Don't know why all the negativity against HDD mining. Yes, it's taken a huge hit in profitability along with everything else in Crypto but development continues. Obviously with the bear market I probably wouldn't run out a spend thousands on a new system, but the goal of Chia at least has been for people wanting to participate, to be able to start with spare capacity they already have. I got in pretty early on Chia using a high end system I was planning to build anyway. Luckily I was able to recoup about a third of my total cost before the market tanked. I repurposed one of my 18TB drives I used for plots but continue to run the farmer solo. Today I managed to farm two blocks in one day with only 56 TiB of plots.

Once the market recovers as it always does, with ETH moving to POS and the focus on green mining, coins like Chia will be in a good position for the next bull run. The development team continues improvements to build the community. If i've learned anything from mining since 2014, it's that miners that are focused on the long term and are able to continue to mine during bear markets are the ones that do best.

I wouldn't buy any Pascal based Nvidia cards for mining Ethash.  Nvidia Pascal cards are no where near as efficient today on Ethash as the Polaris cards despite pulling over twice the power and running much hotter than AMD Polaris cards. Pascal 1070/1080/108Ti cards have the DAG file size limit bug where they lose hashrate every month from the growing DAG size. Nvidia never patched it, now even with a 1080Ti you might get ~45 MH/s instead of the 55 MH/s+ you originally got. AMD quickly developed the blockchain drivers to address the issue before it escalated and continues to implement it in their current drivers with compute mode. Many large mining farms that were started during the 2017 bull run still in operation are still using Polaris cards.

I agree. ETH PoW mining has remained profitable because it has utility and widespread adoption of it's smart contract platform which has evolved in to multiple entire market sectors generating fees for miners. All of the other GPU minable coins have for the most part, empty blockchains and nowhere near the transaction volume of ETH. Once ETH moves to PoS, the block subsidy of those other PoW coins will be distributed to an increasing number of miners jumping in and make it unprofitable except to the miners with the lowest overhead costs.

I very much doubt we will see another POW coin that can support the amount of GPU's and replace ETH's profitability. But I also believe that the millions of GPU's that are currently mining ETH are not just going to sit idly without some project looking to tap in to that enormous computational resource. If ETH's transition to POS is successful, instead of GPU's doing meaningless POW computations to secure a network it may evolve in to a distributed, decentralized network of on-demand computing power such as with the Golem Project and Render coin.

Runing your GPU fans at 100% will wear them out quickly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeK0G-70zIU

If you're having to run your GPU fans at 100% it means the ambient temperature is too high from poor ventilation causing the heat in the room or case to build up. You should focus on ventilating the heat from the room. For 1-2 open air rigs, cracking open a door and a window will help. For larger setups you will have to pull the hot air out of the room using a vent fan so that it gets replaced with cooler air from another room or the outside. Laying some large case fans on top blowing outward or using inexpensive box fans can also help remove the heat from around the cards so the GPU fans don't need to run as high.

Probably better off using a dual CPU server motherboard, but again it dosen't make sense to do so from scratch. You would be better off and accumulate more XMR by going with GPU rig to mine whatever is most profitable and then converting it to XMR.

There was a time around 2018 before the move to RandomX where you could mine XMR with GPU's profitably. Building a mining rig from scratch just to mine XMR is no longer feasible. If you have high end gaming rig or workstation, you are better off using the hardware you already have during idle times to mine a small amount.

Even with a AMD EPYC 7T83 64-Core Processor (highest hashrate according to https://xmrig.com/benchmark), and paying nothing for electricity, it would take about 8 years in a best case scenario to pay it back.

No PSU's are 100% efficient. A PSU's rated efficiency is based on how efficient the PSU is in transforming the AC power from the wall in to the DC power that your components can use. 80 Plus is an organization that tests and certifies PSU's for manufacturer's and groups them according to their efficiency.

https://youtu.be/P2rjxK9aZ24?t=643



Higher rated PSU's consume less power because they use better quality components that are more efficient. e.g. In converting a 500 watt load, a PSU rated at 90% efficiency will consume 555 W from the wall vs a PSU rated at 80% will consume 625 W from the wall for the same 500 W load. The rest is wasted in heat.

How efficient a power supply is also depends on the percentage of the rated load being outputted, with most PSUs running at maximum efficiency around 50% load. Better quality PSU's are able to keep their rated efficiency for a higher percentage of the maximum output. Better quality dual conversion PSU's also convert the entire energy into a 12V single rail and then uses VRM to generate 5V and 3.3V. The cheaper PSU type converts using different taps in the transformer for each voltage and use the 5V line to regulate the voltage, instead of the 12V line like the dual conversion models. In mining, that causes voltage instability from not loading the 5V line.

As far as for mining, I would stick to Gold or higher rated PSU's from EVGA, Superflower, Seasonic or Corsair. Another good less expensive option is using a server power supply, but those tend to be much louder and require using a breakout board.

They make riser without LED's:

The 009S risers only have a small 12V and 3.3V LED, not the obnoxious disco LEDS's the newer risers have.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/009s-Plus-Riser-6-Pin-Inferfaces_1600368709100.html?



