AMD is good at quite a few algo, not just ETH - they just happen to dominate on ETH on a hash/$ basis over anything NVidia, even though NVidia is very competative to slightly superior on hash/Watt on ETH.

 For example, on ZEC and despite recent gains on the green side, AMD is still competative-to-superior on hash/$ though noticeably inferior now on hash/Watt.

 The major DOWN side on Nvidia is that all of the algos it DOES dominate on have much smaller network hash pools (in number of cards) than ETH and ZEC do, so while NVidia has more options they are all much SMALLER options and tend to bounce around a LOT more on profitability (DGB is a major case in point recently, I've seen it bounce 3:1 on profitability in an HOUR at times depending on which DGB algo you are looking at).

 It says a lot that there were a couple points in the last week that I was ballpark 0.2% of the entire DGB-skein or 0.5% of the entire DGB-groetsl hashrate with MY small number of 1070s (not at the same time though), and actuallly managed 1% of the total DGB-Scrypt network hashrate for one short period with my SMALL A2 farm.


There's more than 3 coins "the herd" flocks to, BTW - BTC ETH ZEC LTC XMR DASH all have major pools of miners, though only 3 of those are GPU mineable any more.

And again, folks confuse "use of technology" with "use of the coin".

 The articles clearly state that JP Morgan is planning to integrate/in process of integrating some of the ZEC *TECHNOLOGY* into their own blockchain-based platform - which will NOT use ZEC the coin.

 This is a LOT more clear-cut based on what the articles SAY as opposed to the confusion of "Ripple Technology" vs the use of XRP the coin.


 But yes, the spike DOES appear to be based on that news - and it's good for us miners as long as the price stays up, even if the reason is wrong. 8-)

 My 3-card "hybrid" 1070 rigs pull about 600 watts at the wall on a good gold PS despite pushing a top-end AMD A10 cpu hard on the GPU side.

 A 6 card "mining-specific" rig should be QUITE comfortable on a Seasonic X-1250 gold/X-1200 Plat or an EVGA 1300 G2 / 1200 P2.

 You could probably go with 1080 cards instead of the 1070s, if you keep the power limits down some - at least some 1070 cards (Gigabyte in specific) change the TDP to 180 watts in order to be able to support their higher clock rates, my Gigabyte 1080 card TDP is only 20 watts higher.


 The 1080 ti needs *2* PCI-E connectors (one 6-pin one per card - there are exactly ZERO power supplies in the under-1500 watt range with enough PCI-E connectors to run 6 of those cards (and I think you have to go to 1600 watt power supplies to get to 12+ connectors) - which doesn't factor in whatever you have to use to power your risers.

 I've got 1 or 2 rigs running on the FM2A88X Extreme 4+, but I don't do riser rigs so no idea how well it works with more than 2 cards.
 It IS solid with 2 cards though, but I prefer the Extreme 6+ version for my own rigs.


 A GOOD 1000 watt power supply (EVGA G2 or P2 series, not sure if there is a Seasonic X-series at the 1000 watt level in gold but I think I remember a 1000 or 1050 Plat X-series) should handle 6x RX 470/480/570/580 card rig on just ETH if you undervolt and keep the power limit down a bit.

If you already have 9xx series cards, by all means use them - I just wouldn't bother BUYING any of them for a mining rig unless they were SUPER SUPER cheap - and I'd be iffy about it even then.

 I'd also ignore anything below the 980 completely as far as buying cheaply goes.

GRC as of right now is a little over 3.5 cents/coin.

 If it had an ICO I'd expect it to be more like a dollar.

 9-)

Chelan and Douglas counties in Washington State, USA, both have RESIDENTIAL (and small business) rates that total up ALL UP to about 3c/kwh - and their large business and industrial rates are even lower (though not a LOT lower on an all-up basis).

 This is NOT new news - ask MegaBigPower and ZoomHash among other LARGE farm operators why their farms are located in the Wenatchee / East Wenatchee area.


