So the announcement is that a cryptocurrency card company is making cards?

Hmmm... not sure that counts as an announcement so much as what you'd expect. Also agree, why would you lock up your coins if the card isn't ready? Unless they are letting you start your 'lockout' six month period now, so you can get the tokens back asap. I guess that would be the thinking.

My small mining rig (not farm) was great during winter. It only heated up one room and was a bit noisy and annoying with the lights but it was kind of nice to not have to run the heater so often, and instead be printing money/coins from the comfort of my own home!

I think it is more related to most other altcoins going up. It could also have something to do with increased attention from the Singapore rollout, or the commitment to revisit something similar to the 1 per cent asset contract, but we'll see.

If it breaks out above about $8 it will be back to roughly where it was before the whole smart contract scrapping/visa joint announcement.

I'm hoping it can pop back down for a bit so I can get some at a better price!

I personally like Binance. I wish they could quickly add a few more coins in the top 50 by marketcap but in terms of useability I like it.

Their fees are also very low. Something like 0.05 per cent if you get a couple or their 'Binance coins' directly from their exchange.

I've mined on a pool with 0 per cent pool fees, and noticed I was actually getting LESS coins than on a 1 per cent pool fee (suprnova in my case).

It might have just been variation or luck, even though this was spaced out over a few days, but perhaps there are unscrupulous pools that are taking just a touch off the top without you realising it, until you switch to another pool or get a proper estimate from whattomine.

If you have a particular pool in mind you could try mining for a couple days on that pool, then try on a larger fee based pool and see if there is any major difference.

It is simulated mining, not actual mining. So it is like you get an airdrop based on how long you are 'mining' for, which might just be an animation of a pickaxe or something. So could be a good way for people to get involved in actual mining, but perhaps there would be security issues for mining since it actually isn't decentralised?

I believe boxmining (a youtuber on crypto) made some similar comments recently. You could look it up.

Slightly more detailed - they have secure nodes in development to provide end to end encryption of transactions, you can add messages to transactions, large engaged team, new website and logo on the way (if that sort of thing matters), and payout structure that incentivizes steady improvements.

From memory the developers get 8 per cent of all blocks mined, rather than a large initial premine amount as you might see with some other coins. This means there will always be a steady amount of income coming in for the developers that encourages long term growth and (relatively) stable price increases.

They also got a mention in a Palm Beach Confidential report, which is apparently a positive but I don't know much about that.

My suggestion for research would be to check out the team. So many new coins have anonymous, underskilled or inexperienced teams.

Think about it like this, if the coin or ICO you are considering was a regular old private company with shares, would you put your hard earned behind them? If not, probably best to reconsider unless you think the idea or coin is amazing for some other reason.

For Equihash mining (like Zcash) you want to increase your core clock and only moderately increase memory. Try reducing memory and upping your core clock to about 50-100 and play from there. I've seen people successfully mine stable at core clock increase of 150.

Also your power limit is crazy high. Most people power limit DOWN to reduce electricity consumption and heat, while only losing some sols worth of mining.

If electricity consumption and costs aren't an issue for you, I would still suggest moving that power limit closer to 100. You'll see the temp come down as well.

You could also try spacing out your GPU's more so the heat generated from each doesn't impact the ambient temperature around the other GPU's.

77 degrees is still ok as long as it is stable at that temperature and your cables aren't getting hot. I wouldn't feel comfortable running them above 80 degrees but apparently GPU's can theoretically run ok above 90 degrees, but I wouldn't want to try that.

Keep in mind I don't power limit to 120 so don't assume that above 80 degrees is ok when you're pulling that kind of power!

I recall Decred was in the process of being listed on Binance. Is that still in progress? I think it was on a community coin of the month program (maybe in September from memory), where it gets voted by Binance users for expedited listing. Did that lead to anything or is it still a maybe? Decred was one of the first altcoins I started following, but just haven't seen it on some of the exchanges I like.

Since you asked specifically about altcoin mining (as opposed to buying altcoins as some people have suggested) I've listed a couple things that I'd think about.

I think it depends on how much electricity costs in their area, and what specifically they'd like to mine.

For equihash type coins go NVidia. For ethash possibly AMD or get a mix of both and mine with nicehash for whatever is most profitable.

If electricity is expensive, possibly go for NVidia gtx 1060 or 1070's. They tend to use less electricity and you can power limit them pretty well without losing too much mining power.

They'll have to think about cooling and ventilation (keep dust away!) cable management, internet connectivity, software to use (prob go Linux based).

I would probably suggest to the person to spend enough to get one mining rig up and running, and then re-evaluate if he wants to drop the whole $450k.

I don't think BTC is dead. If there ever was more of a shift to Bitcoin cash then bitcoin could fork to deal with some of its speed and transaction price issues to increase useability. I don't think the major bitcoin miners will just let BTC die and switch to bitcoin cash.

In the meantime, I think we'll see more bitcoin cash, gold, silver, bitcoinz and whatever other fork names people come up with to try and get in on the bitcoin name.

Safest would have to be ethereum. Over the last couple months the price has fluctuated between $290 usd to about $350 usd. So looks like it has a solid foundation and I can't see it plummeting to nothing. There are too many erc20 tokens that are built from the ethereum blockchain that would prevent it from dropping too far. As it moves to POS there might be a bit more of a fluctuation but that is still about a year off.

I've been looking for a CPU mining coin while my GPU mining rig is mining other things. I think I'll have to give this a try!

I also like the idea of getting a high staking 'interest rate' for 12 month staking. Will hopefully help with maintaining interest in the coin instead of it being sold off in the first few months.

I've seen pump and dumps on ico's and random alt coins - could this be one for gpu mining!!

If anyone knows of a mining difficulty chart for bitcoin gold (like the one on coinwarz for ethereum and a few other coins) I'd be really interested to take a look over the next couple days. I think I'll wait until the hype settles down to start mining (although if it moons I'm going to be really annoyed with myself!)

I'll estimate that difficulty will be crazy high when it first hits as everyone jumps on, then the novelty will fall off and it will settle down, slotting somewhere in the top five on whattomine.

However, I have heard of others saying that the first few public blocks might be a bit easier as people have trouble syncing up and getting it all up and running. Won't have to wait long to find out!

My understanding is that some cards draw different amounts from the riser slot. AMD apparently used to pull more, but the latest drivers from both NVidia and AMD supposedly try and pull less from the slot (read this from a different article, but can't verify).

I think most power gets drawn from the direct cable plugged into the top.

It's not perfect but you can feel the riser and cables to see if it is getting too hot if you think it is drawing too much power. Mine are a touch warm, but not hot. I use NVidia 1060s and 1070s and power limit to 65-70. 

Hmmm I think you're getting a bit carried away. And my point still stands, it was only last week people were talking about bitcoin being a good buy above 7k

Also, bitcoin cash is down to 1400 now - but hey keep believing it will be 5k by Monday

Also Singapore seems like a good trial site. Big enough to get a sense of what people are after, how they use their cards etc.

Monaco is going relatively cheap at the moment. Under $5 usd. Could be a good time to get in to get a higher tier card. Or you can risk trying to ride the bitcoin cash wave! Although I always feel uncomfortable buying something at its all time high.

I'll revisit this thread on Monday to see if it does hit $3000. If it does you can boast

Bitcoin cash still isn't used on exchanges as the main currency or trading pair. If it started being offered as a trading pair I think it could take over bitcoin as the 'real' bitcoin.

Also if the hard fork for regular bitcoin gets put back on (or something similar happens), then you could easily see regular bitcoin swing back up.