Category: Blog

Host Your Own Content

Posted on by MinerWarz
Block Party

The recent incident with YouTube blocking, banning, or striking content creators seems to have opened everyone’s eyes to the fact that if it’s not your platform you can be cancelled at any moment with no explanation.

Being part of the Bitcoin community, we all hear the rally cry for decentralized platforms as the only way to have uncensored content. However, the easy solution is to simply host your own content. You can still use YouTube, medium, or any other publishing platform. Just make sure that your content is also hosted on your own domain AND you have a good backup plan.  If you understand Bitcoin this should be the easiest thing you’ll do this year.

 

How do I host my own content?

 

Step 1: Buy a domain.

The first thing you need to do is buy your domain or “name on the internet”.

Short, memorable domains are the best, and being old-school, I still think .com is the way to go. That said, many of the other TLDs such as .io are acceptable these days.

Use a domain registrar like GoDaddy and buy your domain.  The process is pretty straightforward, but be alert as they try to upsell you several times in the checkout process. You can certainly choose to host your site with GoDaddy, but I’ve found they limit you on some options that a separate shared host would normally provide.

The total cost for your domain should be less than $20 per year.

 

Step 2: Buy hosting.

The hosting account is what actually serves your files to the people of the internet. This is where you’ll upload all of your files and manage your email. Most shared hosting accounts have a 1-click install of WordPress. So, you won’t even need to configure much more than the title of your site before you start adding content.

The cost for shared hosting should run $3 to $15 per month. It should only cost more than that if you’re running a VPS or dedicated server. If you’re reading this article to get started, I recommend you don’t attempt to run those on your own just yet.

The hosting landscape changes fairly frequently, but our current favorite is DreamHost. For under $3 per month (paid annually) you can get unlimited hosting for a single domain. It’ll cost a little extra to add email, but you’ll still be under $5 per month.

If you go this route, please use our affiliate link below. We’ll get a commission and you’ll get the best deal they offer.  As always, we don’t recommend any products that we don’t believe in. This site and all of our others are hosted on DreamHost and we’ve been very happy thus far.

>>> Click here to host your content on DreamHost. <<<

 

Step 3: Profit!

Well… just start by posting your content on your own website first. Your website/domain is now your identity and anyone viewing your content elsewhere should be reminded of that. If your medium posts or YouTube videos suddenly disappear, your true fans should know where to find you.

 

Step 4: Backup (Optional….NOT OPTIONAL!)

Even if your content is saved on your website AND is uploaded to YouTube, make sure to have a copy of everything locally, on your own computer. This is just an extra precaution because accidents do happen. (As YouTube would like you to believe.) Or maybe you just mess something up on your host.  You will appreciate having everything backed up .

 

If you have any questions or need help, feel free to leave a comment below or ask us on twitter @minerwarz.

Mining When It’s Unprofitable

Posted on by MinerWarz

There are many people pushing the idea that you should keep mining, even when it’s unprofitable, because someday the coins might be worth more. I disagree. If you really want the most coins and/or fiat at the end of the day, you should not mine when it’s unprofitable. You should instead, turn off the rig and buy the coins directly.

Please note that I’ve been mining for a few months and have no intention of stopping. I’m not suggesting that mining is dead or that everyone should sell their 1080ti’s. If your rigs are profitable, run them. I’m suggesting that if they aren’t profitable at today’s values, you’re financially better off to not run them.

“Unprofitable” to me, means you pay more in electricity costs than you receive in current coin value.

Let me head off this one and just say that most coins ARE still profitable right now on most GPU’s. Just not as much as last month. It’s only unprofitable right now with low end cards and expensive electricity. For example, a 750ti with $0.25/kWh electricity will “make” $0.41/day but will cost $0.45/day in electricity. That is a losing proposition and that’s what I mean when I say “unprofitable”.

Here’s the main reasons I see when people choose to mine unprofitably.

In 6 months, those coins will be worth 50x what they are now. You gotta mine based on future value.

My stance is that this is incorrect. The future value has absolutely no bearing on profitability right now. The only thing that matters is the cost to mine them today vs their value today. The best way to convey this seems to be with an example.

Let’s say we built a few low cost rigs a year ago and we have 100 750ti’s in our mining farm. According to the WhatToMine website, they will make $0.41 per day in revenue mining on NiceHash. However, it will cost $0.45 in electricity per day to run them, for a net loss of $0.04 per day. Multiply by 100 and we have $41/day in revenue at a cost of $45/day. Loss of $4.

By mining for the coins, you are paying $45 today to buy $41 worth of coins. I would rather take my $45 and just buy $45 in coins. I now spent the same amount as you today, but I have $4 more in coins. So, in 6 months when they moon, I’m going to have more coins than you.

This is also sometimes justified by saying you’re not mining fiat, you’re mining crypto, but the same rule applies. If you want the most crypto at the end of the day, you’ll get more if you buy it than you will by mining unprofitably.

So what about the investment in my rigs? I already paid for them, so I might as well keep them running, right?

Nope. Unfortunately, that investment is a sunk cost. Even if you paid $10k for all those juicy 750ti’s, you still make less money each day that you run them at a loss. Even though it feels wrong you’re better off leaving the $10k paperweight turned off and buying $45 in coins. *$10k is a made-up number used only as an example.

Assumptions:

  • You are mining as an investment and not because you want to support the crypto industry.
  • Your goal is to make as much crypto and/or fiat as possible.

My First GPU Mining Rig

Posted on by MinerWarz

My first GPU mining rig has been running smoothly (well, almost smoothly) for about 4 days. As there are so many questions about mining, I’m just going to post my entire adventure below. If you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll do my best.

