A miners perspective on POS and POW and community engagement

Development
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Yesterday i saw this video on youtube.

I am a miner and i would like to give my perspective.

Firstly if think the developer really has all the right reasons for making Firo coin, so this is in no way to hammer the devs or anything, this is just my perspective.

Im a normal guy living in a rural area, working a full time job to pay my bread and butter so to speak. Last year i invested 250.000 USD in mining hardware to mine crypto, and i do not mine Firo. Why not?
Its not the most profitable coin to mine, and progpow uses a lot of power and generates a lot of heat. So a better stragety for me is to mine ETH, even though i do not like a single thing about the project, its what makes the most money.

Why do i do this?

I run around 35.000 watts of power to my GPUā€™s, thats not free I need to pay the power cost, progpow uses around 20-25% more power, so its more expensive, at the same time it generates more heat for me to manage with exhaust or drilling huge holes in the wall.
I pay insurance for my GPUā€™s, I pay a security firm for alarms and video survailance. I bought stuff to reinforce my doors. I bought exhaust fans for 1500 Usd, i bought and made cables for the power, i paid and electrician to upgrade my power. And i am currently saving up 4000 USD more to install some 40ā€ exhaust fans in the walls, because come summer 35.000 watts in going to be rough to cool. Oh yea, and i pay an accountant 1000-2000 USD to do my taxes on the LLC i made for mining

I am a one man operation, I do everything i am allowed to myself, I have borrowed 100.000 USD to expand the farm, so i need to pay this off.

I literally do not have the time of day, to be active on the forums on all the coins im intesteded in, I need to pay off my debt and keep the cards mining, which is not always so easy if it gets too hot, and I need to do my 9-17 job to keep the family fed, since I have not taken any profits from my mining for myself yet, and thats okay. As long as im not financially ruined I will continue to do this,.

I have been mining for over a year now, and I just used Defi for the first time yesterday , why? Because I have not had the time to do it, not because im not interested but everything comes with time, as I get around to it.

Do I invest in crypto at all or just mining?

Its all a balance, im currently saving up coins and they are all POW coins, thats

ETC,
RVN
Flux
Firo.

I plan to run nodes on flux and firo, and its gonna be bare metal, im gonna run the node myself, not on some cloud service, since im a hardcore libertarian there is only one way for me, thats the decentralized way.

Why do you mine eth and not the coins you are intested ind?

Makes more money, more money I can use to buy more of the cryptos i like, simple as that.

I think there is something lost very much on the POS guys, mining takes a LOT of effort to ā€generateā€ the coins, this has an impact on the price since it makes it more of a commodity than a stock in a company, also it decentralizes a lot more with GPUā€™s like you said in the interview, and it gets people like me into the space, and starts learning about the tech, so its a huge gateway into crypto. But at scale its a huge risk, and a huge investment of time and money to make right.

I might have bashed progpow earlier because of the power and heat.
I am all for progpow, i mined raven during the summer last time (more profits than eth), was 40 degrees celcius in my mining room then, at half the wattage i have now.

If and when ETH is gone, im gonna mine a mixed batch of currencies, i will sell some, i will keep some. And if its not profitable to mine, i will have to shut down my 250.000 USD investment and watch it collect dust. All the while still paying insurance, security and accountingā€¦ā€¦ā€¦

Just a miners perspective

Rant over.
Best regards.

Lars

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Iā€™m also a miner. You invested a lot so I wish you all the best in your mining journey.

Regarding your comment about FIRO being power hungry and generating more heat. Well, itā€™s the way ProgPOW has been designed in order to keep ASIC out the POW network.

However, could you just not adapt your overclocking in order to be maybe way less power hungry while still being efficient. It would definitely have an impact on your hash-rate but iā€™m sure you could reach the energy coast level of ETH.

Once again, all the best with your investment <3

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We often talk about decentralization and the pursuit of freedom, but in FIRO, what I see is that the team firmly controls it, does not let it develop, keeps suppressing it, and then there are miners who want more, isnā€™t that a contradiction? Ruben says firO around $6 makes the most sense, but will miners make money at $6? The team has been saying that they should not be controlled by capital and advocate freedom, but they have been firmly controlling FIRO and restraining firOā€™s development.

