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

Join us for fun as well as profits!

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. Also, check out our #culture-food-fun and 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!

Know the Numbers

Stay on the hottest mining coins by watching sites like whattomine.com. Bookmark helpful resources like these to stay on the pulse of profit! https://cryptorival.com/calcs/cointomine and https://www.cryptunit.com/

Read the Results

Not every miner is created equal – we’ve done some rigorous head to head shootouts to see which payout more, given the same hashrate. Check them out on the PiMP forum! https://forum.getpimp.org/topic/4885/loki-nvidia-shootout-xmr-stak-vs-cryptodredge

Work Together

Ask around! The PiMP community is what gives you the edge in the end. Not just a modern, reliable, up-to-date, and continually patched and upgraded operating system… But a community that shares ideas, tunes, tweaks, bios changes, news, everything you need to mine effectively and efficently for months and years to come.

Crypto Tax Tips

Every time you buy some hardware, electronics or electrical supplies, log it in your “mining hardware” purchase list. You can use an Excel doc, Google Sheet or even a paper tablet – whatever works for you. Then you will have easy access to your cost basis, not just to resell for upgrade, and for ROI calculations, but also for calculating your business expenses.

Miner.farm 3 Roadmap Report

Miner.farm 3 development is right on time. The past few weeks we have been working diligently on the PiMP and Miner.farm subscription interface. For Miner.farm and PiMP OS 3.0, you will not only have full control over your PiMP keys, but you will also be able to add time or rigs to your keys quickly and easily at any time. We are putting a lot of thought and user input into this new system so it works like a charm!

Subscriptions with on screen calculation – Pick a key, and add time and/or rigs dynamically how you like!

PiMP OS Roadmap Report

PIMP-2.8.6: RELEASED 2018-10-17 and it was a MAJOR UPGRADE meaning a milestone to PiMP 3.0! So far over 1,000 installations have proven it to be the most stable version yet, and we have some of our beta team racing for longest uptime! It will be hard to beat a|ien’s PiMP 2.1 which has been running for over 241 days.

  • Upgraded to new PiMP logos, splash screens, colors, fonts, and icons!
  • Upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver.
  • Upgraded to CUDA 9.2 and NVIDIA 396.18. (CUDA 9.1 Still included for legacy miners)
  • Upgraded to AMDGPU-PRO 18.20.
  • Check out the full report on the changelog here: https://forum.getpimp.org/topic/4/updates-and-change-log/14

In the meantime we have been delivering non stop OTA updates for the latest miners including CryptoDredge, XMR-Stak, and ethminer, so you always have the latest and greatest support and the highest hashrates. Cryptonight Monero v8 fork went by smoothly and many of us are hot on the cryptonight variant coins like LOKI, which are paying out nice profits and keeping our houses nice and warm!

Hot Hardware News

 

Nvidia 2070 and 2080 support is right around the corner, but we have plenty of time since the miner developers still have to optimize for these cards.

AMD is working hard too and they are leaking some rumors of some quick updates to the Polaris, called RX 670/680, stay tuned for more news here. We have been building and patching the latest kernels to see what new features we can deliver for AMD GPU users for the next PiMP OS version.

** 20% OFF PiMP OS **

Thanks for reading, miners!

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User Spotlight: Growing Your Farm to a Commercial Space

