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How to make money on a mining farm. How to build a mining farm: step by step instructions

Hello dear readers. The author of the blog Ruslan Miftakhov writes, as always, and in this article I want to discuss such a phenomenon as a mining farm, which is currently most relevant in the West and in the countries of Southeast Asia, especially in China.

And only recently they began to mine in Russia. Many of you have probably heard about such concepts that are gaining popularity on the Internet, such as cryptocurrency, mining on a farm, bitcoin. What it is and how to make money on it, we'll talk about it in this article.

Mining farms or how your computer can bring you money

So, you decided to assemble your own “farm” and start earning by mining one of the cryptocurrencies. To begin with, I will tell you about what mining is and how a mining farm works.

Mining is the process of extracting virtual money in the global network.

Mining can be done by anyone who has at his disposal computer equipment of the required power (the so-called farm) and specialized software that allows using the computing power of the equipment to solve an algorithm with gradually increasing complexity.

Having solved the algorithm, computing power earns a coin or coin - a small amount of encrypted information that goes to your - a kind of account that stores information about your coins.

This currency is stored decentralized, that is, distributed among users.

That is, in simple terms, a mining farm is a kind of block of computers busy solving algorithms 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

So, having decided on the concepts, let's move on to the main object of interest - our farm, which you can easily assemble with your own hands. And you may immediately have a question: what is needed in order to assemble your device for making money?

The farm consists of powerful video cards mounted on the frame, as well as large power supplies, the power of which is enough to ensure the operation of the entire system.

A small-sized system may well fit in a case from a conventional system unit, but there are also units that occupy entire industrial hangars.

Building a farm involves significant material costs on the part of a novice miner associated with the purchase of equipment and payment for electricity consumed, and its volumes will be the more significant the larger your system will be.

You also need to think about adequate ventilation, otherwise you will face problems of overheating and freezing of equipment.

Farms are divided into several types, similar in principle of operation:

created from video cards, on the total computing power of which the volume of mined "coins" depends. Moreover, it is worth noting that only ATI Radeon video cards are suitable for mining, starting from the seventh generation, NVIDIA cards are useless in this case due to low computing power.
made up of FPGA modules. The modules are therefore less energy intensive, smaller in size and work more reliably than video cards.
based on ASIC processors. They are expensive enough to create a farm, but they work the fastest.

There are several ways to make money for a beginner "miner" without the so-called investments in your own farm:

Free virtual coin collection faucets that automatically generate coins and allow you to choose when to collect the currency - after 20 minutes or within 24 hours.

Some faucets, mostly new ones, allow you to earn up to 5,000 coins per hour. Payments are made once a week, which, with the declared capacity, will allow you to collect up to several million coins at a time.

You can start with the bitcoin faucet I tested, where you get Satoshi once per hour for entering captcha, you can withdraw at least 30,000 Satoshi to your bitcoin wallet.

Here is another proven cryptocurrency payout faucet dogecoin from 100 coins, register and earn until the rate has risen to heaven.
The next method is cloud mining, which consists in the collective use of remote servers and data centers, the owners of which bear all the costs of maintaining the equipment.
Farm games provide miners with a creative representation of mining in the form of an economic game. Income is accrued for the development of your farm, the construction of facilities and the development of technologies and can be withdrawn in the form of your virtual account.

The seven largest mining farms in the world or whales of the cryptocurrency market

1. Nothing is known about the location of the largest mining farm in Russia. All data on the location of this industrial giant is classified, as the owners do not want to endanger such a serious source of income.

It is only known that, according to the data leaked to the network by the owners themselves, the size of the room in which the unit is located is 1,500 square meters, which house 3,000 ASIC processors that consume 4.5 megawatts of electricity per hour.

At the beginning of 2017, the farm enriched the owners by 600 bitcoins every month. With a cryptocurrency exchange rate that is held at $3,700 (more than 200,000 rubles) per coin, the income is 134 million per month (at the exchange rate as of August 9, 2017).

2. In the US, the largest farm belongs to Dave Carlson and brings literally millions of dollars in profits to its owner. In just a year, Dave was able to turn his passion, which began with one video card in the basement, into a large-scale production that occupies an entire hangar.

Such growth was ensured by the bitcoin that Dave is working with, which has strengthened in the market. Carlson also founded a company engaged in the production of equipment for mining.

3. The largest farm in Iceland is considered to be a farm built by Genesis Mining called Enigma.

Why Iceland, you ask? A cold climate ideal for mining, which allows saving on cooling, low electricity prices and the cheapest and most stable Internet in Europe - these are the three components of the success of Genesis Mining.

4. In Hong Kong, unlike Iceland, miners are not so lucky with the climate. High humidity and heat do not contribute to the comfortable operation of temperature-sensitive mining equipment.

