Experimental Mining Rig

sspano01

Hello!
Spawned from some projects at work, I have been reading and studying several of the cyrptocurrencies (for about the last year or so) and over the last 2 weeks I’ve constructed a basic experimental rig.

My current mining rig has 9 Nvidia cards spread between 1060/1070/1080. I’ve been characterizing each of them for power and hash performance to see if the things I had been reading online actually match up in reality and they appear to.

My idea is to begin mining several of the alt coins starting solely with Feathercoin with the idea of generating 20-30k coins over the period of 3 months or so and the holding the coins. Rotating through several coins to build up positions in them through mining across 2018.

I am currently hashing at about 5.6Mh/s on Feathercoin and I believe I can boost my current performance about 10-15% with these 9 cards. Currently I’ve invested about $4k or so in the 9 card system.

I want to review the results and coin counts over the next 2 weeks during my “Experiment” phase. If the coin counts look correct (based on hash and difficulty rate) I will then try Phase-2.

Phase-2 would be to add 10 additional 1080 or 1080TI cards (or a mix of AMD and Nvidia) cards. My estimates on adding 10 more 1080TI cards would raise my hash rate to around 47MH/s on Feathercoin. This would require another $8k investment in my mining hardware bringing my total investment to around $12k.

Focusing purely on Feathercoin for 3 months, I am making a few assumptions.

Difficulty level does not increase more than 3x its current level
Coin price in USD does not drop more than 50%
Hash rate of 46MH/s online before 12/31/17

Now, Assuming a three month window with increasing difficulty of 80, 160, and 320 , I calculate the coin count to be as follows. 13k month1, 7k month2, and 3k month3. Total of about 20k coins. Now, if the USD value of the coins stays around 30cents, that would be worth about $6k US or close to the amount of the Phase-2 costs.
If the value of FTC drops 50% while the difficultly still raises to 320, then my value in US is somewhere around $3k. In theory I’m sure I could see 10 NVidia 1080TI cards in a batch for $3k-$4k as well. So liquidating hardware and FTC would get me close to my $7k phase-2 investment.

Now, if the difficulty rises to around 200 or so and the value of the coin raises to around $0.75, my math claims I may have closer to 30k coins valued at around $22k USD.

If after three months, any of these scenarios play out (meaning I have around 20k coins valued in the range of $3k to $22k USD) I would be highly inclined to add even more mining power and continue to mine for the rest of 2018 on both FTC and some other coins as well.

So … what am I missing?

I think I have the risk figured out ???
I am willing to invest maybe $20k to $30k USD in graphics cards for mining over the next several months.
I am looking at “investment time” in the 1-2 year range with a few “Experiments” to sanity check the results in 3 month moving windows.
I am not going to freak out with a possibly “ROI” swing between $3k or $22k in a 90 day timeperiod
Electricity power, space, and cooling is a non-issue for my facility.
Technical details are also a non-issue to make the miner work

I’d like to hear form others on this. What am I missing? What am I overlooking that could make my “investment” worth even less than $3k (aside from a complete market collapse).

Thanks for reading and I look forward to replies!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/0SiHqDiufh2061AG3

(the 9th card is mining on another PC)

Wellenreiter

@sspano01
Welcome to the forum. :)

I have moved your post to the mining section and granted your access to that group.

sspano01

oh thanks!

wrapper

hi and welcome

gonnaforget

@sspano01 said in Experimental Mining Rig:

Difficulty level does not increase more than 3x its current level

Is the “current level” you were using about 80? That seems to be true so far, but if FTC stays on its current trend, that might not be the case. On the other hand, it seems to be jumping around a lot right now, varying between < 50 to over 200. As I’m typing it’s at 216, and just a half hour ago it was less than 50!

Coming back to this: I see your estimation was about 80.

Coin price in USD does not drop more than 50%

Right now that seems reasonable. It was interesting to watch the price action over the past week or so where its BTC price went down to keep the USD price the same, then the USD price went up to get the BTC price back to where it was! If BTC fluctuates more it’s hard to know what will happen. It seems there are market participants who are interested in the USD price and those interested in the BTC price. It seems there is a correlation between BTC, though, which is certainly interesting. It’s possible that your assumption is fair, given the ones who were looking to maintain the USD price where it was. On the other hand, they were the ones pushing it down. But against that, the market seems to have blown through their selling pressure. A very interesting market for sure!

Hash rate of 46MH/s online before 12/31/17

Good luck

I think I have the risk figured out ???

Crypto currency is still super volatile. The question of risk is only what you can handle. I don’t think you should put in any more than you are willing to lose, but then that goes for any investment.

I am looking at “investment time” in the 1-2 year range with a few “Experiments” to sanity check the results in 3 month moving windows.

I think the sanity checks are a good idea, especially because the landscape can change pretty quick. I really like the FTC community, and they’ve dealt with problems in the past for sure.

I am not going to freak out with a possibly “ROI” swing between $3k or $22k in a 90 day timeperiod

Hahahaha, yeah… It’s a good thing var is correlated with alpha.

Electricity power, space, and cooling is a non-issue for my facility.

Sweet.

What am I overlooking that could make my “investment” worth even less than $3k

A lot less regulatory risk than there used to be, but it still exists, also need to consider tax consequences, which can be tricky.

Those are my thoughts. I think it’s really exciting and I wish you luck!

wrapper

Welcome to the new world of crypto currency, this is not history repeating it’self. No one can predict what will happen.

I don’t give advice as, one day, someone might take it, but my friends and I, Invest or support coins we think deserve to succeed …

sspano01

Thanks for the welcome message and the feedback! I’ve been reading more and experimenting more.
I’m 50% to my goal of ~40MH/s or so. Its proven hard to order so many graphics cards, I have to get a volume account setup for my business - so I have been ordering them in small groups.

I currently have three Windows 10 PCs running. This took some effort to get it all running and stable, but it appears like its running well now.
My current configuration is

Windows 10 64-bit on an Asus 19-card mining expert board.
Running 11 cards 5x1070 2x1060 4x1080 hashing right about 10MH/s

Windows 10 64-bit on an Asus H270 Plus board
Running 8 cards 3x1060 1x1070 4x1080 hashing about 6.7MH/s

Windows 10 64-bit on an old HP board
running 3 cards 3x1070 with some experimental modifications … hashing at 3.3MH/s

Currently this puts me right around 20MH/s which is starting to make a good number of coins per day. I am experimenting with some of the profit switching algorithms and direct mining as well as some custom software/scripts that I am developing for mining as well.

I’m hoping I get “most” of my ROI back in about 4 months … we will see!