Everyone is familiar with the term "money does't grow on trees". While that may be true, money does grow in GPU's.
My first introduction to cryptocurrency mining started a few years ago after watching a Vice documentary on Bitcoin mines in China. Now at the time I did not understand at all how it worked and assumed that an expensive ASIC machine was required to get started. As time went on I found myself discovering Youtube videos and news articles on people showing how to build cheap miners using only GPU's. At this point cryptocurrency had started to spark my interest but after talking to my tech guy he assured me that there is no point in trying to mine as electricity costs are too high in North America and the returns are much to small to ever be worth it. It wasn't until my friend told me that the value of GTX 1070 graphic cards dramatically increased due to the mining potential that I became much more invested with mining cryptocurrency.
Now to give you a bit of background I work in the film industry and do a lot of editing. Adobe Premiere Pro is our software of choice so naturally I have always leaned towards Nvidia GPU's as the integration with Adobe products are far better then the competitors. I have invested a bit of money into my editing rigs which so happens to include GTX 1080 SLI and Nvidia Quadro P4000 graphic cards. At this point the idea of my computers, which will sit unused occasionally, being able to pay themselves off was extremely exciting. I realize that if I were to purchase my computer solely for the purpose of mining cryptocurrency it would take years in order to cover the initial investment, but I figured that I might as well utilize the equipment I already owned.
When people ask how much money can you really make from mining using a computer, the daily revenue number are always underwhelming and people tend to right it off right there. But the largest misconception I feel that they are missing is the long term earning potential of the coin itself.
For example, my computers can make roughly 7 - 12 USD within 24 hours (not including electricity costs). Now that is not very much as after a month you would only make $360 on the high end. But lets say you are mining Ubiq which is currently at $1.30 a coin, after a month of solid mining you would have 276 coins saved up. If that coin all of a sudden doubled in value (which is very possible for a low cost coin like this) it would bring your earnings up to $720 for that month. All of a sudden that $12 day has turned into a $24 day.
This is the mindset I use while choosing which coins to mine and it's very simple. If you tried mining Ethereum which is at $400 a coin, in order for your mined coins to double in value the price would have to increase to $800. Now that is by no means impossible, but it is far more likely for Ubiq to go from $1.30 to $2.60. Now if you were to scale that up to quadrupling your revenue from mined coins it is far more likely for Ubiq to go from $1.30 to $5.20 then it is Ethereum going from $400 to $1600.
By no means would I call myself an expert and based on my experience I am definitely still an novice, but if I were to give anyone who is just starting in small scale mining any advice that would be to find a low cost coin to mine over choosing one of the flagship currencies that everyone usually leans towards.
Hands down the highest return for mining that I have seen is from using NiceHash which alternates between different coins and pays out in Bitcoin. Now if anyone was just getting started I would agree that this is the best, easiest option for them, but I stopped using the software due to the amount of noise and heat it produced within my machine as well as making my computer completely unusable while it was running. Ethereum mining on the other hand did not require the same type of load which allowed me to have my miner running while still being able to work and keep temperatures down. While using Claymores dual mining software I started looking into other coins that I could mine besides Ether. Ethereum is the second most popular coin and but due to the mining difficulty and the high payout rate with the different pools I decided to try a coin that was cheaper, lower difficulty and undervalued. At this point I discovered Ubiq which became my coin of choice very quickly and with the benefit of mining Decred along side it I switched both of my systems over to it for a couple of months.
Even though I like the idea of mining two different coins at the same time as it doubles the chance of one of the coins blowing up, everything changed once the Bitcoin hard fork was cancelled. Bitcoin Gold which was released in the beginning of November sparking my interest as it is exclusively minded by GPU's. Personally I believe BTG will replace Bitcoin Cash so I see it as an amazing opportunity to start mining this coin while the price is below $1000.
I hope you enjoyed this brief article on my mining theory and I would love to hear from other Miners about what they think is the best method or approach to take.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Grayson