If you want to mine ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies such as ether, you need a motherboard that supports multiple GPUs, i.e. has multiple PCI slots. You should also be aware that some motheboard-CPU combinations are less efficient than others, so learn about their compatibility.

Begginer's Guide on Mining Hardware

Have a good day!

Hi, guys!

Today we at Finrazor want to talk to you about prediction markets.

What do you know about them? Have you tried trading on a prediction-market platform? What has your experience been like?

A short info for the uninitiated:

A prediction market is a collection of people speculating on the outcomes of events. A prediction market is an exchange where people trade contracts for future events. These events may include sales of a company, stock price fluctuations, elections, weather changes, or any other event where the result can be objectively verified. The main purposes of prediction markets are to aggregate public opinion and to estimate the probability of an event.

Learn more about prediction markets here: https://finrazor.com/news/what-are-prediction-markets

Don't shy away, join discussion!

Hey, hugeblack!

We appreciate you taking the time to write feedback. It really helps us out a ton!
We will make sure your suggestions are taken into account next time!
I will inform you when the next TA comes out.

Thanks for sharing your forecast, too. Difference of opinion helps others form theirs.

Hope you’re having a good day!

Hey guys!

Here is our TA of today’s market! Feedback is appreciated.

For more, visit our website.

BTC/USDT

Bitcoin price is trending below a short-term descending trend line as it hovers at the long-term floor.
Traders are likely waiting for the next catalysts to decide which direction the breakout could take.
Technical indicators appear to be suggesting a slowdown in bullish momentum soon.
Bitcoin price is still trending lower on the short-term time frame but buyers are defending the long-term floor.

ETH/USDT

ETH price recovered a few points after trading as low as $304.26 against the US Dollar.
There is a major bearish trend line in place with resistance at $320 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD.
The pair is struggling to move above the $320 and $328 resistance levels, and it remains at a risk below $310.
Ethereum price remains in a downtrend against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD must clear the $320 and $330 resistance levels to recover towards $355.

XRP/USDT

Ripple price extended losses and traded below the $0.3000 support level against the US dollar, but it broke trend’s line and went to resistance at 0.31
Many doubts, that XRP would be able to pass R1 line and go uptrend.
The pair remains at a risk of more losses below the $0.2900 and $0.2800 support levels in the near term.
Ripple price is struggling to rebound against the US Dollar and Bitcoin. XRP/USDT could extend declines below $0.28.

BCH/USDT

Bitcoin cash price started consolidating losses after trading to the $540 low against the US Dollar.
There is a brake of a bearish trend line formed with resistance at $580 on the hourly chart of the BCH/USD pair .
The pair might continue to struggle to break the $590 and $600 resistance levels in the near term.
Bitcoin cash price is under pressure below $600 against the US Dollar. BCH/USD may perhaps attempt a recovery if buyers push the price above $590 and 100 SMA.

EOS/USDT

EOS price declined heavily and broke the $6.50 and $6.00 support levels against the US Dollar.
There is a short-term breakout pattern forming with resistance near $5.15 on the 2-hours chart of the EOS/USD pair.
The pair may perhaps break the $5.00 support if it fails to move past the $5.15 and $5.45 resistances.
EOS price fell sharply and broke the $6.00 support against the US Dollar. EOS/USD is currently struggling to hold the $5.00 support and it remains at risk of more losses.

Thanks for interest! Have a good day!

Thanks a lot for your feedback!
We'll make sure that we improve our formula to make it more accurate.

Are you a miner yourself?

Binance continues to increase its influence on the crypto market.

What is it working for you?
Any complaints?

Interesting article about how it can sometimes be dangerous to do a good thing.

What do you think about it?

Props to Cory!

Hi guys!

If you are considering mining, you should know about mining pools and what payment structures they use.
Here are short descriptions on the most common ones.
If you have any questions, go ahead!

Pay-per-Share
The most common payout structure. A PPS model keeps count of all your shares and pays a certain fixed amount for each. You can withdraw your money at any time because your payout is taken from the pool’s existing balance. Examples: Nicehash, AntPool, LitecoinPool, SparkPool, and many more.

Full Pay-per-Share
FPPS model is similar to PPS with the exception that it includes a portion of transaction fees into your payout, whereas PPS-based mining pools leave fees to themselves. FPPS was invented by BTC.com, and there are not many pools that use this model.

Proportional
You are rewarded at the end of a mining round (when a block is found) based on how many shares you contributed to finding that individual block. All shares are equal, and it does not matter whether your share was the one that solved the block. Example: NoobPool

Pay-per-Last-N-Shares
PPLNS is similar to Proportional model but your reward is based on the fixed number N of your last shares without any regard for round boundaries. PPLNS is quite common and used in SparkPool, DynastyCoin Mining Pool, ViaBTC, KanoPool.

