I have always been a PoW fan myself for that very reason. To me PoS doesn't sound much different that they way the world runs already, those with the most money (most coins in their wallets) earn the most rewards. It's not a lot different than having a big bank account and earning interest off of it, the more you already have the more you make. At least with PoW, especially GPU coins, the average person at least has a chance to earn a few coins and build up their nest egg slowly without having had to buy 1000's of them to begin with.

I agree with your first line but not the other two.

One any ROI prediction a year out is impossible to figure accurately. By then the network hash rate will probably be double or tripled again making ROI projections even harder. This whole logic train also involves a belief that ETH's value will continue to increase offsetting the ever increasing network hash rate. Might just as well invest directly in the coin if you are relying on its value to keep increasing in order to justify your investment into mining gear.

Even with October 17th change, since it will effect everyone proportionally there will really be no change in profitability. So while mining rewards will increase roughly 23% (according to the above link) since everyone gets a 23% increase simultaneously, the net effect is 0 increase in profits. The only way that would be beneficial for an individual is for just you or a small group to gain a 23% advantage and everyone else to stay the same as they are now.

I will add my 2 cents to this as well. A few years back I had sold maybe 20 or so GPUs on Ebay without issue than for some reason I got two buyers (within 30 days of each other) that filed a SNAD (Significantly Not As Described) claim on their purchases 90 days after they bought the GPUs. My listings clearly stated they were used GPUs and I offered no warranty or refunds, although Ebay forces the 30 day return period on you anyway. So I wrote back and explained this to them and stated I would not accept the return. Well they of course escalated it to Ebay who ultimately sided with the buyers.

I too send in documentation, pictures I had took, etc., and tried making my case that it was a used item they had used it for over 90 days and I should not have to pay for a return. For whatever reason Ebay/Paypal disagreed, took the refund from my account and didn't even make the buyers send the item back. I had used the Ebay account for over 5 years and had maybe 250 successful sales of miscellaneous items over that time with excellent feedback. I didn't even think this type of thing was possible, but I promptly closed my account and will not use them again, at least not as a seller. At the time, I did have a brief period where I had some evil thoughts of pulling this stunt as a buyer, but I am not that type of person and will now simply avoid Ebay and Paypal at all costs.

Anyway, if I sell used equipment now I do it in person via Craigslist or other means. I have no issues if the buyer wants to check it out or even if they returned it within a few days, but at some point a sale (especially used) needs to be final. With Ebay/Paypal you could be on the hook for up to 180 days after the sale no matter what. A unscrupulous person could buy your card(s), mine with them for 4-5 months, then have a good chance of making you eat the return.

You have heard the saying: Buy the rumor, Sell the news. Rumors of the Snowden tweet must have leaked out earlier yesterday when it spiked to just above $400, now that its officially news people are selling. Same thing happened back when the JP Morgan news broke.

I think Zcash is a sleeper coin that has great features and one day will skyrocket in value one people catch on to its utility.

Zcash has only been out for just under a year with roughly 10% (2.3 Million/21 million) of its maximum supply mined so far. The developers also control a good portion of this (20%) so there is even less in the hands of traders and individuals.

Once enough coins get in the hands of the market manipulators, we will probably see more action, but right now I think it is intentionally being kept low so big players can continue to accumulate as much as they can get their hands on.

I fully believe Zcash has $1,000+ potential within the next 2 years and have had at least a few rigs mining it since its launch.

Anything is possible but Bitcoin currently enjoys a 10X price premium versus its closest competitor. Another coin, such as ETH could potentially overtake in in market-cap one day, but I still think that would be a few years off. Myself, I hold BTC as well as many of the popular alts, so I would probably continue to hold a variety of promising coins including BTC if it were to ever become dethroned.

On a truly dedicated server you would be fine as you are paying for the entire system and can do what you want with it as long as it is legal. On a shared system (VPS) they might throttle you usage if they find you are pushing CPU utilization 100% 24/7 and might even close your account as it may be considered abusive. Since dedicated servers are usually fairly pricey, I do not think you would make ROI on this plan.

I agree strongly with his advice on only downloading files from the official website. Even if the version you are looking for exists somewhere out on the web, downloading it from a non-official source can lead to problems, such as a Trojan or virus infection. If the infection contains a worm as well the other machines inside your network can equally be at risk.

Yes, this is a good thing and not a bad thing.

Unregulated exchanges will cause more harm to cryptocurrencies in the long term than ones that are "common sense" regulated. Keeping money launders and criminals out of exchanges is not a bad thing. Also margin trading is little more than gambling with some of those sites that offer 100x margins, again there is plenty of money to be made in crypto without margin and this only serves to protect the more "mom and pop" type investor, which again is not a bad thing.

I think governments that are allowing crypto trading and are only applying regulations with a light tough will only help fuel its growth.

Exactly, I think there are far too many newcomers who simply equate ICO and Crypto 1:1 and do not differentiate between the two. Cryptos have been with us for close to 10 years and ICO's are a more recent phenomenon.

Unfortunately since most ICO are riding on the backs of Crypto, when many of them eventually fail or turn out to be little more than outright scams, it will leave another black stain on the entire Crypto community as well.

