DIY: Cat warmer that gives free beer (aka small scale GPU crypto mining in Taiwan)

Life Technology
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Winter is coming. Many people in TW use electric heating. I despise the energy wasting that cryptocurrency mining causes, am quite sure that blockchain technology is useless outside of cryptocurrencies (eg. doesn’t solve any problems better than existing tech), and strongly believe that today’s cryptocurrencies have almost no value besides unregulated speculation.

But… what if you would do mining instead of using an electric heater? You still use electric energy, you still get your home warm - but additionally you get a little bit of money back.

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For illustration only. Results may vary depending on cat and beer brand. Some assembly required. Cat not included.

Very generally this DIY project consists of the following steps:

  1. Create an cryptocurrency wallet that easily allows to spend funds in TW
  2. Set up your gaming PC for cryptocurrency mining
  3. Find a mining pool that is suitable for very small scale GPU mining
  4. Wait a few days, keeping your cats and/or place warm
  5. Use the mined cryptocurrency to buy beer in Family Mart (or deposit as NTD to your bank account for later use)

It took me a bit of trial and error, but my “Cat warmer that gives free beer” is working well now. I’m writing this post while enjoying my first self-mined free beer. With two lower mid range gaming PCs I get around 500NT per week while keeping the living room nicely warm, and giving the cats two nice warm places to sleep on. Note: if I ever put my 1660Super GPU for sale, be aware it has been used for mining ^^

The original setup from December 2021 is like this: gminer/t-rex, 2miners pool mining ETH but paying in BTC every 0.005ETH, BitoEx wallet to sell BTC and deposit TWD to my bank account or get Family Mart gift coupons for beer.

The technical details will change quite often, so I’ll put them in this “solution” post:

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Ill put the technical details here soon.

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Status as of 1/2022

Prerequisite: What kind of gaming PC is suitable?

Currently mining only makes sense if you already own a not too old (and in case of Nvidia: not too new) graphics card with at least 6GB of dedicated video RAM.

Details

For Nvidia that would mean probably at least a GTX 1060 6GB (2018) or newer. Very new cards of the RTX series are also not very suitable, or at least need a bit of work to get enough performance out of them (they are intentionally limited for mining)
For AMD I don’t have recent experience, might add later. Laptops or graphics integrated in the CPU: 99% forget it. Also: it doesn’t make much sense to buy graphics cards currently, since they recently are extremely overpriced. Also be aware: mining does put some unusual stress on your graphics card, due to typically running 24/7 for many years, while gaming typically is only for a few hours. In this case here we are not going to push any limits (overclocking, …) to get maximum profit whatever the risk, and will also only run for a few weeks or months when it is really cold in Taiwan. This should make it possible to keep the “wear and tear” on the graphics card limited, with no significant risk of early failure. However, the risk is never zero.

Set up first: A way to easily spend or convert to NTD the earned cryptocurrency

For Taiwan the only place useful for small scale mining I found is BitoEX. This Taiwanese company allows you to sell cryptocurrencies for NTD to deposit into your Taiwan bank account, or you can buy gift codes that you can use to pay for things in family mart.

Details

I will add more here later. Generally you need to get verified, which includes sending photos of your ARC, a selfie with ARC (and a photo of your bank book if you want to transfer NTD to your bank account). It takes a few days for this verification. The English website is OK, it just doesn’t explain exactly enough what you need to enter in the “account name” fields (you need the exact same name spelling as on your ARC and bank book respectively). Depositing NTD to your bank account is free, no fees. Family Mart gift coupons have to be printed out using the self service station in the store. The rules say you can’t buy tobacco or alcohol with it, but at least when I tried it, it worked ok to pay for beer.

Next step: find a mining pool

The are only two mining pools that seem useful for very small scale Ethereum mining: Nicehash is easiest for beginners to set up, but can only withdraw every ~1200 NTD (0.0005 BTC). 2miners is a slight bit more profitable and can withdraw every ~500 NTD (0.005 ETH) - so I chose 2miners.

Details

I will add more here later. Currently it seems only Ethereum mining is meaningful (This will change soon). For people with just one or two graphics cards most mining pools have huge problems, though: First it takes a long time of mining, maybe several weeks, to reach the payout threshold. And then the transfer fees take away lots of the earnings. These two pools work around this issue by not paying directly in Ethereum, but in Bitcoin. This means that for 2miners, if you choose to get paid in Bitcoin you get paid every 0.005 ETH = roughly 500 NTD (with 2 graphics cards I need around a week for that), and the transfer fees are small (maybe 5 NTD).

