Crypto-Currency - A Good Investment, or a Tiring Nightmare?

Bitcoin, Ether, BURST, STEEM, and more. Are they worth your time, your energy, your sleepless nights, and your hard-earned cash?

Technology has made it so that we can easily make money from home. I use many of these services like Upwork and Virtual Vocations to find jobs that I can work at from home. I love the opportunities that they afford me and wish that more companies offered their jobs this way. But many people treat Crypto as more of a job than what it truly is: An investment. I know how hard it may be to some people to see it as such, but there are costs involved with every Crypto-currency. Costs can vary based on what you may have laying about, but this list may give you a short idea of what some things to look forward to expending should you not have them.

• A old computer with many SATA ports (preferably 4 extra or more).  The old Dell OP(tiplex) 755can go for as cheap as only $80 with shipping included. However, a more powerful CPU would result in a higher hashing power, so we're looking more around $500.
• A few SATA III hard drives with at least 5TB space. This one is mostly for if you plan to do BURST mining, which at the time of the writing is the easiest solution for home-based mining without using dedicated ASIC miner. These can go from anywhere between $30-100 on the used market (each), but usually leans more towards the $100-250 range in the new market (again, for each one), although with more and more people mining, the prices may rise further.
• A couple powerful GPU's (AKA: Graphics Cards). While on the used market they can go for anywhere between $200-1,200 for one of these bad boys (or girls, they aren't sexist). The GPU market is also in flux due to more and more self-proclaimed "millionaires" mining Ether. New markets you are rarely able to find one in stock, or at a decent price. I'll choose a middle price for our GPU's for the total and say that each may cost around $500 (say for a GTX 1070, or an RX 580).

So after all of that we get an abomination that started with a decently powerful Xeon system (check example here) which runs around $400-450 and, this example, has 48GB of RAM, so you could have all your mining in virtual instances, should you choose. Further, I just clicked the first GTX 1070 that I could find (here) and if you multiply it by two it comes to around $1,000 (RX 580 here with about $200 in savings for both cards together). And then onto the hard drives, then you needn't look any further than White label drives. These are usually marked-down refurbished units from large companies, that sold their assets to smaller OEM's, who didn't necessarily "make it". So 4 of these 5TB drives (the max for the backplane that's included with the dual-Xeon system linked above) would cost a staggering $600! Plus throw in a small SSD for our boot and our program drive (so we can have all our software on that and the other drives can be strictly for mining) and our whole system will cost an estimated $2,125 for the Nvidia system (which could use CUDA to assist in GPU mining) or $1,925 for the AMD RX system.

So as you can tell, you are spending a LOT for a starter system. Software like MultiMiner and Miner's Gate are great for beginners and I highly recommend to use them if you don't want to get too in-depth with code. I would, however, recommend you use a Linux flavor for your mining OS because of the lower impact on storage and RAM. Further, another concern that many have is the noise, heat generated, and the electricity that it pulls! As a final concern is the impact on your Internet! Every request and packet that is sent/received takes a toll on the Internet and could mean the difference of 4K Netflix and 720p Netflix.

Of course, you could just put that money towards cloud mining! There are several companies that I personally use and many swear by them. For the "tried and true" you have Genesis Mining (use offer code "z70qNG" (without quotes) for 3% off your purchase) which is one of the first companies to offer cloud mining. Then you have the "modern kid on the block" Hashflare, who offers the ability to change how your mining power is used. Finally you have the aforementioned Miner's Gate who I would actually call an "identity crisis" simply because they have no idea if they want to be a client or a service.

So how much does $700 buy you? Well.. From any of the services linked above you will most likely get half of that back in about three months, but you are usually limited to one type of mining, weather that be Ether, X11, Scrypt, etc.I personally do a mixture of home-based solutions, and cloud mining so that I can at least get a little money back. Sadly this isn't a job yet, unless you start selling your hashpower, but if you are doing that, then you most likely don't need to be reading this article. I love the options that mining offers and for those with a plethora of tech just laying about, this is golden for them, however for those of us who just have the bare minimum, it may not be completely worth it.. At least just yet. 

-Joseph  

FCC and Douchebag Disclaimer: Some links in this article may lead to sites where I may receive a small "kickback" or referral for you buying the product or service.