I think this Ethereum mining craze is silly…so I’m going to try it out for myself

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I got interested in the idea of mining Bitcoin. Yes, I know it’s at around $2,500 now, don’t remind me, I only doubled my money when I could have grown it 10x…I never got too deep into mining, while I did try it out, most of the Bitcoin I owned I bought directly. Today, you’re honestly only making money mining Bitcoin if it’s your primary business, you live somewhere cold (or your servers do), and you have some unfair advantage that other people don’t have. No seriously, the people who made big bucks in mining could get asics and GPUs before anyone else – it was a hardware race.

I gave up my Bitcoin mining dreams long ago but now I keep hearing about Ethereum mining and to be honest, it sounds a lot like the Bitcoin mining crazy talk that got me interested in Bitcoin mining in the first place. When it comes to cryptocurrency mining I think that by the time it’s getting covered on the Huffington Post, the big mining opportunities are probably long gone.

Today I was talking with my Dad on the phone about Ethereum mining and I was telling him how I think these “mining crazes” that people go through with new cryptocurrencies are silly…but then I couldn’t really back it up with data. I also happen to be typing this blog post on a super high-octane gaming PC that I built for my VR setup so I have all the core components one would need to dive into the Ethereum mining game.

So I’ll give it a shot. I’m not planning on making a huge investment, in my mind all I probably need right now is to determine if my GTX 1060 is a powerful enough graphics card to get started with or if I need to go with something more powerful or perhaps more specialized for mining. I noticed that Asus recently introduced a graphics card specifically for cryptocurrency mining so that might be worth looking into if I want to really give this a real test.

As you can tell from what I’ve written above…my hypothesis is that I spend money getting some silly video card that’s apparently “made for mining” only to find out that I can make a $10 – $20 profit each month after I pay off my higher-than-normal electricity bill. But I could be wrong, which is why, without data to tell my Dad that there’s no way it could work, I thought I just have to dive in and try it myself.

Stay-tuned, I don’t have much more to share now but I’ll try to report back here on my blog every week or so to let you know how it’s going.