It has been a month since we sold our fully automated 56/64 Vega rigs with 14 cards on 3 mobos and 3 PSU’s, automated Arduino hard reset and custom made software reset tools. All true and devoted miners would ask – why? Well, it was not a FUD nor price drop which made us go that way, but there were a dozen of other reasons for and against the sale. Actually, it was not our intention to sell it at all, but we just wanted to test the market and raised the price 50% up, so in case someone buys – we’ll profit nicely. As all we know, Radeon RX Vega are quite rare on the market nowadays, almost impossible to find at all!!!
How everything started … Me and my business partner are quite a while in IT industry, and we’ve been following all the crypto craze since 2010, but as the most of you out there, we never seriously considered investing in crypto or mining before. However, after reading some articles in September 2017, we decided to give it a try with mining, focusing on Monero. After short calculations, we decided to put some money aside to buy Vegas, which should be the most profitable way to mine Monero.
Since we live in very isolated country, we were not able to get the cards delivered so we had to travel to another country inside EU and collect cards we ordered online from Amazon and elsewhere. During September 2017, the XMR mining community started to lobe and price the cards, but setup was pain in the ass. However, after AMD released blockchain BETA drivers end of August 2017, people started experimenting and finally released a Definitive Vega Guide on Reddit. It has triggered an avalanche of newcomer investors and amateur rig assemblers which surprisingly led very fast to supply crisis of Vega cards globally. Of course, the prices jumped and the supply has slowed down until the end of December where the cards completely vanished from the market and were available on preorder only, but without specified delivery date. This was another signal which affected our decision to sell.
To make the rig running smooth, we spend 3 weeks intensively on tweaking hardware and software to make them fully automated. The rigs warmed up our office space and brought up to 8 XMR’s a month. With 26kH/s we expected even more, but the net difficulty started to concern us. It increased from day to day exponentially, although the XMR itself gained a lot in fiat value during that time, so it was still looking green. However, since we plan to move to another country this spring, we decided to put an ad online and try to sell the rigs. We put the price that should compensate all our effort and reward our devotion. A week after we received first offers! I didn’t think it would happen at all, but mining craze came even here , to the country which GDP is 10% of BTC’s market cap!!! At first I’ve started to feel sorry about that, but we realized that botnets tend to take over the XMR mining and nobody could stop them. The net difficulty rose enormously, and we realized that starting from spring we wouldn’t be able to naturally cool the space, so the investment into cooling facility would eat our profits so we accepted the first best offer. A few days after an enthusiastic guy came over and took our rigs. Soon after, the crypto crash overgrown into FUD and everything looked bad-&-red. South Korea issued ban to their exchanges, China expelled mining companies, and soon after mayor credit card companies and banks banned buying crypto using cc’s world wide. We felt satisfied, although not overjoyed. It was a feeling like I was 6 yo and someone took my old favorite toy and compensate it with a new shiny one. At first you are overwhelmed with happiness and joy and a few days later you realize you really miss something.
Nevertheless, the decision to sell the rigs was a quite thoughtful, pragmatic and profitable. At least my logic part of the brain thought that way … We ended up with 10 XMR’s and a nice profit. We learned a lot and felt innovative during the crafting time. It was kind of a hobby, and it helped me even to overcome the hard time after I lost a close family-member during that time. In short, it was a successful time and a nice story, and crypto and blockchain won a few more enthusiasts and evangelists.
Now, it seems that botnets ruined the average-miner-guy’s dreams, at least for XMR. We predicted the 1Gh/s net diff mark will be exceeded in March, but it happened already in February. Crypto movement is continuing the fight to justify its value, applicability and rise the confidence of new investors. Most faithful hodlers would probably hodl until the crypto reaches ‘ground zero’, but the most of them would exit much sooner. Anyways, I’m still with crypto, mainly supporting further development of blockchain technology which surely has a huge potential and would survive all the misfortunes standing on its way.
Predictions and speculations
People love predictions, and I love to predict … Now, after we successfully quit the mining saga, I turned to watch the market and do some speculations. For speculations, you have to compare a lot of scenarios, read a lot of bullshit and finally … to act from the gut 🙂 There’s a lot of questions that cry for predictions like: What will happen with blockchain technology? Would fintech adopt the technology? Would banks destroy the crypto? Would whales and huge mining farms centralize decentralized infrastructure? Would volatility decrease with the time? … Anyway, a lot of funny stuff is waiting for research so I will devote my next article on predictions, and the time will show how substantiated they were … Stay tuned 😉