 Grant county next door can also get to less than 3c/KWH power all up but you have to be a much larger user (200 KW or more) otherwise it's a hair over 4.5 cents at the small business rate and a bit more at the residential rate all-up.

 Ask Mickey$loth, Yahoo (soon to be Verizon), and Google among others why they located huge server farms in Quincy WA, which is ALSO somewhat old news now.


 All 3 counties own LARGE Columbia River hydropower dams

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_in_the_Columbia_River_watershed

 Douglas County PUD, which has about half the pop of the other two counties, owns one dam of 840 (peak) Megawatts.
 Chelan County PUD owns 2 dams on the Columbia totaling 1947 (peak) Megawatts and a small dam on a tributary that adds another 40 Megawatts or so. The Alcoa smelter near Wenatchee however was shut down a few years back.
 Grant County PUD owns 2 dams on the Columbia totaling 2047 (peak) Megawatts and some misc other small projects (including a little wind power generation) that might add another 200 Megawatts.

 All 3 County PUDs subsidize local rates to somewhat BELOW their cost of generation through the sale of "excess" power on LONG term contracts at quite a bit higher rates to power companies in outside areas, mostly the Seattle/Tacoma area but some of it makes it all the way down south to PG&E land in California.


 "USACE" on that list is the Western version of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Federal Government controlled, and sells power from the dams they own to power companies all over the West - specifically including the power output from the Grand Coulee dam which is the biggest power output dam in the USA and spent several years as being the most powerful dam in the world (I think it STILL makes the Top 10 list on power output, barely, depending on if you go by peak capacity or actual power generated in a year).


 There are quite a few places in foreign countries that have access to power in the 3c/kwh or less range - though some of those countries would be VERY risky to set a mine up in and others aren't noteably friendly to foreigners.

 Worst case, all of the hardware I've bought in the last year for mining *still has good resale value* because it is current or half-generation old.

 If you've been paying attention, RX 4xx series cards are sometimes selling now for MORE than they sold for new, due to the short-term scarcity of the RX 5xx parts as AMD gets those ramped up and the resulting price gouging raising the floor on the value of the older "IN SOME WAYS BETTER but overall generally a tossup" parts.

 Realistically though, if I ended up having to sell in 6 months, I could still probably realise 80% or more of what I paid for my recently purchaced gear - worst case rebuild it into "gaming machines" and might even be able to sell at a small profit.
 Any of the gear I have that was NOT recently purchased is long-since paid for and PURE PROFIT making at this point (except for electric and cooling costs) and most of that gear I'd probably be running anyway on various "distributed network projects" like DNet and F@H.



 POS and the eventual end of ETH POW is not FUD - the most recent statement out of Vitalik is still "aiming for POS end of year or early next year" but planning to impliment in stages, and the first stage is supposed to be ready "soon".

 I won't be shocked if there are further delays though well into next year.

 I still see no significant probability of an ETH ASIC.

 I can see a possibility of the "diff bomb" driving most miners out of ETH before ETH goes full POS, but that's still months away and it will probably get "adjusted" again if the POS work goes slower than currently planned.

 That's if you insist on going to 6-card riser rigs.

 For $6750 you can easily build 5 and possibly 6 no-riser 3-card rigs, and if you go with Phillipma's favorite Biostar 4-card board you can probably build 4 or 5 4-card rigs.
 
 The smaller rigs have the advantage that if something breaks, you lose half as much hashrate - at the cost of slightly more power consumption and *usually* somewhat more space needed.
 
 You also get better reliability IME, risers have a bad habit of having issues and 6-card rigs can be a pain to get working reliably since the drivers aren't really INTENDED to handle that many cards.
 
 You also don't NEED a "frame" for a non-riser rig, which saves back some of the money (as does not needing risers) you have to pay for 2 MB/CPU/RAM/drive sets (PS is a push, one big with a GAZILLION connectors to power the GPUs AND the risers vs 2 half-size "normal number of connectors needed" is pretty much the same price on high quality PS).