But that didn't stop Allied Control from building the largest farm in China, one of the top three largest in the world. The company solved the problem with the heating of the system by using the unique technology of double immersion, which allowed not only to reduce the risk of overheating, but also significantly reduce the noise level.

5. The BitFury farm is located in Georgia and, like the Hong Kong one, uses double-immersion cooling technology.

The system consumes electricity from a local hydroelectric power station, which, thanks to relatively low electricity prices and low labor costs, makes the overall cost of mining extremely low.

This allows the company to constantly increase the capacity of cryptocurrency mining in Georgia, which could well make the farm the largest in the world.

6. The owner of the Linthal farm, the commercial director of the Netmon IT company from Uster (Canton of Zurich) Guido Rudolfi, stood at the origins of bitcoin mining in Europe.

Due to the low cost of electricity and mild weather conditions, the system has grown rapidly and is now the largest in Europe.

7. In China, mining is much more common than in any other country. Ask any miner where the largest cryptocurrency farm is located, and he will certainly tell you about a mega farm in the Chinese province of Sichuan.

For many years, nothing was known about this mining giant, except for the very fact of its existence. Until the spring of 2017, when Chinese photographer Liu Xingjie managed to sneak in.

It turned out that this is a whole complex of farms, each of which is busy mining one specific currency, which allows the owners of the entire complex to receive huge money on each cryptocurrency.

What is the reason for such rapid growth, you ask a natural question? The answer is simple - cheap electricity.

How much can you earn on cryptocurrency or how much is the power of your computer

So, having figured out how the farm works and looking at the real "titans" of mining, let's ask ourselves the question of how much we can earn on this business.

No one can give you an exact answer to this question. It all depends on what investments you are ready for, since the profitability of mining directly depends on many factors, which I partially mentioned above when analyzing the system device.

Also, the volume of production is affected by the instability of the exchange rate to the real currency. In order to clearly determine how much money you will receive from your farm, there are many calculators on the network, many of which calculate profit, taking into account many negative factors.

Summing up, I want to say that by collecting a farm and starting to mine, you do not lose anything, and by reading certain literature and delving into the market, you can quickly recoup all expensive equipment and start earning money. As they say, who does not play, he does not win.

Thanks for reading this article. Good luck with mining. See you soon!

I was with you, Ruslan Miftakhov

Every crypto enthusiast thinks about creating their own farm. Without a doubt, this is expensive and not always effective if you approach this matter without enthusiasm and without considering all the nuances of the mining process through the farm. A cryptocurrency mining farm is the only way to earn bitcoins, and one of the most effective means of accumulating other cryptocurrencies, which may well repeat the fate of the pioneer.

How to build a mining farm

As already mentioned, building a farm is expensive. Despite the fact that it is not known when the investments will pay off, no one stops mining. However, there is one significant nuance, which is that the requirements for equipment are constantly growing. Therefore, even if a person has already equipped a small farm, this does not mean that the matter will end there.

The equipment will have to be regularly updated, buying more modern and technically advanced models. For example, consider mining on video cards and ASICs. Previously, a video card was enough for a farm, but now you have to buy several ASICs, which are very expensive, but, admittedly, more economical. What will happen in a couple of years? Throw away a few thousand dollars to upgrade equipment again? And so it will be.

But such expenses are not so terrible, if we talk about the fact that the earnings for solving one crypto problem is 12.5 bitcoins, each of which costs $ 2,700. At this pace, everything will pay off in record time. The main thing is that in the hands of the user there are tools that work at the modern level.

Earnings on the Internet has become a common and quite popular thing for a long time. From time to time, new types and methods of it appear, which are immediately successfully mastered by network users.

This is what happened with the mining of cryptocurrencies. It was only necessary to appear on the market, as they immediately found those who were engaged in its production. By the way, one of the first to do this was the creator of the first crypt, who generated about a million new blocks back in those days when the cost of BTC did not particularly impress anyone. But looking at the current rate of this digital currency, you understand that a person provided for himself until the end of his life. He also became the first owner of the mining farm.

Virtual currencies are now heard even by those who, in principle, have never been interested in this topic. They talk and write a lot about them, they call them the future of the global financial system, so it is not surprising that many people far from this area began to show interest in it. And, of course, such people have a lot of questions, which we, as far as possible, try to answer in our materials. We will talk about what a mining farm is in today's article.

Indeed, there will be very little of it, since the topic of digital money mining is not rooted in the depths of centuries, but only in the recent 2009, when a certain Satoshi Nakamoto revealed Bitcoin to the world.

As soon as the cue ball was born, some users began to mine it, at first, rather out of curiosity, since the cost of BTC at that time was low. But with the growth in the cost of the crypt, the interest of people in its production also grew, which, in turn, provoked not only a further rise in the price of the coin, but also the complication of the process of generating new blocks.

