Ok, so a couple months ago I started paying attention to Bitcoin, then Ethereum, then ZCash, etc, etc. Over the next couple weeks I had invested about $1000 Bitcoin and other altcoins and was hooked. Not just because my investments were increasing in value, but because I felt like I was in on the beginning of the next big thing. I printed out different whitepapers, highlighted them, and took notes. I watched hours of youtube videos and read hundreds of crypto forums. I loved the complexity of it all and the intellectual challenge of understanding something completely foreign and new to me.
After all the research I did, I wanted to be closer to the action. I entertained the possibility of buying mining rig of some kind and started figuring out if it would be worth my investment. It was pretty intimidating to say the least. Until recently, my experience with computer hardware had been buying a couple different laptops over the years and using them to browse the internet, watch videos, and do homework. I'd never worked on PC's or even gamed on them. I was what you might call, a noob.
Economically, it made sense to buy a mining rig. The one I was looking at was sold by chameleon_computers on ebay and going for $4300. It advertised 226 MH/s on Ethereum at 1200 Watts. If I plug that into this calculator, right now I get $16.67 of revenue when mining Ethereum. I'm lucky to have some of the cheapest electricity in the country at 7 cents per kilowatt hour so that would leave me with a profit of $14.65 per day. That means in about 294 days of operation, I would theoretically pay back my investment. And after that I would be earning about $440 per month until my machine wears out and breaks down. Now, these calculations would only hold true if the value of ETH, mining difficulty, and hashing power of the network stay completely the same. The biggest fluctuation is the price of the coin. If it's up that day, you'll earn more, and if it's down you'll earn less. When you buy a rig you are gambling that the profitability of mining the coin is going to go up or at least stay relatively the same. So after doing the cost benefit analysis and believing that there was a high chance of me at the very least breaking even, I decided to pull the trigger!
Chameleon_computers accepted my offer on this miner and I waited anxiously for it to arrive. It arrived 14 days later which was longer than I hoped but still within the promised delivery window. I hooked it up to my TV because I didn't own a computer monitor, powered it up... and nothing. All that it showed was some bios for the hardware but it was supposed to load windows. Me being the noob that I am just stared at it for a couple hours not knowing if it was something I was doing wrong or something wrong with the rig. This was supposed to be a plug and play miner! I emailed Chameleon Computers asking what the fuck was wrong with my new four thousand dollar toy. It was around 8pm in the evening and I wasn't expecting a response until the next day but about 10 minutes later my phone rings and it's Cody from Chameleon. He tells me to check if the hard drive came unplugged during shipping. I don't even know what a hard drive looks like and I'm pretty embarrassed that he has to completely spell everything out for me. Sure enough, I find the hard drive (the thing that looks like a hard drive would look and says 60 Gb right on the front of it) and it had come unplugged. I plug it in, Windows starts right up, the ETH miner auto starts to my conveniently pre programmed wallet address, and... it crashes. Blue screen of death, FUCK. Cody lets me know it's past his bedtime in Colorado, now like 11pm his time, and that he would need to help me troubleshoot the next day. Of course I was a bid disappointed that my new investment wasn't already making me money, but I was glad I had Cody to walk me through what was going on. Without his help I wouldn't have even plugged the hard drive in.
The next day Cody was able to walk me through how to troubleshoot my rig over the phone and through texting. He assured me that he had tested the rig before shipping and it had ran perfectly. Honestly, I completely believe him. Over the course of a couple hours we traced the problem to one out of the eight GPU's. He said it's most likely a bad riser card and he put two of them in the mail for free. In the meantime I could mine 7 out of the 8 GPU's and was still making about $12 a day so I was happy. The day before my cards got here my rig started to crash due to some over clocking issues so I just shut down the machine until the next day. This time Cody had me install a free remote access software so he could control the computer from where he was at. He literally spent four hours on the phone with me as I switched out riser cards and rebooted and he remotely re installed my drivers one by one, adjusted a bunch of settings, and tuned the over clock software. But alas, we couldn't get that one GPU up and mining. He sent me a couple more riser cards to try just to make sure because riser cards are usually the weakest link, but if that doesn't work again he's going to exchange my bad GPU for a good one and keep troubleshooting with me until everything is working great. In the meantime I'm mining on 7 out of 8 GPU's and making over $10 a day in profit. It feels good to be profitable right now and I'm looking forward to being 100% operational.
This whole process might seem like a nightmare and it has been pretty frustrating. However, I truly believe that I simply hit some bad luck when it comes to the manufacturing of my hardware. Chameleon assembled the components and did the best they could reasonably do to keep this from happening but you know, sometimes shit happens. If this had happened with a different seller on Ebay, I would be surprised if I got such great support. If I had tried to build this myself and ordered all the parts separately, it would have taken me months just to get the thing turned on and then I wouldn't even know where to start when it comes to troubleshooting and optimizing. So is it worth it to buy a crypto miner? I would say yes, I love it. Is it worth it to spend the extra few hundred bucks and buy from an experienced seller with good tech support? Unless you've built computers before, already really good at troubleshooting, and have lots of free time, absolutely.