 
I'm NOT impressed with a couple of the blockoperations picks:

 Not real fond of Antec PS, and their plat PS is *BARELY* more efficient than the EVGA 1300 G2 "gold" or the Seasonic X-1250 "gold" models while costing noticeably more.
 
 They're paying too much for their ram - 4GB is plenty for most mining rigs, and DDR4 still carries a price penalty over DDR3 (but if you INSIST on Intel, most of their recent MB are DDR4).
 I'd suggest 2GB but it's almost impossible to find 1GB SIMMS any more (and they've gotten kinda expen$ive).
 
 Buying the OS on a stick/SSD might make it easier to deploy the rig, but does waste a bit of money over just buying the stick and doing an install of a FREE OS (even the free mining-specific OS distributions).

 
 With all that said though, that site DOES give a good "this is a place to start" on the cost and choices to make for a 6-card riser rig, and their total cost is pretty reasonable all factors considered.


 As far as electric cost goes - before I moved into my current place (fixed-price electric built into the rent by negotiation with the landlord before I moved), my last full-month electric bill was for $394.86 all up, on 8640 KWH used, or just a bit under 4.6 c/kwh

 I figure about 13k of that was mining gear.



 Buying hashrate from Nicehash *can*, sometimes, make more than owning - but most of the time you're fighting other folks that probably don't HAVE any mining gear and you end up paying more than you would make from pointing YOUR gear at Nicehash, much less what you can often make by pointing it at even MORE profitable options.

 ZEC changed that for a brief while this morning during the spike - it's still up a LOT even now, but I think it fell back behind some of the skein and groetsl coins (intermitantly, those coins are ALL small network hash and tend to bounce around on profitability a LOT).

 Be wary of the BURSTcoin calculators out there - they all underestimate the "network TB" by quite a lot, and uniformly give an estimated return that is commonly 30-50% higher than the number of coin you will mine in reality.

 I believe the issue is that the NET TB only counts whichever specific miner machine from a given person last submitted a valid deadline (for those of us that have multiple machines mining to one address) due to how the pools are built - and that machine is NOT always the highest-capacity machine a specific individual has.


 This is not to say "don't mine BURST" - it's DEFINITELY worthwhile if you have spare HD capasity you're not doing anything else with.


 Now for a scary thought - if Backblaze were to assign 4 of their "vaults" to BURST mining, running Seagate Archive 8GB drives in the pods (480 GB per pod minus RAID redundancy) they'd roughly double the network TB - and for them that would be a rather SMALL part of their total drive capacity.

 There are many many sites outside of the Cryptocurrency world that handle 40k users online and consider it a light or even a very light load.
 Poloniex needs to put a LOT more effort into getting scaled up into a platform that can handle the load they have - they have been FAILING FOR MONTHS at that.


 I hesitate to think how many users Amazon.com has online during Christmas Buying Season peaks - apparently some morons tried to DDoS Amazon once in November and Amazon had to check their logs to notice.

Flypool is a ZEC pool, NOT a "ZEN" pool - whatever ZEN is.

For a start, if you want to mine ZEN you need to use a ZEN pool.

 ETH is a rather low-profit choice for NVidia cards compared to many of the other options they're good at, as is ZEC at this time.

 I was mining on theblocksfactory for their DGB-Skein and DGB-Groetsl pools for a few days, and also tried the suprnova related pools - it's a bit iffy though given the VERY small net hashrates on all of the options for mining DGB (it's a multi-algo coin like Myriad).
 

The RX 470/570 has 2048 cores, the RX 480/580 has 2304 (1/8th more exactly).
This sometimes provides more hashrate, depending on the coin - most WILL benefit some, a few (ETH is notorious) are "memory-hard" and don't benefit much if at all from the additional cores.

Memory speed is normally related to the size of the memory NOT to the card model - 8GB cards generally have 8000Mhz memory, 4GB cards usually have 7000 and a few older 4GB cards have 6600.
This specifically applies to both RX 470/570 AND RX 480/580 except that I don't think anyone is making any RX 570/580 cards with 6600 Mhz memory.
 This is a fairly small factor on MOST coins, but ETH loves all the memory speed you can feed it.

