Mining and Crypto currencies

I am not sure in which thread this fits, but I think it should go here especially since it will mostly be about Crypto mining, but also about trading and so on.

Who here actually mines? If so, what are your specs on your rigs, and what are your daily figures?
Those who don't mine, do you buy and sell BTC at all and keep an eye on the market?

This BTC and crpyto mining/currencies is absolutely fascinating to me. I am either thinking of utilizing my current rig as it should mine like a beast even though not optimized for it, or sell it and invest in a mining rig.
I have also purchased a small amount of BTC to play around with the market. And I absolutely love it.

I'll give my limited knowledge on the subject a go, but if anyone is more knowledgeable, please by all means.

The most important thing to note: Your choice of wallet is your life. Choosing one is essential and hardware wallets + backups are probably the best, next to paper wallets. If you your online wallet is hacked, go's down or compromised, there is a good chance you will never get it back again. Mycelium, bread wallet and bitcoin wallet are good ones to use, next to the Terzor

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There are basically two options: Mining and Buying/Selling Investing. I tried both and investing is easier for me since I can toss in what little money I can afford to lose and watch it grow, or shrink.

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Mining
If you chose to mine, you'll have more success mining alt-coins and converting them into bitcoins, since bitcoins are mined on ASIC hardware. So you can mine Litecoins and Etherium as well as a few others.

Mining requires 2 things: Hashing power (your GPU/CPU/Miner) and Electricity.

ASIC miners start at around 20k and promise a ROI (return of investment) within a few months. This is obviously based off of USA/EU prices of electricity. Since one unit needs a 800W PSU, and it will use just about all 800W's of power.

GPU's are pretty good at mining alt-coins. You can use any thing from the Nvidia 7-series up to a Titan Xp and AMD's 7-series R9 and RX series of cards have proven to be good mining cards. (sans the RX550/560/460) the RX 470 with volt mods performs the best when it comes to price/hashing power.

Mining 24/7 can put a strain on your GPU as well, so take that into consideration when using GPU's to mine. There is also the option of using multiple GPU's to mine, with PCIe 1x USB adaptors, as we have seen in mining rigs.

AVOID Places that will sell you GPU mining rigs. You can do it for cheaper, but also remember, work out your power costs vs. Hashing power.

Always calculate you ROI before doing anything. Even then, coins are a non renewable currency and as time progresses so does the difficulty to mine them. Your ROI will not always be a set amount of time.

If you are interested: Create an account at Nice Hash*, download the application, point your miner at your nice hash wallet**, do the bench marks and mine away. You'll get an idea of cost/power/reward ratio fairly quickly.

Alternatively, you can download cuda miner or CGminer and mine some litecoins: https://www.litecoinpool.org/ Will give you the info you need. I gave it a whirl for fun and on my OC'ed GTX 750 managed around 120 kh/s which resulted in around 0.01 ltc (R3.14) after about 2+ days.

I played around with NiceHash miner and I got around 0.05BTC after mining for around a month. My average daily income from mining was around R6 (not worth it at all) Now I have to A) Wait till NiceHash does payouts to external wallets which could take a very long time, or B) mine until I get 0.1BTC. Option B is looking to be the best for now (currently at 0.0053xx).

Also note that mining certain algorithms will eat into resources quickly, causing your PC to slow down to a crawl, so rather mine when it's not in use of switch to something like Lbry, even then, using the PC while mining will lower the Hash rate.

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Buying/Selling/Investing is the other option.

It's the easiest to get into, create an account at Luno: https://www.luno.com/ buy in from R5+ and HODL! The price of coins will rise and fall***

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Remember, never invest anything you can't afford to lose.



It is important to note that, specifically the bitcoin community is facing a crisis of sorts with Segwit and UASF (user assisted soft-fork), it's a bit complex for me to explain but, basically; From the 1st of August bitcoin (might) be split into to currencies, both will be accepted at certain exchanges/banks and depending on which becomes more dominant the other may disappear. They might co-exist as well, only time will tell.

Also, if you can invest in LTC/ETH/BTC and other coins too, no one can predict the market.

*Nice hash mines alt-coins and turns them into bitcoins.

**You can use another external wallet, but as of late the price of transferring btc has risen dramatically. It's easier to mine into NiceHash because it will deposit anything over 0.001 btc daily, to it's own wallet. Otherwise you'll have to mine until you reach 0.1 btc before it deposits it into another, external wallet.

***Bitcoin is like a comity, the price fluctuates extremely quickly. I have limited knowledge of it, but I implore anyone who wishes to invest in it, to do research on block chain technology. Before tossing a lot of money into it.