Alternate Title -- Should I Just Sell Shovels?

If any of you ever get a chance to travel to northern California, and you are lucky enough to go there when the entire state is not in lockdown, you might consider a visit to Sutter's Mill.  Many locations were chosen for spots to mine for gold, but John Sutter picked the epicenter for his new home.  He was, however, a shrewd businessman.  Instead of traveling to California to mine for gold, he decided that he could make more money selling shovels to the miners. 

After about a week of mining cryptocurrency, I'm about ready to do the same.

I started mining after a simple YouTube search helped me discover a terrific YouTuber who teaches you about all things mining.  In this short video, I learned how to use my PC to mine Ethereum:  How to mine Ethereum (YouTube).  I didn't have a gaming PC, so I thought I'd stroll on down to my local Best Buy to invest in one.  I figured if mining didn't pan out at least my son would have a nice PC.  

Best Buy was pretty much sold out of gaming PCs, but just happened to have a good one on hand.  I spent ~ $1800 and was off to the mine.  I figured Ethereum was trading at $2000 at the time, so my investment would be recouped in 10 minutes right?  Wrong.  

Setting up the PC was easy.  I even started making a profit.  But I quickly found out, it was going to be a very small profit.  I am only mining at a rate of 35mH (mega hash) per second.  If you don't know what that is, don't worry -- I didn't either.  In order to get a good return on mining you really need at least 60 mH or more per second.  Unfortunately, this is not something you can just "turn up the volume" on your computer to improve.  I thought I could just improve my PC, but after further YouTube searches, I found out there really is only one way to improve the speed of your mining ... get a better graphics card or GPU.  

Cool, I found a solution.  I'll go out and buy a new graphics card.  Sounds easy enough.  Wrong again.  Buying a good graphics card right now is like trying to get tickets to Hamilton during COVID-19.  Not only are they not on sale, but the ones that are on sale are scalped at prices so high you'd need a dozen BTC to pay for them.  I found a cool "now in stock" tracker that will tell you when something is in stock, and every day I search it I find the same thing...NO GOOD GRAPHICS CARDS ARE IN STOCK!  GPUs in Stock.

You can get a decent graphics card like the GEFORCE RTX 3080, but you won't pay the $850 retail price.  You'll pay the scalped price of $1500-2500 on Ebay.  Which begs the question...why mine crypto if the set up to mine crypto is so expensive?  Then I had another idea.

If you can't beat them, join them?  I am still going order graphics cards, and I'm still thinking of building my own mining rig, but I might just place a backorder on about 50 graphics cards.  When they do finally come in, I'll either have enough graphics cards to build a sweet mining rig -- or I will have plenty of "shovels" to sell to hungry crypto-miners.   I'm also sure that these miners would be willing to pay double price for a GPU that normally should be easy to find.

Personally I think scalping graphic cards is unethical.  But I have yet to find a GPU that I can purchase now without paying a scalper.  Either way, I'm not getting a graphics card anytime soon.

So for now I'm stuck with my factory installed 35 mH per second 2060 Super.  It isn't bad, but it isn't fast.  Because it is so slow (comparatively) I'm beginning to learn all about stale shares, average hash rates, and increased electricity costs.

How much have I made so far?  About $25.00.  Was it worth it.  Actually, this may surprise you -- but yes.  At its core, this has been a fun adventure.  Prior to this week I knew nothing about crypto-mining.  Now I know how to ping a location on my PC, I know what a hash rate is, and I have dreams of someday owning my own huge mining operation with solar panels and my own shed with hundreds of GPUs.  For now though -- I can only dream.  

What are your thoughts -- please share below.