 RX 480/580 generally uses a little more power than RX 470/570, if ALL other factors are equal.

 Cooling is card-model-specific, many companies make both a RX 470/570 and a RX 480/580 with the SAME cooling system on it - in which case the RX 470/570 version will usually run 1-2 degrees cooler at the same clocks and fan setting.

I would not even look at a GTX 9xx series card for mining with any more, the 10xx series blows them away across the board by a lot.

 I'm pretty sure the GTX 1060 6GB is pretty close to a tossup on mining performance for most coins vs. the GTX 980, the GTX 1070 DEFINITELY blows the 980 away across the board.


 The only way I would even THINK about a GTX 980 is if it was very cheap - like $150-$200 OR LESS level cheap - and even then I'd probably take a pass on it.

 MOST of it is being pumped in by Chinese investors, due to a combination of the Chinese recent economic issues, and the very very weak Yuan.

 As far as that one big ETH farm on ethermine.org - they HAD over like 1500 rigs at one point a week or two back, must have shifted half of them at something else or some other pool.


 I'd like to have what they pay for their electric bill as my income.....

 The total hashrate in ETH equates out to appx. 1 million AMD GPUs - which isn't even in the BALLPARK of their total sales on the RX 470 and RX 480.

 If you add in ALL of the hashrate on everything else, it MIGHT double that figure.

 Then factor in a LOT of older AMD gpus are mining ZEC, some are still mining ETH, a few mining other stuff, then subtract out the NVidia brigades....



 AMD cards are not in short supply due to mining (though it is a small factor, there was NO shortage on the RX 4xx series for many moons up to last month when they were discontinued), they are in short supply 'cause the RX5xx lines haven't gotten up to full speed yet *AND* AMD is selling MAINSTREAM cards that perform comparably to many of the high-end cards of the last generation for well under half the cost while eating half the power *AND* Nvidia has been very slow to move DOWN to the mainstream segment on their current generation cards.

 I also suspect AMD has been a bit slow DELIBERATELY on getting volume production and shipping going on the RX 5xx series so the remaining RX 4xx cards could get cleared out, since they don't have a lot of competition YET in that segment.


 I highly recommend AGAINST Poloniex - I had nothing but ISSUES far too much of the time I dealt with them over the last month and a half or so. They seem to be suffering some SERIOUS "can't handle their growth" pains.

 I don't like how Bittrex has their website set up in some ways (their pop-up "order confirmed" RIGHT on top of the main menu is VERY irritating, as is their insistance on using Crapcha) but they do get the job done and don't lag to hell and gone for hours a day like Poloniex does most days - and they don't hang on to your withdrawals for DAYS at a time.

 Never used Kraken, GDAX, or Bitfinex - but I am probably going to be checking one of more of those out in a month or so (I have a move tentatively set up next month into a MUCH better place).

 For getting your fiat into / out of BTC/ETH/LTC I find Coinbase works reliably, though their ATH transfer times are a bit slow that seems to be true for everyone that uses ATH.

 Poloniex and Bittrex have NO option to deal in fiat at all.



 See my last post for *MY* estimate of when the current very nice profitability will come to a screeching halt.


 IMO LINUX is the way to go for mining, though it would be nice if it had better tools like Afterburner for tweeking cards with.


 Open air rigs are usually a hair noisier, but you don't need MASSIVE fan volume on them like a "in a box" rig does to stay cool so sometimes they're quieter - and they're almost ALWAYS cooler.

 They are also a little less expensive (no case cost), and they use a little less power (no case fans needed, or you can get by with a MUCH LOWER POWER fan at most).

 Vega is aimed at the 1080ti, not the 1070.

 THAT power comparison is pretty close, the question is how the performance compares.


 The one that doesn't make a lot of sense is the "Eclipse", unless it's intended to be a way to take Nova GPUs with one bad CU and do something sellable with them.

 kfa and galaxy are the same company, it probably IS the same card with different brand labeling.