Setting up the PC for mining
You need to download a mining program and set it up to use your mining pool and your BitoEX bitcoin wallet address.

Details

I will add more here later. For Nvidia cards I use Gminer. For certain old high-end cards with GDDR5X memory (RTX 1080 and 1080Ti) it can make sense to use T-Rex or some other miners instead, since they have a special memory optimization that can extremely boost performance on those two card types. For the newest RTX cards with mining limiting (LHR) different mining software continuously improves workarounds, so it would need some experimenting to find a good setup.

Optimizing the mining PC
Optimize the PC for a good balance of performance, power draw, cooling and loudness.

Details

I will add more here later. Basically, many Nvidia cards like my GTX 1660s use way too much power with default settings. You can limit them to for example 60% of their maximum power without any noticeable drop in mining performance. Depending on the mining program you can limit directly through the mining program, or use a 3rd party app like MSI Afterburner

I will add more details here. But in case anyone wants help setting up: I am in no way a professional, but I dabbled into mining for around a decade and successfully helped several people setting up and optimizing small GPU farms.

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Sounds like a very expensive heater… and it’s not like you’d profit from mining crypto because unless electricity is only 0.0001nt per kwh.

The GPU for example would likely set you back no less than 40,000nt EACH, then you’d have to defeat the driver level anti mining technology.

I think I’ll stick with playing games. My cat seems to love sitting on the computer when I am playing games.

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You are right. As I wrote: this only makes sense if you already own the graphics card, and if you do mining instead of electric heating. Only this way you avoid paying extra for hardware and electricity. It basically is a heater that gives back a tiny bit of money.

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Yea, and you won’t really mine much, and seriously it would likely damage your GPU, especially if you need it for gaming or other more useful purpose, and sending it to GPU heaven would be costly until the chip shortage somehow sort itself out.

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You are not wrong. For me 500 NTD per week is enough for a few extra beers, and if you set it up not too aggressively it will not wear out the graphics card significantly in short term. Trust me, I’m an engineer :rofl:

If you do this 24/7 for years - different story. My setup is just for this winter, since the mining world will look very different in a few months from now anyway (Ethereum going away from the silly and wasteful proof of work).

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I looked into this when I just bought my new GPU a year or two ago. You can find calculators online where you can put in the price of electricity for where you live and select what you are going to mine (Ethereum, or whatever) and some other parameters. I remember it was not very profitable back then, or only very slightly and not worth it. I have not paid attention to what the price of electricity has done recently in Taiwan, I think it has come down as a government policy related to Covid? Everything really hinges on price of KWh.

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In Taiwan the price varies depending on the type of place you have, for most residential places it starts at about 2.6nt per kwh and it tops out at about 4.5nt per kwh depending if it’s summer or winter. Summer rates will be higher though.

But if you use AC a lot you will hover around the middle of the pricing scale, and if you live in those shared places you will pay a lot more per kwh compared to a flat.

So best case scenario would be to have industrial account and mine in the winter. Or if you have those demand based billing (which is like really rare in Taiwan, if it even exists at all, as it requires a smart meter) you could mine at night because the cost would be around 1.5 per kwh.

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Exactly: it would likely make not much sense, unless you do this (like me) INSTEAD of running an electric heater (and of course only if you already own the GPUs already).

In my case for example: I have 2 extremely low idle power workstation PCs (Made-in-Germany mainboards FTW :howyoudoin:). So for both PCs running the two GFX cards (65W for one, 180W for the other) it’s way under 300W total. 24/7 that would be roughly 50kWh per week.

Meaning between 75 NTD absolute minimum @1.5NTD/kWh and 225 NTD @4.5NTD/kWh.

Now, depending on what those crazy gamblers currently are willing to pay for their monopoly game coins (eg. on the highs and lows of the bitcoin and whatever), I get around 500NTD per week currently.

Yeah, not getting rich this way. This is just a silly hobby DIY thing, nothing more :slight_smile:

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l have never used a heater in Taiwan, don’t have a cat, and only drink beer on hot days after exercising.

Why am l in this thread again?

:pretzel:

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Weil ich ein Mädchen bin, weil ich ein Mädchen bin :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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My October / November electricity bill has a top rate of 5.03NTD/Kwh. I have seen it higher than that, so I assume if I use more it would go as high as 7NTD/Kwh that I have seen in summer?

I ran some figures using two different mining calculation tools for Ethereum. One estimates 32USD/month profit, the other 40USD/month. That is better than I expected.