair amount of money worth of my crypto.

Most any equihash algo coin (ZEC, ZCL, ZEN, Hush) have a considerable Nvidia advantage.  Skein does too, and of course just as I got my first 1080ti going, I watched that market tank, so profitability is down.  It does seem that Skein/Equihash and Groestl algos all have a distinct advantage on team green.  In honesty, from the playing around I've done many other non-daggerhash algos seem to do better watt per watt compared to Nvidia too, so you might want to look at Lyra2/TimeTravel/Nist5 algos too.

I found a great deal on a used laptop (on newegg) that I'm going to set up as a staking machine.  I've been wanting something that would have a built in battery backup (beyond my UPS setup) and that I could let run without worrying about a miner crashing it (or keeping it on my main computer as I've been doing).

So the questions I have:

The system comes with an i5 and 4 gigs of Ram, in everyone's experience is the 4g sufficient for running multiple staking wallets and/or master/secure nodes?

Backing up a wallet.dat allows me to import the wallet, but does this bring the blockchain with it or will I need to resync/bootstrap from day zero again for all the wallets i'm running?

Is there any advice/experience others have had with such a setup you could offer to save me some sanity?

Thanks in advance!

When I see an ANN with more than one typo in the first line, I must admit, I'm a little concerned.

I'm trying to set up some Zcoin mining, but I'm having a hell of a time both finding a decent pool (miningpoolhub seems the best I can access, Suprnova doesn't appear to be open) and optimizing/mining appropriately.  I have a 3-1070 + 1-1080 rig I want to point at Zcoin, but when I ran it for a full day I netted only .08 Zcoin.  Even with the price bump this is WAY off a normed earning curve compared to alternatives.

Is zcoin mining really that low on returns?

It's been slow, stable, and modestly increasing in value. 

Once there's some development reveals and more utility, plus being added to new exchanges we should see a consistent gain.

At this time I see Wyvern as holding a niche similar to Hush, and kind of expect it perform similarly in the near-term.

Long term value will be based on what Wyvcorp and others can do to provide practical applications for it.  The more of those there are the better it will do.

yeah the "-a skein" part

It does matter if you're using the right ccminer and/or version, google is not terribly reliable for finding the current or even correct versions of mining programs often.  Double checking Git or searching around here is a better bet.

I'm only pool mining so I don't have much to offer in the way of tweaking for solo though, sorry.

or TAAS

What BTC wallet is everyone using to link with??  

I use a KeepKey for my BTC and it seems it changes addresses with every transaction so I always show a zero balance on BB.  I thought I'd linked last round and then nothing dropped for me.  I just checked again and the chatbot is reporting 0.00 BTC in my linked address which is NOT correct.  I can move it to another wallet, just wondering which one will actually give me a static address???

This is just the normal up/down of the market, the bubble we're in is MUCH bigger and started 2-4 months ago.  When that pops it's going to be MUCH more dramatic than what we've been seeing the last few weeks with big gains and modest losses. 

6gb will have a slightly better resale market, and is DAG size resistant if you were to use it for ETH for some ungodly reason.  Otherwise they're almost identical.

I'd agree a mistake to buy them, for sure.  If I had to guess these were probably speced and designed for HPC applications (science/big data/simulaion/etc..) number crunching, and with the recent GPU boom they looked to how they could capitalize.  I doubt very much the CARDS are going to be beneficial for any of the smaller home miners, and are really only a perk for large scale operations that just want to maximize hash to ROI without concern for resale.

The second hand market will be shite for these because only miners and researchers will have a practical use for them.  The mobo looks like a best, but I think it was Phillip who commented on that yesterday, and again it's really out of the realm of practicality for a DIYer.  Running 13 GPUs (if it's even supported at the moment) on one system is going to have power requirements that are ridiculous and only really benefits someone who is INSANELY concerned about hashing density. 

I suppose if you were running 13 1080ti cards it might have some upside, then again if you have 13 1080tis you already have too much money 

No one can say for sure due to increasing BTC links.  Anywhere from 3 to 9+, probably 6 or 7 more.

Every full moon till their all distributed.

https://hothardware.com/news/nvidia-amd-and-motherboars-optimized-for-ethereum-botcoin-and-cryptocurrency-mining

I'll just leave this here, looks like Summer is heating up.

TAAS is almost by definition a passive income token.

Fine by me, lucky move of the day. sold at the 23k peak and bought back in at 19k 

ARK will easily perform as well as Lisk, more realistically i see it on par with blocknet in the $5-10 range eventually.

So... what exactly is the rationale in moving to a waves taken over the existing coins/algo? Trying to understand how a waves release adds any kind of value proposition here.

If you experience actual power loss or brown outs to the point of electronics resetting (think blinking alarm clocks) then yeah you'd probably want/need a UPS, depending on the frequency and duration.

Although a UPS won't run a rig for any considerable amount of time (I have a largish APC on my primary desktop and get <5 minutes running only one 1080ti).  They would be good to avoid constant reboots, that said, if you only have one or two a day, doing as a previous poster suggested and just having them set to restore after power loss might be the better bet.

It's a hobby with POSSIBLE financial gains.  If you're ok looking at it like that and you enjoy tinkering and tweaking it's fun.  If you just want to make BTC then you're better off buying in and trading.  The same way the cards have resale value, odds are purchased coins won't hit zero worth, so both have a safety net built in.