If at the initial stages for mining there was enough CPU power of a more or less modern computer, then over time it became sorely lacking, and miners began to use graphics processors (video cards) for their own purposes, the power of which was dozens of times higher. For some time, GPUs became leaders among all possible mining options, they formed entire complexes called farms, consisting of several video cards. But even this method of mining gradually lost its relevance, as it began to bring less and less income due to the continuously growing complexity of the process.

And in 2012, the GPU era was replaced by the era of ASIC equipment specially sharpened for mining. These devices give a result incomparable with the previous ones, they are high-performance and energy efficient, so the extraction of crypto coins with the help of ASICs is still relevant today.

True, for home use, some miners still collect farms from video cards, since they are much cheaper than ASICs, however, they bring less profit.

As you probably already guessed, a mining farm is a large amount of special equipment concentrated in one room and designed exclusively for cryptocurrency mining. This, as they say, in general terms.

This equipment is designed specifically for computing work. It's not important that you have a very productive CPU, the size of the hard drive does not matter much either. The main elements are powerful video cards (GPU) and corresponding power supplies that are able to provide energy to the system you have created. If a home mining farm has good computing power, then you can easily set up the extraction of digital coins and will have a constant, fairly decent additional income. And with a good combination of circumstances, such income can eventually develop into the main one.

But you, of course, understand that it is only on paper that everything turns out smoothly and smoothly. In reality, before setting up a mining system, you need to take into account a lot of details and subtleties, since this type of wallet replenishment is quite complicated and requires a lot of money to be invested.

So start by calculating the cost of your enterprise, including here both the cost of equipment and the cost of electricity. Take care in advance about the room where you place all this "hardware", as it heats up quickly and requires constant cooling and ventilation. If you do not provide the necessary conditions, then your components will simply fail from overheating, and instead of making money, you will only have losses.

The mining of digital currencies can be individual, when the user works alone and all the money earned goes to him alone (it is called solo mining), and it can be collective, as part of a pool, when the block is generated by joint efforts and the reward is divided among all members of the pool.

We will consider several types of mining farms for working alone:

Firstly, farms can be assembled from several video cards (up to 6 pieces). The profitability of such a system is directly dependent on the total power of the GPUs used, that is, the greater the power of your system, the more profit you can count on.
Secondly, there were attempts to create farms on FPGA modules. However, they quickly stopped, since in all respects, except for energy efficiency, such systems lost to their counterparts on the GPU. So this practice has not received proper development.
And farms created from ASIC miners are leading today. They are quite expensive, but their performance, payback periods and profitability leave far behind those of the options described above.

To imagine how a mining farm functions, you need to understand that, in fact, this entire system is a computing device. Calculations are made in the blockchain, in accordance with certain algorithms and programs. Miners track and process new blocks of transactions, and each such block brings a certain reward to the “miner” who discovered it.

You can search for a block for 10 minutes, or for several days or months. The timing depends on certain factors, among which the 2 most significant ones can be distinguished - the capacity of the equipment and the complexity of production.

Now let's talk about mining difficulty or network complexity. The activity of the blockchain chain is provided by users-miners, and the more there are, the more difficult it is to search for a new block and the lower its cost. The profitability and relative simplicity of this type of earnings attracted a very large number of users, which means that the complexity of the network has increased significantly over the years of the existence of cryptocurrencies, and the profitability of this business has decreased accordingly.

If you have a more budget mining farm, namely on a GPU, then you should not even talk about Bitcoin mining, since the complexity of the network is so high that you will only work at a loss. Hence the conclusion - you need to mine altcoins like Ether, Monero, etc.

If you want to get exactly the cue ball, then here, as they say, there are options:

You can buy ASIC devices specifically designed for mining it, but in this case, get ready to shell out a tidy sum, and then wait several months for your investment to pay off.
The second option is mining altcoins on the GPU, and their instant conversion into BTC on special services. You can’t call this method very profitable, but your income will be in cue balls.
And finally, you can do cloud mining. You may not earn very much, but you do not have to invest a lot of money, your costs will quickly pay off, and problems with setting up and maintaining equipment will not affect you at all.

So, if you are determined and no arguments can shake your desire to get your own system for mining crypto, then you need special equipment and software. The second one is easier - go to the Internet, look for the right option and download it for free.

But with the "iron" everything is much more complicated. And there are many types of this technique, go and figure out what is worth buying and what is not. And a lot of money will have to be spent. You can, of course, not very much, but then you can’t expect much income either. Well, and problems with assembly, configuration, maintenance. In general, there is enough trouble, and you need to have at least basic knowledge.

There is also such an option as buying a finished farm. Finding such offers is not a problem, but such an “easy” option will cost you almost half as much as a self-assembled system. Moreover, there will be no confidence in the quality and performance of the equipment, because, perhaps, the system has already been actively used, and there is nothing left for it to live. So the option with the purchase of individual components, and independent adjustment of production is still preferable.

