Which one carries more weight?

Beginner Questions
21

Haha,
The old mining distraction. I guess it must be in the blood after I spent my youth exploring for oil, and met a load of other guys who had been to “the dark side” doing mineral exploration. In the late 1970s, oil was the thing to be in and I was a beneficial recipient of loads of moollah by being in the right place at the right time.

Nowadays, I think those who participate in Forex or other instruments using leverage are in a prime position to do something in the crypto market.

I was supposed to run a very simple pilot study to determine whether mining crypto is profitable. As with many things I start, I have only run the Chia pilot, and not even considered the other three potential pilots that are based on methods other than “proof of time and space” as is Chia. I’d only get involved with proof of work or other mining methods that use graphics cards when a second hand card doesn’t cost more than the RRP of a new one. Today is about getting the base knowledge. Tomorrow is taking advantage of the market if there is an almighty crash in hardware costs associated with mining, due to shifting sands like EIP 1559.

It is on my agenda to write a small piece about my Chia pilot experience. And I don’t know whether this is good or bad. My elder son’s gaming rig (10 years old) gave up the ghost end of June. I had just had a Surface Pro fixed by a reputable vendor so gave him that whilst we sent his gaming machine away for repair. It came back with the news that the nVidia GTX1660Ti was broken and uneconomical to repair. So at that stage I decided that I would “upgrade my own knowledge” of hardware and software at the same time as I ran a pilot for mining. Nothing like figuring out more than one purpose to spend some money, eh?

Anyway before I bought any hardware I decided to watch far too many Youtube videos, bought three broken PCs - a tower, an All In One and a laptop to repair them. The motivation was "I’ll repair them and sell them, meantime setting them up to compare their usefulness as mining devices. So my own laptop (a SurfacePro i7) was the first device to be used, and that took about 4 days to download the Dogecoin blockchain. After reading about damage to SSD drives, I gave up that idea, and decided to mine Chia. Three milestones here.
Milestone 1 - plot one Chia plot - achieved 27Jul21 - it took 7.8 hours on the old repaired gaming machine.
Milestone 2 - plot 10 Chia plots - achieved 7Aug21 - running old gaming machine in parallel with a cheap but modern desktop I bought for £207 new with all the coloured lights on. That is the low cost Intel Pentium gold core, but still managed to create a Chia plot in 3.1 hours.
Yesterday I fired up a third machine in my workshop - which I have been tidying and preparing as a room for an entire farm for mining if I pursue this. I have a 42U rack that has sat there for about 15 years as shelving, finally being used for IT equipment.

Tomorrow my second serious rig arrives in bits. I will use a Ryzen 7 3700X CPU with a target to create a plot an hour to take me up to milestone 3 of 100 plots. I’ve used the time in between to procure hard disk storage of almost 100 TB for pilot stage 4 to create 1,000 plots in as short a time as possible. My Terms of Reference need a serious rewrite from 50 or so rough notes dotted around the office and workshop, but my gut feeling is that the probable return on investment of hardware (not time) is between 2% and 4% per month. With that in mind (and since it is my own money, not that of a corporate client), I did a bit of “licentious Agile” planning and will put that small system straight into production and see if my initial revenue estimates materialize in practice. I could think of far riskier ventures to put our capital into - like crypto (LOL), but the entire cost of this hardware kit is being funded from profits we already materialized from Crypto investment. Just can’t resist pursuing a Get Rich Slow scheme. It is in my blood.

By the way, harvesting will be find on 5400rpm spindle disks. Plotting would be the slow boat to China. So whilst I am currently plotting to two cheap SSDs and one NVMe drive, final destination technology is currently SATA drives, but I am sorely tempted if I go to the next phase of biting the bullet and going corporate (Dell / HP servers in racks). There are guys out there with 10 petabytes of storage, and the pools only just started late June! The estimated rewards for the 10 petabyte guy is about Euro 800 per day! Size does matter, and I doubt I will ever contemplate 10 petabytes. But I will continue to do the cost per plot created and cost per plot available to farm, and if the economics are good enough, who knows?

1 Like
22

That sucks. Could you have gotten away by replacing it with an older generation (1050/1060 GTX cards)? Chia mining isn’t GPU intensive right?

Looking at your performance comparison 7.8 hrs (old gaming machine) vs 3.1 hrs (Pentium Gold) I’ll read up a bit more on Chia mining and what affects performance. Just for curiosity’s sake.

My jaw dropped seeing you mentioned you had 100 TBs. Head exploded when you mentioned 10 PB setups. Damn!! Aren’t those hardcore enterprise solutions?

I’d seen a 3PB storage video a while back. Seeing the HDDs stacked that way was mind-blowing.

