BURST Coin Mining – When CPU and GPU Are No Longer Enough

The ever-increasing computational demands are hard to keep up with, and the declining demand for altcoins brings the hopeless situation where the already very expensive graphics cards' profitability, considering their power consumption, is heading toward zero.

While an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB model was bringing in $2-4 daily profit in late January/early February, by mid-March it's good if it can produce a round $1 in daily revenue. The 1080Ti cards produce roughly double that in 24 hours, but considering their higher power consumption, they might be in an even worse position than the 1060s.

So what's the solution if we don't want to give up, sell all our hardware on the market, and completely stop mining? If you have spare hard drive capacity and don't want to wait for someone to use it (e.g., Storj: https://storj.io) then you need to start using your hard drive capacity differently.

This is where BURST Coin comes in as a good opportunity — let's simply call it BURST. The essence is that your computer can connect to the BURST network with much lower power consumption, where you only need to account for hard drives consuming a few Watts, which produce negligible heat compared to graphics cards and can still bring you profit.

I'll try to present the steps for starting mining in a later article, in a way that's viable at this moment. Until then, let me say a few words about the most important sites:

• The official site where most information can be obtained and the BURST wallet can be downloaded:
  • https://www.burst-coin.org
• Calculator where you just need to enter your disk size in the Total Plot Size section and you can immediately see below how much Burst you can mine in 30 days. On the right side, in the Price Calculator section, after Amount enter the received value and in the Total EUR-USD-BTC section you can see how much profit you can get from all this:
  • https://explore.burst.cryptoguru.org/tool/calculate
  • Currently (2018.03.17) with 10TB of storage space, we can generate approximately ±€5 in monthly revenue.
• The program needed for hard drive preparation (Plotting) can be found here, I'll write about it in detail later:
  • https://github.com/bhamon/gpuPlotGenerator/releases

Profit: As clearly visible among the above links, if you happen to have a 10TB hard drive at home in 1 or 2 pieces or who knows how many, then ±€5 monthly revenue is better than nothing. But I don't think it's worth immediately running to the store to stock up on hard drives. Not even considering that graphics card prices are currently at incredibly high levels. A 10TB drive represents an investment of approximately 80-100,000 HUF, which with ±€5 monthly revenue results in a payback period of over 50 months. That's a very long time and can't be called a good investment at all.

However, let's not forget that the current BURST Coin price is: $0.02091780 and €0.01701151. But if it goes up, then we can really start talking about profit, and that's when it will matter how many BURST coins we'll have at that moment. It's a similar situation to when someone ordered two Pizzas for $10,000.

That person wasn't stupid, because back then Bitcoin was worth so little that it was a miracle you could get 2 Pizzas for it. Now let's look at BURST coins similarly — currently we could buy 2 pizzas with about 1,000 Burst coins, but if BURST's price reaches a respectable amount like Bitcoin's, then we'll need to calculate what our 10TB hard drive has earned us. We can count on mining approximately 3,600 BURST per year, which a 10TB drive is currently capable of.

3,600 BURST coins are currently worth (2018.03.17) €60 at a price of €0.01701151. If BURST's price exceeds €1, that would be approximately ±€6,000 with our 10TB drive. Now that would be really nice profit on the initial 80-100,000 HUF investment in a 10TB drive... 😀 However, this is just wishful thinking, since it could happen, but it's also possible that BURST won't even be worth as much in a year as it is now.

So who is this good for? For those who have spare hard drive capacity at home. I also collected hard drives lying around or from non-operational equipment and managed to put together 5TB of capacity from four 500GB drives, one 1TB and one 2TB drive, which isn't bad to get started. Still, it's important to mention that I didn't need to invest anything in this — I bought these drives years ago. Some came from a game console, a broken laptop, and various other stuff. This is fine, but buying hard drives just for BURST... No, not yet... But why not give it a try! 😀

This is also good for those who have such a large amount of spare storage that it allows them to instantly jump into the mining opportunity BURST offers. This could be, for example, a not-so-successful web hosting business, or a closing PC shop with years-old stock sitting in the warehouse. Of course, this is just speculation, since who knows if such a company or anything similar exists. To be continued...