Mining Experiment

Back in July 2017, when I bought my latest desktop, I figured I had enough GPU power to possibly make some money mining cryptocurrencies. With a little MSI GTX 1060, could I actually make money while my machine is just sitting "idle".

Choosing a Pool

Personally, I think Ethereum has the largest potential upside of any cryptocurrency at the moment, so I started there. I knew I needed to participate in a mining pool in the hopes of getting some return. I ended up choosing nanopool, the third largest $ETH pool, because they have an easy to use miner, a transparent operating model, and only charge a 1% pool fee.

via etherscan.io

Before I went on a roadtrip or went to bed, I would turn start the Claymore DuelMiner. I'm sure there are some system optimizations I could of done, but I was running the miner with stock settings, using the GTX 1060, running on linux mint. On average, I was mining about 8 hours per day.

Power Consumption

What is the cost of all this mining? I'm not going to take into account all the GPU wear and tear. I'm only going to focus on power consumption. I bought a P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor from Amazon to see what kind of watts of was pulling while I was mining.

My PC with the GTX 1060 running the claymore miner pulled about 0.151kw. In California, I pay $.1239/kWh. Considering nanopool's and my projections below. I'm making $0.081 per hour mining ETH and paying 0.151kw * $.1239/kWh = $0.0187/h. That is a per hour profit of $0.0623 or $1.49/day.

At the time of writing this, ETH was somewhere between $700 and $900.

Results

I found that my actual results were near identical to these projections.

Conclusions

At the current difficuly and price, mining ETH is definitly profitable.

However, as the price of ETH increases, the difficulty has gone up in proportionally.

It is unlikely that with my little box, this endeavor will remain profitable. So if the goal is to speculate on the price of ETH, just buy it.