Score system
Slush Pool keeps score of all shares during a mining round. Early shares are more valuable than those submitted late in the round. This prevents ‘pool hopping’, a cheating strategy where miners switch pools within a round.

Learn more about crypto here!

Thanks for interest, have a nice day!

Hi there!

Today we at Finrazor are bringing you a guide to calculating mining profitability.

Feel free to leave any feedback. If you have questions, ask away, and I promise to help you.
If you want to learn more, visit this page for more educational articles for newbies.

FORMULA

Expressed in the simplest form, your mining profitability equation looks like this:

I - B = P,

where I stands for income you make, the value of the number of coins you mine each month, B — electricity bills, money you spend on electricity, P — profit, money you are left with at the end of the month. You can figure out approximate earnings beforehand by going to online mining calculators, where you can choose your GPU model, enter your electricity rate, and the cryptocurrency you mine.

HARDWARE EXPENSES

You will have to make sure your equipment pays for itself in a reasonable amount of time — usually three months. As a miner, you would usually use either GPUs or ASICs. Graphics cards are common for mining ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Monero.

A GPU-powered mining rig implies that you will have to spend extra money on additional hardware, such as PSUs, Power Supply Units. PSUs differ in the watts they supply and draw. If a PSU claims to supply 800W and is 80% efficient, it would actually draw 1000W from your wall. Don’t cheap out on PSUs and buy those with higher efficiency. GPUs also generate a lot of heat, so unless you want to risk your house setting on fire, you will have to have a good cooling system, which is another item on your expenses list.

ASICs are usually easier to manage as they come in their own cases with their own fans for cooling. You may want to buy a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) so that you can go on mining your precious coins without downtime, even if power shuts down. Although this is true for both GPU and ASIC rigs. Among the most popular ASICs are:

• Antminer S9, 14 TH/s, $3k;
• Dragonmint 16T, 16 TH/s, $2.7k;
• Antminer R4, 8.6 TH/s, $1k.

ELECTRICITY BILLS

After you’ve returned back the money you had spent on your rig, you start making the actual profit off of it. Electricity costs can vary dramatically depending on where you live. In EU, due to their ecological policies, prices for electricity are much higher than, for example, in China, where coal is cheap. Due to this, mining is big in China, and Chinese miners provide the largest portion of total hashrate in many cryptocurrencies. Here is an incomplete list of how much electricity costs in some countries:

• China, 4 US cents/KWh;
• Germany, 35 US cents/KWh;
• Japan, 22 US cents/KWh;
• Russia, 2.4-14 US cents/KWh;
• South Africa, 15 US cents/KWh;
• UK, 22 US cents/KWh;
• United States, 8-17 US cents/KWh.

To calculate the precise amount of money you spend on mining, compare your bills from before you started mining and after, and find the difference.

ADDITIONAL COSTS

If you are pool-mining, which is most likely, you should also take into account the pool fees. Some pools do not have fees at all, other can charge you up to 4% of your earnings. Read their instructions carefully and learn about their reward structures, before joining a pool. Here is the list of the biggest mining pools:

• Antpool, 0-2.5% fees depending on the type of membership;
• Slush Pool, 2% fee;
• F2Pool, 4% fee;
• BTCC Pool, 2% fee;
• BW Pool, 1% fee.

Mining equipment is mostly manufactured in the US, so this means that you will have to spend some money on shipping, which is not very cheap, considering that ASICs can be heavy big machines. Some of your money will go to various accessories, such as cables, adapters, and so on.

There are plenty of useful websites that will do all the math for you.

Crypto Compare. An easy calculator. Choose the cryptocurrency, enter your hashrate, wattage, and power cost, and it will give you your daily average profit.
What To Mine is one of the most useful calculators online. You choose your GPU model, and the site will calculate the power draw, hashrate, profit, and even recommend the most profitable cryptocurrency for your hardware.
NiceHash Calculator is an easy straightforward calculator that lets you choose your GPU model and country, and gives you the average daily, weekly, and monthly profits.
MyCryptoBuddy is another good calculator, which accounts for the average difficulty increase each month;
Coin Warz is an Ethereum mining profits calculator that allows you to put your hardware cost in calculations.

Thanks for your interest! Have a good day!

You are what you eat, and you ought to know thyself

On a serious note, I do sometimes wonder where the patty in my burger came from.
It could be nice to know.

Blockchains can use oracles to record data onto the blockchain automatically. For example, blockchains can keep track of the temperature at which food products are stored and record the data onto the blockchain. And since blockchains are untamperable, they provide transparency.