Look for the latest graphics cards from manufacturers like Nvidia or AMD. Which type of GPU to buy depends on what kind of crypto you intend to mine.
Choose a motherboard in terms of having enough slots to connect all your video cards.
Naturally, you need a computer and constant access to the network. Everything else in your machine (CPU power, RAM and other nuances) does not matter much. From the company you only need uninterrupted round-the-clock work.
Of course, you need a hard drive.
You also need power supplies, preferably of high quality and with a guarantee, in the quantity necessary for the mining farm to work stably.
And you can’t do without a frame on which all this splendor will be mounted. You can buy a frame, or you can build it from what is at hand, the main thing is that it be reliable and convenient.

As for the assembly of all the listed components into a single whole and setting up this “whole”, it is better to find detailed instructions on the Internet and follow them exactly. But if you are completely new and have little understanding of the computer, then we advise you to turn to a more experienced friend for help. Still, at least elementary knowledge and experience in this matter are necessary.

The advantages of this method of creating a farm, first of all, include cost savings, especially if you already have some components. The second plus is that you can show some flexibility in the selection of the necessary parts. Well, and most importantly, this is the pleasure that you will get in the process of work, as well as from the knowledge that you could do it!

But it can't be done without the downsides. You will have to spend a lot of time searching for and purchasing the necessary components, and it’s not a fact that you can buy everything, since, for example, powerful GPUs are in great short supply and it’s not so easy to purchase them.

Then, as we have already emphasized, for this work you need to have some special knowledge. However, they can be quickly purchased, the Internet is full of such information. And one more thing - you will be forced to put up with the lack of a guarantee for your product and do without after-sales service.

Naturally, before spending money on all the components for your own mining system, any sane person will ask himself the question - is the game worth the candle or, in other words, does it make sense from the point of view of profitability to invest in all this hardware?

Let's figure it out together. The first thing to consider is the increase in the payback period compared to the early years of mining popularity. 3-4 years ago, the period of “going to zero” fit plus or minus into six months. But time goes by, progress in the field of crypto mining is moving by leaps and bounds, and now such a period is rather a rarity than a rule. Even large companies include much longer time periods in their plans.

The second point is the amount of money spent. If you assemble a mid-level farm, then at least 150 thousand rubles will be spent on equipment, plus electricity costs and the amount is quite significant. This means that in order to quickly return your costs and start earning, you need to choose the “right” crypto and make allowances for fluctuations in its rate.

In the middle of this year, the top five most profitable digital currencies looked like this: Bitcoin was the leader, followed by Ethereum, followed by Dash, Monero and Ripple.

If we take the ratio of the profitability of a coin and the time required to mine it, then Ether looks the most tempting from this position. At its current cost and equipment costs of 150 thousand rubles, a mining farm for ETH will pay off in about a year, even a little less. But you should not trust such forecasts too much, since they are made for the long term, and during this time any changes can occur, because in this sense the cryptosphere is very dynamic.

Let's summarize

To conclude our article, we would like to say some things that you may not like. But on reflection, you will understand that we are not doing this out of malice, but simply so that you do not lose your sense of reality.

Firstly, numerous articles about big earnings on cryptocurrency mining, as a rule, are 99% just an advertising ploy of interested manufacturers of the same mining equipment and others like them. And if one percent of users really managed to earn big money, then this does not mean at all that the same thing will happen to you (although it is possible that it will happen).

Secondly, mining Bitcoin on a home farm is futile (one wants to say “dead number”, but it’s impossible, education doesn’t allow), no matter what anyone tells you. Of course, I would like to (of course, at such and such a course), but take a better look at new, less popular currencies, visit a couple of forums, analyze the situation and choose a coin with potential and prospects. After all, not Bitcoin alone!

In a word, be patient, realistic and make only informed decisions before risking money and nerves. Good luck!

The increase in the popularity of cryptocurrency has led to a systematic increase in the interest of users - many began to find out whether it is possible, in general, in practice with their own hands. The situation is different for different types of means of payment, but the very construction of a coin-mining installation is a simple process. Even for people who are rather poorly versed in hardware and PCs. In the current century, all boards and components are modular in nature, and also abundantly supplied with manuals and drivers - any of you are unlikely to have any difficulties connecting them.

How it works?

A GPU farm for mining is a computer with equipment connected to it, which ensures the return of computing power in favor of the system. In the most common cases, such components are video cards - a standard tool used by ordinary users for games, rendering and other tasks.

But the mining farm on video cards will not be limited to just installing components on a rack or in a computer case. The fact is that the heat dissipation of these cards is very high - for some models, a temperature of 120 degrees Celsius is still acceptable for short-term loads. Those who want to earn money face the question of how to set up a farm for mining and maintain a normal heat exchange mode. Cryptocurrency mining, after all, involves constant hours of work “at high speeds”, therefore, the mining farm of video cards requires care about cooling as well.

