CryptoCurrency MINING

Most of them unless you pay less than 4p for your electric its probably not viable.

A decent mining box will be about £1k. + another couple of hundred for a PSU. But it will consume over 1000watts. Thats close to £1000 a year in electricity.

Now you know why that have mining farms in countries with super cheap electric.

If your looking at those that rent out the miners, just think why do they not run the miner themselves?

were wrote: »

What you want is to be a programmer who is able to write 'screen savers'

Has anyone used a screensaver since CRT days?

I'm actually mining with a tiny profit...
I'm using raspberry pi's

The "alt-coin" I'm mining takes me 5 days to get 1 coin in a pool.
Each coin = (as of Nov 17th @ 23:40 ) $0.26
My electricity costs Kwh = £0.16 ( $0.21)
It takes 7 days, in total, for all my pi's to use a single Kwh

So as long as the coin is above $0.21 I'm making a profit

I'm also "renting" out spare Disk drive space using "Storj"
5.7Tb in total. But I don't think it's going to be profitable at the moment.

I'm told the income can be around $1.50 per Tb per month.
But I've just started using it a couple of days ago so will have to wait till the middle of next month to see what I receive.

I also get a % of the "users" fee if a user downloads their stored data from my drives. ALL data is encrypted on the users machine before it's uploaded and mirrored between upto 6 other random people who are renting out spare drives for redundancy.

Mining is not profitable these days unless you go for one of the smaller "alt-Coins" that have a quirk. The coin i'm mining uses a mathematical formula that GPU's and the mining ASICs (?!?) are very slow to compute, but CPU's can do easily.

It takes away the advantage the huge miner farms have and aimed at more "spare CPU cycles" mining and environmentally friendly approach.

forgotmyname wrote: »

Sharing HD space, are you MENTAL? Do you know what they are storing on your computer?

NO! That's a GOOD THING!! I used the word "ENCRYPTION" for a reason... please keep up!

forgotmyname wrote: »

The only way i think that would be a great idea is if i needed somewhere to store some illegal stuff. Let the police take your equipment away and lock you up.

Again NOPE!
People might not be as perverted as you (think)...
They might just want cheap cloud storage without the bigger companies (Amazon Google, Dropbox Microsoft) sneaking a peak at their stored data for marketing or other usages.

As i said all data is encrypted before it reaches my spare drives and I have "Zero Knowledge" of it's contents, so I'm legally protected.

If the police came to my door with a warrant to search my house and i have rented a room to someone else, and they have put a lock on their door. The police CAN'T enter that room without an additional warrant for that room as it's "owned" by another person. It's the same with Data, I can't open/break the encryption if I don't own the key. Though they might take my drives as "evidence" to use once they arrest the actual person uploading it. But their would be insufficient evidence to arrest or charge me with any crimes.

forgotmyname wrote: »

Making 5p a week using the pi, you forgot to add in the cost of the pi and whats its lifespan running 24/7 at full load whilst mining?

I make that 13 years to pay for just one pi? And you have how many running?

What about the transaction costs? I think your probably mining at a huge loss.

I didn't forget the cost of the Pi's. (and it would be at most 3 years after electrical costs are taken into consideration to pay off a £35 pi with current estimated, and conservative, trend in the value of the coin, so still worth it...)

As I had them already and they were laying around doing nothing. This way they are doing something so no additional cost to starting this.

As for the lifespan...
People have been, for years, running them under load for extended periods in extreme conditions without them falling over.
So sitting in a home environment with heat-sink and cpu temp never going above 65c (and sitting around 50c at night) It's not likely to fail after a few months, if they did it would be known about and a huge problem for the Rpi foundation. (Especially in regards to their NASA/ESA Certifications for the Raspberry pi based "AstroPi" kits that have been going to the International Space Station for the past couple of years to run simple experiments. (Those agencies don't let any old junk go up to the ISS.)

TL;DR version:
If you have the stuff laying around not doing much, it's possible to make a couple of £ over a year with no additional investment.