Hi guys. I am kinda new to actually mining cryptocurrency but have spent a few months researching it.
Me and about 15 others are willing to pool resources on this as a hobby, but also have £1.5k we can invest in equipment if we wished to take it further. Although investing in actual coins seems an idea too. The be fair due to our climate in the winter i wouldn't mind setting up a mining rig and setting it so the exhaust fans help contribute to the house heat : ) 1.2kW of power for some of the 4.8 TH/S rigs i saw is sure to chuck out a large amount of heat! So using it for dual-purpose depending on how much heat one actually chucks out, almost like a makeshift fan heater. Users of these would know about the heat output you would expect from one of those highly expensive but high powered rigs! Or in my case my landlord usually plugs a fan heater into the communal hall (this house is converted into 4 seperate complete flats with their own living rooms, bedroom bathroom and kitchen) and there is a hall with a socket that he usually uses a fan heater for in the winter, i would consider asking him if we could substitute it for that if it still does the same task!
Now mining bitcoin seems like even with the best mining hardware of a few Th/s we could struggle to make a profit, although we were debating to set up our own pool if we got dedicated hardware. However ONE of us has solar panels which is a 3kW array, so in the day there is no charge as they only use about 1kW in the day. At night we in the UK have a tariff called economy 7, which is off-peak electricity at 0.07 pence per kWh. This is very reasonable and combined with the solar panels means a mining rig could be run for the cheap however it does mean he would get a bit less off national grid : ) (you sell your unused electricity back to the grid) one of us also has free electricity as he is in supported accommodation.
Now we have also looked at mining altcoins such as bytecoin and distributing our resources so it runs in the background on all of our computers, which are of varying specification. Minergate seemed to have a good distributed pool and we guessed we can use multiple computers on one account to pool mining resources for this or setting a command line miner to start up automatically and be on the same pool account as a different worker. Then sell the bytecoins for bitcoins when we reach say 5 million. Most of us have half decent GPUs as they like to keep current! CPUs for all of us minus my desktop is at least an i5 / i7. My best GPU though is a nvidia GTX 970M as my laptop is a gaming one but my desktop PC has a nvidia geforce 9500 as its aging a bit (core quad) which I use as a file server and webserver I didn't want to spend out on hardware i didn't need in terms of computers although this is due an upgrade soon. I understand mining with the CPU or even GPU is pointless for bitcoin, or litecoin for that matter so we were looking at mining bytecoin (BCN not BTE) and selling it for bitcoin when we have got enough of it. Maybe buying a few litecoins and bitcoins here and there to see where it takes us! Or if mining bitcoin with dedicated hardware could be profitable, we might consider that too. Although id see any money spent on the hardware as a form of gambling at this point so we wouldnt spend what we cannot afford to loose. I don't see this as a 'get rick quick' scheme, we are just enthusiasts and are quite interested in this.
I am also interested in getting something like this if we do equipment : Bitmain ANTMINER U3 BITCOIN ASIC MINER 63 GH/s as a starter point with equipment to test how it works, etc before going onto bigger babies. I also read someone found a block solomining with something similar, and as electricity is free for one of us, its worth leaving one of those running indefinitely anyhow to play the lottery. if anyone has one of these they are willing to sell in the UK i would be happy to look. The ebay prices are high if you compare it to the better mining rigs out there.
If there are any recommendations it would be great to hear any recommendations for hardware, software or any advice that can be given. Also 1 more thing, if one wanted to solo mine, is this site: securepayment.cc genuine?
Thank you in advance!
Jacob