23

Well, I always try to turn a problem into an opportunity. The elder is nearly 30 now so his habits are less gaming and more streaming (videos, social media), so once he got used to the old Surface Pro he said he didn’t want a big tower in his room any more. More goodies for me to play with.
BTW, the graphics card was intended to mine Doge, but that went by the wayside.
I thoroughly dismantled the 1660Ti (that cost more than my Acer laptop at the time we bought it). It was caked with dust and grime - almost blocking out the fins on the cooler. same for the i7 CPU. I think it works now in the newer PC, but that is on the back burner until I finish Pilot #3.
3.1 hours is now pretty consistent as my total plots nears 40. Had a senior moment last night reconfiguring an old Talktalk router as a network switch for wired LAN to the workshop from the house. For some reason, I must have misconfigured it because it took down internet access for a few hours until I unplugged it from the network. So much for watching Youtube videos and not thinking first principles. Anyway all the cabling is routed now and just needs trunking / nailing to the walls. My 19" cabinet is starting to look like it has some purpose.
I’ve actually only got 90TB gross which equates to about 760 plots. Got to wrestle with the TB and TiB definitions, with a Chia plot being 101.4TiB or 106.x TB. You get 9 plots to the Terabyte.

If I can get the Ryzen down to about a plot per hour on NVMe drive, I will be satisfied. Even 90 minutes per plot will be OK.

So now there are two different requirements for Chia - a fast system to create the plots, and a slower system with massive storage capacity to farm the accumulating plots. If I go beyond 100 TiB, I’ll have to go Enterprise. Now I do not have specific knowledge in configuring Enterprise grade servers, or even building them, but that doesn’t put me off. When I have finished Pilot 3 and can calculate the “ROIC to date” on my pilots 1, 2 and 3 builds, if it is attractive, I will put those systems into production (perhaps Pilot 2 and Pilot 3, not Pilot 1), and may play around with some 10 year old Dell / HP / Compaq Enterprise stuff. What else to do with the 19" rack that has gathered dust for 15 years?

I think the second trial will be Helium. There is a 5 month lead time on hardware right now, and I fancy a new aerial on the roof. Good opportunity to rip down the 3 satellite dishes my wife had installed over the years, and which are now redundant with content streaming over the internet. May convert those to solar concentrators for some free hot water. LOL.

24

Just skimmed over a Tom’s Hardware guide, from which I gathered bottlenecks are the CPU, RAM and Storage.

I wasn’t familiar with the Ryzen processor you mentioned and just read up on how good it is. It’s got raving reviews and low power consumption suprised me (65W TDP). Since you’re not considering Doge mining you might be able to run with the onboard/integrated graphics on the CPU on the gaming rig right? So that system shouldn’t be totally out of commission yet, atleast for mining.

That sounds like a killer project though. If you can learn and configure and enterprise server that’d be awesome. That’s something I’d love to do one day.

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It was 1999 when I decided I had better stop blagging it with IT consulting and took the plunge to do the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer study course. It was probably the best adult education I did in my life, because 20 years of technical project manager / programme manager and consulting followed in a subject that I have a great passion for. Now imagine over the years how many network, infrastructure and data architects I have worked with? I do not keep in touch with most of them, but I sure know where to go for the nitty gritty of advice. And about the Ryzen? I had put AMD to bed nearly 20 years ago since most corporates were Intel / IBM / HP afficionados (nobody ever got fired for contracting IBM). In this particular case, if I have understood correctly the basis of proof of space and time from the white paper, it’s all about cores (and perhaps threads - thought they say that multiple threads are only used in anger in Phase 1 of the five phase plot generation effort).

Yes, what lead me down the path of Enterprise solutions with second hand kit was the thought that scaling to petabytes with SATA hard drives offered no sea change in cost of ownership per terabyte. My estimate of the storage cost alone to create a 10PiB farm is of the order of £200-£300K. To make an attractive ROI, one must contemplate the repurposed use of second hand kit and probably pay only 10c on the dollar for this kit. On a personal basis, anything up to £5K investment with a solid business case is fair game. Once it gets to £20K and above I’d need serious “back tested evidence” that return was in the order of no more than six months to payback to risk that amount of capital. And that is consistent with some of the project ROIC figures I encounter in my contracting life anyway.

Somebody at bp once told me “if your business case cannot support a 40% per annum ROIC, forget it. There are hundreds of investment projects vying for billions of dollars of capital with higher ROIC outcomes”. Makes you wonder why banks pay 0.1% interest on deposit, eh?

:wink:

26

AMDs been a beast since Dr Lisa Su took over as CEO. Didn’t help that Intel, as the dominant player at the time, was just milking the market with smaller incremental changes, while AMD just demolished them with the 7nm process and chiplet design. Major PC brands couldn’t couldn’t ignore demand for AMD chips, especially in smaller formfactors (e.g. high-end gaming laptops). Heck there’s a lot of buzz on how quickly they are evolving their GPUs as well. Though Nvidia is still the clear market leader, AMD appears to be closing the gap.

