Monero XMR -- is anyone [H]ard mining?

Pocatello

DC Moderator and [H]ard DCOTM x6
Staff member
Joined
Jun 15, 2005
Messages
6,693
I feel dirty. I went to /Reddit to get some current information about mining Monero.

Seems like Monero mining was designed to be resistant to ASICs.

Is anyone here at the [H]orde mining XMR?

Lots of the folks at Reddit are mining with AMD Ryzen hardware. The faster the CPU and the faster the memory the better. Sounds [H]ard to me!
 
Last edited:
Oops! I meant XMR. I edited the title and post to reflect XMR.

I also read enough at /reddit to realize that no one is mining anything for profit. It is all about ideology or fun or the chance to purchase a lottery ticket anonymously. As I was advised here at [H] ... if I want to own some XMR I should go to the online exchange and purchase the crypto asset.

The other thing I learned in my online research is there are apps for your phone where you can find local people in your area that will sell crypto for cash. Due Diligence is your responsibility ... but you can purchase various crypto for cash with local sellers. This is mostly anonymous if you practice safe purchasing.
 
Pocatello , my mining XMR is through NiceHash so I'm not getting to keep it. However, you can also dual mine XMR with Biblepay now too. I've not ran the miner yet and it is still early on with its development but you could in theory get both for a higher profit. Let me know if you need help getting the biblepay wallet set up. In the guide section, I have a video for that portion. The miner on the other hand I have been waiting for feedback on it being at a point where making a video doesn't mean making another one in a week....

Also, from what I'm told, you need at least 2MB L3 cache per thread you mine on. If you run too many threads, you won't see any gain. So, just do the math and save your resources/electricity. Ryzens tend to do quite well because of that. And yes, the faster the RAM the better. If you run the Biblepay miner, you can also set up Proof of DC so that you can get a few extra BBP from running WCG on any extra CPU threads you have left over...
 
Yes. Running xmr mining here to miningpoolhub which autoconverts it to other types.

What info are you looking for?

It's profitable enough to cover power and then some.
 
I'm curious if any [H] are mining XMR and finding it worthwhile. Is it profitable or.... what? I can understand the ideology argument as well as the low-priced lottery ticket argument.

I want to end up holding the crypto assets so I don't plan to convert the coins to fiat USD to pay for my gear or my electricity.

But I am new to all of this and I would appreciate your thoughts on mining at home.
 
Here's my thoughts after playing around for a few months:

The Ryzen 3000 series is ideal for this as it has a large amount of cache. While mining, you're not pushing the CPU to it's absolute max peak (depending on your bios settings, PBO, etc.). I think my 3600 was averaging something like 80W and averaging $0.35-45 a day (Nicehash using XMRig). 80W x 24 hrs = ~2 KwH a day at whatever your electricity rate is (so maybe $0.25 a day to run?). So yes, it is profitable at some level, but not extremely profitable like in the old mining days.

Ryzen 2000 series is closer to break even. Intel is lose money territory due to the lack of cache.

Personally, I wouldn't go out and buy a mining farm to mine with. But I don't necessarily not mine with CPUs in the winter as a heat source.
 
I'm curious if any [H] are mining XMR and finding it worthwhile. Is it profitable or.... what? I can understand the ideology argument as well as the low-priced lottery ticket argument.

I want to end up holding the crypto assets so I don't plan to convert the coins to fiat USD to pay for my gear or my electricity.

But I am new to all of this and I would appreciate your thoughts on mining at home.

I don't think the argument is necessarily any different than any other argument for/against mining whatever coin with whatever equipment that there is. There's cycles of making it worthwhile based upon price as I'll outline generically -

1. In normal times, mining is usually marginally profitable on a variable basis and you'll run 1-2 years of an ROI on equipment (plus or minus, of course).
2. In rapid price escalation times, mining is wildly profitable on a variable basis and you'll have an ROI on equipment in the month to three range. If there's a hardware shortage of what you need to mine with during this time, it extends the time of huge profits at that point in time, but if hardware is readily available, the difficulty will adjust quickly to get you back to #1's state.
3. In price decline cases, the variable profit heads towards zero, ROI timeline becomes infinite, but miners stop mining because they don't want to mine and HODL. Over time, you'll arrive back at #1.

So, let's put this to use - I have a pair of e5 2698's running (20c/40t each) XMR mining yielding a hash rate of 15 kh/s. Based on today's price of XMR, that's worth 84 cents/day in revenue. Power costs at .08 kw/h assuming 250w (probably estimated low there) would be 48 cents/day, leaving my variable profit of 36 cents/day or $130 per year. You can do similar math with a 3950x/10980XE (10 kh/s), 1950x (7 kh/s) or any other CPU to see where that lands on a variable basis. Uniformly, at today's pricing and difficulty, you will never make your money back if you purchased hardware explicitly for mining. However, if you have it anyway, then go for it. If you want to HODL and shoot the moon to pay it back, then go for it.

Now we have the HODL vs not. Bitcoin folks that were mining 8 years ago were pulling in similar sorts of numbers to above, but 4 GPUs running would earn about 1BTC a day for a while. Back then, that was a similar profit level to what you see above (this was after the first spike to $30 when it returned to around $1-3). If you decided that the margin wasn't worth selling, but you have the GPUs anyway and don't mind the extra heat, you may have just kept mining and accumulating regardless of price, turning it into a lotto ticket. Now, if you go back and look at it - considering the equipment costs, what if they bought equipment + variable costs in bitcoin INSTEAD of mining? They'd certainly have a lot more today, but the cash outlay is much larger up front (whereas, on the variable side, you can move from coin to coin depending upon the return that day).

I suppose at the end of it, if you have the hardware and are curious, it's not going to hurt anything (except your air conditioning in the room you're mining in) to mine some and hold on to them. Best case, you sell them for multiple desks, mid case you sell them at a slight variable gain, worst case they're worth nothing.
 
To determine your potential mining rewards, you can use the Nicehash mining calculator which has CPUs as choices as well. Just plug in the device you are looking at, your electrical cost and look at the chart (not the big green amount) below.


If you use A/C, rough rule of thumb is A/C power usage is about 1/3 the electrical energy to remove heat generated. So if you are outputting 300w of heat, A/C unit will consume additional 100w to remove that heat. Computers power usage is virtually converted 100% into heat, yes some is converted into electromagnetic waves but is rather insignificant. So if you are using 1200w of power for your mining rig, 1/3 x 1200w = 400w additional for cooling -> 1600w. What I do to just make it simple is to add an additional 1/3 to the energy cost rate, for example my .12dollar/KWH and raise that to .16/KWH so the calculator automatically calculates my total electrical costs when using Rig + A/C unit.

I was mining previously with several Ryzen processors Monero but now it is just not worth the few extra dollars.
 
Back
Top