Hello. I am not sure if there are any spots left but I am interested in applying if there are.

Username: Za1n
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BTC address: 14qetVGtQKW6edXKya1nY5x3YY7oXg9tTG

Will change signature if accepted.

Thanks!

Confirmed I received my final payment.

Sad to see the ZenCash campaign end so soon, thanks for the opportunity and hope to see ZenCash continue to grow.

My former campaign just ended and I am looking for a new one. Are there any spots open?

Username: Za1n
Rank: Hero Member
Starting post count: 1112
Profile link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=529727
BTC address: 14qetVGtQKW6edXKya1nY5x3YY7oXg9tTG

Will change signature if accepted.

Thanks!

Stay safe man, glad to hear everything worked out for you and the storm missed you. I don't know if I would tough it out or not, but I would have probably shut my miners down for awhile due to all the lightning and flooding. A short somewhere on the electrical grid from a lightning strike or a substation shorting out from flooding could potentially cause electrical spikes to travel to your house and fry some rigs.

From my experience I do not see any performance degradation at all after running mining rigs for months on end. I periodically choose to shut down for cleaning as stated earlier, but most of  my rigs do not crash, hang, reboot, or lose any mining performance whatsoever. I have rigs running under both Windows and Linux and can make the same claim for both.

The key is to create a solid working environment, meaning quality hardware and risers, a stable OS install, proper settings, stable drivers, and tweaking your GPUs to run optimally. This does not mean run everything balls to the wall trying to eek out every last hash, as then you will probably run into many issues. I try to optimize my rigs to get a good hash-rate versus lower power consumption while still being stable.

If the settings I choose make a rig unstable where it cannot run a solid week without running into problems, such as hangs or reboots, than I know I was too aggressive in something and will back down the clocks or up the voltage sightly to stabilize it. If after this it is still ustable I will look into other factors, such as drivers, PSU, are the connections tight, etc., until I can get the rig stable.

After building quite a few I know what works and what doesn't so it is easier now than it was at first, but the main point of all this is that a mining rig is very capable of running very solidly for long periods of time (months), without user intervention. If your rig is having trouble and routinely hangs or reboots, you are missing something in its build or configuration. You might want to back off on timings a bit to start. I can assure you that 1 or 2 Mhash/sec loss per rig will be more than offset over the long run by the continuous run-time of weeks or months on end versus having to reboot or restart a hanged rig every few days that may run slightly faster.

As others have said, two things to keep an eye on are dust and heat. Computers are fine to run 24/7 and many in business environments do just that. Schedule a regular cleaning, maybe once every 3 months or so to vacuum out dirt and dust, and keep an eye on heat as you may need to add airflow in the warmer months. The routine cleaning will obviously help with heat as well.

The other two things to watch out for is humidity, don't keep your rigs in too humid of an environment (90%+ humidity) and also if you live somewhere where it storms a lot make sure you use quality surge suppression. This can be in the form of a surge suppressor that you plug your PSU into. Spend a few dollars here and get a quality brand, not the cheap $2-3 outlet types from Walmart. Tripplite makes a quality unit with a steel housing for about $25-$30, but there are some Belkin brands (plastic housing) that work ok too that are maybe $10-$15.

Minergate or even Nicehash will cost you dearly in excessive fees. Profitability is already way down and fees are really going to start becoming a major factor as time goes on. I would suggest researching and using a low fee pool as well as using a miner that charges 1% or less in fees.

Ethermine.org and Nanopool.org are two solid pools that only charge 1%, but keep an eye on the minimal payout settings too so as not to incur additional withdrawal fees. You may need to mine a little longer to reach a payout threshold that does not incur a fee, but both these pools offer the option to select the payout threshold in their settings.

You will need to do a little more work on your end as far as sending the coins to an exchange and trading, but in the end you will also keep more money in your own pocket.

And if you think the profit in two weeks will be bad, wait unit next month...

The days of easy profits are quickly coming to an end for most. Total network hashrate and the resulting difficulty continues to increase across many coins (not just ETH) while coin prices are stagnant and may even move down more in the coming weeks. This coupled with hardware prices that are still about 150% above normal MSRP means getting into mining now may never be profitable. Unless something changes, I expect sometime around next month mining will start turning to at best break even and at worst a loss for users with higher power costs. People with lower power costs maybe can hold out for an additional month, but the immediate mining future is not looking good.