:woozy_face:

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27

Do you work in IT or just a passion for it? What is your specialisation or the aspect you are most interested in?

28

Nah, just enthusiastic and a bit passionate. I actually wanted to get either an MCSE and/or a CCNA around the same time you got your MSCE (think there were well paid jobs and good careers with those certifications then too). It was around my last year in school and I wanted to get into computer hardware at the time.

Nowhere good enough or knowledgeable enough as I used to be when I was younger. I was proficient enough to pick my own parts and assemble a PC that performed as well an Alienware rig that cost 3x in 2004. But knowledge since has deteriorated. I started watching tech reviews and guides on YT about a year back and have a better broader understanding, but I’d still have to do a lot of reading if I wanted to do redo a similar system build.

I worked more on data mining and working on large clusters of data. I’m not a data scientist or statistician though. But I was a subject matter expert having worked operationally on the data for extended periods of time. Bridged the gap b/w business and IT (which is where I heard terms like Agile, Scrum, JIRA, etc. :slight_smile:)

29

I get super excited and salivate seeing stuff like this modular laptop for some reason. I’d love to swap and tinker with stuff just for fun if I could. I think similar to folks who hot rod I guess.

30

Nice specialisation. Two years ago I had to deal with “the guru” of big data at my client’s head office. They had signed a new contract with Infosys and some geek (shhhhh - it was Deloitte) had “recommended” they measure the contract performance with over twenty indicators. It was Mr Big Data’s job to create scripts that pulled each of these KPIs off the IT support application ServiceNow. My job was to analyze and comment on the data. As you may imagine, after over 40 years in data analysis, I found as many inconsistencies as I found consistencies, and needed to show that to Mr BigData by manual calculation of the data streams he had pulled, pointing out that there were errors in the data streams that had not been picked up even at a rudimentary level. Conclusion - big data can ruin you if you put all your faith in one or two gurus.

Anyway, that is by the way. When I needed to dig down deep and understand how APIs are used to call data sets from large databases, I thought of Forex and the EAs that people love to talk about. If I live long enough, or have sufficient time in the day to look into this in depth, I would be really interested in backtesting whether social media sentiment indicators are useful in the development of EAs. It’s a dream - a bit like finding that energy from dark matter. It will probably stay in my mental aether and never see the light of day. With a big data background, are you ever tempted to create EAs to use?

31

Nah, not one bit. But I’d like to leverage that for intermarket analysis over time. For that I’d have to pick up statistics, macro economics, programming in Python (data scraping atleast) and possibly more. Not to mention actually learning and trading other instruments. This is a long term goal with FX being the introduction to trading :crossed_fingers:

Mid term, by year end hopefully I’ll have a solid enough grasp of macro economics & statistics to initiate data analysis in the data warehouses for the central banks & BIS. I’ve already got some data extracts for Trade weighted currencies and 10-Y bonds.

Short term goal is the stuff I’d been working on in Notion, where we met the first time :slight_smile:. Did learn basic MT5 and coded a script for a data extract I mentioned here to enable a more efficient analysis of the 28 currency pairs on a regular basis. Believe it helped immensely in accelerating the learning curve.

For me it’d make more sense to have a stronger understanding of how the various indicators work and what works best in what market environments before I consider EAs. Atleast additional reading on algos and quant trading before I consider coding I think. I’ve seen some who’ve taken to EAs immediately but don’t know about an ATR based trailing stop. I’d like to avoid those pitfalls.

Totally. That’s why I learnt some basic MT5 coding for now and intend to learn Python later. Right now I only know that the FRED has an Excel Add-in to enable any similar function without additional coding

32

Thanks for taking the time to make a detailed response. I checked back on the thread about Notion and now remember. The thing I love about this forum is that you get to meet some special people who reinforce that it is often necessary to go to great lengths to fully understand a topic. So many people just stop at the first level (and there is nothing wrong with that if all you need is a director-level understanding of a subject). But to me the real interest comes when at level 2 there are some questions from inquisitive types that make you realize that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew. And if this is a matter on which you have put much reliance on other assumptions derived from that “level 2” understanding, you think again. I think we got to level 3 in this discussion. I define level 3 (of understanding) is where one starts to become an intellectual equal to the gurus on such subjects, and that is where real understanding starts. I think we’ve highjacked this thread of @Arni21 more than enough, so if you are still there @Arni21, please accept my apologies for going so far off track this is a journey to Mars. :grimacing:

It’s been great for me though, so thanks @darthdimsky for persevering with my deep questions and answering them fully

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33

You guys met on Notion??

34

It’s a free productivity tool that’s become popular recently. Folks use it for a variety of purposes like daily planning and project management.

I created a thread to find other people who used Notion and Mondeoman was the first to reply and exchange pleasantries :slight_smile:

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LOL. It sounds as if we were searching for partners on a site called “Notion”. I love to read your posts. Even if you are Delta8

36

I wont execute my trades based on divergence alone