- Vic Laranja began mining cryptocurrencies after being blocked for over a year.
- He started by using his work PC and ran it overnight when he wasn’t using it.
- He finally built another GPU mining rig that mines Ethereum and rewards with BTC.
About a year after the blockade, Vic Laranja realized he was suffering from “Covid boredom.” He was working on social media content for marketing campaigns and wanted an additional hobby. So, in October 2021, he decided to try crypto mining from his home in Sarnia, a town in Ontario, Canada. He loves making things, so I thought spending time might be a fun project.
Cryptography It wasn’t new to him.He has consistently invested Bitcoin, EthereumWhen XRP Since April 2020. A year later, a cryptocurrency run in 2021 took place, prompting Laranja to sell all of his ethers, XRP, and most of his Bitcoin at record highs.
“I’ve made a pretty profitable move and have been reinvesting in it ever since,” Laranja said. “I wanted to create a dollar cost averaging machine that could use mining rigs to pay for electricity and hardware every day and convert it to cryptocurrencies. So it’s not as much as a source of income. More Investment automation means. ”
To Mining cipher, Laranja provided the power of computers to help maintain a network of blockchains or protocols.He and other miners do this to be cryptographically rewarded, but with the cost of the equipment and theirs Power consumption It is a source of controversy.
How he started
Laranja started with the equipment he already owns and a good technical knowledge base. As the founder of a digital marketing agency called Social Gravity, one of his main jobs was video editing. This meant he had a powerful gaming PC at hand. Gaming PCs are equipped with high quality graphics cards that can be used to mine different types of cryptography.
In addition, Laranja said she took a computer hardware class in high school, allowing teachers to disassemble the PC and allowing students to replace it. Those who finished early were able to play computer games with each other. From that class, Laranja learned about the basic features of a PC and how to build and diagnose problems in the first semester.
These skills will ultimately help him build a mining rig. However, his first approach was to mine a cipher called ravencoin (RVN) and test the water because he only needed to download the software. This meant that he could run the software overnight using his work computer when he didn’t need a desktop.
Ravencoin is a peer-to-peer blockchain based on the Bitcoin code fork. As of Monday, RVN was trading at about $ 0.05.
When he started, in October 2021, RVN was one of the most profitable coins to mine after Ethereum, depending on the transaction price.He felt his single
Graphics card
Ether mining cannot be processed. He told insiders that he followed an online tutorial and soon it was up and running.
He downloaded an open source software called NBminer via Github, but remembered that the profits were pretty low, about $ 1 a day. The only desktop he used was the AMD RX570 8GB graphics card. So he did it for only a few weeks.
Mining rig scaling
Laranja later learned that his friend was also mining RVN, but he was using three different mining rigs. So he wanted to try and scale.He first used recycled parts from an old PC, motherboard, RAM, and
Hard drive
.. They will be the bones of his rig.
“It’s just a computer with a variety of graphics cards,” Laranja said.
Other components he added include a power supply, a PCIe power extension cable to power the graphics card, and a PCIe splitter to connect more cards, both for less than $ 25. He also added card space to the motherboard and bought a riser for the GPU that can be retailed for about $ 40.
“I thought it would be fairly easy to spend a lot of money, especially if the market conditions and GPU prices are high,” Laranja said. “So I wanted to be profitable, have good things, and escape with as little spending as possible.”
The biggest challenge in building a GPU mining rig is the graphics card itself. They are in high demand and can be expensive and in short supply. A friend of Laranja advised me to get Nvidia’s RTX 3060 at a price close to retail. This is because they make a lot of money. It’s cheaper than the new 3090 model, but has better performance.
One of Laranja’s points is that the market is flooded with scalpers who arbitrage graphics cards by buying them from retailers and reselling them with large markup. To keep his profits, he had to find a card that wasn’t overpriced.
He spent two weeks as an online messaging seller and remembered that about 10 new cards were posted each day. However, about 90% of the people he sent messages to did not reply because they sold out quickly. The whole process, including searching and building the rig, took him about a month.
“That’s why all my cards are different because it was so difficult to get at the time,” Laranja said.
Purchase price
Below is the price he paid for his card in Canadian dollars. He relied on both eBay and Facebook marketplaces for purchases.
$ 360 for GeForce GTX 1060 6GB ($ 281)
$ 350 with GeForce GTX 1060 6GB ($ 273)
$ 400 with GeForce GTX 1660 6GB ($ 312 USD)
$ 840 for GeForce RTX 3060 12GB ($ 656)
$ 850 for GeForce RTX 3060 12GB ($ 664)
One obstacle he encountered was that both RTX 3060s had a write hash rate (LHR). This is the speed at which the block calculation is resolved. Nvidia has added the ability to make cards unattractive to miners to address the chip shortages caused by mining.
In response, Laranja downloaded open source software called T-Rex Miner from GitHub. A newer version of this code is the LHR unlocked version. I don’t think I’ve completely removed the card limit, but the hash rate per second (MH / s) has increased by about 10 MH / s per card, from about 22 MH / s to over 30 MH / s. I remembered.
Laranja estimates that he spent about $ 3,000, or about $ 2,343, to go all-in.
Learning curve
One of the biggest challenges in building a rig is not lifting the hardware. This can easily happen when the rig is pushed to maximum capacity and is running a large number of graphics cards 24/7.
One way to avoid hardware burnout is to ensure good air flow. Laranja hangs his cards on the rack and releases them. He also keeps the rig away from the wall, adding a simple PC fan from an old computer.
He puts it away from the wall and separates the cards from each other so they don’t overheat.
Victor Laranja
The second obstacle was learning how to overclock the card to maximize performance beyond what the manufacturer intended. This is done by changing certain variables in the mining software (T-REX for him). He returned to YouTube with guidance from his friends to understand it. The disadvantage of doing this is that the manufacturer’s warranty may be voided.
The mining pool was used by Laranja 2 minor You can pay with Ethereum, Bitcoin, or Nano. He chose Bitcoin because he didn’t want to pay for Ethereum and had never bought or used nano. Based on the moving averages for the last four months starting in December 2021, he received 0.01487789 BTC. That’s about $ 562 or $ 140.50 a month.
As for electricity charges, the monthly charges will change because the charges will change throughout the day depending on the amount used. It goes from about $ .08kW to about $ .17KW in Canadian dollars. He remembers that it comes somewhere between $ 30 and $ 50 CAD or $ 23 and $ 39 a month.
