Diao Si's past of counterattack and wealth - earning 100,000 yuan in ten days by mining with graphics cards

On August 14, 2009, I wrote the following in my QQ space:

I always feel that warm things should be very old and yellowish, like ancient books treasured on the bookshelf, which still smell as good when opened. At the beginning of today, I didn't have as many thoughts as before. Instead, I often felt warm and peaceful in my heart, like a bakery that was busy and the bread was about to be baked, the whole room was filled with sweet fragrance, and I was sitting there.

These words are the most appropriate to describe the feeling I had just after writing the above article. After writing it, I sat aside, feeling the full warmth and sweet fragrance in the comments, and at the same time receiving sincere blessings. I think this is also the motivation that supports me in writing the second series of articles.

Looking back in time, I flipped through the photo wall in Synology PHOTO, and a flood of memories came flooding back. Mining machines and graphics cards are both relatively important parts in my history of struggle, so I think I have more complexes to express about graphics cards.

Part I: Ten Days and Ten Thousand Brotherhoods

However, when I started playing with Bitcoin, there was no high-profile Li Xiaolai, no ASIC mining machines, and not even a formal trading platform, let alone the various derivative industries we have today.

Back then, a loser like me opened up a small space at home and assembled a high-end graphics card that was too expensive to buy. I changed from one card to two cards and kept doing various things, mining coins, selling them, changing equipment, and mining again. At that time, there was no payback period, and I didn't expect such a huge change. I just thought "I can earn some pocket money without doing anything with the machine, which is great."

For individual miners, especially those who have started mining with graphics cards in the early days, graphics card mining machines are actually a hobby, just like women like all kinds of brand-name bags. When seeing interesting digital products, men can't help but be curious, not to mention that this is a digital product that can make money just by putting it away. There is a very interesting saying that explains the inner mentality of men liking electronic products and women liking clothes and bags: men like hard things, and women like soft things. Of course, the later professional mining machines are really pure gambling for profit purposes and have nothing to do with hobbies.

When it comes to AMD graphics cards, most people have the impression that they generate a lot of heat, consume a lot of power, are cost-effective, have a lot of mining cards, and have a high risk of holding them. Today, let's take a look at A cards. As for A cards, I have bought quite a few of them for mining, so I have a general understanding of A cards.

Timeline: August 2012

2012 was a very simple era of graphics card mining. This is a record of my Taobao transactions. Later, there were also quite a few offline transactions. Don’t think that all of them are mine. I only have a few. The rest were purchased by people I am familiar with. Because there is an electric mining farm nearby that can host graphics card mining machines, many friends entrusted me to purchase them and then put them in a nearby mine to mine Bitcoin.

What was the concept of a mining farm at that time? This was the concept. All were naked, with several graphics cards plugged into the motherboard, just left there. Each mining machine was connected to an Internet cable, and a computer was used to open TeamView for remote management. The noise of the graphics card, CPU, and power supply fan was accompanied by the high heat from the graphics card. They were in production day and night. At that time, the miner sometimes couldn't handle the graphics card and asked me to go over to debug it. Basically, I wanted to help if I could, because I knew that there was not much left after deducting the electricity bill. To put it bluntly, mining was a hard job at that time. Even though the miner of a graphics card mining farm didn't make much money, I debugged it for him for free, just as if I had made another friend. Mining at that time wasted huge electricity and human resources, and not only did it not make much money, but it also supported AMD's stock price at that time.

I almost forgot what the price was at that time. Later I found a friend's email and remembered that it was only 80-100 per BTC in early 2013.

However, as far as this old friend's email is concerned, his prediction is completely correct. If his bitcoins can be saved until now, he is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. However, it was not easy to maintain 10G computing power at that time. The computing power of an HD5850 reflected in the mining software CGMINER is about 325M. To maintain 10G computing power, 30 5850 cards are needed. Don't underestimate 30 5850 cards. The power consumption of one card is about 200W. 30 5850 cards plus the motherboard CPU consume at least 6000W per hour, which is 6 kWh. 24 hours is 144 kWh, and a month is 4320 kWh.