So you want to mine commercially instead of residentially?
This article will discuss some pros and cons of moving your mining rigs/devices to a commercial place instead of keeping them at your house. Please understand that many views here are opinionated and not all of this information will apply to everyone’s particular situation. After acquiring a commercial space to store my mining rigs I decided to make the move. Mining rigs in a residence are not only loud but as you may know they generate a significant amount of heat. This can be ok in the winter but when summer rolls around you may find it difficult to keep your house cool depending on whether or not you have central air. This is assuming you are not running any ASIC miners which generate significantly more heat and also more noise.
Another thing you must consider as crypto miner is cost. What other costs might be associated with a move to commercial, whether you are expanding or not. Initial costs are obvious, moving the actual rigs which depends on how many you have and how you are currently storing them. Additional initial costs include setting up proper electrical in the new space to run the specific rigs that you are managing (e.g. 6/7 card rigs or 13-20 card rigs). Depending on your area and who services it, electricity cost per kWh for commercial usually runs at a higher rate than residential. Are you paying rent or did you purchase a building? All of the costs must be considered in order to determine whether the move is worth it.
There are some other aspects of moving your rigs that indirectly relate to cost but in my opinion relate more to convenience. As we know rigs may sometimes need maintenance. This maintenance while not impossible from a remote location is much easier to do on-site.
Will you have access to your rigs all the time if something were to go down at midnight on a weekday? If you don’t then you must also account for this potential loss of mining rewards.
Are your devices in a relatively safe area? How many people know where they are and do you have proper security devices around the location? (e.g. cameras etc). This last portion may be a little paranoid but mining can be very lucrative and we have seen how GPU prices skyrocket. This can be potential for possible thieves etc.
Hopefully this discussion about moving your mining rigs sparked some internal debate or helped you make a decision that you have been pondering for a while.

Tips, Tricks, & Troubleshooting: Doc’s Cryptomining Triage

Hello fellow PiMPs! As promised in last month’s newsletter, this month’s Cryptomining Triage is a little more detailed.
This month, I want to pass on a simple troubleshooting tip that may not save you time, but it will save your sanity. Something I had to learn the hard way.
When it came to computers, I started learning as much as I could the moment I got my very first one: a “Tandy SX25”. Likewise, 20 years ago (as if the “Tandy SX25” reference didn’t already make me feel old…), when I joined the US Navy to be an electronics technician, I learned as much as I could about AC & DC theory.
Like all new sailors, I wanted to be the superstar technician… and since my knowledge and gained experience got me through my early computer years, it was going to be my secret weapon for troubleshooting complex aviation electronics… or so I thought.
Maybe it was pride, or just plain arrogance… but I ignored one of the most important concepts of troubleshooting: K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Only after I embraced this concept, was I able to become that superstar technician I wanted to be.
So, what does KISS have to do with cryptomining? I’m glad you asked.
Our cryptomining rigs are complex machines with many, many parts. I don’t know of a single cryptominer that has not had to do the troubleshooting “dance” at least once. Risers break, power supplies die, and GPU’s give up. These things happen and as cryptominers we are the ones that have to fix them.
At the fist sign of trouble, I see miners go tearing through their rigs trying to find the problem. Cables being pulled, GPU’s flying through the air, and curse words echoing throughout. We try to rely on our knowledge alone to solve the problem, but what we’re actually doing is causing a bigger problem.
We “shotgun” the problem based upon what we think could be wrong. This is really nothing more than a Hail Mary pass – made in desperation, with only a small chance of success with time running out on the clock – and my experience has shown me that this has less than a 25% chance of actually finding what the problem is. The other +75% of the time, it just ends up causing me more work and pushing the actual problem further away.
Next time you find yourself having to do the “dance” apply a little KISS to your method. For example: If you’re troubleshooting a GPU problem in a multi-GPU rig, consider grouping set items together (i.e. Keep each GPU grouped with it’s original riser, USB cable, PCIe 1x adapter, and power connections.). Treat these groups as single items when you’re moving stuff around. As you move these grouped items around, the original problem will most likely move around with them. This will allow you to narrow down which group has the problem. Once you’ve identified the problem group, you can begin to narrow down even further by swapping out the individual pieces from that group, one at a time, until you’ve found the problem.
This process can take a bit of time, however, it will net you the faulty part every time. Remember, that every change we make in the system becomes another variable we have to deal with and the more variables we have to deal with, the harder it becomes to narrow down what the actual problem is.
When we forget to KISS, we waste time, run in circles, and build up frustration. It doesn’t matter how much we know or how much experience we may have, opting to “shotgun” the problem is still just a Hail Mary pass. Proper troubleshooting will win the game every time.
Until next month, you PiMPs stay PiMPy!

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