CPU mining is largely a waste of time and power. You'll be lucky to beat the price of electricity, let alone make enough to withdraw from your pool.

ETH 2.0 has been pushed back for so long that it's safe to assume that it will never happen and when it does happen, make the call to sell your cards

I'd argue that unless you got in on day one with pre-Chia HDD and SSD prices, you're out of luck.

Closed source miners generally perform better then Ethminer. You'd be surprised how much a 2% fee incentivizes these miner devs to make their miners as competitive as possible

Putting $10k into a rig right now would be the equivalent of lighting $10k on fire. Use that $10k to buy when crypto inevitably crashes again or wait until after a crash when things start picking up to mine some altcoin because by then ETH would be unmineable

You're 3-5 months too late, GPU prices are sky high and the bull run WILL come to an end soon. Even bear market earnings will end when ETH upgrades to 2.0, if that EIP everyone is worried about doesn't decimate earnings before then.

Those cards are ~8 years old, don't expect much on those other algos

I hope you're not mining on your employer's cards, they won't like that

Solar mining only really works if you have the solar work during the day and use grid power at night or use net metering. Lithium ion batteries are expensive, inverters are expensive, lead acid batteries are expensive. The easiest all in one solution would probably be a Tesla Powerwall and getting enough of those to keep a farm online at night would be pretty expensive

Maybe pool luck is playing a factor?

Those programs either do nothing for mining or are likely snake oil. Your friend is stroking his ego

Don't waste your time mining on a GPU, RandomX is made for CPUs.

Phone coins are almost always complete failures. Pi has been going for ~3 years, no real progress and talks of KYC (read - data harvesting).

Anyone can configure a miner, anyone who can't shouldn't be mining. Stick a dedicated miner OS on your rig that automatically starts or set up Windows to automatically login and put the miner in the startup folder.

You're using a proxy that hasn't been updated in 5 years and you're wondering why it doesn't work? Grab a popular maintained fork from Github or the forums and go from there

ASICs are famous for shipping late.

Your card doesn't have enough VRAM and the heat output would kill that poor laptop anyways

1. Yes.
2. Doesn't matter
3. Setting up Phoenix/TeamRed/LoL takes ~5 min if you can read basic instructions and copy and paste your wallet address.
4. Good luck finding any. Probably the 3060ti,3070,or 3080.

Don't blow up your risers by powering them with sata, don't skimp on power supplies, don't invest more then you're willing to lose, etc.

Let the ones that want to learn come and learn. Let the arrogant, stupid ones that buy in over MSRP and lose it all fail. Let them fail

Even if demand for GPUs dips due to a bear market, there's still a silicon shortage.