We are rapidly running out of 2017 and I do not think the remaining 3+ months will be enough time for Ethereum to reach the lofty $1,000 mark. If you had said $500, I would have perhaps believed it more, but as others have posted right now Ethereum is struggling to stay in the $300 range, much less push back and grow past the $400 area which would be a first step needed to launch any sustained push higher.

With the current ICO crackdown and the uncertainty going forward with the eventual switch to PoS, I do not see ETH going to $1,000 anytime soon. Maybe this outlook will change as we get into 2018, but for now there is just too much uncertainty in the market to fuel the growth needed for such an aggressive high. I think a lot of people buying in this late in the game are setting themselves up for a big disappointment thinking ETH can just forever keep going up without pausing and even losing some ground. Myself, I think we have a better change of seeing ETH hit under $200 again before we see it touch $1,000.

I would say the price sucks. Was looking at the MSI RX580 8 GB, I bought mine when they first came out for $220 shipped and now the same model is going for $499. Even the 4 GB versions are about 1.5x what I paid back then for the 8 GB version.

Crazy times, anyone who buys at these highly inflated prices is going to have a very hard time to ROI much less earn any profit. Heck, at $499 even if you get free electricity it will take nearly a year to break even and that's a big if as I am sure difficulty will raise well before then pushing the actual date out even further.

Well the actual specification states that a single 8-pin PCIe power connector can deliver up to 150 watts maximum. However, you will probably be getting some power from the actual PCIe slot as well, which can provide up to 75 watts, so yes in your case you should be OK.

You might want to keep an eye on it the first day or so to see if the wires or connector get overly warm, but I still think you would be ok. Most people get in trouble when they try to use those splitters to power multiple cards which then does try to draw way more than 150 watts through the connector causing heat issues and potential fire hazards.

Sorry, I did not see any link to a new SATA power connector pin-out specification, only to a testing methodology pdf that outlines how to test that particular Molex connector. Can you please re-post the link to the new pin assignments in the newer SATA specification? I can only find up to version 3.3 (February 2016) and actually in that one instead of adding a 4th 12VDC line as you imply, they keep it to three and actually reduce the number of 3.3VDC lines by making pin 3 a sense pin.

Look into coins that use the Equihash algorithm. These are mainly Zcash (ZEC), ZenCash (ZEN), Zclassic (ZCL) and a few others. You can also check out a few other algorithms like LBRY (LBC) as they are periodically a bit more profitable.

If you haven't already, you can also check out sites such as https://whattomine.com and input your number and model of GPUs to get a rough estimate of what is most profitable at any given time.

While Nvidia can mine Ethereum somewhat efficiently, you are losing a lot of potential profit by not looking into alternatives, so you are right to question that strategy. Even if you want to end up in ETH, I think you would be better off mining a more efficient Nvidia friendly algorithm, such as Equihash, and then trading those coins for Ethereum. Even accounting for trading fees, you would still end up with more ETH at the end than by trying to mine it directly. AMD pretty much dominates the ETH mining space.

This is one of the reasons why I mainly try to stay away from ASICs. The larger miners who buy in bulk get first mover advantage and milk out those juicy first month profits while the small time miner sits on the sidelines fretting about his or her order. By the time most smaller miners get up and running, the big boys have already recovered a good chunk of their ROI while the little guy is just starting. It ends up being a hamster wheel as then a new tech is announced and the cycle continues, again with the bigger miners who probably made ROI already can again front-run everyone else and thus the cycle continues.

At this point in the game I would start very slowly with only 1 or maybe 2 GPUs and use your existing PC if at all possible. If this is not possible, try to keep your overall build costs to a minimum. I think we are starting to enter a very tight period of low profitability versus the relatively high (retail prices have been jacked up) cost of entry, and that this period will last a good long while.

In a few months, if you are still interested in mining, I cannot help but think the prices of hardware will be coming down as the mining environment reaches its saturation point and some people start to get out by selling their equipment. This will not only increase the supply of used mining hardware, but also pressure new hardware prices to come down as both new demand will be lower while second-hand supply will be increasing, putting lower price pressure on both (used and new) market segments.

Mainly you buckle down and mine harder.

