Why bother with researching details and informing yourself about what you are mining when instead you can continue to buy rigs at 150% normal retail prices and hope for the moon!  /s

As has been said, it does not work this way. Although those extenders do indeed use a USB 3 cable to transfer data, it is simply a reuse of a commonly available cable and connectors, it does not follow the USB 3 standard for data transfer. Basically a cable is just a cable, made of wires that any protocols can take advantage of. The USB 3 standard requires both ends, usually a peripheral and a USB controller or hub on either side of the cable to operate. In the case of a PCIe extender, there is no USB controller or peripheral, again it is just using a commonly available cable.

For an even simpler analogy, think of using standard two conductor "lamp cord" to wire your speakers. While the lamp cord is designed to run 120V and maybe 8 amps, it also works just fine for feeding your speakers from your receiver. Another example may be using Cat 5 or 6 network cables to run a standard twisted pair analog phone line. Heck, you could even use LAN cable to wire your door bell or many other things. So basically the USB cable is being re-purposed for a specific functionality in the PCIe extender but it is NOT using the USB protocol and will not work with USB ports.

I highly doubt it. With the difficulty bombs continuing to drive Ethereum difficulties ever higher, and with continued network hash rate coming online daily, it will not be too long before those with higher power costs barely break even much less worry about ROI on any recent hardware purchases. Even if you switch to a more profitable coin it will not be long before others do the same and drive that coins mining profitability into the ground as well.

Rinse and repeat this a few iterations through all the somewhat profitable-to-mine coins and soon GPU mining will soon be a thing of the past. Don't count on Ethereum's future update to come to the rescue either, although it does reduce difficulty the block reward will also go down from 5 to 3 ETH making mining profits about the same and even a bit lower than they are currently.

Soon only those with sub $0.05 power cost will even be able to turn a few pennies profit. I predict a lot of used GPUs on sale for this coming Christmas, which should also pressure the prices of new GPUs to come down as well. Gamer's will finally be happy again!

I think we are one step away from it being mainstream. However, one needs to consider the cycles Bitcoin needs to go through first, as the "next" step may still be one to two years away.

The first cycle was from Bitcoin's inception to the Nov 2013 high of $1000. This period included pretty much the computer nerds and hobbyists, and eventually some tech savoy investors. The later's involvement propelled Bitcoin into the wider world of public awareness, but with the peak and bursting of the initial bubble much of its early momentum was lost.

The second period, that we are in now, many people have seen the first rise and fall of Bitcoin and may have gotten in because they decided to ride the on the way up. I think many are now starting to see the writing on the wall and may be selling their assets in anticipation of another crash. I don't think the crash will be as severe as in 2014, but it will still hurt a lot of people. Once this next period is over and Bitcoin is sub $1000 for some time, probably at least a year, will people start getting in again once it stabilized and hopefully rises again with more restraint.

In the meantime, 1 to 2 years, hopefully more establishment type of exchanges come online that are following regulations of their respective governments so as to eliminate much of the current drama and probably much of the "mainstreams" hesitation to get into Bitcoin. Once it is not subject to being shutdown or banned simply on a whim of a government, or the exchanges are not so shady as to simply vanish overnight, then the more mom and pop type investors will start to enter.

As far as day to day usability, we will need more and some major merchants to start accepting Bitcoin directly, giants such as Amazon, Walmart, as well as most online stores will need to make taking crypto payments as easy as they now offer credit card payments. Again, much of this will depend on how much larger exchanges and possibly banks deal with Bitcoin and of course the surround government regulations that are sure to be in place by then.

Yes, I would agree that most asset classes are indeed in a bubble. Much like the last bubble in 2007-2008 time frame, it took some time for it to burst, even though some people had been pointing out the economy was in a bubble for a few years prior. So while we may all know they symptom and recognize what is going on, we don't necessarily know when it will burst.

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” - John Maynard Keynes

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Plus even though there is a maximum of 21 million coins, some coins will not be mined until may years from now. Also some original wallets, thought to be Satoshi's contain over 1 million BTC, and there is a lot of lost or burned BTC that will never be recovered. So the real amount of usable BTC is much less than 21 million right now, I think it is around 17 million in circulation, and after subtracting the unusable BCT it is probably only 15 million or so.

The card is good, you should be able to get around 28 Mhash per second if you mod the BIOS and overclock/undervolt a bit.

I do think the price is high to expect to ROI with it anytime soon, but then again $300 is pretty much the going rate right now. Just keep in mind that most GPUs are selling for 150% their MSRP right now so any hardware ROI is goign to take a long time. If you can hold out another month or two this situation may change as mining profits are starting to come down off their recent highs and hardware prices (might) start to come down.

I agree 100% with this recommendation. Especially the situation which you describe where it sounds like you are simply buying a share of someone else's farm with a portion of your investment non-refundable. I also think 1.5 years to ROI might also be pushing in right now, what happens if it is not profitable by then, do you lose your share of the farm at that point or something?

What you are describing basically sounds similar to cloud mining where someone else owns and operates the hardware and you are simply buying hashrate. Many cloud mining services also have that disclaimer that once profitability drops below production costs for a certain period of time (30 days - 3 months) they will shut down and you will have nothing left to show for it.

Yeah, it really makes you wonder how much behind the scenes manipulation really happens by the big players. Jamie Dimon bad mouthing Bitcoin followed by nothing but bad press to help drive the price down along with the China news. Then not even a few days later the price rebounds not seeming to care about any of the recent events and the press suddenly is full of positive news again. The type of things that make you go hmmm.

Search for your card here:  https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/

They have a great database with almost all of the recently released GPU VBIOS in it, just be sure to pay attention to slight variations though as many models will have different revisions.

