A Little Miner's Mining History (Part 1)

Introduction: Today I officially dismantled my graphics card mining machine, which also marks the end of my journey as a small miner. I would like to take this opportunity to record it.

I am the smallest miner. If mining is a glass of water, I am a H2O molecule, the smallest unit. Those who have never mined can read this article as a story. Those who have mined can also exchange ideas. Of course, we welcome advice from veterans in the cryptocurrency industry.

1.

I entered the cryptocurrency circle not too early, nor did I start mining early.

The first cryptocurrency I came into contact with was zec, also known as Zcash in English and Zero Coin or Big Zero Coin in Chinese. I had heard of Bitcoin a long time ago, but like most people at the time, I thought that something created out of thin air must be a scam. The next time I came into contact with it was before May Day in 2017, when a friend sent me a zec mining tutorial. I took a quick look at it and thought, can I make money by using a graphics card to calculate? I didn't understand. At that time, I used an R9 390 graphics card, which could mine more than 500 yuan a month. I felt that I couldn't mine much, and it was not interesting, so I gave up.

During the May Day holiday, my friend told me that the BTS he bought had doubled in a few days, and gave me a website, Yunbi.com (now gone). The price of each coin on Yunbi.com was very eye-catching, and the May Day holiday coincided with a small bull market. Every time I opened Yunbi, I found that the price had risen. BTS had doubled again in those few days. I couldn't help it, so I bought it! Dig it! ( The future and concepts are all fake, only the surge can touch people's hearts )

Following the ZEC mining tutorial, I started mining with my own computer. The noise was very loud, so I could only mine during the day when I was working. A graphics card could mine very slowly. At that time, the computing power could mine about 1 ZEC per month, and one ZEC was worth 600 yuan. 500 yuan a month was not very attractive. Do you think this is metaphysics? After I started buying coins, the Mavericks came to a sudden halt and then began to fall sideways. Am I the one who destroyed the environment? The real turning point was on May 17 (it should be this date). Around 9 o'clock that night, ZEC rose from 600 to about 2,000 in five minutes . Damn, awesome, what the hell is this? My three views were shattered by the skyrocketing ZEC. (Please forgive my lack of culture, I don't know how to describe it)

2.

Along with zec, the miners group was also going crazy. I just learned that there is a kind of mining machine called graphics card mining machine. People in the group assembled it by themselves, and then they found that using a single card for mining is too weak and cannot be called a mining machine. It is very simple to assemble a graphics card mining machine, cpuG3900, memory 4gb, SSD 60G, power supply Great Wall Julong 1250W, motherboard TB250 mining special version, and graphics cards need to buy 6 mid-to-high-end graphics cards. At that time, 6 cards RX480 and 6 cards 1060 were mainly popular, and then buy a few graphics card bridge cards. No monitor is needed. The above configuration can be said to be the standard configuration of graphics card mining machines at that time. Except that the graphics card is a little expensive, everything is kept simple, so the graphics card mining machines you see are all on the shelf like the picture below. Why are there 6 graphics cards? Because the motherboard at that time supports up to 6 cards, but later 12 cards were launched.

I quickly bought all the accessories for a mining machine, including the RX580 graphics card. A single graphics card cost 1,800 yuan, and 6 graphics cards cost 10,000 yuan, so the cost of the graphics card mining machine at that time was about 13,000 yuan. At that time, a graphics card mining machine could mine one eth and one eth600 in less than 10 days, and the static payback period was about five or six months. Everyone knows what happened later. It doesn’t take that long to get your investment back. I remember that the big miners in the mining group could get back millions of funds in one or two months , so I think the payback period of mining is very difficult to calculate, especially in bull and bear markets .

