Adventures in Mining | Volume 7

**This is the Shaky Markets Edition(tm)**

If you've been following me, you'll know I've got two mining rigs up and running:

They're setup in the office of my house like this:

With the price of BTC falling rather dramatically, I figured an update on profitability would be in order...

I already had a GTX 970, and I purchased 3 other cards off of Craigslist for mining, here's the results so far:

I've got about a 28% return on my investment approximately 5 weeks after purchasing the cards. Honestly, nowhere near what I was projecting in terms of an ROI. My projections were a total breakeven around week 8, which clearly won't happen at this point...

There are a couple factors that I think you can learn from when it comes to mining...

• Power outages, even subtle ones, reset a mining rig. I don't have an UPS attached to the system, and that's an investment I'll be making soon. Downtime kills ROI calculations
• Mining a specific altcoin hurts profits. In my case, switching back and forth from mining pure Monero to mining on NiceHash has hurt my overall profitability
• Unnecessarily transferring Bitcoin between wallets wastes huge percentages of money when you're dealing with these small amounts

Right now, I'm generating the equivalent of approx .0013 BTC/day or $2.50/day on NiceHash:

3 weeks ago, I was closer to $10/day! That's a massive decrease in a very short period of time, and makes reaching profitability much, much harder...

I've been investing my profits in Genesis Mining contracts, the wisdom of which I'm beginning to question.

 I'm at at 13% ROI on those contracts, and the payout are dropping rapidly, certainly in BTC payouts, but perhaps more importantly in nominal USD: 

USD are more important here, since if the amount of BTC generated in USD falls below the cost of power used, the contracts get cancelled...

All that said, I remain long term bullish on the market, and my overall view is this will ease the demand on GPUs, at least in the short term. I believe strongly in blockchain tech, and once supply is available, I plan on building a GPU mining rig from scratch. Worst case is it remains a fun hobby, best case, I make some (significant) money! Like I said in my first post (https://steemit.com/mining/@crachau/adventures-in-mining-1) I've missed out twice in crypto markets, and I don't intend on making that mistake a 3rd time.

Do you have any tips for more efficiently utilizing the hardware I have?

Don't forget to like, follow and resteem!

Happy Mining!