It very well could be the increased power draw, as I have been running the AMD blockchain drivers for well over a month on several rigs with no reboot or hangs. The only thing I did notice, which is well known is the increased power draw, but even that is fairly minor with it maybe adding 100 watts to an 8 card rig such as yours.

Do you have a way to measure the power draw, either from a kill-a-watt meter or similar. I also think that 2 x 1000 Watt PSUs per rig should be more than enough power, how is the load spread between them, pretty much 50-50, or 5 card and 3 cards + system? How often have the reboots been? The more information you can provide the easier it will be for someone to help you.

You could maybe try to remove 1 card for a day just to see if that helps, as that would also point to power issues if the rigs run ok with a reduced load. Also, how are your risers powered? If you are using the SATA power adapter, those can cause trouble once the power draw gets too high. Best to use risers with 6-pin PCIe or 4-pin Molex connectors and feed no more than two risers per chain (cable).

Price is way too high, a rig like that I would pay only around $1,700 USD. This price is what those components would normally cost new, but with the markup on everything because of miner demand your friend is probably not trying to cheat you but only recover his costs since he paid about a 150% premium for everything.

At the asking price you would be hard pressed to ROI on it anytime soon.

You do not state your electrical price (cost per KWh), but assuming it is around $0.10 USD you would only earn around $6 USD a day with that rig. I am not sure what the exact conversion rate is to USD, but assuming the rig is somewhere around $2800 USD, you would be looking at mining 466 day's just to break even.

If you get free electric, you would earn ~$7.50 per day and ROI would be roughly 373 days. Keep in mind the actual payback period will likely be much longer as network difficulty continues to climb. So even if ETH's prices goes up the increasing difficulty means you will mine less and less coins as time goes on.

IMHO, it is NOT a good investment.

As others have already said, since it is a laptop I wouldn't worry about trying to mine much with it unless you are just fooling around seeing what it is all about. If you try to run that 24/7 I think you will have issues and may eventually burn up your laptop, as they are not designed for continuous operation, much less under the load that full time mining would put on it.

If you are buying new, unshielded Cat 6 cables are your best bet as they cost about the same as buying Cat5e. If you have some old Cat5e cables laying around already, by all means use them first as the performance in a home setting will be roughly the same. Distance and bandwidth requirements are low enough that in a home environment you will not specialized cable.

Umm, what? Binary options? Do you think this is a gambling website or something?


First BTC based what? This is a new cryptocurrency not based on BTC or anything else.

You will be watching the project? Not likely considering you don't know the first thing about it when posting such nonsense to begin with.


Why wouldn't they be able to participate? It's a mine-able cryptocurrency, anyone can download the wallet and start mining to accumulate some.


What's a boring and pertinent question, the US residents part? Again you seem to not have any idea whatsoever of the thread you are posting in.

You are a text book example of why signature campaigns can bring out the worse type of people and I, and I hope others, report your post to not only your signature campaign manager but also to the moderators.

No, I know your post was sarcastic, but that does not detract from your implication that the original poster you were relying to was a "gloom and doomer" whom you thought needed to be ridiculed. Anytime that someone points out that mining profits are getting slim and that the days of profitability may be numbered I see a bunch of trolls pounce and all yell nothing to see here, all is well, mining will live on forever, anyone who says otherwise is a fudder. I do not know if it is simply pure trolling, mass delusions, or some other hidden agenda but any serious discussion of the matter seems impossible.

Actually that is not my quote, I was simply empathizing the quote from the poster whom I did quote in my post. Other than that, yes you are agreeing with what I was implying that mining profits are in no way guaranteed.

The biggest danger I would see if if someone else is mining the so called dead coin and you just are not able to find the active nodes. If the seed nodes are down or out of date you and three other private groups could be mining the same coin all on essentially separate chains. When and if you were to try and sync these chains up yours might no be the longest and all your effort is wasted.

Normally people who want to resurrect a dead coin take over its management and start by making a posting here informing the public of your intentions. You then either take over the original website of if that is not possible start a new one. You will also need to run some full-time seed nodes where others can sync up with the new chain that you are mining to. You will also need to either take over (if you can find the original developer) the coins codebase or create a fork on GitHub as you will need to maintain it going forward.

Then you are in the same boat as the hypothetical miner above who invested $2400 to mine the same coin, however by holding a coin you can cut your losses a lot quicker than a miner can.

I am not against mining or am I against trading as I do both. However, there is a time to do one or the other and getting into mining right now just isn't a good investment. Early this year it was a good investment, simply because the run-up in prices in virtual every coin. So now we have this big group of people who either bought a bunch of mining gear and got rich, who maybe held a lot of coins (almost anything) and became rich, and those who first invested into cryptocurrency (again almost anything) and become rich. So most of the people we see posting really never went through the bad times, they have only seen good times where almost any decision right or wrong has paid off since everything has went up so dramatically.

So now myself and a few others try to inject some reason into to all these "you can't lose money" type of posts but are just meant with ridicule and disdain. Yeah, everyone wants to party to keep going and easy money to keep flowing in, but at some point you really need to sit down, do the calculations, the real ones and not rosy "if the price shoots up I will be golden" type ones, and come to your own conclusions. Markets do have boom and bust cycles and mining follows along with that but also has unique dynamics all its own.

As I type this the mining difficulty for most popular coins continues to rise even with the recent downtrend in price. This means even if prices recover, the amount of coins a given hash-rate can produce will be less than it was in the past. So prices not only need to recover, they need to go up enough to offset the increase in difficulty that has occurred in the meantime. This would mean Ethereum would probably need to hit $500-$600 to even remotely return to recent mining profitability numbers. So eventually one way or another the mining glory days will come to a halt, either by a sustained market downtrend or after a complete saturation of network hash-rate.