Mining Thoughts - #JustMinerThings

Me mining bitcoin for the first time

I finally figured out why adding a 4th GPU to my rig was not working, and hopefully why everything I tried to mine besides ETH was crashing. I was using SATA cables to power my risers! I followed a tutorial that said to do that. As I read more lately I saw lots of people warning not to do this, as these cables are not meant to draw that much power, but I thought I wasn't using SATA. I was.

OOPS!

Now that my 4 GPU rig is finally running smoothly, I'm hoping to try mining some other coins, though ETH does seem to be the most profitable at the moment. I'm mining ETC for now, and I recently got a 0.2 ETH payout, and man, that is rewarding. Feels good man.

If I find the time, I'd like to start speculatively mining new coins that just launched. I actually have a small bit of experience with this: I mined electroneum with my old laptop (don't mine with your laptop unless you're an idiot like me, or you want it to die though hahah) on the first night of the launch. Mined about 600 ETN over a day. I imagine I could have made a ton more using a GPU rig.

So the idea would be to look out for bitcointalk ANN threads about new POW coins, and mine as much as possible while the difficulty is still low. It's a bit of gamble, since the coins could turn out to be worthless. But there is also tremendous upside if you hit on one that makes it to an exchange and has even a moderate value.

The other thing I want to try is mine with my GPU rig and then stake those coins to make even more. It seems like an obvious strategy but you never see it discussed in terms of increasing the ROI of your hardware and maximizing profits. Of course, the catch is that this requires you to A) hold instead of cash out immediately, and B) hold a POS coin specifically, and C) trade whatever you are mining for said POS coin...

...Unless it's a POS/POW hybrid. I was thinking of trying this with Lux, but apparently the mining is not super profitable right now. And even though I've liked it in the past, it's seeming more and more like a clown show. They delayed their new wallet release, and then when it was released it was broken and broke all the PoS and Masternode rewards. And the new wallet release is supposed to work but it is not working for me. Extremely disappointing as I have not been able to stake my coins in quite some time.