As you know, the evil, ugly IRS considers mining revenue 'income' the moment it arrives in our wallets. However, I found a trick to roll the crypto into a retirement plan and therefore get a tax benefit.

Step 1: Incorporate your mining operation as an LLC, if you didn't do so already
Step 2: You must earn a net profit after power cost & depreciation!
Step 3: Open a Solo 401(k) retirement plan for the company. There are services that make this very simple. They will register a trust fund entity on your behalf and appoint you as the trustee & plan custodian.
Step 4: Open a new corporate exchange account on Kraken/Gemini/Coinbase Pro in the name of the trust.
Step 5: Send your mined crypto to the exchange. Sell the crypto for cash, transfer the cash to the trust bank account, then transfer the cash to the exchange.
Step 5.5: Buy whatever crypto you want on the exchange.
Step 6: You just made a 401(k) contribution which is either on a pre-tax or Roth basis! If you chose pre-tax, it's like buying 20-30% more coins. If you chose Roth, you'll never owe any future tax on withdrawals.
Step 7 (optional): Send the coins on the exchange to your own hardware wallet.

Solo 401(k) accounts allow you to invest in almost any asset. The other benefit of this type of account is a high $60k contribution limit, the ability to borrow up to 50% or $50k at zero interest, and rolling over existing retirement accounts into buying tax-advantaged Bitcoins while the price is still low.

Of course, please consult with an accountant or attorney to make sure you're doing this correctly. Mistakes will be expensive. The maintenance / transaction fees can be $1000/year or so as well.

I have just started this experiment today. The process should be complete this month.

[Late 2017]

I've been a GPU miner since 2013. Here are 4 different times when I built rigs for mining Ethereum. Power cost was 10 cents.

• Late 2017: $220/card (RX 570 4G), 100-125% ROI
• Early 2018: $370/card (RX 570 4G), -50% ROI
• Early 2019: $140/card (GTX 1060 6G), 400%+ ROI
• Late 2021: $1300/card (RTX 3080L), 20% ROI

Here is what the mining calculators said:

• Late 2017: 400-500 days for payback
• Early 2018: 300 days for payback
• Early 2019: 600-700 days for payback
• Late 2021: 300-400 days for payback

What happened? The case in which I made the most profit was when Whattomine said it was the least profitable. When Whattomine showed rosy projections of payback in 1 year, I made the least profit.

The most important factor in profit, especially for GPU mining, is buying the equipment for a reasonable price, then selling it for a reasonable price later.

I think $425 for an RTX 3060 today is a decent price, considering PoS has been pushed back. Beware that the price was $600 just 2-3 months ago! There is no way anybody made $175 of mining profit in the last 3 months, even with free power.

So don't blindly trust the calculators!

I'm considering buying used MicroBT Whatsminer M20S ASICs for a new farm. The electricity price is 6.5 cents.

Is this a good choice if I can buy them for $3400-3500 each? I've heard that Whatsminer is generally a reliable brand.

The other models I have looked at are the Antminer T19 (new) and the Avalon 1126 Pro (used). I don't like the S19 series because they are too expensive per TH, and my power cost will likely go down to 5.5 cents or lower after the summer.

I don't want to buy anything less efficient than 55W/TH because they are higher risk, and I'll probably have a limited amount of power capacity available for the first 5-6 months.

I believe BTC price can fall to as low as $25k this year, but it will most likely stay flat at $40-50k. Any recommendations?

I've been GPU mining since early 2013 on and off, starting with a single Radeon HD 7850 video card, then multiple R9 270's during the Dogecoin boom, then with 200 GPUs (RX 570's and GTX 1060's) during the 2017-2018 ETH gold rush with help from outside investors. My business went bankrupt in late 2018 because a big investor pulled out after ETH started falling, we only got 200 cards instead of 1000+ so we defaulted on the lease, and I scaled back down to a single rig in 2019-2021.

But now, with my regular job (software development) allowing me to work fully remote, I'm really interested in moving to somewhere with cheap-ish power and opening a small warehouse again. Since I'm currently in NJ, I thought about upstate NY first, but I don't like the BitLicense crap and state income tax, plus it's the middle of nowhere. I also considered NH/MT because they have no sales tax, but I'm interested in having a real life outside mining. OR/WA have cheap power but are too far away timezone-wise, as my job is located in EST.

My primary destination would be the Dallas TX area, unless one of you can recommend a better state. It seems to be an up-and-coming destination for mining farms and Bitcoin people (should be easier to find investors), plus the regulators are nice. The heat could be a problem, but at least the climate is dry. The best power cost I can get on ONCOR seems to be 7.0¢ in total (5.2¢ energy, 1.8¢ demand). I'm hoping to get day-ahead pricing and lower the cost to 6.0-6.5¢ by shutting down during price spikes.

My initial budget is $60k: $50k for the equipment and $10k for the lease deposit/construction costs. I want to add $6k of equipment per month, for a total of $100k invested by EOY. Warehouse rent will cost $1400-$2000/month and I think I can get a 3PH 600A 240v supply for 200 kW of capacity (600 x 240 x 1.73 x 80%). I have the financial stuff, like how to avoid income tax & sales tax, under control thanks to my accountant.

However, with the uncertainty about ETH PoS, I don't want to buy GPU rigs again. I'm thinking of starting out with ASICs. I did some research and I think I can start out with 100 Antminer S9's for $380 each. With custom firmware, I could run them at 13.5 Th @ 1100w. Mining calculators are telling me each one could make $1.40/day of profit, which is a ~270 day payback period. Of course, BTC difficulty will keep growing and that margin will be squeezed and that doesn't account for other costs.