I remember that at that time, there were basically no A cards for sale in shopping malls. If there were any, there would be rich people who would pack them up to clear out the stock. So for A cards, many people would travel thousands of miles to the warehouse or factory to pick up the goods. The larger A card agents were basically very arrogant and would ignore you if you didn’t have a good relationship with them. It was hard to imagine that you would go to a so-called Sapphire provincial agent to buy graphics cards, and you would have to treat him to a meal, and be responsible for KTV nightlife at night, and the price of the graphics card was whatever he said. . . . . . So people who wanted graphics cards for mining had no choice but to collect cards online, or collect graphics cards from enthusiasts, but I really didn’t catch up with the wave of graphics card mining for LTC.

May 2013

My neighbor and I have invested in ASIC mining machines and have entered the high-speed accumulation stage

October 2013

At the end of 2013, my neighbor and I had basically decided to withdraw from the Bitcoin industry. Especially after buying a house, we wanted to focus on our family. With the lessons learned from the past, we decided to withdraw from the virtual currency group and chat about products and technologies with friends in the computer group when we had nothing to do.

One day, a co-founder of Yuban Miner, Helmet, called me and asked me if I knew what PTS BitShares was. I said I was basically going to fade out of the mining industry now, so why should I care about it? This friend was very honest and said that you should study whether there is a possibility of doing a wave, anyway, you should study how to mine. At that time, I talked about this matter with my little brother Jianwei in Shenzhen and the local miners. I said that it might be an opportunity like Bitcoin ASIC mining machine. You two have no house and no car, so you should study it appropriately and see if you can wait for an opportunity to turn things around, just like when I encountered Bitcoin ASIC mining machine.

Popular Science: BitShares was originally PTS, claiming to be a CPU mining platform, but later a tool for GPU mining was released, and we had already obtained it before the release of this tool software. That is to say, in theory, it is possible that the official team used graphics cards to mine from the beginning, competing with everyone using CPU mining. Everyone should know that the difference between GPU and CPU is not of the same magnitude, so in theory, it is possible that the official team holds a large amount or even most of PTS and it is very likely that all of them have been cashed out. Therefore, if Bitcoin must be said to be a technical scam, then BitShares is a pure Ponzi scheme. And the opportunity for me to get involved was 0 cost.

November 2013

On November 5, Jianwei called me and told me to quickly find a few computers to install the PTS wallet he sent to me in my mailbox, and immediately do not hesitate to start SOLO mining, but only CPU mining. I immediately called my neighbor Lao Zhao and asked him to gather all the computers together and wait for me to debug.

I had only two computers at home at the time, one I7 2600K and one I7 4930K, so after turning them both on, I immediately went to my neighbor Lao Zhao's house to help him run the program on his three I5 hosts to mine PTS.

I took pictures showing that: from November 5th to November 8th, I mined nearly 700 coins in three days, my neighbor Lao Zhao also mined 400 coins in three days, Jianwei actually rented an Internet cafe to mine PTS and mined about 8,000 coins, and the mining motherboard mined about 4,000 coins. In fact, there was no price reference for this thing at that time, so I just treated it as a warm-up entertainment and didn't put too much thought into it. Starting from November 9th, the difficulty increased greatly, and I found it very difficult to mine blocks solo. Originally, 50 PTS could be mined for one block, but it became 47.5 in just two days. In the following days, the world's supercomputing center intervened and opened a large mining pool. It was basically difficult to mine blocks, and I could only mine in other people's mining pools. Fortunately, someone started to collect PTS, from the initial 50 cents to 5 yuan and then to 10 yuan. After a few days, the miner called and said that he found someone to buy the mining program for the graphics card, so I could use the graphics card to mine and the efficiency would double. I said I didn't have a graphics card, so what was the use of a GTX570 and an HD5850? The miner said something that touched me: Come to my place and move a box of 290X to mine. It's considered as a loan to you. Return it when you don't need it.

I didn't hesitate and went straight to his place and brought back a box of brand new goods.

After I installed 5 cards on two hosts, I asked my neighbor Lao Zhao if he wanted the remaining 5 cards. The mining owner gave him a GPU mining program, which is faster than CPU. Lao Zhao said yes, so I went over to install and debug it for him.

Two days later, Lao Zhao came over with a box of HIS 280X and said, "How about... I'm drunk."

I said that I had no computers left to install graphics cards, and Lao Zhao said that I could just move two computers to his house, as he had only installed 8 high-end computers, all of which were I7 4930K, and install his graphics card as well. I said OK!

The newly-furnished house I just bought was turned into a mine house by the two of them just because of their politeness. . . . .

By November 16, my PTS wallet had received 1,058 PTS.

