My comparatively long history of cryptocurrency mining ⛏

I started mining crypto in August 2017

On a GTX 1080—still a very good card today—with my “gaming PC” on NiceHash. That was when Bitcoin was worth about $4k. At the time, I was just a freshman in high school looking to make a quick buck, essentially free money with my parents paying for the electricity—I was after all heating the basement. I was only slightly interested in cryptocurrencies at the time, occasionally looking at the prices on CoinGecko and re-partitioning my, at the time, Coinbase portfolio into a bit of ETH and LINK in 9th grade English class.

I kept on mining until the great bull and crash of 2017-2018. I clearly remember everybody in my family telling me to sell, sell, sell, like seagulls devouring food on the beach. I probably would have, however I didn’t actually have a way to convert that crypto into fiat. Although this may seem bad on the surface, it turned out to be a really good thing for me and taught me a lesson in patience. Compared to the prices at the time of writing this, ~$50k BTC and ~$2k ETH, I’m glad I am still HODLing.

The only thing that I regret, is stopping mining. I don’t exactly remember why I stopped, probably because I lost interest due to the crash.

Fast forward to the winter of 2019-2020, right before the Coronavirus pandemic took the world by a surprise. I decided to give crypto another chance after reading The Bullish Case for Bitcoin—a phenomenal read by the way. I went back to my old trusted method of NiceHash and Coinbase for a couple of weeks until I decided that I was sick of Windows 10. I was sick of stupid updates, the goddamn pop-up notifications that would cause me to crash my plane in WarThunder, and just the general clunky user interface. Plus, I was slowly moving away from gaming as my interest in RC flight and Raspberry Pis took over. Ubuntu, here I come!

Eventually, after countless hours, probably countless dozens of hours, I was mining ETH with PhoenixMiner on Ubuntu, this time to Exodus wallet—a wallet that I still use to this day. I also started using the OhGodAnETHlargementPill, which when administered to my GTX 1080 yielded 35, maybe even 36 Mh/s instead of the 28-30 that I was getting before.

I kept mining ETH non-stop until about June of the same year. Having heard of Nerd Gearz from a Red Panda Mining video, I found a fantastic deal on some used Gigabyte Aorus RX 580’s, so I bought two for a price of $200, which at this point has payed for itself many times over. It’s crazy to think that these graphics cards can—at the time of writing—be sold for almost $300 each due to the GPU shortage and insane demand from crypto miners. I pointed the two RX 580s to mine ETH, while I switched the GTX 1080 over to RVN.

Fast forward to November 2021, and I pointed the GTX 1080 back to ETH. I managed to pick up a Red Devil RX 5700XT on Craigslist—an absolute beast of a GPU—for about $350 used. I also invested in a hardware wallet, the Ledger Nano X, to keep my crypto secure.

So to this day, I have a GTX 1080, and a recently acquired RTX 2080 mining ETH with MinerWrangler, two RX 580’s, and a RX 5700 XT mining ETH sadly using HiveOS, although it works for now. I still haven’t figured out how to use AMD drivers headlessly. However, I might switch the GTX 1080 to RVN as recently, the popularity of the project has gone up by a lot!

Update as of Aug 10, 2021

With the governmental uncertainty regarding mining in the United States, I have suspended all my rigs until further notice.