How we built and configured our mining rig. Progress report illustrated with photos and general hints about what to take care of. Now with an extra video!
Once upon a time, the baby cried… sure, I won’t start from scratch, but I hope I can give you a general idea on how to start building your own mining rig by giving you a collection of tips and useful hints. I will also provide links to all of those interested in this crypto mining thing.
Continue reading “Harvester 1 – The Birth of an Ether Mining Rig”
Five months ago with my brother we built a special computer to gather some manna, the Harvester 1. We barely believed that it will quickly extract its own price and additional costs, but…
Well, dear Nicehash lost the resulting bitcoins of around 10 days of hard mining work just a few days ago. It was a bit, hmm, let’s say “refreshing”. But still, maybe because Nicehash aimed my attention to BTC, or it was just the increasing value of our precious bitcoin, nobody will tell that now, but I changed all the excavated Ethers for bitcoins a week ago.
By the end of the day, 2 days ago Harvester 1 reached the break even point for the hardware, and yesterday it stepped over every additional costs including the electricity bill. Yaaaay! We did it! This moment has come far earlier than we expected. Originally we estimated an optimistic 8~12 months of sleepless mining to be at €0. Moreover there were NO any issues with the machine *knock*knock* during this 7/24 five months of marathon so far, so I have to give a proud respect for the manufacturers of the pc components we use, especially for the great VGA cards with their exceptionally good price/value ratio. Here they are again: 6 pieces of MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Armor OC 8GB
Also let me say a HUGE thanks for the constant help from the great mining community. I hope in change at least my articles can help newcomers to join this wonderfully exciting and unique world.
Also let me list the main sites I love to visit and tools I use to keep everything in place in my mind (without the need for completeness):
May the Hashpower be with You!
Mining is a serious business so you should be very much on the spot!
You know, shit sometimes happens even if you did everything right with more than enough caution. Mining is a serious business so you should be very much on the spot!
This time my dear neighbor who is also the caretaker in that block of flats visited my flat for some reason that is not important now. He is a good, thorough man. As he entered, he noticed that I forgot to turn off that “radiator-like thing”(!) in the bathroom, so he just pulled off the plug from the wall. Literally. He made a photo of it and also sent me a quick email about the case. I’ve told you, he is a thorough man.
Unfortunately, I could read this email only a few hours later, thus there was a painful operational loss for this period.
I like him very much, honestly, but this time he just miscalibrated his attention a bit and mixed up the order of steps to do in such cases.
What if Windows asked the following:
Bitcoin Core can be extremely slow to sync the whole blockchain, and needs outrageous amount of storage space. Most of us have fast drives but with not enough space to put the whole chain on it and a bigger drive, but with poor performance. For this case I have a solution for you.
This BIP91 / SegWit issue you might have heard about, and the uncertain effects on our precious coins of the upcoming chain split on August 1st raises a question whether we should put our money in a desktop wallet instead of leaving them having a rest at an exchange or an online wallet. Now I can see, that a desktop wallet actually does blow that haze away from the future… partially.
After the block chain splits, you’ll have some BTC (XBT) and some BCC coins, however the exchanges announced different approach to handle the situation, thus it’s extremely recommended to be well informed about the wallet where you hold your money. For instance, with Coinbase, you are going to lose your BCC(!) option. Saving your coins in your desktop wallet can be a solution for that, but of course it won’t help to avoid value losses due to volatility during the upcoming days.
A report about the final setup of Harvester 1, I give you some hints to increase performance and efficiency, and a few words about optimal dual mining.
It’s been a while since I gave you an overview of our Ethereum mining rig. During these days I tried to achieve as much manna from it as I can, of course, but I also kept the initial sensible attitude to take care of the expensive components. We’d like to avoid troubles that may come with maintenance occasions and anyway, we still plan for a long run. With this approach I could finish putting the rig together to its 100% shape. This post is just a short(?) update with pictures and also I give you some useful hints below. Stay with me. Continue reading “Harvester 1 – Rig updates, dual mining, optimize efficiency”
Juke Says 