After the GPU mining PTS program was made public, I basically couldn’t mine anything. When I liquidated these PTS, I sold them in batches. I sold them at an average price of around 90 yuan, some of which were sold for more than 100 yuan. Some of them may have depreciated a bit after being exchanged for BTSx, but in total I made about 100,000 yuan. I was busy for ten days.

ending:

Jianwei rented out Internet cafes and university computer rooms to mine PTS, and eventually made a profit of about 3 million RMB. But it was a turnaround.

The mine owner was said to have made more than 800,000 yuan without liquidating the equipment.

My neighbor Lao Zhao is similar to me.

But the most powerful people beat our IQ in seconds. Some people rented all the cloud computing servers of Shanda at that time, and mined hundreds of thousands of PTS overnight, and really became rich overnight. So it is true that the virtual currency industry is a ruthless plunder of the wealth of other non-professional participants by the owners of technology and knowledge.

In fact, sometimes I feel that people get along with each other because of fate. If I hadn't introduced Jianwei to the PTS project, he wouldn't have reminded me to intervene at the critical moment; if I hadn't debugged the graphics card mining machine for the miner for free when I was in trouble, and asked him to intervene at the right time, I might not have had a graphics card and used GPU software in advance; if I hadn't asked my neighbor Lao Zhao to intervene in time and give him a graphics card, I might not have had a host and a graphics card for the later period. So people are really mutual, true brothers and true friendship, money is not the key, this mutual help friendship allowed me to achieve 100,000 in ten days. The money may not really be much, it is probably enough to buy the pile of GTX1080s on the cover of the article, but this friendship has kept us very close to this day, and we always take care of each other when we have projects.

Finally, I say again, don't get involved in this field. BitShares PTS reached its peak after exchanging BTSx, and also started a long journey of decline. During this period, it is possible that the development team did not have enough coins of its own, and also merged multiple currencies into BTS. In fact, it was also a disguised over-issuance, giving itself more coins, which also accelerated the collapse of people's confidence in it. So far, BitShares has been hovering at a low level and has now withdrawn from the top ten electronic currency circulation market value. But you can make a few more close friends. It is only a matter of time before you have three or five reliable friends to make a fortune, so a person's greatest wealth is still friends.

Here is a little off-topic: About mining cards

My advice is not to buy mining cards, but how do you distinguish mining cards?

The first is the model : mining cards are basically locked in the 5850 5870 5970 7850 7870 270X 280 280X 290 290X models due to computing power and cost-effectiveness. When buying second-hand graphics cards, you need to pay attention to whether they are mining cards. The later 380 380X and higher 3 series products are unlikely to have mining cards, because these are products released after the mining myth was shattered, and you can buy them with confidence.

The second is the back core :

The back PCB of this graphics card core has turned yellow, which is basically caused by the high voltage and high temperature of mining. Please stay away from this kind of graphics card.

Please note that the core on the back of the A card that has not been used for mining is not yellow.

Part II: Public version of the story

Section 1 WHY?

I have a serious fetish for public version graphics cards, no matter whether it is A card or N card, when I choose a card, I will choose the public version A card for mining, but it is not that good, the public version of A card is in high demand, plus the excitement of mining, it is even harder to find a public version; but for my own use, I will try my best to choose the public version N card.

Public version graphics card: A public version graphics card is a graphics card that is designed and produced in full accordance with the board PCB and cooling design solutions provided by the graphics card chip manufacturers (NVIDIA, AMD).

Non-public version graphics cards: The PCB design is inconsistent with the public version graphics card scheme, and the graphics card does not adopt the official recommended design. Note that all graphics cards that have slightly changed the public version design scheme are still non-public version graphics cards. Non-public version graphics cards are further divided into ordinary version, overclocked version, and reduced version (castrated version). As the name suggests, non-public version graphics cards have both good and bad characteristics compared to public version graphics cards with the same specifications and quality.

----From the great Baidu

The difference between my opinion and Baidu's is:

I think the public version graphics card is a complete industrial design product, including circuits, PCB, IC, chips, video memory, and heat dissipation, all of which have been considered and tested by Yuanchang Laboratory and released as a SAMPLE to explain the characteristics of the GPU.

So why do non-public versions exist?

1. Non-public shrunk version

Because CUT DOWN can generate huge profits and save costs, facing huge competitive pressure in the market, only castration can effectively reduce costs.

