Bitcoin and crptocurrency markets

[hurricane matt]

IBM power 8 or 9 too. I'm talking integrated hw and software stack not a bewolf white box clustering

[habanerojooz]

I've considered mining on a small personal scale. Custom build a rack, maybe 6- 8 - GPUs, architect it so that it can mine several types of altcoins, etc. I am an IT professional. I've seen the videos on the builds and I've seen the components. This would be simple.

Everybody is aware of the power draw. I can deal with that. What I'm learning is that a rack of GPUs and cooling fans makes a lot of noise and gives off a fair amount of heat. Obviously, the bigger your mining farm, the greater these two things go up. Know that the harder you're running those GPU's, the hotter they get, the more cooling you need to provide, and the more power they draw.

I read a story about a mining operation that was setup in a house somewhere in surburbia. They were drawing so much power that the local authorities were alerted and suspicion was raised that it was a local grow house. Authorities raided the place and expected a large scale pot farm with guns and crooks. Instead, they found a bitcoin mining operation and probably found red bull and geeks.

It sounds like you're strategizing and visioning more on the commercial scale.

With your background, you probably know the strategy is to have operations in a cooler climate with cheap electricity and strong internet. The Scandinavia and Nordic countries are prime places. Closer to home, somewhere in the far NW of the US would be ideal IMO.

You made a comment earlier that made it seem as if you were pondering altcoin storage options after mining. Basically, there is hot and cold storage. Keep most things in cold. Transfer over to hot only what you need. Keep small amount in hot for operations. Rest stays in cold. Same general concept as in IT. Read up on the services on some of the larger online wallet services and see what is commercially being done. You'll get the picture and you'll be able to design the services or operation you're envisioning.

HW and operations is one thing. Then there are topics like mining pools, mining contracts, hash rates, algorithm difficulty, etc. Things one needs to know if they're going to be good at this stuff. There's more to this than just connecting a bunch of components together and turning them on. Configuration, tuning, and optimizing is extremely important in order maximize your profit margins and ROI.

Rambled a lot here. Send me a PM if you want to go further on anything. Like many, I'm still early in the learning curve but I'm happy to share what I know and learn from others.

[hurricane matt]

Well I wouldn't run it in a house. Colo like cyrusOne. At work I just installed 6 racks of CRAY XC system with broadwell ,KNL, and Kepler K80's. Penguin computing APU may be an option. Also ARM based system for low power too. If you were to do something like this you would need to scale it out way beyond some home brew system. All of the software would be opensource and deployment with xCAT on diskless nodes with centos or in cray case their CLE sles stack. MPI wise openmpi or mpich2. 150-500 K for a decent real system. Storage wise I'm sure you could get away with a small NetApp over 10gige or even 1gige since the mining isn't I/o bound like it is with seismic data so no I cards And a small Nexus 7K switch. Yeah this would be a lot to get in but something doable with a few of my hoc geek friends. Hmmmm

[hurricane matt]

And I have 10+ years benchmarking (STREAM , hpl, hpcc,linpacl,lapack) and acceptance testing.

[hurricane matt]

Habanerojoos 281-773-3266 if want to chat

[cman]

wow. what a horrible day/week/month. i believe i will sell when this hemorrhaging reverses.

[Wizness]

Originally Posted by cman

wow. what a horrible day/week/month. i believe i will sell when this hemorrhaging reverses.

I'm in for the long term. Gonna hold at least 2-3 years and see what happens. Never know.

[cman]

I'm all out of GBTC, bitcoin and ethereum. I am slightly positive at the end of the day. Bought and sold a few times.
I think you are right that a few years may be golden, but I was just playing short term on this and need to build my vacation house now. I probably could have done better if I'd have been less greedy.

[Mr. Breeze]

If you stay long.......hit the House of Pain button.

[cman]

What do you mean?