Installing additional coolers increases air circulation and reduces the stagnation of hot masses in the space between video cards - so the mining farm will work longer and more productively. This not only increases their performance, but also prolongs the life cycle - not a single modern component is combined with excessive heat. Semiconductor elements on memory boards quickly begin to break down, if proper air circulation is not provided and if the bitcoin farm is not properly maintained, it will turn into a pile of failed components.

Basic nuances when assembling

And yet how to build a farm? In the ideal case, video cards are installed on a remote rack, coolers for blowing are attached to the structure from several sides. The maximum number of cards connected to a computer is 6 pieces - these are the capabilities of modern motherboards. But before you create a farm for mining, it is worth considering a lot of details.

The next issue that the future miner needs to solve will be energy consumption. If we collect a farm for mining, then this becomes a matter of first importance. The fact is that with all their energy-saving improvements and a decrease in the technical process, video cards devour a huge amount of current. If you are planning to build a mining farm from scratch, then electricity costs should also be taken into account - they will be very large.

The minimum power of devices in the middle price segment with not the best computing power is 50 watts per hour. For top-end solutions, the figure of 100 W per hour is more relevant, which, when multiplied by 6 (the maximum number of slots), gives an impressive 0.6 kilowatts. Building a mining farm will force you to consume current almost like any household electrical appliance.

But that's not all that you need to know for those who want to build a farm. The installation cannot work on its own - in fact, it is the same computer as everyone else, only with advanced features. Therefore, here we also add the central processor, RAM, hard drive and coolers on the racks and inside the system unit.

All of the components listed above can add another 200-400 watts, which in ideal conditions gives 1 kW per hour. Or about 24 kilowatts per day - for some citizens this is the consumption rate per month per person. Creating a mining farm will turn you into a current consumer comparable to a small office. Do not forget about the dimensions of the farm for mining with your own hands. The dimensions will be comparable to a small diesel generator or something similar. The size of an ASIC-based mining farm can also be huge. Some units weigh up to 25 kilograms.

Another way to mine cryptocurrency

The profitability of mining could not fail to attract large companies involved in high technology and electronics. Already in 2012, the first saw the light - specialized microcircuits for counting hash sums. In fact, instead of a video card, which is a multifunctional device, manufacturers simply created a mechanism that can only mine cryptocurrency.

Now users have stopped thinking about how to make a mining farm on video cards - it turned out to be simply irrelevant. In addition, I didn’t have to think about how to make a mining farm from a bunch of spare parts and maintain them all. The performance of such solutions is incredibly high. Current controllers outperform flagship graphics cards by about three orders of magnitude in processing power. Such figures gave birth to a bunch of questions about how to build a farm for mining. The step-by-step instructions for controllers turned out to be several times easier. Another thing is that the price of high-end miners is one and a half - two thousand dollars, and sometimes even higher. And therefore, not everyone could afford a do-it-yourself mining farm. 2017 was the era of these chips. At first glance, such a purchase looks unjustified and it is better to think about how to make a bitcoin farm on video cards.

But here it is worth comparing installation on video cards and miners in several key parameters. For example, the Radeon RX 550 and Antminer S9 are taken - the most popular solutions:

Farm of six video cards + power supply	Miner
Power consumption - about 0.5 kilowatts per hour (not including the computer)	Power consumption - 1.5 kW (without system unit)
Computing power is about 210 Mhash/s.	Computing power - 13000-14000 Mhash / s.
The price (including the power supply, excluding additional coolers and racks) is almost $900 ($120 for each card and about $150 for the PSU).	Cost - $ 1900 (power supply built-in).
The noise level is about 60 dB.	Noise level - less than 40 dB.

As a result: one miner with a loss in cost by 2 times has an advantage in power of almost 70 times. And given half the energy consumption, the profitability of this farm will be even higher. The payback is higher, which should also be taken into account before assembling a mining farm.

Profit and financial component

For performance calculations, we will compare a farm of six Radeon RX 550s with current models using . We also use power databases, which can be found on the site with instructions on how to build a farm for mining in 2017. We will take the average price for electricity in the region of 4 rubles per kilowatt, for the convenience of the account. We select miner models according to the optimal ratio of price and performance.

For

Radeon RX550x6:

productivity 60 Mh/s;
net income of about $70 per week;
electricity costs - $ 6 per week;
price - $ 900;
payback period - 3.5-4 months.

Miners are non-existent.

Hello! In this article we will talk about farm mining.

Today you will learn:

What is a mining farm.
How it works.
How to build your own farm.

What is a mining farm

Let's start, as always, with a little theory.

In simple words mining farm - a set of components that are interconnected and produce virtual currency.

Cryptocurrency farms can consist of completely different components: video cards, processors, hard drives, special equipment created exclusively for mining. Initially, the concept of "farm" did not exist. Especially at a time when only a home PC could be used for mining.

