Forget Ethereum I'm a Bitcoin miner now

Following our stint as Ethereum miners, and the diminishing returns for our work, we have moved our mining power to NiceHash in the pursuit of Bitcoin wealth.

We bought our mining rig in June, with its six Aorus Radeon RX 580 4GB cards kicking serious butt when we started.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon did not last long – and we dropped from making 3.3 Ethereum per month to 0.7 Ethereum per month. This was just over $200 at the time.

The table below details our revenue from mining Ethereum between June and September 2017.

Ethereum Payouts
Amount	Date	Duration
1 ETH	2017-06-07	N/A
1 ETH	2017-06-16	214.9 hours
1 ETH	2017-06-29	307.3 hours
1 ETH	2017-07-15	389.6 hours
1 ETH	2017-08-11	645.0 hours
1 ETH	2017-09-14	806.7 hours

On to NiceHash

As we are a resilient bunch, we were not going to dismantle our rig for spares and give up on cryptocurrency just yet.

Enter NiceHash, a crypto-mining marketplace that “connects sellers of hashing power with buyers of hashing power”.

What that means is we essentially get paid to connect our rig to the NiceHash system and mine cryptocurrency for people.

Payments to us are made in Bitcoin, but we do not mine Bitcoin – as GPU-based mining rigs are not effective on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Our mining rig, running the NiceHash software, cycles through algorithms that check which altcoins are profitable to mine and puts our machine to work.

Our rig then mines the selected altcoins, and we are paid in Bitcoin for the amount of mining we do.

Currently, our rig is mining through:

CryptoNight – Monero, Digital Note
DaggerHashimoto – Ethereum, Ethereum Classic
Equihash – Zcash
Lbry – Lbry
X11Gost – SIBCoin

Making money

Thanks to the recent rise in the price of Bitcoin and the efficiency of our rig through Nicehash, we are currently making – and getting paid out – between R750 to R800 per week in Bitcoin.

The NiceHash software can be downloaded via its site – with the application available for Nvidia and AMD mining rigs.

As our rig is full of AMD cards, we were directed to the NiceHash Miner Legacy page on GitHub.

Once accessing the “releases” tab and scrolling down to the latest stable version, users must download the NHML .zip file to their rig and open the file.

You are then required to open the NiceHash Miner .exe and install the application.

During our installation, Windows 10 on our rig repeatedly flagged the NiceHash Miner as malware and deleted the file in the unzipped folder.

To overcomes this, we created an exception in Windows Defender for NiceHash. Please research the issue before creating an exception in Defender, and we do not recommend doing this unless your are an experienced PC user.

Once the miner is installed, you enter the Bitcoin wallet address you want your earnings deposited into, let the application run benchmarks on all the algorithms available, and you are good to go.

Users are also able to monitor their rig’s performance online via the NiceHash “Find miner” page using their Bitcoin wallet address.

Until we find a more profitable use for the rig, here’s to happy NiceHash mining.

This is an opinion piece. Always conduct research before installing software and engaging in crypto-mining.