Thanks! A lot of good, easy-to-understand thoughts there! Passing along to the skeptics in the house.

There goes ADA!

There's a Dell deal I keep seeing with a 2060 card for just over $1k. Might be a better investment, not really sure.

More like CardanGO!

For those new to mining that don't want to mess with .bat files and manually entering and selecting pools, try NiceHash. Super simple. Download the application and hit go.

I've made about $250 in the last three weeks since I've started with my 3080.

Man, seriously if that's true, at least just get them all going on Nicehash. You could have them all setup in an hour. Might make $80/day or more.

Does it really matter? You guys here are my crypto financial advisors and if I listen I should just HODL and look back in a couple of years

Don't you ever sell anything? I'm sure those that got ADA at .20 or so are tempted to sell at current rate?

I'd be lying if I said I didn't take some profit here or there and let the rest ride. But that's just when I have a need for cash for some reason. Otherwise I try to let it run, or even add to it if I can.

Sell for what dollars? Fiat is a losing proposition. I will sell when I have an important appreciating asset to buy...like a home. I would not sell to buy depreciating assets like cars or pinball machines.

Why I don't care about the volatility of BTC

1) I did my homework...I know where this is going, so day to day or even month to month values mean next to nothing to me. I have literally gone months without even looking at the current value. In 2018 I had no clue it had dipped below 4k.

2) This was always a long play for me...buy and hold...for years...not weeks or months. This isn't a get rich quick game for me...that being said I will likely be able to retire a few years early because of it.

3) Bitcoin isn't going to zero at this stage. If you don't know why that's true, then you don't understand network effects and Metcalfe's law. If it's not going to zero its going to go a LOT higher.

4) It's not going to get banned in the US. It will get regulated. Thats a good thing. That will bring in even more institutional investors. Regulation means "legitimacy".

5) Central bank digital currencies are coming. They will have no negative impact on BTC...they will likely drive it even higher by introducing even more people to the concept of digital money.

6) If this goes where I know its going...I'll never need to sell. I'll take collateralized loans against it and earn interest off it. Neither creates a tax event and both allow me to keep all my Sats.

I wouldn't call pinball machines depreciating assets, although I suppose it depends what era you collect. I buy Bally/Williams DMD games mostly and they've all doubled to quadrupled in value in the past 15 years. Same thing has happened to 80s arcade games, especially color vectors, they sell at 5-8 times what I bought them for ten years ago.

Those of you wanting to mine, don't buy a gaming computer. Your dollars are better spent building a real mining rig using a motherboard specifically designed for mining, a small amount of RAM and a cheap CPU. Then load it up with GPU's. My rig's Motherboard can run up to 13 GPU's, I am currently running 8 NVidia RTX 2060's. The trick to GPU's is finding a nice balance of performance, cost and watts to operate. For me the RTX 2060's fit that perfectly. The super top end cards are just simply too expensive for the marginal increase in performance.

problem is, all of this stuff is practically unavailable at the moment due to COVID and demand.

Note it also depends on what you want to mine. I mine RVN and ETH. Interesting to note that I earn about double mining ETH AND it draws less power.

Also note, I think Crypto currency is horrible for the environment. TONS of electricity is being wasted having computers around the world try to solve difficult problems to just get the privilege to confirm transactions.

Have you seen how great mineral mining is for the environment?

I think this is also a big selling point with ADA versus btc. I’m even with a green staking pool on ADA.

How much ETH do you mine per month?

We don't need institutional investors. And regulation is not a good thing. It gives them a way to manipulate the currency just like everything else that's "regulated". Regulation = control.

Ok I'm convinced and become HODL; will try to by some small parts weekly at whatever price it is at that point.

So now I need to order a ledger

Well that's true...mine have certainly held or gone up in value. But you get my main point.

FIAT currency uses more energy than crypto. Crypto is actually better for the environment. There's been a lot of studies done proving this, but plenty of people still push this myth that crypto is worse.

Also yea, I wish I could buy a video card right now much less 6 of them. HAH

You will never flip gold without institutional investors getting involved. And more regulation is coming...like it or not. They can't really "manipulate" Bitcoin...they just want to make sure they get their taxes. I'm fine with that if it means greater adoption.