1. How did I get into all of this?
I only bought my first $100 worth of Bitcoin in August, 2017. Then, $100 in Litecoin….then Ethereum… The prices kept going up so I kept buying a little more here and there. Eventually, I found Hashflare which is a cloud mining service. They basically have a warehouse full of Bitcoin mining equipment and they sell contracts to mine for yourself. For example, 1 Terahash of mining power costs about $220 and will make around $2.00 per day. Learn about Hashflare here. Then, I learned that you didn’t need special equipment to mine altcoins. (altcoins are all the other non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies. aka alternate coins) You can actually mine these coins with any decent graphics card in a computer. I then joined a few Facebook groups related to GPU Mining and absorbed as much as possible. (GPU = Graphical Processing Unit (aka a graphics card)

2. Where to start with GPU mining?
If you ask anyone on a GPU mining Facebook group about what coins to mine, the first response is almost always to check out the WhatToMine.com website. This is a great site that lets you select your desired graphics card(s), input a few parameters, and it’ll tell you what is most profitable to mine. I went through each one to see how much each would make per day. Then, I searched for the best prices for each card. Sprinkle in a little math and I had a list of cards by profitability and time to break even. (The prices vary so wildly, that rather than post a list, I think you’ll need to do your own legwork on this one.)

3. So how do you build a GPU mining rig?
I expected this to be more complicated, but honestly you can start today if your home computer has any of the graphics cards listed on the WhatToMine website. As you get more into it, you’ll want to add multiple GPU’s to your PC. Many newer motherboards can fit 2 GPU’s with no major alterations. Above that, and we have to introduce risers. But let’s not go there yet. Let’s assume you’re going to get started just like me.

4. The hardware bits:
I bought a new motherboard, power supply (PSU), SSD hard drive, 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 2 GPU’s for about $1,500. I intended to use an old Xeon server case for this, but the graphics cards were so big that they didn’t fit. This led me to do what most miners do, and build an open air rig. This basically means to connect everything out in the open and tie it down as much as possible. Here’s my shopping list if you’d like to follow in my footsteps.
– Motherboard: $120 – MSI Pro Series Intel Z270 DDR4 HDMI USB 3 SLI ATX Motherboard (Z270 SLI PLUS)
– Power Supply: $100 – EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G2, 80+ GOLD 750W
– Processor: $46 – Intel BX80677G3930 7th Gen Celeron Desktop Processors
– Hard Drive: $50 – Kingston Digital, Inc. 120GB A400 SATA 3 2.5 Solid State Drive SA400S37/120G 2.5″ SA400S37/120G
– Graphics Cards (GPUs): $1,040 – 2X – MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X SLI DirectX 12 VR Ready Graphics Card (GTX 1080 AERO 8G OC)
– RAM: $100 – Corsair 8GB DDR4
After tax and whatnot, it all came to about $1,500.
As far as “building a rig frame” I just used some scrap plywood and screwed everything to that. Both GPU’s fit directly onto the motherboard, so there’s no need for risers or additional supports/mounts. The PSU sits on one side of the board, and the motherboard with GPU’s on the other.

5. What software to use for mining?
I bought this stuff with almost no idea how I’d actually go about mining. I knew I didn’t want to pay for Windows so I went with a specific Linux distribution for mining called SimpleMining. You just download the image for the SimpleMining OS (SMOS as some call it) and write the image to a USB or SSD drive. Plug that drive into your mining computer, boot up and you’re mining. Well, almost… You need to change one line in the config file so it uses your SimpleMining login email. This is how the OS communicates with the SimpleMining.net website, and that’s where you manage your rig. If you can’t edit the config directly on the USB, you’ll need to boot up your mining rig and use PuTTY to access the configfile. I thought that was all there was to it, but no, apparently you also need to join a miningpool…

6. What is a mining pool?
While SMOS is a great way to control your rig, you still need to pool your resources with other miners. Pooling resources evens out the payout. Rather than wait a month to mine a block, your resources are pooled with others. When a block is mined, everyone shares in the rewards. The pool I’m using right now is called MiningPoolHub. They take out a 0.9% fee from my mining which is the industry norm. Once you sign up for an account at MiningPoolHub then you can start mining… well…almost…

7. Now you need to choose what you want to mine and get the appropriate wallet.
Search for the most official wallet for the cryptocurrency you decide to mine. Make sure you own both the public and private keys. Without the private key, you don’t really own your wallet. There’s also an auto-exchange feature on MiningPoolHub which will…you guessed it.. automatically exchange whatever you mine into the coin of your choice. So, let’s assume you’re on MiningPoolHub and you have a wallet set up.

8. Config SimpleMining.net to work with MiningPoolHub
Let’s go back to SimpleMining.net and insert our mining pool info.
Under your rig groups, you’ll choose the mining software depending on your GPU brand (NVIDIA vs AMD) and you’ll enter a string as shown below.
–server us-east.equihash-hub.miningpoolhub.com –user myusername.myrig–pass x –port 20594
This will mine the equihash algorithm on miningpoolhub. “myusername” would be replaced with yours and “myrig” can be anything you want. Once you activate mining on SimpleMining, MiningPoolHub will identify your miner with whatever name you provide here. The password is usually just left as an “x”. And that’s all you should need to change. It’s scary to think that you missed something, but really the worst thing would be that you accidentally mine to someone else’s account until you figure out what’s wrong.

I hope that was a decent overview. If you’d like a deeper dive into anything, please leave me a comment.