You don't even have to go through all of that if you have a valid Windows 7 key as the Windows 10 activation will accept those keys as well on a fresh install. I have done this on several of mine as well as several friends PCs already and it has worked every time.

I think installing Windows 7 for the sole purpose to upgrade to Windows 10 will have the potential to cause more issues with stability down the road versus a fresh Windows 10 install.

Also if you look around there are free options for Windows 10 as well such as the Assistive Technology Users Free Upgrade found here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgrade

Dwarfpool doesn't have as much interest from Zcash miners as it does from Ethereum miners. This is why the payouts are more inconsistent as they do not have the hash power to find block in as timely manner as they do with Ethereum. You should move to a different pool that has a higher Zcash mining population, such as https://zcash.flypool.org.

There are other pools as well, but be sure you check out their statistics pages to make sure they have plenty of miners and hash rate pointed at the pool you are interested in before you join.

First off I do not think investing $20K into GPU mining right now is the best investment. Basically high hardware costs and super high network difficulty's for most of the profitable coins are going to make ROIs very hard to come by unless all the coins double in value within the next 6 months.  In that event you would still be better off buying the coins directly and earning 2x profit versus maybe earning back half your investment in mining.

With that said, if you are still intent on mining I would agree with the others who mentioned going for the Nvidia 1080Ti cards, as they offer the highest performance and you can get the density you need in fewer rigs. For $20K you should be able to build around four 1080Ti - 6 GPU rigs which should get you pretty good performance at a competitive power efficiency, which you will need as the mining environment becomes more saturated.

Miners need to run 24/7 for maximum efficiency. Unless the driver is to improve stability or improve performance (hash-rate) you will be cutting in to your profits trying to keep up with the frequent driver releases.

You should already know if your system is unstable and usually mining software will indicate the best version of Graphics driver to use for optimum performance. Other than that leave your miners alone so they can perform their work at hand.

They have done this before and in the end it doesn't really matter as your shares are worth more work. A pool share is simply a representation of your relative contribution to the pools effort in finding a block and allows a mechanism to proportionally reward your work when it finds a block. The actual value of this share is not really important as long as it is low enough to ensure you are able to mine a number of them in the time it takes the pool to find a block. I am sure they implemented it to address server load issues and since the difficulty of the Zcash network is increasing anyway there ultimately is no ill-effects.

For example, say before you got 1000 shares in the time it took the pool to find a block. Maybe everyone who contributed to that block mined a total of 1 million shares, so your reward is 1/1000 or 0.001 of the block (excluding pools fees for simplicity). Now they reduced the shares by making you mine at a higher difficulty, so now you only mine 500 shares in the time it takes the pool to find a block. Since this difficulty applies to everyone across the board, now the total shares earned during a block is 500,000, resulting in your proportion of the reward being the exact same of 1/1000.

Well this list is a generally pretty good list of tips but I do think you shouldn't be so certain in some of your statements.

For one your "If I can do it, so can you" statement is a bit misleading as you started in June and had three relatively good months of profit. Newcomers to mining are entering at the beginning of a rapid deterioration in profitability coupled with hardware prices still selling for a premium, this includes used equipment as well. Claiming users may need to wait up to 150 days (which is actually a quite good time for ROI) is also a bit misleading as the number is likely double that if not longer for the reasons I just mentioned.

Everything else though I agree with for the most part and can be applied to existing miners. I just don't think we should be encouraging new miners to invest so much at this point in time as the future is quite uncertain and once ROI projections get out to a year or more it really is questionable if they will ever recoup their investment.

Thanks, just changed over my avatar, personal message, and signature.

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That money you save by buying cheap knock-offs will probably come back to haunt you down the road with reliability issues. To win the mining game you need to look for "the best bang for the buck", which isn't necessarily the same thing as "the cheapest you can find". To successfully mine long term you need to buy quality (usually name brand) hardware at an appropriate price point and optimize your rig, its settings, and maximize its up-time. You go too cheap you will be down due to reboots and crashes, and possibly outright component failures.

Now this also doesn't mean you need to buy the top-end of everything, as there is definitely a point of diminishing returns. Stick with good names, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Evga, Corsair, etc., and you should be ok.

If all you have is a 500 GB HDD, that will work fine. Actually any HDD will work fine for mining,it just needs to be large enough to hold the OS, some virtual memory (about 16 GB) and the mining software. So for Windows even a 32 GB would work, although I would recommend getting something slightly larger such as a 80 GB as it would be tight. For a Linux build you can even go smaller and even use a flash drive as has been mentioned.

If you get to the point that you are building new rigs from scratch (ordering the parts) I would recommend going with a SSD. They are becoming fairly reasonable in price and you can often pick up a 120 GB for under $50 if you catch them on sale. If your motherboard supports it you can also go with M2 drive. The last couple of rigs I built I found some Intel 120 GB M2 drives for around $69, which while a bit more expensive than I normally like to put in a mining rig, they do eliminate the need for using a SATA power cable at all and since they mount on a motherboard I don't need to worry about the drive.