Hi guys!
We at Finrazor have prepared a beginner's guide for choosing mining hardware.
Feel free to leave your feedback, suggestions, further questions, or corrections down in the replies.

Mining is not the easiest way of making money in crypto. If you are not a tech-minded person and do not have the time and effort to become one, you better off hodling or day-trading. You can also find an appropriate application for your professional skills, such as web design, community management, social media marketing, translation, and many others that the crypto space may demand. However, if you see yourself as a miner, especially the one who makes their living off of it, you have to have all the know-hows of mining, particularly hardware management.


FACTORS

When choosing your hardware, you must keep in mind two criteria: hashrate and energy consumption. Your hashrate directly affects your earnings: the larger a portion of a pool’s hashrate you provide, the more you earn. However, with great hashrate comes great energy consumption. So you must make sure that you are making more than you are paying for electricity. There is a lot of mining profitability calculators available online. However, they do not account for two important factors:

Growing difficulty of mining. As the network grows, your hardware becomes less and less efficient, because mining is designed to become progressively harder in order to maintain the same block time.
Price appreciation of a cryptocurrency. Mining a certain coin may not bring as much money to cover your bills now. But if you are confident in the project’s success, their coin may go up in price in future, and you will have your eventual returns.

HARDWARE CHOICES

There are three types of hardware you can choose from to get into mining:

• GPU
• FPGA
• ASIC

GPU mining

Graphics Processing Units, or graphics cards, are used by your computer to process all the polygons in your games. This is done by making thousands of calculations per second, which is coincidentally the same what mining requires your computer to do. GPU mining is, arguably, the most common and reliable way of mining altcoins, such as Ethereum and other ASIC-resistant cryptocurrencies. With GPUs, you can always switch to a more profitable coin to mine. This grants you that flexibility other mining hardware cannot.

GPU mining is also an optimal choice for beginners and those who want only to try mining out. A GPU-powered mining rig is not as much a commitment as an ASIC miner. If you decided that mining is not for you, you can sell your graphics cards to return a significant portion of the money you have spent on them. Your GPUs will not make you wait for too long to find themselves a new owner. GPUs are and always have been in great demand.

Two biggest GPU manufacturers are ATI (AMD) and Nvidia. ATI graphics cards are much more powerful with their high-end models offering up to 2.5 GH/s, while the Nvidia’s biggest Tesla S2070 — around 750 MH/s. For more information about specific hardware, click here.

Setting up a GPU mining rig can be a tricky job. You will have to pay close attention to choosing the accompanying hardware. If you are going big and aiming for a complete eight-GPU mining rig, you must get yourself an eight-slot motherboard, which, in turn, must be compatible with your CPU. Another issues you may come across are drivers and other necessary software to support your rig. Fortunately, there is a ton of help online, and half an hour of googling should do it.

FPGA mining

A Field Programmable Gate Array is a piece of hardware that can be configured to do a certain task. Mining companies buy these chips and program them to do mining and put them into their own equipment. Though FPGA mining is not very popular, it has its own upsides. FPGAs are more moderate in terms of energy consumption than GPUs. They offer about 750 MH/s, which is on-par with GPU mining standards. FPGAs are half-way between GPUs and ASICs: they do not consume as much energy as GPUs and, at the same time, they do not offer as high a hashrate as ASICs.

ASIC mining

Bitcoin is largely an ASIC-mined cryptocurrency. An Application-Specific Integrated Circuit is designed to find solutions for a specific hashing algorithm, for example, Bitcoin’s double SHA-256. If you want to join the bitcoin miners, you have to have an ASIC miner. Otherwise, you will see little to no return whatsoever.

ASICs are the superior hardware when it comes to mining, as they offer up to 20 TH/s (e.g. Yesminer M20) and consume much less energy than GPUs. An ASIC mining rig is far easier to set up compared to a GPU-powered one. Most ASIC companies deliver pre-configured hardware with all the software already installed. Some of them come with a ready-made wallet. All you are going to have to do is to plug power and Ethernet cables. Go here, if want to learn about a specific ASIC.

Though ASICs may seem like a go-to option in mining, it is far from being true. If you can get hold of a new high-end ASIC from the first batch, it may pay for itself in a matter of weeks. However, you will not be the only one with the new ASIC. As more miners acquire their new ASICS, the total hashrate will see a significant spike, and the mining difficulty will increase. This makes it so that ASICs are becoming rapidly obsolete. The most powerful ASIC right now may not remain so in just three months. This is a very important point you should consider because ASICs can cost up to $10k and they have a terrible resale value. Do an extensive research and consider mining hardware as an investment, and investing more than you can afford to lose is never a good idea.

If you like this kind of content, hop over to this page for more educational newbie-friendly articles on crypto.

