[Since June 16, 2017, end of the school year, the team has been disbanded]
I founded and led the [MMM] Misty Mountain Miners. It’s a rag-tag team of four three from the same hall in college trying to make money from mining.
Since move-in weekend for college, I began mining with my desktop computer (CPU: 5820K, GPU: Nvidia 970 and AMD 280). I knew that mining had very little bandwidth usage, so I wasn’t too afraid of getting banned from the school’s network. And even if I was caught, I would probably get a warning first before getting banned. After mining essentially 24/7 for 2 months, I have yet to be contacted by any IT representative, so I’m in the clear.
Now let’s take a step back because the story actually started the summer before school. One of the reasons I stopped mining is because the electricity cost was more than the amount I was earning. However, during the summer before college started, I knew that I was going to have access to “free” electricity, so I wanted to get back into the mining community. And golly lots have changed since 2014. Bitcoin is still there and not profitable. But now there’s Ethereum and that seems to be all the rage for GPU miners.
Call me a filthy casual, but I didn’t want to deal with the terminal code stuff, so I looked up GUI miners and found MinerGate and NiceHash. Both works on the principle of giving them your computing power and they mine the most profitable coin based on your hardware. I tried MinerGate and immediately uninstalled it; it was too confusing and I didn’t bother to learn all the options of it. NiceHash is much simpler and they paid out directly in Bitcoin.
Then I found SuchFlex. It uses the same principle as MinerGate and Nicehash, but it had the most aesthetically please GUI out of the three. SuchFlex was in beta and it unfortunately never got out of it-the devs had shut it down during the week of 11/23/2016.
“Although we have been successful in getting interested from owners of consumer devices to contribute their computing resources, we have not made as much progress in building the demand-side of our distributed computing marketplace.”
-SuchFlex
Fast forward to one month, about late October, into college and I had the idea of expanding my mining operation. Since my PC’s motherboard was an mATX, it could only fit two GPUs max and I already had two GPUs in it. So I thought about buying a cheap computer from Craigslist and adding a few GPUs in it to achieve ROI and make some profit while I still had access to free electricity. So, I began asking a few hallmates if they would be interested in such a venture. Several expressed interest and I didn’t get serious until one had asked for some calculations. That prompted me to draft up a spreadsheet of some initial calculations and some research in the computer cost.
Over the course of a week, I did much more research, such as the best-performing GPU for the cost (it’s the AMD 480) and the necessary parts needed. Even though I could’ve afforded the initial PC build (~$600), I wanted others to join with me, so that in the event of a loss, the loss would be distributed among several people. Even having more people on board would mean fewer earnings for myself, it would also mean that the risk is decreased. A bit selfish, but I made that point clear when I personally went up to people I wanted to work with and giving them my pitch.
After giving my pitches, showing people my calculations and spreadsheets, and explaining the basics of how Bitcoin works, I managed to get the interest of about 10 people out of a hall of about 50 people, several of which I didn’t bother to give my pitch because I wasn’t too close to them.
Due to the vastly higher number of people who were interested than I had originally thought – I was initially only looking for about 3-4 people to work with max – I had to modify the PC build. Because we had more people, that means we would also have a larger pool of capital to use, so I had to upgrade the PC build plan to make it worthwhile. So I looked into a 4-GPU setup, then a 6-GPU setup. Having a greater number of GPUs is important because the earnings are going to come from the GPU computing power when mining. At the end, I ended up with a $1,800 custom 6-GPU PC plan that I planned to build. Since I had built 4 PCs in the past (one for myself and three for my parent’s office), I was comfortable with the notion that I would be building a 6-GPU system. I then worked further trying to cut down costs by trying to find the best deals on the parts, which I managed to reduce the total cost down to ~$1,600 range. Not too bad, if I must say.
I held a few meetings, the first two was more of the initial plan, explaining the risks and rewards of the venture, and the calculations of it. When the third and final meeting to finalize the team and to talk about the final PC build plan, the meeting I made mandatory and was willing to kick anyone who didn’t show up, several people didn’t show up. Few didn’t show up because they didn’t see my message before the meeting reminding them of the meeting. Some who did show up decided to leave the group but stayed just to listen. Now that I think about it, those who did express interest might have done so just to see where it went and wasn’t planning to actually put down money. One didn’t want to come to the meeting because he was in the middle of a League of Legends match.
At the end, only three two other persons were committed, so I kicked everyone else out of the Facebook group and the Facebook group chat that I had created.
Fast forward to 11/26/2016, we have all the components either on hand or on order. I plan to start by December 1, which gives us less than a week to build the system.
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