We are happy to present a series of authors’ articles by our friend, who will tell you about his experience as a miner. He will explain to you step by step how to build a farm, avoid the mistakes of a beginner, and even sell it without significant losses if you decide to quit.
Hi there! My name is… Never mind! All that matters is that I’m a miner. I’ve been mining for three years, assembling rigs to order, consulting on purchases and operations, and running a small 23-rig farm. Allow me to share my experience with you in a series of five articles on:
- Choosing mining hardware and facilities: component parts, models, and producers;
- Configuring mining software: updating BIOS, automatic rig activation, video card BIOS firmware, video card overclocking, remote monitoring, and control;
- How to organize a mining farm: choice of location, ventilation, and smart home system.
- Maintaining a farm: monitoring, backup hard drive, cleaning, health checks, minor repairs, and warranty returns;
- Quitting mining: selling the hardware, service life of video card memory, and financial loss.
Today we’ll focus on choosing the hardware. I took up mining quite late: it was 2017, the Bitcoin rate was skyrocketing, and video cards and motherboards were out of stock in every single store. Back then, I had to buy whatever I could find, which allowed me to try out different combinations of hardware models and producers.
Video cards vs ASICs
The first item on the agenda was the mining method. Cryptocurrency is generally produced by means of lengthy and complex calculations. In the case of popular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, we would generally use video cards or Application Specific Specialized Circuits (ASIC). The latter are more efficient, they consume less power, and can produce Bitcoin, but quickly become obsolete and have no value on the aftermarket. I went with video cards: at least they can be reused for gaming.
Next up were the rigs, specifically assembling and configuring them properly to ensure maximum efficiency.
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