The 006 risers have no LED's at all.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/6-Pin-Powered-PCI-E-PCI_1600356511417.html?

Sapphire Nitro+ RX580 8GB currently getting ~$1 per card a day before power. If you can get a RX580 for<$200, I would say it's a good card to hedge the uncertainty in the market and POW mining with since the ROI time frame is much shorter than comparable cards. Hashrate is 31-32 MH/s @110W at the wall for BIOS modded and undervolted cards.

Glad to hear you were able to mitigate the attack. All too often we only hear about the opposite result. For 2FA a hardware security key, like a Yubikey is your best option. Most large exchanges support using a Yubikey directly. If someone has access to your phone they could gain access to your software 2FA authentication account, but a Yubikey requires physical access to use, similar to a hardware wallet and is something a hacker or someocan't do. It also has an authenticator app to use 2FA on websites that don't support using security keys. The Yubico authenticator app requires the Yubikey to use, so it's safer than using 2FA apps like Google Authenticator or Authy.

It was still possible to solo mine BTC with a single high end CPU in early 2011.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C65B5yO9yVE&t=2604s

All the DeFi and NFT activity is causing high the high gas fees. The London fork making a base fee mandatory made the fees even worse. It won't get better until Layer 2 side chains and forks drive adoption away from ETH due to the high transaction costs. Maybe once ETH 2.0 sharding increases throughput ETH can be usable again.

On Ethermine you can set the maximum gas price limit for automatic or manual payouts. I set mine at 25 gwei and it usually gets confirmed around midnight UTC when the network base fee drops.

A security key like Yubikey is the safest 2FA option. Theoretically a hacker could gain access to your software 2FA authentication account, but a Yubikey requires physical access to use something a hacker can't do. It also has an authenticator app to use 2FA on websites that don't support using security keys. The Yubico authenticator app requires the Yubikey to use, so it's safer than using 2FA apps like Google Authenticator or Authy.

On Ethermine you can set the maximum gas price limit for automatic or manual payouts. I set mine at 25 gwei and it usually gets confirmed around midnight UTC when the network base fee drops.

Foe the vast majority of home miners, converting to BTC makes no sense. Ever since Wall Street got involved, ETC is a rich mans game designed to preserve wealth, not make gains. Too may good promising projects out there with better upside. Even if BTC goes to 1M, percentage wise it won't make you rich, unless you already are.

RX 500 series was an updated Polaris version if the RX 400 series released in spring 2017.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_RX_500_series

IMO, you are better off with the newly released RX6600 XT. Same hash rate as the RX 580 at 40% less power and a 3-year warranty vs a 4 year old GPU run hard in a Chinese warehouse. Those fans will probably be shot. Better resale with the newer cards and GPU availability has already started to improve and it will will improve more the closer the expected ETH POS merge date nears.

London fork was about limiting ETH inflation rate and MEV. The inclusion of a mandatory base fee resulted in an increase of overall gas prices. Before the fork I was able to get ERC20 transactions confirmed for <10 gwei during off peak hours. Now you will be lucky to get a confirmation at 20 gwei regardless. ETH network fees have limited is functionality and adoption for the growing DeFi sector by pricing many projects out of the market from fees. The situation will only improve once Layer 2 and forked chain adoption grows, as those chains will certainly have more to offer standard users.

Before the London fork, pools could set the gas cost at 1 gwei for payouts and mine to their own blocks to be able to offer free payouts. The new fee structure now requires a minimum base fee, which is set by the ETH protocol for every transaction. This no longer makes free payouts feasible.

The Matic network payouts use MATIC for gas feed and are possible if you use a wallet where you have the keys. The payout address is the same for both chains and you just need to import the wallet seed phrase in to Metamask to be able to access your coins on Polygon. Keep in mind payouts to Matic are made in WETH. If you want to  bridge back to ETH, you will have to pay a pretty high gas fee to the ETH network.

If you want to keep your payouts on ETH, you can set a lower gas fee limit from the default 40 gwei on Ethermine. I would also set a higher payout limit to keep the gas fees from eating in to your payouts.

For AMD cards, you need to set the kernel parameter to enable overlooking and voltage adjustments in Linux.

https://www.blog.albertbling.com/posts/how-to-mine-ethereum-on-linux

PhoenixMiner also needs to run as root to set overclock and power limit.

For Nvidia cards, you need to enable coolbits in the xorg.conf file for each card to allow overclocking and power limit. For overclocking a single card, you can run X-server as a standard user. To be able to set overclocks and power adjustments for multiple Nvidia cards, the X-server needs to run as root.

https://www.ethmining.net/posts/overclocking-nvidia-cards-on-ubuntu-for-ethereum-mining

The priority fee (miner tip) comes from users, so it's not inflationary. For the block to be deflationary to the ETH total supply, the base fee (also comes from users), which is the only part of the fees that is burned, must be higher than the 2 ETH block reward that comes from inflating the ETH total supply.

There is also ETH supply inflation created on the POS ETH beacon chain which is not being included in the total supply until the POW to POS merge. EIP 1559 basically just slows down the rate of inflation by burning the base fee portion of the network fees instead of rewarding it to miners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faf1M4fzv8I