My Cryptocurrency Mining Journey

This post is as of February 12, 2018, I will write another post with updates after a month of mining

As I write this blog, it's been exactly 1 week since my mining rig has been fully functional and so far I've earned 46 VTC and 3400 XVG. This blog is for those who are thinking of setting up a new mining rig or are in the process of making one. And the question that's on everyone's mind - is it worth it? Read on and decide for yourself.

The Beginning
I first heard about cryptocurrency mining in August 2017, when the whole crypto world was going crazy about Ethereum and how everyone was making money "mining". I did some digging and it seemed like something I could do with some initial investment. Then I explained the whole thing to my wife (who is now a cryptocurrency expert), and convincing her to spend that money wasn't easy. I created my own excel model to calculate my revenue/profit per coin/GPU/algorithm. My eyes were on Monero at that point of time, it was $50 a coin and it was the most profitable coin to mine. After couple of months of deliberation and observing the market daily and observing the difficulty of all the coins go up, I finally decided to go for it before it became too late. Based on my calculations in November 2017, the ROI was 4-5 months.

Purchasing the Hardware
I was already a little late getting into this game. From the time I started looking at Monero and the AMD GPUs to the time I decided to buy the hardware, the price and difficulty of Monero had grown exponentially, and the Radeon Rx Vega 64 GPU I was after had disappeared. They weren't available anywhere, and I didn't want to settle for any other GPUs. That was my first learning, Do not procrastinate in this game, you snooze you lose.

I had to change my strategy and look for the best coins to mine using NVIDIA GPUs. And the best GPU was the 1080 TI, and I acted fast this time, they were available on Amazon, Newegg, Tigerdirect. I ordered 4 from Amazon, 2 from Newegg, 2 from TigerDirect and I asked my brother-in-law to order 4 for me (every site had a limit on number of GPUs/order/customer). RAM, CPU, SSD were easy to get. Motherboard was available only on Newegg.com. Given below is the complete list of my hardware:

• 12 x ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Ti AMP Extreme Core Edition 11GB
• BIOSTAR TB250 BTC PRO Motherboard
• Intel Pentium G Series 3.50 GHz Dual-Core LGA 1151 Processor
• Kingston 8GB 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4
• 4 x EVGA Supernova 1200W PSU
• Kingston Digital, Inc. 120GB A400 SATA 3 2.5 Solid State Drive
• 12 x PCI-E 16x to 1x GPU Riser Adapter 60cm USB 3.0
• 4 x Dual PSU Power Supply 24-Pin 20+4 ATX Motherboard Adapter Cable
• Keyboard, Mouse
• Whitmor Supreme 3 Tier Shelving with Adjustable Shelves for my frame (doesnt have to be fancy)
• Zip ties (most useful thing ever!)

All of these took about a month to arrive as not everything was in stock and it took us several tries to figure out the best setup for our space.

Setting up the rig
By the time all of my hardware arrived, a lot had changed. Bitcoin had fallen below 10K, and the entire market had plummeted. My excel model assumptions didn't apply anymore, the time to break even had doubled. But I decided to go for it anyway, hoping that the slowdown was just temporary.

I chose Windows 10 Pro as my OS, I will install Ubuntu as well in a week or two. I followed Vosk on Youtube and I found his videos very helpful. I started with 1 GPU to make sure everything installed properly and added more once that worked fine. Came across several issues on the way:

• BIOS wouldn't find the SSD - I had forgotten to power my SSD (seems pretty silly in hindsight)
• BIOS found the bootable USB but during booting, I kept getting a black screen - I had to change the video to PCI and that solved the issue
• Once Windows installed correctly, I downloaded the latest BIOS update and copied it on to another flash drive and installed it on the next boot using the flasher utility, following changes needed to be done as well
  • PCIE settings needed to be changed to GEN1
  • Enabled Mining mode
• GPU wasn't recognized by Windows - I downloaded the latest driver from nvidia website (390.77) and it did the trick
• One PCI-E riser cable was faulty, had to order new ones
  After one GPU worked, I installed 6 and then another 6, each time I had to re-install the GPU drivers to make it work. My wife helped me build the rig, and took care of the aesthetics to the extent possible. I connected 3 GPUs per PSU, split the first PSU into 2 using the dual power supply splitter and daisy chained the rest. Primary PSU had 3 GPUs + SSD + CPU, spilt that into 2 and then the secondary PSU into 2 and so on. I did not connect the aux power supply in the motherboard.

Mining... Finally
Once the rig was setup, it was time to mine. I chose Vertcoin (P2Pool) and Verge (Zpool) to mine at first, as Vertcoin has a great community and people are very helpful on it's Reddit page. Downloaded the core wallet, let it sync with the network, created a .bat file for ccminer, with intensity set to 22 and that was the max. I've been alternating between Vertcoin and Verge with possibility of mining Zcash soon (on Ubuntu). I get about 820 MH/s for Vertcoin and 770-780 MH/s for Verge. It helps if you set your own node using Vertcoin's One click miner to remove latency. In one week, I have about 46 VTC and and 3400 XVG. Without OC, my GPUs run at 75 degrees and draw 290-300W.

Overclocking
I installed MSI Afterburner to try overclocking my GPUs. Zotac amp core 1080 TIs draw a lot of power, 100% power is about 300W. I've brought the power down to 85% and core clock +50. The hashrates have dropped by 8% after these changes but the cards run cooler and draw less power so I'm going to try this for sometime. Memory clock makes no difference to Lyra2v2 algorithm as no matter what you set it at, the hashrate does not change. I've yet to try other algorithms like NeoScrypt or Equihash, but I will try them soon. I need to do a lot more research on the OC settings per algorithm for 1080 tis. There are a lot of half truths and outright false information about overclocking out there, so don't believe everything you read as every GPU and algorithm works differently.

Looking Ahead
As of today, mining Verge is going to give me about $55 a day, Awesome miner gives me about $50 a day, which is nothing compared to the original analysis I'd done 2 months ago, where the top coin to mine was at least $100-120 a day. But the entire market is down right now and one can only hope that the market goes up soon and mining profitabilities pick up soon too. Additionally, with countries coming up with new regulations to control the flow of cryptocurrencies or block them completely, it's not easy to make long term decisions. Having said that, I've learnt a lot during the past 5 months or so, about blockchain and its various use cases across industries, different currencies and their applications, how the market works, and I've seen a lot of ups and downs in the cryptocurrency market.

There is a certain sense of accomplishment at the end of it all, I'm not going to lie, setting this up is not easy, especially if one's not from this field, there are roadblocks at every step of the way and not finding solutions can drive one crazy, one just has to be patient.

So, is it worth building a mining rig today? Based on current rates on whattomine.com, it will take me 11 months to recover my initial investment, so technically, no its not worth the turnaround time. But I believe this is just a temporary slowdown, and things will pick up soon. It's not a great time to be a miner, especially if you're looking to setup a new rig, GPUs aren't available or are really expensive and the profitabilities are really low. So my advice is to wait until the markets/profitabilities go up again, then consider building a rig.

Good luck!

Here's what my rig looks like today, not the prettiest looking rig out there :)