Not going to mine, never, however...

A local guy on marketplace sold off his crypto mining electronics, he is giving up the futile gesture and this year is going off out into the fresh air and will be mining for gold, pan in hand, off to enjoy a stake in British Columbia, I can think of worse things to do.

I bought this off him :

Yes, before you think it again, I have gone a little crazy, but that is the way I roll. This is a quality steel chassis, with a lid, with four industrial fans, a Bitmain AW7-12-1800W mining quality power supply, a BTC65 8 GPU slot motherboard running an Ivy Bridge "Pantherpoint" CPU with 4GB DDR3 and a 64GB mSATA boot drive with HiveOS installed and I paid $400 for it.

I have to qualify that though, I paid the money for the three MSI and two Gigabyte GPU cards, they are NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI 6GB video cards, so fundamentally, I paid $80 each and I have cleaned them up, brushed out all the dust bunnies and they all work and are ready for action, or inaction as they will be sitting in my drawer for a month or so, waiting patiently to be installed in computers.

Here at the start of 2026 these GPU are useless for mining digital coinage of any sort, I asked the chap if he ever made any money in "crypto" and he said he just about broke even which I consider to be the situation for most of his ilk who participated in the gold rush, the institutions that were guaranteed to make money being the ones that "sold the picks" the component parts, being the chassis, motherboard, fans and all the graphics processing units and to a lesser extent, those that sold the electricity and the governments that collect the taxes.

Today, the energy used per hour with the five GPU, the four industrial fans, the motherboard and the main PSU would be running in the region of 750W so here in British Columbia, that would cost your average homeowner $2.65 a day, and if they were mining coins like ethereum classic they would generate between $0.40 and $0.55 a day, so a daily loss of $2.10 or $766.50 a year which is why this rig is obsolete. 

Every miner sells his original equipment at a loss, an example of that would be this rig which from my conversation with the guy was bought back in 2021, during the "mining fever" time, so the cost would have been in the region of $4000 or more and yes, in the first twelve months money would have been made, but then when ethereum went to proof of stake at "The Merge" in September 2022, things went downhill very fast for this particular miner. 

I highly doubt if most domestic miners run their rigs as a business and write off their equipment, nor do they bother to maintain a record of the comings and goings of the money, a spreadsheet of gain and loss, so like most gambling sorts they have an opinion or a feeling of how they did, and the truth is an elusive commodity, a bit like the actual crypto currency itself.

A rough estimate from the original owner was that he "broke even" and possibly only because for a while he was using the rig as a heat source and there is the sad reality of this mining nonsense from the domestic user point of view, perhaps the accountants at the industrial level only allow for profit, industrials are profitable because of the massive scale, write downs and cheap electricity, your average Joe has none of those benefits.

Anyway, another discussion of gambling from me and I am now faced with having five lovely NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI 6GB video cards to do something with, and the empty chassis to flog as quick as I can to someone out there who still thinks they can make some easy cash because as someone once said, there's one born every minute.

Will keep you posted.