It varies a lot, but roughly 1 ETH a month

Edit, after looking at my charts it really bounces anywhere from 1/2 ETH to 1 ETH a month so average is probably more like 3/4 ETH a month. Up until the recent RVN pop I was raking in 18,000-20,000 RVN a month but now its way way down due to so many miners jumping in, difficulty sky rocketed.

I'm assuming you own the business? If not, a lot of people are getting fired and or arrested for stealing power. I just wanted to to throw that out there in case.

On a side note, 20 x 2070's will pull in about $2,200/month.

Anyway, here is how you set it up.

1. Create a wallet. I'd just use the MEW (MyEtherWallet) for your iPhone/Android to create the wallet. Make ABSOLUTELY SURE you write down the recovery phrase and store it in a safe place. Do NOT show it to anyone and DO NOT store it electronically. It will generate a wallet address and look something like this:

7a285f9b972648789d3b7b851e8efc253f41ffe9

Copy that wallet address somewhere safe

2. Download your mining software. A lot of people use PhoenixMiner, but you can use whatever you want to use.
a. Mining software is always picked up as a virus due to its interaction with the HAL. Anyway, you're going to have to create an exclusion in your AV software for the folder. I just create a folder on the C:\ drive named Mining and exclude that folder. Then you can drop whatever you want in there and it won't flag it.

Phoenix Miner

https://mega.nz/folder/2VskDJrI#lsQsz1CdDe8x5cH3L8QaBw

3. Extract the Windows PhoenixMiner_5.5c_Windows.zip file into the C:\Mining folder you created above.

4. Right click -> Edit the start_miner.bat file

5. Replace the wallet address in the .bat file with yours. You'll want to edit the .bat file for each computer and change what comes after the . in the wallet address. So use .miner1, .miner2, .miner3, etc.

PhoenixMiner.exe -pool ssl://us1.ethermine.org:5555 -pool2 ssl://eu1.ethermine.org:5555 -wal 7a285f9b972648789d3b7b851e8efc253f41ffe9.Rig001

6. Save the file and then right click the start_miner.bat file you just edited -> Run as Administrator and away you go.

7. After about an hour or so, go to the ethermine website and search for your wallet address in the "Miner Address" search box to find your miners.

https://www.ethermine.org

If you want to get cute about it, you can create a task in the Windows Task Scheduler to fire off the .bat file at a particular time. So if everyone leaves at 5pm and you want it to start at that time, you can. If you want to do that, let me know and I can help out.

Feel free to mine for me if you're bored. I left mine wallet address in there just in case you wanted to donate.

Anyone have their eye on anything today? I have a little spare cash laying around.

I was thinking maybe DOT, UNI or SNX. I have all three currently, with the largest stake in SNX. I have a little UNI and a little DOT already.

I was hoping to add to my Ada bag this weekend, but the price keeps rising on me. I might still add a little bit.

I wouldn’t mind picking up some hbar, but it’s not on the exchange I use and I don’t want to sign up for another exchange just for it.

What’s everyone’s thoughts on ripple/ xrp? Worth owning a bit?

I have about 600 XRP. I'm not a fan of it at all. A lot of it is locked up for the creators and even more gets distributed to the guy that created it. I posted the details in this thread somewhere. I think if the lawsuit gets dropped it will spike, but in the long run, I'm not a fan.

Found it. I'm just going to quote myself.

I grabbed 2.323 AAVE @ $339.40 per AAVE a few minutes ago. It's been on my watch list for awhile and had a pretty decent pullback over the last week or so.

Super thanks for the details! Will check and see how to setup asap

I know ETH 2.0 is coming but I don't understand how this works, if you have ETH, will it all become ETH 2.0? Coinbase had something about staking your ETH, with no min, for like 7.5%. Trying to decide if I should do that since I'm holding some.

The way I understand it is that ETH 2.0 is just a protocol update and your ETH will just stay ETH. It's not a fork, just an upgrade. Coinbase is doing something different though that I'm not 100% spun up on. Typical ETH 2.0 staking involves your coins getting locked up until the 2.0 protocol is released. Meaning it could be tomorrow or it could be never, at which point your ETH is gone.

Coinbase is saying you can stake and unstake at will, which is different than what I've seen associated with the normal staking for 2.0.

