PiMP Mining Magazine – So you Stay in the Green – December 2018

Happy Holidays from our family to yours!

We appreciate you being a part of the PiMP Project and for reading our newsletter. We want to hear from you, so jump in the PiMP discord at discord.me/pimp and tell us what you want us to be working on. Join our Wednesday Clubhouse Calls to get to know your fellow miners and have some fun. 

Strategies for Staying Profitable

The PiMP Community remains flexible and has all the tools and advice and help that miners need to stay profitable in any market. Come chat with us!

Latest & Greatest

Mine all the hottest new coins with pimpup OTA updates so you have the new versions of the miners. This ensures you are current with the latest optimizations from your friends at T-Rex, Z-enemy, CryptoDredge, and over 20 other modern miners – all tested and integrated by the PiMP Beta Team.

Lower Difficulty

Not only is PiMP OS making it easy for miners tired of fighting with Windows drivers, the folks that are selling their farms are leaving plenty of cheap GPUs and lots of block rewards for us to grab and enjoy. Those who have stayed the course are reaping more of the rewards.

Tell Your Friends

We have seen an increase in signups for the PiMP OS Referral Program and some folks are earning extra money by recommending the easiest way to mine crypto to their friends. Check this out and make some extra cash for yourself!

Crypto Tax Tips: The Brash Report

The Brash Report is primarily geared toward US tax law but the ideas can be applied most likely to other countries. This section of the PiMP Mining Magazine is to help you learn about how to be tax compliant and profitable with crypto!

December Tax Tips – Where is YOUR wallet?

Let’s look at your Crypto Wallets… where are they?  Hardware?  Coinbase?  A USA based exchange?  In Korea?  Is it somehow not specified because it is in a distributed blockchain based exchange?  The question is a binary question… Is it in the United States?  Yes or No.  If you cannot prove that it is in the United States… then guess what?  It is a foreign account even if you cannot reasonably assign it to a specific country.
Here is the scenario:  You have $6,000 value in 1.0 Bitcoin in a German exchange and you just hold it.  No trading or converting into another currency.  During the year, the Bitcoin price goes to $11,000 and then drops to $9,000. Notice that in this scenario there is no income to report, so this is not technically an income tax problem, however the required reporting IS on your income tax forms.

 
There are several places that you need to report your offshore accounts, depending on the value of all offshore accounts.  
 
Schedule B question 7a at the bottom of the page… easy to overlook – Do you have financial interest or signatory authority over a financial account in a foreign country?  Yes is the correct answer here – even if you have nothing in it.  
 
Still on Schedule B, question 7b… If yes, then are you required to file FinCEN 114?  We will get to that next.  Question 8 name the country – Germany in this scenario – it could be “Various” if you are not sure.
 
Now for the tricky trap… look at the “high water mark” in each account…then add them together… if that ever exceeded $10,000 during the calendar year, then the FinCEN 114 is required.  For example, If you move $5,000 from Germany to Japan, then you have 2 accounts with a high watermark of $5,000 each… so add up the high watermarks and you have $10,000 (I know, it is just the same $5,000, but that’s how you determine what you need to report).  The math underlying this is the current law.  By the way, the penalty for omitting this form can be $10,000 for EACH YEAR that accounts are not reported… Be sure to report all accounts, even the ones that are empty.
 
Next tricky trap… if your high water marks added together in offshore accounts exceed $50,000 then the IRS form 8938 is required.  Look out, because there are differences between the required accounts to be reported.  Oh, and the penalty for omitting this form is another $10,000… so this makes it worth the time for IRS to look for this kind of omission.
 
In our scenario, you are required to answer the Schedule B questions, and file the FinCEN 114 with the Department of the Treasury, but not the IRS Form 8938.
 
While the jury is still out, because the court cases have not yet been settled and IRS and the US Department of Treasury have not made their final pronouncements… Note that the IRS voluntary disclosure program (amnesty program) for prior years has ended as of 9/28/2018.  That means you do not get to use it for the 2018 tax year.  So, going forward… don’t have ANY NEW lack of reporting.
This is the most conservative approach.  There are amateurs who will give you bad advice, and there are professionals who do not know crypto.  When you do this right, you will get to keep more of your crypto.
My best suggestion is to get competent, professional advice, and educate yourself.  Ignorance of the tax law is not going to help you in the long run.
 
Respectfully,
 
Brash 
(Bitcoin Believer since 2013)
ASK BRASH! 
Brash is taking your questions for the next issue! Just email ask@getpimp.org your tax or other crypto related questions and we will help you find answers!