But over time, the complexity of mining increased, the algorithms improved and became more complicated, and therefore it became simply unprofitable to mine on a home PC. Then people began to look for components and their correct combination. Initially, these were processors, then hard drives were added, and then video cards.

True, now most miners mean by the concept of "farm" several video cards connected to each other. Such a design can perform only one task - to mine cryptocurrency using its computing power.

Farms on video cards have become popular thanks to the ether, which does not have such a complex mining algorithm as bitcoin, but has already gained great popularity. That is why many remembered that earlier, back in the 12-13s, cunning gamers used their video cards to mine bitcoins. And they did it quite successfully.

And in order to mine bitcoins now, just a farm on video cards will not be enough. You need special equipment - ASIC processors, which cost a lot of money (from 5 thousand dollars), but have enormous computing power, ideally suited for mining.

The first cryptocurrency mining farms have come a long way from home PCs to full-fledged installations that cost several million rubles.

In this article, we will mainly talk about farms on video cards, because:

They have a fairly simple design;
Do not require huge financial investments;
Quickly pay off (150-180 days including electricity).

Bitcoin mining farm

Before talking about the work of the farm and how to do it at home, you should immediately understand one thing:

The bitcoin mining farm will now turn out to be practically unprofitable.

Due to the high difficulties in mining this cryptocurrency and the arrival of large Asian companies into mining, a single farm simply cannot cope with and will work with much lower profits than if it were mining, for example, ether or z-cash.

This does not mean that you will not be able to mine bitcoins. Not at all, you are guaranteed to receive your income.

But another question is what you need for this:

Use third-party services, lending them your power;
Share profits with other participants;
Depend on complete strangers.

And this all means that such mining is too risky and less profitable.

How a mining farm works

Let's focus on video cards. The “red” representatives of Radeon are best suited for mining. They are more adaptable, have more computing power, and, consequently, they mine a lot of currency.

But since there are almost no Radeon video cards in Russia, and those that do cost a lot of money, you have to be content with green counterparts from GTX. Their later models are average for mining, but the demand for them has not yet reached the point where the price becomes disproportionately large.

Now about how the mining farm works.

To put it quite simply, mining farm - an installation that directs its computing power to solve one problem - cryptocurrency mining. That is, you build a small analogue of a PC (very conditional), connect all the necessary equipment, set it up, and after that all resources at the maximum level will be directed to the extraction of cryptocurrency.

The power of one farm is about 26 times higher than that of an average home PC for 40-50 thousand rubles. At the same time, unlike a computer, power is not distributed to working programs, maintaining the system, or performing any operations. It is clearly focused on one thing - the extraction of currency.

Now that you have roughly understood how a mining farm works, let's figure out what it takes to build a farm.

What is needed for a mining farm

In order to assemble a mining farm, you will need:

Motherboard. It will be enough to have a regular motherboard, in which there will be the required number of connectors for a video card.
HDD. 60 gigabytes may be enough, but it is better to take 100-160. One wallet with ethereum weighs only 25 GB, and with bitcoins - from 50 and more.
Video cards. No special advice here. Choose a suitable video card for mining, and then, based on this, collect the rest of the parts.
Power unit. Farms with 4+ graphics cards often require more than one power supply. Buy basically a few blocks of 750 watts and just connect them together to work.
Adapters for mounting video cards (preferably Razer).
Equipment start button.
It would be advisable to buy 1-2 more coolers for better cooling.

Another important detail is the frame for the farm.

Approximate dimensions:

Width: 42 cm;
Length: 55-60cm;
Height: 35 cm;
Height of the bar for the video card: 23 cm.

It is best to make a frame of wood or aluminum. The size of the mining farm will be slightly larger than its frame due to protruding parts, adapters and a cooling system.

In total, the average truss will be about half a meter high, 70 cm long and 50 cm wide. A large mining farm can reach parameters of length and height of one meter.

Now a few tips regarding equipment:

Don't Buy ASRock Motherboards. Although the developers claim that they created their product exclusively for cryptocurrency mining, experienced miners actively dissuade them from inserting them into farms, referring to overloads and overheating solely due to the design of the motherboard.
Buying video cards in Russia is becoming increasingly unprofitable. Those models that just a year ago cost 10-11 thousand rubles are now sold in leading stores for 18 thousand. If you decide to build a farm yourself, pay attention to the stores of Western Europe and America.
Don't spend a lot on motherboards and hard drives. The cost of all related equipment should not exceed 10-15% of the price of the farm itself.

Now to more detailed instructions on how to assemble your farm.

How to set up a mining farm

Building a farm yourself is not an easy task. However, if you know a little about computer hardware, this will not be difficult for you.

Video on creating a mining farm:

Farm setup

After you have assembled the main structure, you need to set up the farm. In fact, setting up a farm comes down to a complete demolition of the system, installing new drivers and then working with programs.

