Earlier posts in this series:
- When to mine and when to buy
- Liquidation value is everything (this post!)
2. Liquidation value is everything
Because the main reason to mine (instead of buy) is to decrease variance, it should follow that liquidation value matters most--it limits your losses. To determine liquidation value just ask yourself: if crypto dropped to zero (or ASICs come out for the major GPU mined coins) what could you sell your parts for?
Most people fail to consider this. When picking parts, you shouldn't just be looking at hashrate per $, it's hashrate divided by [price - expected liquidation value]. By this metric, here are parts to avoid and to buy:
Parts to avoid:
- Specialized mining rig frames - Almost always overpriced (just go to home depot and/or be creative) and totally useless outside of mining.
- Greater than 1000W consumer power supplies - Also marked up and no one besides miners uses them (see a pattern?)
- Mining only (or marked up) graphics cards - See above
- Paying for software - I hope this was obvious.
Parts to buy:
- Nvidia GTX 1080ti (or some other top-end video card w/o mining markup) - This card is the king of liquidation value. Not only will it depreciate the least (assuming gaming is still popular), by concentrating power into a single slot, it helps you limit buying necessary parts with little to no liquidation value, e.g., mining motherboards, bottom barrel CPUs, 1 GB sticks of RAM, PCIe risers. If you read this and say "this guide is trash, the 1080ti sucks at mining [coin of the day]!"--I'll get to that tomorrow.
- Server power supplies - There's a bit of a learning curve but worth it if you're familiar.
- <1000W consumer power supplies - Gamers with SLI rigs might actually buy these off of you, plus they go on sale. Use an "add2PSU."