Thanks for your interest, and have a good day!

A lot of food giants explore how to apply blockchain technology to their food supply chains. Some people use blockchain just as a PR and a tribute to modern fashion on technology, and someone really uses the developments. But is it so necessary for the food industry?
What are your opinions on this matter?

If you are out of the loop, check out this article.

Hi guys!

Robert Kiyosaki says, 'I think the dollar is toast because Gold and Silver and cyber currency are going to take it out'.

How likely it is that it will be true?
How can this affect crypto, specifically the price of Bitcoin?

Thank for you opinions!

I completely agree with you that there is a lot of scam and fraud in cloud mining.
This article is descriptive in nature and should not be treated as an investment advice.
We do not encourage engaging in cloud mining.
The article aims to give a simple explanation of what cloud mining is.

Hi there, coinhunter2050.

A cryptocurrency is a digital decentralized currency. Cryptocurrencies enable quick and cheap transactions to anyone all over the world. No one controls this money, and new money is generated collectively by the network.
Cryptocurrencies are possible to blockchain technology, a way to record and store data by collective agreement.

You can earn money in crypto. You can buy cryptocurrencies and wait til their prices grows. You can invest into mining hardware and earn coins by giving your computing power to the network. You can also day-trade by speculating on the prices of cryptocurrencies.

We at Finrazor prepared a series of educational articles so newbies like yourself can learn about blockchain.
Hope over and start reading!

Follow our news feed to stay up to date!

Good luck!

Hi, Sohailul!

It depends on whether developers decide to get it listed on an exchange.

The price at which you will able to sell your tokens depends on the success of the project.

Hi, darkie199!

It is only inspiring that you are committed to learning about blockchain.

I understand how hard it can be to learn about such complex topics, as cryptography, consensus algorithms, and mining. I've been there.
I know the amount of information available online is overwhelming.

This is why we at Finrazor have prepared a series of educational articles available at: https://finrazor.com/news/category/essential.

You can start at the very beginning with What is Bitcoin,
and then go on to learn about how bitcoin transaction work
and what soft and hard forks are.

As for books, I would recommend Melanie Swan's Blockchain: A Blueprint for a New Economy. It helped a lot when I was starting out.

Thank you for your interest! Have a good day!

It is another big step in bitcoin adoption. Many are saying that this will make bitcoin ETF redundant.
If you are out of loop, read this article to get you up to date:
https://finrazor.com/news/bombshell-message-the-first-large-scale-regulated-exchange-for-institutional-investors

Hopefully, things will turn out better than they were after bitcoin futures were intoduced.

Cloud mining, as an alternative to traditional mining, lets you use shared processing power from remote data centers. There are generally three cloud mining options you can choose from:

• Leasing a physical mining farm from a provider;
• Creating a general-purpose Virtual Private Server, which you can then configure to be your mining farm by installing necessary software;
• Buying a cloud mining contract, which is the easiest and most popular thing among cloud-mining investors.

What is a cloud mining contract?

By purchasing a cloud mining contract you essentially rent a portion of the mining company’s hashrate, which is usually measured in gigahashes per second (GH/s; one billion hashes per second). During the period of the contract, you will be receiving a percentage of the company’s profits from mining. Your percentage is based on how large of a portion of the company’s total hashrate you own.

What should I know?

Prices for cloud mining contracts vary depending on cryptocurrencies and, of course, on their providers. Bitcoin contracts are usually the cheapest at only about $0.6 for a 10 GH/s year contract. Scrypt-based cryptocurrency (such as Litecoin) contracts cost considerably higher with around $2 for a 1 MH/s year deal (one million megahashes per second).

The total bitcoin hashrate is, at time of writing, 44 million TH/s (terahashes, trillion hashes). This means that a 10 GH/s bitcoin contract is not even close to making any reasonable profit. You might have to invest into cloud mining contracts as much as you would spend on a complete mining rig, and still expect lower returns because cloud mining is offered as a service, which usually entails costs for the provider.

Cloud mining is also a good investment if electricity costs are high in your country. Owning a mining contract lets you bypass this problem, as all the hardware maintenance costs reside on the provider’s shoulders.

How to choose a provider?

On the other hand, cloud mining implies certain risks, as you, as a customer of a cloud mining service, do not have access to the information about the actual profits of the company. For the same reason, you cannot calculate the profitability of a mining contract for a certain amount of hash power. This is why you should be most careful about choosing your cloud mining provider: pick an already established company with a good history and read their user feedback on forums. Some of the widely known and reliable cloud mining companies include Hashflare and Genesis Mining, though you should only act at your own risk.

For more beginner-friendly explanations, visit https://finrazor.com/news/category/essential.

If you still have questions, feel free to ask them