The Joy of Mining

The emergence of scrypt-based coins, popularized by Litecoin, has made it profitable to again earn bitcoin on my dusted-off graphic card mining rigs. I am running three rigs with a total of six 5770 cards. The operating system is Ubuntu, I run cgminer 3.7.2 and achieve about 144 KHs per card. The conversion to bitcoin is handled automatically by the pool software which heuristically chooses among various exchange-traded crypto currency coins and mines a particular network until it becomes unprofitable to mine when compared to other candidate crypto currency coins. I use TradeMyBit as its operator posts frequently on the pool forum. It is an easy upgrade from the obsolete 5770 cards to expensive but currently in stock R9 280x cards. My first one is on its way - yay!

The coinwarz web site gives a great profit calculation of daily dollar profit on each ranked crypto currency coin given hashing power and price of power. When I input the figures for a single R9 280x card, 700 MHs and 250 watts respectively, the projected Revenue / Profit (per day) for my local power usage is projected to be $15.24 / $14.54 for Tagcoin at rank number one, and  $8.70 / $8.00 for Neocoin ranked five. The actual profit is lower, chiefly due to fees and the effects of periodic coin network switching that result in stale shares and rejects.

When bitcoin prices eventually explosively rally again as suggested by the logistic model trendline, it is very likely that the most-popular-at-the-time scrypt-based coins will exceed the price acceleration of bitcoin, i.e. have a higher beta. I look forward to manually selecting coins to mine from TMB at that time for postponed exchange into bitcoin.