Of course, i missed the boat on the global crypto currency market increase lately, but at some point, locally, i think still think that this is a good hobby to venture into, and perhaps with the right chess-play, it might turn out to be a potential source of passive income? who knows, right?
It's never too late to start, and personally, i think i should venture and simulate on how to obtain the best out of this new multi-billion dollar market trend.
Me being me, has always interested on how we can manipulate performance technology to somewhat benefits us. For this, i believe crypto-currency mining is the best platform to simulate on.
Although that it has been around for quite some time, it's not that until this recent that i think it's good to understand how it works, and perhaps try and simulate on how difficult it is to set up a mining rig.
Types of coins to mine?
For the time being, i'll just focus on the most popular ones, as these has got a lot of available source of reference and documents, and some proven workability on the established mining rigs.
My only choice is either bitcoin, or ethereum, which is two of the most common and profitable cryptocurrency as of now. As of this article is written, 1 bitcoin equivalents to 4412.29 USD.. or converted to my local RM via google exchange, equals to RM18666.19. wow. But, the downside of mining bitcoins, is that i will need a dedicated miner, which is ASICS-based platform, to do mining for me.
Ethereum in the other hand is pretty much easier to mine. The price of 1 ethereum is about 301.65USD now.. or equivalent to RM1276.13. Ethereum is also easier to mine compared to bitcoin, as for now, we can still do mining by using GPUs (powerful graphic cards) in a normal PC. Plus, i liked the name Ethereum better. Feels like a gaming currency, same like Zeny in Final Fantasy series.
What is mining?
In simpler words, mining means that we use our own personal computing power, and join with the grid of network, to calculate and solve complex functions. All of these computing power will solve each block of function, and when these blocks are combined together and if the functions are solved, we will get rewarded for the computing power that we provide so help solve the calculation. These reward comes in the type of either bitcoin, or ethereum, or whatever crypto currency offered for that mining pool.
Google will help you to understand better.
Establishing my own mining rig - as a hobby.
Some says that this is not a good time to mine. As the hardness level has increased, and the income is not as profitable as a year ago. Well, i missed the boat on profitable income, but surely, keeping up with the technology is what interests me.
I'm choosing to try and mine the Ethereum, instead of bitcoins, as bitcoins require special ASICS-based device, such as the Antminer to do the mining. Ethereum, in the other hand, the mining pool can be set up by using normal hardware, as simple as normal PC system, with a powerful graphics card. And seems like i've got these handy, i might as well just start to try to mine Ethereum today.
Ethereum mining rig.
After 2 days of trying to configure the mining rig, with various types of Eth mining software, can't seems to be able to produce any MH/S. MH/s are the measurement to measure the number of hashes, or computational functions performed per seconds. These are measured by:
- 1 kH/s is 1,000 (one thousand) hashes per second.
- 1 MH/s is 1,000,000 (one million) hashes per second.
- 1 GH/s is 1,000,000,000 (one billion) hashes per second.
- 1 TH/s is 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) hashes per second.
Apparently, my current display card does not support the size of DAG - in layman term, is the overhead needed to be loaded for the GPU to perform the calculation. Current DAG size is more than 2GB, so i'll need a graphics card that has got a bigger than 2GB of memory in order to be able to load the current DAG. Seems like people are doing it with multiple of 8GB of display cards nowadays. A simple browse on the local pc hardware price, 8GB display cards, costs at least 1.5k upwards, depending on model.
This is too much of an investment for just to simulate.
So i researched further, and apparently, these Ethereums can be mined without loading the DAG into the onboard memory. But can only be done with the EthOS? In which a mining platform dedicated for Ethereum. It's Ubuntu-based specific distro, with miners and everything built in for Ethereum. But it costs around 39usd per copy.
I'm considering for this distro instead, rather than having to fork out RM2k for a new display card.
Let's see how it goes.
:)