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It does not currently make sence to mine mine firo, if you are intersted in firo.

I mine ETH, because then i make more $$$, for less power. That way im able to Buy more Firo, FLUX, RVN and ETC on the exchanges.

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I use to think that way, but getting wrecked by gas fees trading eth for firo/flux/rvn etc is not really an option for me.

If you want to mine Firo I would suggest choosing cards that are best suited for progpow and point the rest of your farm at whatever you like. Pretty much any Ti gpu will do well on firopow. I was hitting blocks solo mining with a single 1070ti.

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Very interesting post there, and if Reuben is wondering why miners havenā€™t fallen in love with Firo the way they have with ETH, itā€™s partially the increased energy cost, partially the lesser relative popularity of Firo vs. ETH and some other coins, and the bottom line is that miners mine for money. Some may care very deeply about privacy principles, but frankly Firo is one coin among many that can be mined and which offers a decent level of anonymity. Why drive a gas-guzzler when there are so many other fine automobiles on the market with windows tinted just as dark?

I like how he formed an LLC for his own mining operation. It sounds like he probably had to do it given the outlay he described, but thatā€™s something Iā€™ve thought about.

It also sounds like heā€™s planning on running a Firo masternode on his own server if Iā€™m reading that correctlyā€¦? Iā€™m not the most tech savvy person, but I was wondering how to do that. I read the instructions for masternodes on the Firo main page a few weeks ago, and IIRC the only method described was to use hosting services (though Iā€™ll have to check again). That doesnā€™t appeal to me at all, but Iā€™m sure itā€™s the easiest route.

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So one of the things I wanted to address is the reason why FiroPoW is so ā€˜energy intensiveā€™.

The idea is to make the GPU the ASIC meaning you optimize the usage of the GPU to the max so that even if you build an ASIC, it starts resembling a GPU.

Generally if the card isnā€™t used to its full effect, its an indication that an ASICs or FPGA can be built and we are seeing this with many other algorithms (which I wonā€™t name) on even popular coins that have FPGAs on them at least (cause theyā€™re too small on ASICs).

Ethereum also has ASICs and FiroPoW (ProgPoW) was designed to address this. Obviously Eth ASICs havenā€™t really taken off because of Ethā€™s known switch to PoS so ASIC manufacturers donā€™t have an incentive to spend too much R&D to develop them or manufacture them in quantity. If this wasnā€™t the case and enough time passes, I would hazard a guess that GPU mining on Eth wouldnā€™t be really a thing since you can get quite a big speedup from an ETH ASIC.

But the whole point of FiroPoWā€™s intensiveness is to make it GPU exclusive so itā€™s sad to hear that it backfired and miners think that the algo is out to make them lose on power while other less well designed algorithms compete with FPGAs (often secret).

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To be honest.

I am well aware that Progpow is the way to go for GPU Mining, but soo many miners who are not in it for the tech, and are just in it for this bullrun know nothing really, I can see so much from the videos comming out and the questions asked in mining groups.

Right now, ETH is just so much more profitable than the other coins, that it is way better to mine ETH and dump it for FLUX, RVN and FIRO instead. Add in the reduced power cost of 40% it becomes a nobrainer profitability wise

So thats what i am doing.

Looved the videos with OhGodAGirl and Drew Vosk you made by the way. Soo much good information in there.

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Ich bin ein sehr grosser Fan von Bitcoin aber auch ein grosser Fan von Firo erst habe ich mir 8 Firo Masternodes zugelegt und hoffe doch das solche geistigen DurchfƤlle wie Umstellung auf PoS von PoW schnell vergessen sind. Auch weiss ich nicht wie Andere darĆ¼ber denken allerdings wĆ¼rde ich bei einer Umstellung auf PoS sofort meine Masternodes auflƶsen und meine Firo in BTC konvertieren.

Mfg Nodejunky

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