After installing the operating system, we immediately update the hardware drivers to the latest versions. Then we download MSI Afterburner from the official site to overclock our video cards. Next, install Teamviewer to work with the farm remotely, set the swap file to 20 GB and install.

We go to the site through which you will mine, select the pool (the network through which we will mine) and download the program itself. Then we open it as a notepad and write in it the number of our wallet, the name of the farm and the mail to which notifications will be sent. We close it, press start, and the mining farm starts working.

Add the miner program to the autorun of your farm so that immediately after turning it on, it starts mining cryptocurrency.

This is how a mining farm is set up from scratch. Almost all of the setup time will take the installation of the operating system.

For a better understanding of this, watch the video:

Where to buy a ready farm for mining

If you do not want to bother yourself with finding the necessary components, assembling, installing and configuring equipment, then it will be much easier to buy a farm. But there is one important detail.

It is not worth buying ready-made mining farms on the secondary market and bulletin boards. Firstly, people do not know the real cost of their structures and often overprice (up to 2 times), and secondly, you may encounter incorrect settings or low-quality equipment.

If you are in Moscow or St. Petersburg, then in your cities there are several companies that sell already configured turnkey mining farms.

In the provinces, this is more difficult. It is rare that anyone is engaged in mining in principle, and sells a finished farm either for a lot of money, or already killed.

Speaking about the ready-made purchase of farms, one cannot but mention special equipment for mining. It is created by manufacturers in order to use iron to the maximum with minimal investment.

The most popular of the special equipment is ASIC processors. These are designs made specifically for working with bitcoins. They give out maximum power precisely in terms of production, and are completely unsuitable for everything else.

If we compare the cost of special ASIC equipment with the price of one average farm, it turns out that a farm for mining will cost much less, even if you buy a ready-made one.

The capacities of farms at the same costs will be approximately 1.5 times less. But when buying special equipment for mining, there is a high risk that if the system entry threshold rises very much, you will not be able to mine anything on it, and there will be no one to sell it to, since the structures are not suitable for anything else.

Therefore, if you only want to engage in mining with maximum profitability, then it is better to buy a ready-made installation that will mine cryptocurrency. Prices: from 3 thousand dollars for the minimum configuration.

What cryptocurrency to mine on your farm

The question of which cryptocurrency to mine is quite interesting and controversial. On the one hand, there is a clear answer - ether. On the other hand, the complexity of mining and small rumors about changes in mining algorithms force us to look for fallback options.

These options can be divided into two groups:

Famous cryptocurrencies;
Growing popularity of altcoins.

It’s up to you to decide, but it’s much safer and more profitable to contact popular cryptocurrencies, and it’s more profitable to contact those that are gaining popularity.

If you want to mine new altcoins, it is recommended not only to mine this cryptocurrency, but also to buy it. So, with the increase in value, you will receive more money from the farm and have a stable return on your investment.

But messing with altcoins is now very unsafe. You can easily burn out and lose a few days / weeks, or even months of your farm. Therefore, if this is your only farm and one of the few sources of income, then it is better to limit yourself to popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Z-Cash, etc.

There you need to choose a mining algorithm, set the power, and after that you will be given a list of options with the profitability of each of them.

How much does a mining farm earn

The most interesting question is, of course, “How much does one mining farm earn?”

It will not be possible to answer it unequivocally due to the fact that, firstly, farms are different, and secondly, the cryptocurrency exchange rate has been actively jumping in recent months, and it will no longer be possible to talk about exact numbers.

The only reliable figures that can be obtained are the payback of video cards. If we consider the most popular model in Russia now - NVIDIA GTX 1060, then the payback period varies from 140 days to 200, depending on the cost of cryptocurrency and electricity. Well, from setting up the farm, of course. Other video cards pay off a little longer.

When overclocking the power of the video card, you can significantly reduce the payback rate of the farm, by about 20-40 days. True, such a farm will heat up more, consume more electricity, require a better cooling system and, in principle, live less.

Therefore, miners are forced to balance between income right now and the prospect of stable earnings for several years. But since the future is still vague, despite the increasing interest in cryptocurrency, experts advise overclocking your video cards, if, of course, you know how to do it.

At the same time, judging by the numerous articles on the Internet, investments in the farm pay off in 100-110 days. But if you explore the topic a little deeper, and look at reliable forums, the figure will increase to 140-150 days at best. Based on our realities, we can talk about semi-annual investments, and in some cases even annual ones.

That is, video cards pay for themselves in an average of 150 days + equipment from the cooling system, motherboard and electricity will add another month. Total we get 5 - 6 months of payback.

For those who like specific numbers, it will all sound something like this:

A farm on the GTX 1060 brings 90 rubles per day x the number of video cards;
A farm on the GTX 1070 brings 120 rubles a day x the number of video cards;
A farm on the GTX 1080 brings 130 rubles per day x the number of video cards;
A farm on the GTX 1080 TI brings 180 rubles per day x the number of video cards.

