Started Crypto Mining

I have never really paid attention to Cryptocurrency since it became a thing in 2014, but I am kicking myself in the rear end for not buying into ETH in 2016. And again for not trying to buy in 2018 and early 2020 when the markets crashed.

Over Christmas, I saw this article on PolkaDot Crypto, so I had a few good chats with a buddy of mine who has been involved since 2015, and he told me a few times to get involved.

So in late January 2021, I purchased my first Bitcoin… I bought $200 worth and quickly exchanged it for DOT. I went with DOT, because I believe in what they can do, and watched it for a month, while it started jumping up in price pretty quickly.

I couldn’t afford to keep buying large amounts of crypto. And the best option was to start mining crypto. Curious for a taste of mining, I got XMrig running on my MacBook pro and began mining XMR with a rate of 800 h/s.

I was feeling pretty good.

After one week, I was sitting at 99 cents… The most painfully slowest week of my life.

I gave up on that and began looking into building a gaming pc that I could also mine on… It all seemed so fascinating and figured it would be an awesome venture.

Part selection

With the help of my awesome brother-in-law, I picked out some pretty decent gear starting with a Lian Li LANCOOL 215 Gaming Case, which has one of the best designs for mass airflow.

I decided to go with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core processor offering 6000 hashes. My brother-in-law offered up his old Asus Rog Strix x470-5 motherboard for a case of beer, even tossed in a Noctua NH-U9S Premium CPU Cooler, so that really saved me a couple of bucks.

Powering it all with a 650w gold power supply, which should handle dual GPUs at some point.

All that was left was the Graphic Card, I figured I would be waiting months, but I somehow snagged a Radeon RX 570 Gaming 8GB Graphic Card on Newegg for a really good price.

I felt pretty good about my purchases, considering I haven’t bought a Windows system in over 15 years.

Time to start mining

I got everything set up while waiting for the GPU… Yet, a bit impatience, so I found a super cheap 4GB 1050ti locally. Install Windows and Steam along with 600GB of games I have been waiting to play for a few years…

And went to town mining with Nicehash, since that was the only miner I could get working with a 4GB card.

I was pulling about 20MH/s which ran for about 3 days when my RX570 showed up much quicker than I thought it would.

So I swapped cards and decided to step up a bit and leave Nicehash. My brother-in-law told me to try Phoenix miner. Downloaded and took forever to configure, since I didn’t know anything. And I was only pulling about 8 MH/s.

After a few hours of troubleshooting with my brother-in-law, increasing page pools, overclocking with MSI afterburner, and realizing I did not check for that stupid Compute Mode…

I got Phoenix mining ETH at 29 MH/s with the RX570. I was also pulling 6100 H/s while mining XMR using XMrig on the CPU.

I was so happy, with my estimated mining profit of about $120 a month… And over the next two weeks, I watched it religiously as that payout grew, while I had minor freak-outs thinking I may have messed something up.

First payout

After 2 weeks, I never got payment. I figured it was delayed so I was going to wait. A day later, I got that first ETH payout of 0.00245 WHOOP WHOOP… Only came to about $51.16 CAD at the time I received it.

And a week later, it grew to about $60… Not bad for a first-time miner!

I will admit, I was pretty nervous about the whole process until that payment came through safe and sound to my Exodus.io wallet…

Thinking I will need to toss in a few extra bevies in the near future for that awesome brother-in-law, a million questions later, and he still hasn’t gotten annoyed.

Hungry for more

I plan to see how the current mining operation works out. But I got that taste for profits, now that I got my first payment, and realized how much more I could be making.

Yet, it is very rare to find a decent GPU these days without it being marked up in price. I already consider myself extremely lucky to have found what I got in such a short time. But I will keep looking for something better if the price is right.

Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty happy with my estimated $120 monthly, which could go up or down, depending on the markets. But adding an extra card, or rig will only increase those profits!

I am pretty excited about the future of Crypto, and Blockchain technology.

Have you considered blockchain tech or Crypto?

I’ve spent a good portion of the last few weeks learning about Crypto and blockchain. Technology is disrupting every industry around the world. And by 2025, it is estimated that 18 percent of the world’s GDP will be moving through blockchain.

I think it is here to stay, and it is not going anywhere, although I would love to hear what you think about Crypto in the comments!