But I'm new to ASIC mining, so I'm worried about the following stuff:

• 1: What would the failure rate be on these old S9's? I heard that ASICs die quicker than GPUs.
• 2: Is 7¢ too high of a rate to get into ASIC mining, especially with Antminer S9s? If BTC price falls below $30k, the profit margin looks like it will be so low it will be unviable for me.
• 3: How can I get insurance for this business that has the highest chance of paying out if there's a fire?
• 4: Can I get away with installing 240v 6-20R outlets then plugging the PSUs directly into them to avoid the cost of PDUs? I used to have 30A L6-30R outlets.
• 5: Is it worth mining with ASICBoost? Why isn't everybody doing it?
• 6: Should I go with the Antminer L3 series instead? It seems they're selling for 1-year low prices and less of the revenue is spent on power.

Once ETH goes PoS, and I locked in a cheap power rate due to demonstrating that 100 kW of demand to the suppliers thanks to the Antminers, I would stop investing in new ASICs and start buying up cheap GPUs. I think that could be a great time to get into large scale GPU mining with older cards like the GTX 1000's / RX 500's, which should crash the most in price after the n00b GPU miners panic. At 6-7¢/kWh, it's probably a better long-term choice than ASIC mining.

Any recommendations from the seasoned ASIC operators? Should I just wait for PoS and stick to GPU mining because it's what I know best?

Hello, I'm wondering if there are any commercial ASIC mining farm operators located in the U.S., especially Texas, who have negotiated real time (hourly) or day ahead pricing with their utility. I'd also like to know if any farms have old ASICs like the Antminer S9 or Avalon 1146 that are usually unprofitable.

I'm thinking of writing software that takes in real time or next-day grid prices (preferrably ERCOT) and can remotely turn less efficient ASIC miners on/off depending on what the power cost is. I'm hoping that these old miners can be profitable if they run overnight, or when power is cheap enough.

I have done some preliminary calculations. For a medium-sized farm using at least 100 kW, it looks like you can get a 200-day ROI on a used $350 Antminer S9 as long as power costs < 4¢/kWh (uptime = 60-70%). Basically, it would be turned off during the afternoon and evening or during heat waves in the summer. This accounts for the higher demand charge for having a 60-70% load factor instead of running 24/7 and getting 99%. The demand charge averages 2¢ and the energy charge averages 2¢ during that 60-70% period of runtime.

You would probably have to plug in a small Raspberry Pi to the same LAN as the miners, and my backend would broadcast commands to perform the switching. Yes, the miners are less efficient, but heat is less of a concern because the weather tends to be cooler when electric prices are lower.

Would anybody with these older ASICs be interested in such a service instead of recycling them? If not, I'm thinking of starting my own warehouse with a few dozen used 16nm ASICs and seeing how it goes. 200 days seems really good for SHA-256 mining, and with ETH going to PoS, this might be a good investment.

With so many GPU coins switching profitability every few hours, it's become hard for me as a miner to keep track of the wallets on multiple exchanges as well as the mining pools. I have to log in and manually trade ETC, CFX and ERG into LTC, then withdraw the LTC. I'm worried about price fluctuations; I want to sell these coins at the best price.

I know that multipools like Prohashing or Nicehash already exist, but the problem is they don't support all algos and they charge high fees.

I'm thinking of developing a website that takes in withdrawals from various mining pools (ETH, ETC, CFX, RVN, ERG, FLUX, SERO, FIRO, etc.) and auto-trades them to one output coin, like ETC or LTC. The website then instantly deposits the single coin to your output wallet for a small fee (~0.3%).

Under the hood, all the wallets will be hosted on an exchange like Hotbit and trades will be performed on that exchange. Security shouldn't be a problem because all incoming deposits are traded and sent out in seconds.

With this service, you can always mine the most profitable coin (which will more than compensate for the 0.3% fee) and receive the earnings in the coin of your choice. You can also track the revenue history/prices of each algorithm over time. You can use any combinations of pools that you want, like choosing those with the smallest fee or the best reliability. When the market becomes unstable after ETH PoS, mining the best coin out of several choices will only become more important.

I want to know what the community thinks of this idea. Is it unnecessary or is it convenient?

[reduce mining-related downtime]

Hello miners, my name is Hammereditor and I'm from Coinfarm Ventures.

In January I started my own mining farm with 200 video cards. The only problem: the warehouse was 100 miles or 2-3 hours away in another state. We just couldn't get a reasonable electric rate here in Long Island. At first it was a nightmare: I had to use expensive Wi-Fi smart outlets and deal with offline rigs. Every single week I had to visit the facility.

I bet many of you struggle with rig crashes, blackouts and GPU stalls. Not just large miners, but small hobbyists too. Until I crafted a little rig resetter for way cheaper than Wi-Fi outlets or smart PDUs. It solved 90% of crashes, eliminated most lost profit, and saved me countless hours of traveling to the warehouse.

Now I'm turning it into an actual full-featured product that's built from the ground up with only one purpose: reduce mining-related downtime. However, I first need to know how many miners need or want Resetter RF and whether it's useful or not.

You can help by taking the market survey, which is 14 questions and < 5 minutes long. If you're located in the U.S. or Canada only, you have a chance to take part in the closed beta test 3 weeks from now and try out a prototype of Resetter RF for free for around a month. 10 beta units will be handed out. If you're not in those countries, though, you can still submit the survey, then PM me a request to participate.

In the future there will be support for international outlets (EU, AU, UK) and the control panel will be upgraded over time, but we're sticking to the basic features for now. The more interest there is in this, the more I'll discuss in this thread. That's all! Any questions or suggestions?