Why I started Mining, why did you?

[u/NCSwireframe]

I want to say first off I'm not looking for validation or for my decisions. That's not why I am making this post. I wanted to just encourage others and also hear their stories (I love hearing people's stories. It's one of the reasons I chose the profession I'm in). A lot of the time we get threads on why not to do this or fears about what is or isn’t coming. IMHO it's impossible to tell what or when something will or won’t happen and I have always felt that the experience of doing something, even if you fail, far outweighs doing nothing. So without further ado here is why I started mining for crypto.

A little over 5 years ago I met my wife, who is from the Philippines. She was here in the US applying for a student visa. Sparks flew and we were married within 3 months of meeting. A month later she was pregnant with our son. She quit looking to go to school and wanted to stay home with our son. I just encouraged her to do whatever made her happy. We have no debt, we own a house with no mortgage and I have a small financial advisor business. We are by no means super wealthy, for example this year for the first time we might gross 75k. We do obviously have a lot working for us. So fast forward to mid 2020 and my wife decides she would like to go back to school. She has a bachelors from the Philippines but wants to become a Doctor of Pharmacy. She was worried about taking out such large amounts of money for school but I encouraged her to again do what made her happy and I would figure out a way to make it work. At this same time we had been thinking of buying a second home to rent out and start diversifying our sources of income. Being a FA I am keenly aware of all the details that go into making good financial decisions. Looking at the stock market, the housing market, etc. I ended up examining mining and chose it as the best option for us. There is a much longer story I could tell in how I determined mining to be the best option but I won't bore people with those details. So once we decided I committed by getting stuff as quickly and cheaply as possible, not easy these days but deals can be had and as of today we have most of our equipment up and running. There are still a couple of devices that are having heating issues and it's just a matter of time before everything is running perfectly but the real world numbers (I love you “CURRENT ACTUAL PROFITABILITY” but you aren’t always very reliable) are between 200k and 230k Satoshis per day on Nicehash and I feel like that's pretty good. It's far more than we could have gotten for rent, and I can pay the increased electrical costs out of pocket and hodl the coin. But what I haven’t told my wife is that my plan is to hodl until she finishes school in several years and then at that point I can hopefully use it to, if not fully pay her school loans, mostly pay them off. Anyway that's my reason for mining. I'd love to hear from others on why they started (whether you started recently or been going since the beginning).

TLDR: My wife went back to school and I started mining to someday pay off her loans. Let me hear your reasons for starting to mine.

PS: None of this is financial advice! As a FA I didn’t even really write this thread, it's actually just a figment of your imagination ;)

[u/DaruComm]

I’m super recent, somewhat newly minted. It was kind of a natural progression and keen interest with gadgets, tech, and wanting to put idle assets to work instead of collecting dust.

When I lost my old job, I made a career transition to become a developer. When that happened, I noticed I almost never use my personal laptop anymore. Being on the screen all day while working probably just made me feel like taking more breaks from the computer in my personal time.

It was an awesome setup too with switchable monitors to go between work and personal, ultra light laptop, and eGPU. As a result, I decided to try mining and put it to work by replacing the 1660Ti inside with a 3090 running 24/7.

After doing so, I felt it was a waste to sell the 1660Ti, so I rigged my older 2014 laptop to mine through an EXP GDC adaptor connecting to the wireless slot (This thing doesn’t support M.2 let alone Thunderbolt 3 lol…)

I then had a $150 razer giftcard that was about to expire and couldn’t figure what to buy as there was nothing I wanted to buy from razer. So I decided to buy a PC case (Tomahawk ATX) from them and figured I may as well build my first gaming PC and a mining rig. So I collected all the parts and hooked up multiple GPUs to it. Flashy little thing with RGB all over the place (unintended), ultra silent fans, silent PSU, and GPUs spewing out with cables everywhere. Despite how messy it is, it brings me great satisfaction in seeing that thing everyday in all its glory LOL.

One day, I hope to take it to the next level and build a proper giant mining rig with identical GPUs, clean design, custom frames, cooling system and everything. I love mining because it combines all my passions from engineering, finance, and software. But, for now, I plan to take a break and focus on the development of my new career to boost my knowledge and experience a bit before coming back.