Miner.farm 3 Roadmap Report

 

Miner.farm V3 was released!!! and not only is it a massive upgrade for monitoring and management, many new features are available for PIMP OS as well, including: Configuration file library with push to rigs, complete rigs stats including power usage, immediate re-image ability, and lots more. 

Miner.farm makes your PIMP OS rigs easy to monitor and manage remotely, along with putting all your key and account information in one place.  And Dark Mode is Free!

PiMP OS Roadmap Report

PIMPUP OTA Updates have been huge and full of the latest and greatest updates from folks like CryptoDredge, T-Rex, and Z-enemy. We have added a ton of new miners so you have lots of choices and support for every coin and algorithm, including teamredminer, gminer, phoenixminer, cast-xmr, and wildrig-multi. If you have a stable miner with api and per-device stats that we should include, let us know!
PiMP OS 2.8.6 is our most stable platform yet and we continue to progress on building our new kernel and integrating the latest AMDGPU and NVIDIA/CUDA drivers for PiMP 2.9. We are also trying to decrease the image size so you get a faster download, faster image write, and more free space if you need it. 
We also have been hard at work on the 3.0 generation of PiMP applications. First up, pimpup3 gets a makeover with all new SSH-based GUI (like miner.farm agent console) and CLI options. You’ll also get a rig backup/restore option to allow you faster deployment of rigs and easier management of your favorite settings.

Support Team Shout Outs

We want to welcome RoyKiii and g33kster to the PiMP Beta Team – Thanks for your help with making PiMP and Miner.farm the most solid mining OS available, and for telling everyone about it! We saw quite a few new signups to the Referral Program and some miners are earning extra money!

** 20% OFF PiMP OS **

Thanks for reading, miners!

Enjoy this Coupon Code:

HOHOHODL

(Expires Jan 31, 2018)

Still mining ETH?

If you are mining ETH then you are probably loving all the deadline pushes for Constantinople. The latest updated information is showing a tentative date of January 2019. As we know the prices are not great right now but if you are planning to mine and HODL then you may still be mining ETH as many are. The technology is definitely there and while some people think the crypto markets have cooled or frozen over, we know that it will heat up again eventually. While Constantinople will reduce block rewards, which is bad for miners, the network upgrade should add some value to ether. Lets go ETH!!

Commercial Mining Corner

If you are still mining commercially then there is probably a good reason. In the October edition we talked about moving your rigs to a commercial environment and what that entails. While some areas are moving toward colder weather we are definitely in what I like to call “mining season”. When your rigs can generate enough heat to heat your building it helps to keep you regular heat bills down from the gas/electric company. We see the opposite of this in the hotter months because you are generating extra heat and having to cool even more, so lets take advantage of these winter months and mine on!!

Doc’s Cryptomining Triage

Happy Holidays, PiMPs!

I hope this year was a great year for you, but if it wasn’t as great as you would have liked, then… here’s to 2019!

Okay, so for this month I thought I’d cover what I call “easy updates”.

First, we all know that PiMP OS comes with the most current Linux packages, kernel and video drivers at the time of it’s release. To ensure each release meets the PiMP OS standards of stability and reliability, it is heavily tested by the PiMP Team. Thankfully for us, the moment a new version of PiMP OS is released, the PiMP Team is already working on the next version.

Secondly, most of us know that miner software developers are constantly updating their miners and… well, who doesn’t want to be running the newest miners on their PiMP rigs… am I right?! PiMP OS brings these updated miners to us as quickly and as easily as possible via the ‘pimpup’ tool. Before these miners are released via ‘pimpup’, the PiMP Team gives them the same testing treatment as they give PiMP OS.

Miner software developers not only update their software to add support for new hardware and drivers, some also remove support for older hardware and drivers. Unfortunately, PiMP does not have control over what other developers do and this can cause all sorts of problems.

Here’s where my term “easy updates” comes into play:

I know how easy ‘pimpup’ makes updating miners. I also know how re-imaging can be a pain. It’s very tempting to just take the “easy updates” via ‘pimpup’ and avoid the PiMP OS update.

The PiMP Team is working on making the PiMP OS install easier by developing a PiMP OS Installer, but until then, don’t let this be the reason you don’t update your rigs to the newest PiMP OS version.

Bottom Line:
To run the most current miners available via ‘pimpup’, you need to also be running the most current version of PiMP OS.

If, for any reason, you can’t run the most current version of PiMP OS, then don’t update your miners.

Okay, until next month, Happy Mining, PiMPs!  

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