Seriously though, you do try to find ways to optimize your rigs as much as possible, meaning you want to be hashing at the most efficient level versus power consumption for most of us as electricity really starts to matter when profits get tight. When times were good and you were making 10x your electricity costs tweaks didn't matter to most people as they just wanted the most hashrate possible regardless of the power draw. Now as that profit to electrical cost ratio starts to creep down to maybe 3x, then 2x, then 1.something X those optimizations will really start to matter just to be able to tough it out.

Once you exhaust all the tricks you can to keep in-front of electricity bills, you will need to resort to droghtak's suggestion above, sell your GPUs. However, by that time many other people are probably already going to be dumping their GPUs onto the second-hand gamer market, so I think that many gamers who have been put off by the recent high GPU prices will indeed have a very nice Christmas this year.

The problem with that assumption is that the test procedure was written to stress the connector to make sure it does not fail, it is not indicative of is normal operation. Case in point, all of the pins they are saying to wire in parallel for power to test with are specified for 3.3VDC and 5VDC lines in production.


Pin      Description
1    +3.3 volts
2    +3.3 volts
3    +3.3 volts
4    ground
5    ground
6    ground
7    +5 volts
8    +5 volts
9    +5 volts
10    ground
11    ground
12    ground
13    +12 volts
14    +12 volts
15    +12 volts


There are only 3 pins designated for +12VDC (which are pins 13, 14, and 15) so that only makes 3 X 1.5 X 12V = 54 Watts available under maximum load on the 12V rail. There are also 3 - 5VDC pins for 22.5 watts and 3- 3.3VDC pins for 15 watts of additional power at those respective voltages. So while one could add all these wattage values up (54+22.5+15) to claim that the SATA connector can provide ~90 watts of power, without the context of associated voltage levels it is meaningless.

Since most of the SATA power adapters for risers that I have seen seem to only include the 12V rails, the actual maximum power ratings for these adapters in my opinion would only be 54 Watts@12V.

I have been using a mix of Kabylake and Skylake CPUs for sometime and I have not encountered any GPU limitations as of yet.

I had also seen rumors similar to those the OP mentioned early on, but now tend to lean toward the consensus that it may have just been more of an issue with early versions of motherboards versus a widespread issue with the CPU architecture that you would need to be worried about.

Ahh, but here you have almost stumbled upon the most obvious question. If you think the coin will rise, why not just buy the coin?

I really do not see the point in this "I am ok with a 12 or even 18 month ROI period" mentality when investing so much into mining hardware, especially since everything is so overpriced. As I have said many times, in all cases you are pinning your hopes of profits on one simple fact, that the coin(s) you plan to mine will continue to increase in value. This means market prices must continue keeping up with or exceeding mining supply (which can basically be equated with the network hashrate and difficulty), thus making mining profitable.

So again, if your belief is that the coin(s) you are interested in mining are going to continue to go up in value, after all that is why you are willing to invest $1,000's of dollars in hardware that might in maybe 1 year break even, why not instead invest $1,000's directly into the coin(s) and in 1 year be in profit, not just at break even?

There are certain times in the crypto-lifecylce where mining makes sense and you can often net average your coins for far less than you could by purchasing them outright. However, for most current coins that ship has long sailed and only those with hardware already paid for, or who have super low or free electricity would be better off at this point buying hardware versus just buying the coin outright.

What they are banning is the following behavior:

• Come up with an ICO name and possibly some random business problem
• Copy/Paste whitepaper from another ICO, make few changes to make it look unique
• Copy/Paste website from another ICO, make few changes to make it look unique
• Copy/Paste few pictures of obscure people off the Internet (with or without their knowledge), make few changes to names job titles (madeup or real)
• Hire marketing team for few $K to spam next great ICO on all social media and relevant forum avenues
• Pay few dozen shills to visit aforementioned social sites to proclaim it's the next great thing since Bitcoin itself, perhaps even better!
• Sitback and profit$$

Now maybe some ICOs will turn out to be less scammy than some others, but in my opinion just about all of them are scams. The only ones who may be even somewhat legit are the ones who limit their fundraising to reasonable levels, but those are far and few between and even some of those are probably scams just designed to look more legitimate.

This has little to do with cryptocurrencies other than the fact that all these ICOs have been using crypto as a side run around rules already in place for organizations to raise capital, but it had to be stopped sooner or later. I suspect in a few months we will be seeing a "Who's behind bars this week" type of thread going when some of these ICO organizers are (hopefully) brought to justice.