The data is valid for September-October 2017. What will happen next is still unknown.

If we compare prices with profitability and payback period, then it turns out that the more expensive the video card (from those presented in the list above), the greater will be the profit and payback period.

That is, in the long run, it may turn out that nominally the income from 1 farm for 1080 TI will be higher, but for the same money that was spent on 4 TI video cards, you can buy 3 farms with 1060.

Now it is difficult to find real data on how much farms bring per day. And it is even more difficult to predict its income, because due to the great popularity, mining algorithms are becoming more and more complicated, prices are still jumping, and cryptocurrency sellers at any time risk their actions simply to collapse the market.

To see if it's worth mining at all, work with hardware vendors for a bit. This is called cloud mining. It will allow you to understand whether there is money in cryptocurrency, whether it is profitable to invest in it, and in general to feel the “taste of money” in this.

While you are testing cloud mining, you need to watch tutorials on:

Creation of a mining farm at home;
Overclocking video cards;
Correct equipment setup.

This is done so that you simply do not lose your investment. And the first farm will now have to spend 100-110 thousand rubles, which is quite a lot, given the unstable economic situation.

After you have tried cloud mining, compared all the costs and watched the tutorial video, it's time to start building your own farm.

This is done quite simply, we even told you how. But one important point is still worth recalling: you need a normal cooling system. Overclocked graphics cards get very hot, and overheating is one of the most common causes of breakdowns in gaming graphics cards, not to mention mining, in which poor cards work even harder.

And now about acceleration. As they said on one of the forums: “If you can’t overclock a video card for mining, then it’s better to find yourself a stable job.” As harsh as it may sound, it's true.

Overclocking a video card from scratch is not an easy task, especially when you have absolutely no experience in this. But YouTube is one big instruction on how to overclock video cards, including for mining.

To understand how to overclock video cards, watch the video:

And one more, but very important remark. If you are building a mining farm at home, then you need to live either with very peaceful neighbors, or in a house with very good noise isolation, since the farms buzz quite strongly.

What to do with the farm if the cryptocurrency goes to the bottom

To be frank, the situation in which the cryptocurrency will break the bottom is almost unrealistic. Demand for bitcoin, the flagship of the virtual currency, has been growing steadily for more than eight years. This is a pretty good indicator.

Another question is that there were periods when he significantly sagged, and lost up to 50% of the positions earned during the year within 1-2 weeks.

It is in light of such uncertainty that people think what to do when “mining is over”. This is especially true with government statements that it seems to want to regulate the circulation of bictions and cryptocurrency in general, but continues to tighten the screws on money laundering.

The easiest option that comes to mind is to sell components. And this is the most correct option. You will have nowhere else to use computing power, except for mining another cryptocurrency.

Those who are seriously thinking about assembling PCs from mining farms can be safely advised to forget about this idea. You will have to spend on components for 3-6 PCs (depending on the number of video cards) an amount comparable to the cost of a farm. At the same time, you will still need to understand that a used video card will cost significantly less than a new one.

It remains only to closely monitor the video card market, and immediately after the moral obsolescence of the equipment, throw it into the secondary market, maximum within a week.

Important fact. The Russian secondary market is now very sensitive to everything that happens to the economy. But despite this, computer components have always stood apart, because there are always gamers, and they need hardware. Therefore, if you carefully time the moment, dismantle the farm and sell exactly the video cards, then you can easily recoup the cost of the farm in a week, if you have time.

But everything is not so sad. Blockchain technology is very interesting for businesses and entrepreneurs. Therefore, cryptocurrencies will continue to be created and quite actively.

True, these are often hypes and that are made in order to collect money in the owner's wallet. But in some cases, worthy and interesting projects are obtained. So, the same ETH in 2014 was “another alternative to bitcoin”, and now it is already the second cryptocurrency in the world.

The world of currencies is developing very quickly and in the near future, perhaps we will get two or three more worthy replacements for the old cue balls.

Therefore, do not rush to part with mining farms and think about what to do after bitcoin or ether lose their value. You will be able to mine and trade on altcoins that are just starting to appear. With competent investments in trade and equipment, you can.

Conclusion

Summing up, we can say that the mining farm is now the only way to adequately invest in cryptocurrency earnings. If for some reason renting a mining farm is inconvenient for you, then it will not be difficult to assemble your installation in your apartment. This will require only cash investments (100+ thousand rubles) and a little time to completely figure it out.

Don't expect your investment to pay off instantly. Most people who keep talking about 2-2.5 months are simply far from cryptocurrency and modern farming realities. Time passes, algorithms become more complex, the price goes up, and the payback is still around 120+ days (at best). If you want to start mining, it's a bit late, but still profitable.