I'm trying out BlockFi for interest on some of my Bitcoin. It's a bit of a risk but I've dug into to company and the CEO. While they are obviously not backed by the Federal Goverment, they are backed by Gemini...which is something.

I sent over enough to generate about $400 a month (at current BTC value) in interest. We shall see how it goes. I'm wondering if they will maintain their interest rates if BTC goes to 100k+?

Looks like they pay 3% at that level. Celsius pays 6.2%.

Never mind. I was looking at the wrong thing. It looks like they pay 6% up to 2.5BTC. They have a ~$100 withdraw fee though for more than one transaction a month.

So, if you had 2.5 BTC on there and it goes to 100k, you would get $1250 a month in interest.

If I'm going to pull my BTC off of there I would do it all at once...which would be free. By the way...they pay the interest in BTC! I consider that a bonus. Plus your interest then compounds every month...so really in my example above that $1250 a month would increase every month even if the value of BTC stayed flat.

Never thought about earning interest off crypto that’s a interesting idea. Any one got any experience with https://nexo.io/earn-crypto

I like that payout better than Celsius, which pays out based on the USD value of the wallet at the time of their snapshot. I'd rather get 13.99% of the SNX held in my wallet than 13.99% of the value at the time of the snapshot converted to to SNX. It's a little weird.

Are we in a bear market? Did I miss something? Last I heard we were in the middle of a bull run. I’m starting to get annoyed. I’m getting hammered over here.

My problem is I already spent my play money. Ugh.

Just for you new guys.....Welcome to the world of cryptocurrency.

I would like to personally thank those who sold BTC to allow me to pick it up at a discount...thank you.

This is an accumulation game...don't worry about the current values. Where we're going...you won't need fiat.

I think it will now touch 40k before bouncing back, definitely more sales coming.

Wouldn't surprise me.

I sure hope so, I'd love to buy a bunch more at that price.

I saw this in an article today that I thought was interesting.

“ Fortunately, the third retest of this key support level may have a silver lining for the bulls. Data analytics resource Glassnode noted that the daily Bitcoin Spent Output Profit Ratio (SOPR) has seen a "full reset."

The SOPR essentially shows whether spent outputs are in profit or loss at the time of transaction. This key metric turned negative for the first time since September 2020. In other words, investors are now moving BTC at a slight loss on average, suggesting that profit-taking has abated, according to Glassnode.”

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-sell-off-over-strong-buy-the-dip-signal-flashes-for-the-first-time-since-september

I am still enjoying my RVN that was worthless then shot up and is now holding way higher than my electricity cost. This is fun! Yeeee hawwwwww

Doesn't look promising

I noticed that the difficulty went through the roof really quick. I have older cards and was getting 100RVN about every 2 days. It now takes 7 days to mine 100RVN. I might need to see what else I can mine. It's still profitable though, but not by a lot.

Thanks to this thread, I've decided to put my idle gaming PC to use and have been mining ETH for the past week with one RTX 3080. In looking at whattomine.com, I see that Conflux (CFX) is reporting similar mining potential to ETH. Does anybody know anything about CFX and whether it might be worthwhile building up a stockpile?

I also made my first crypto purchase this weekend, thanks to this thread. I overpaid for some ADA on Saturday just before it dropped down. That's fine - I'm looking at this as a long term hold anyway.

Yeah I switched to mining ETH but that is slowly getting worse too and I see RVN is going up in value today so that only spells more difficulty for that coin. Which I am perfectly fine with

Unfortunately, the DAG is too big for my 4GB cards.

The site I use for calculating hash rates doesn't have the 3090, but it shows the 3080 as having an Ethash rate of ~91Mh/s. Assuming an electric cost of $0.15/kWh, you'll be pulling in gross revenue of $7.88/day. Subtract estimated power usage of $0.83/day and it shows a net profit of $7.05/day or $211.48/month.

Edit -> NiceHash shows $8.51/day with the 3090.

Thrown it on Nicehash for a few days and see if it works for you. There's some power control settings that will lower the power draw. (low, medium or high) I use medium on my 2 Nvidia cards. The games my kids play don't even notice, even if the load is at 100%. The VR won't run though with NH mining.

I’m hoping that some people spend their covid cheque on crypto. It could cause a nice bump in the market.