After the surge in ZEC, ETH also followed suit and rose from 600 to 2500. Apparently, I was not the only one who was frightened by these coins. Within two days, the graphics card rose from 1800 to 2000, 2000 to 2500, and then to nearly 3000. The most important thing is that the graphics cards on the market were completely out of stock. Graphics cards are a necessity for gamers and have a very sacred status in the hearts of gamers. I am also a computer hardware enthusiast and I really like the feeling of unboxing a new graphics card. I feel very excited when I touch the cold new graphics card. Graphics cards should be packed in an unbreakable box. When they reach the hands of gamers, they should be untouched like a virgin. If there are scratches on the gold finger, they must be returned. In the hands of miners, for convenience, graphics cards are not packed in boxes, but in a red plastic bag. There is no manual for accessories. They are compressed and placed in a rotten cardboard box. They are purchased in batches. In order to "print money", the mine boss drives a car to block the door to get the graphics card. I learned from the Taobao store’s customer service that graphics cards were out of stock nationwide, small dealers could no longer get the goods, and it was difficult to get a card online and offline, which made life difficult for the popular PUBG players at the time.

The emergence of a large number of graphics card mining machines means a surge in ETH computing power, which also means that each mining machine can mine less ETH. Fortunately, ETH has been rising higher and higher, reaching nearly 3,000. The payback period from 6 months has been reduced to 1 month. Many people, whether speculating in cryptocurrencies or not, have joined the mining army. Everyone has a consensus that this is not mining, but "printing money."

3.

Bitcoin mining machines use ASIC chips. After you buy them home, configure them, and plug them in, they can work. In comparison, graphics card mining machines are really troublesome.

It takes up space, is inconvenient to move, makes loud noises (smaller than Bitcoin mining machines), consumes a lot of electricity (the power of one machine is estimated to be around 1000W), and is easily exposed to dust. If you don’t find a special place to put it, it will be quite a headache.

At that time, there were two ways to buy a graphics card mining machine. One was to buy one assembled by others, and the other was to buy accessories and assemble it yourself. The assembly process is often accompanied by various strange problems. The most important thing is that you don’t know where the problem is. Maybe a certain line is not plugged in tightly, or maybe there is a problem with an accessory. Unfortunately, I just bought a bad graphics card. I didn’t know at the time. In order to test what went wrong, I tested it for several days and was very frustrated. In fact, buying someone else’s assembly is not much better, because assembly is just like putting the accessories together, just like paper paste, problems may occur at any time. If you don’t have some hands-on skills, it is still very difficult .

After the hardware is done, the next thing is the software. Ordinary computers only have one graphics card, so there are fewer problems. However, the mining machine has 6 graphics cards, so all kinds of inexplicable problems arise. The most common problem is that it cannot be recognized. When 6 cards are plugged in, only one is recognized, or the recognition is incomplete. You don’t know whether it is the motherboard, the adapter card, the graphics card, or the driver. Every time there is a problem, you have to test it for at least two or three hours. It was summer at the time, and the mining machine couldn’t work. I was anxious and irritated, but I couldn’t find the problem. Now I feel desperate when I think about it. So I hated to see the mining machine later, and I stopped it for a long time without taking care of it.

The graphics card can change the core parameters. RX580 is an A card. You can reduce power consumption and improve computing power by flashing the BIOS and changing the memory timing. After flashing the BIOS, the computing power can be increased by about 10%-20%. Of course, this good thing should be done, but this job has a threshold. First of all, there are risks. If you make a mistake, the graphics card will become a brick. Secondly, most people don’t know how to flash it. Different graphics card models and different graphics card manufacturers are different. So at that time, there was a profession in the major miner groups that specialized in flashing the BIOS for others remotely. Don’t underestimate this profession. Flashing a card is about 50-100. It can be said that it is easy to make a few hundred or even one or two thousand a day. It has to be said that mining feeds many people and saves the stock prices of AMD and Nvidia.

Therefore, mining with graphics cards is a job that requires both skills and strength, as well as patience. Because of my love for hardware and my enthusiasm for cryptocurrency trading, I once thought that being a full-time miner would be great.

That’s all about the start of graphics card mining machines. I will continue to talk about the rest in the next article.

Author: longbtc
Link: https://www.jianshu.com/p/70562ce9f15a
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