2. Non-public ordinary version and non-public high-frequency version

In fact, most of the graphics cards we see on the market are ordinary versions, not official versions. ASUS's Eagle Knight, MSI's GAMING, and HIS's ICEQ are all such products. The purpose of designing ordinary versions and non-official versions is not to castrate, but because the existence of the production lines of major manufacturers requires some solutions to control. For example, HIS's ICEQ or MSI's GAMING graphics card solutions, the supporting procurement of PCBs and ICs including radiators in this series is fixed, and the supplier has signed a long-term supply contract. Then all production supplies of this product series are perfect, and there will be no shortage of goods due to lack of IC or PCB. As long as an order is placed, it can be quickly produced.

However, this is not the case with public version cards. For each version of public version cards, the downstream manufacturers will not be informed in advance of which ICs I plan to use, which specifications of PCB I plan to design, and which radiator I customize. For example, there is a big difference between the public versions of GTX980 and GTX1080, and there is a big difference from the radiator to the materials. If a manufacturer tries to produce the public version of GTX980, then when he produces the public version of GTX1080, the production line will have to be rearranged and the procurement of materials will have to be re-signed with a supply contract. The losses caused by the market layout in the release time of the graphics card and the excessive consumption of manpower and material resources are enormous, which is not worth the loss for the graphics card manufacturers. Generally, after the core of the graphics card is determined, the downstream manufacturers begin to design their own series of products, which can ensure the highest release timeliness and the fastest production efficiency. With minor changes to the production line, the materials remain unchanged or slightly adjusted to mass-produce graphics cards.

But can the non-public version and high-frequency version achieve the stability of the public version of the graphics card? See how to interpret this question

1. If you just play games casually, the non-public version graphics card may be more suitable for color matching, more gorgeous appearance, quieter fan, and the frequency may be slightly higher than the public version graphics card. Then there is really not much difference.

2. If you want to do some professional purposes, such as GPU CUDA calculation or STREAM calculation (mining), the stability and compatibility of the public version of the graphics card will be revealed. Take mining as an example. For a simple CGMINER software, the number of non-public versions is definitely far greater than the number of public versions.

Mining overclocking: The public version card is the best choice, overclocking high frequency and pressure is simple and stable.

Operation stability: The design concept is different. The design of the public version card is not only for the civilian game market, but also takes into account the professional card market such as FIRL GL, QUADRO, TESLA and other professional graphics card markets. Therefore, their original product design takes into account various needs at the same time. You will see that a radiator and PCB prototype basically use up the corresponding GEFORCE, QUADRO, and TESLA production lines, and ensure maximum safety and reliability.

However, the fan of the non-official graphics card is different. I think anyone who mines will encounter it. The fan of this card is very quiet when used for gaming, but it will break down within two months if it is used at full speed. So MSI had no choice but to abandon the original REV1.0 solution and re-build the 280X with REV1.2 solution to put it on the market, and recycle the REV1.0 version of the card through RMA.

Is there any public version with terrible design?

The answer is yes, HD5970 is it.

To be honest, 5970 was once a flagship product. For graphics card mining machines, the highest configuration is 3 5970 cards. The computing power of a mining machine reaches more than 2G, but its high status was ruined by mining. This batch of cards requires water cooling under the high load of mining CGMINER. The resistors around the PLX bridge chip are easily burned out. If the original resistors cannot be replaced with substitutes, the card basically needs to be returned for replacement once a month.

Section 2 My Public Collection

I personally like NVIDIA and AMD's public version cards, including gaming cards and professional cards. Friends who have read my posts can see that if I don't get a satisfactory hardware, I will consciously make a computer installation show to show my joy, and of course public version graphics cards are no exception.

1. Public version AMD 270

CHIPHELL's once popular ITX card is now rarely seen.

2. NVIDIA QUADRO K2000

3. NVIDIA GT635

Weird Samsung OEM public version graphics card GT635

4. ASUS GTX TITAN with EVGA backplate

As the saying goes, graphics cards are easy to get, but backplates are hard to find. I searched for EVGA's TITAN backplate for 2 months and finally got it through overseas shopping on EBAY.

Installation SHOW

5. GIGABYTE GTX980

The first NVIDIA Titan Pi graphics card with its own backplate.

Installation SHOW

6. AMD 290X

7. NVIDIA TESLA K80 dual-core monster/QUADRO M4000

It ends without words, thanks for watching.