Hi guys, it's been a while since last report but today first major rig failure happened. Currently it seems one PSU has friend, the rest of the rig should be intact but I will be able to confirm it in something like 2 days. OK, let's get into details.
PSU Failure
After today's maintanance (cleaning) I plugged in everything as usual and at the moment of firing up the rig the was a loud "tick!" sound and the fuses at my flat went off - not a good sign.
The rig didn't start up (no response at all, no fans spinning etc.) so took off the main PSU and used the second one (which was used to power only the GPUs) to power the mainboard. After switching the rig the fans started to spin - good sign. I powered off the rig not to risk any more damage.
Now I will disassemble the rig and use my PC to test every single component singly. It should take me about 1-2 days (not much free time at the moment).
Thankfully the PSU that is not working is the old one that I took from my PC like 6 months ago. It was already quite old at the time of using it for the rig, maybe it had enough (constant high usage + dust from keeping it in the basement + really hot summer).
OK, let's review the current mining situation before we'll decide what to do next as the failure got me thinking.
Current Situation
For the past several months I was using NiceHash for mining:
https://www.nicehash.com/miner/3KVnqALMtzDwWP3jK8D6QZ9j3KhTxWoUTP
But the profitability was really falling down lately. The 2 main reasons:
- ASICs for Equhash algo, which was the only really profitable algo for GeForce cards. More about it here:
- the whole crypto market going down
Lately the rig was doing around $4 daily with electricity cost at around $2.8 - ouch.
Few weeks ago I've installed the ETHpill which makes mining ETH on GeForce cards more profitable than any other algo but with current prices it does not help much.
Things to consider:
- in about 3 months new series of GPUs will be launched - faster and more efficient in mining than the one we're using
- ETH will switch to POS at some point (no more mining on GPU)
- ASICs are starting to dominate the mining for many algos, making GPU mining not profitable
Possible Solutions
Now, we know that we've got one dead PSU, that lately GPU mining is barely profitable and that probably it's gonna get worse. Here are the possible solutions:
1. We keep on mining on single PSU - this should be possible as recently the GPUs were set at 55% power limit which didn't affect mining speed by much (at least not for ETH with the ETH pill).
But considering the falling profitability and not too good perspectives, I would like to propose pulling of the plug - which means.
2. Selling the rig. Most probably in parts. If I'm not mistaken this should bring profit of about 3000 SBD (if the SBD stays at 1 USD). Whole profit from selling would be paid to investors according to stake.
During the funding we collected 714 SBD so this means way over 100% ROI, especially considering that a total of 514 SBD was already paid, but of course the SBD at the time of funding was at higher price.
3. Selling the rig and using the profit to buy BTC mining contracts.
Not a fan of this one, I would prefer to pay the SBD to investors and let them decide what to do with it.
4. Selling the rig and using the profit to invest STEEM POWER into STEEM services (voting bots etc.)
Also not a fan of this one, I would prefer to pay the SBD to investors and let them decide what to do with it.
So No Payouts For Now?
Of course not :D I feel obligated to give back as much money as possible so from today I will be using my second service - @tipU - to generate daily payouts to 
OK, So What Now?
I'll need about 2 days to test the other parts of the rig to see if there was any more damage. The fans spinning when using the second PSU is a good sign.
In my opinion it would be best to sell the rig in parts - I would start from the GPUs. I would be using local auction website - allegro.pl, basically Polish version of eBay. But if any of you guys would like to buy the GPU with good price - let me know :) With DHL the shipping shouldn't be a big problem.
In the meantime @tipU will be responsible to generate the daily income for the investors. Even after selling the rig I think it should be possible continue using @tipU this way :)
OK - let me guys know what do you think. I think I would be seriously thinking about selling the rig even without the today's failure. The GPU mining market is shrinking every day (lots of people shutting down their rigs now). Unless you have free electricity it's not really profitable any more because of the crypto market falling down and the ASICs (and FPGs) taking the market. The already earned profit is pretty good and it's a good moment to pull back and take the profit from the hardware while it's still at decent prices.