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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the early times, 'solo mining' was trying to find actual block target values and would yield the full reward, winner takes all. Mining pools were invented, that aggregate a whole bunch of miners all working on the same thing. Although there is only one true winner a block, the rewards are shared among all the miners, prorata their submitted hash rate. Care was taken by miners not to use one big pool, and keep…

One of the problems I have been thinking about, people can still solo mine when they have lots of capital to buy hardware. Now, most crypto miners are using pools that reward them for their hashrate. However, there are only a handful of pools that the majority of miners use, which means centralization.

The current pool distribution for Bitcoin is here: https://btc.com/stats/pool No pool has >20% today.

It is in the interests of the miners to prevent a situation where one pool takes a majority of the hash rate. Miners will migrate to smaller pools if one is getting too big.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I understand correctly, you buy things at the thrift store that are offered online for at least $20 more, to then do the same?

I just make sure that I will net $20 before I commit to purchasing an item from the thrift shop. This is: final eBay sale price - eBay fees - shipping // unless you have the buyer pay actual shipping costs - the cost I paid for the item -------------------------------------- my net profit (hopefully more than $20 for my time and effort) last week this happened: two refrigerator filters new in package ($3.99 each) - s…

How are you tracking everything for taxes?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#154
post #45

I mine cryptocurrency and make about $110/day. I have two L3++s, an AvalonMiner 1246, six RTX 3080s, an RTX 3090 and a couple older cards. It more than pays for the mortgage, and after electricity (residential rate) my profit is about $100/day. I also have the GPUs in a grow tent (designed for growing marijuana) with an 8 inch in-line fan hooked up to the supply of my home’s HVAC system. I’m heating my whole house wi…

How much did the setup cost? I saw a similar post where the poster was making a decent amount but wasn’t yet profitable because of $30k in startup costs.

I started small, let things pay for themselves before buying more. My initial investment was about $10,000, and that was just for a handful of GPUs, some parts like motherboards and CPUs, an electrician for the 240V 30A line, PDU, etc. Once I made that money back I slowly bought more. My most recent purchase has been the AvalonMiner which will pay for itself in another six months or so. If I include the revenue from all the mining hardware though, the AvalonMiner will be paid for much sooner. It’s funny how that works :)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#155
No way I'm telling you people. The business I'm in is centuries old. Even still, I'd need to be a special kind of stupid to advertise that there's easy money niches of it to a bunch of people who have discretionary income.

Edit: There's wood involved, but not that kind of wood.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#156
I earn more than $500 a month with [redacted], a phone contract comparison website for the UK market.

[link redacted]

Today, 90% of my time is spent on content marketing, followed by improvements to the website.

Data is automatically pulled once a day. Parsing the data feeds can be frustrating, as there is no consistent format or documentation, therefore I need to code around many possible edge cases.

I do all the web design and development work myself.

Stack:

Front end: plain JavaScript

Back end: Node.js

Host: $10 DigitalOcean droplet

Web server: Nginx

SSL: Let's Encrypt with certbot

Proxy: Cloudflare

Database: Postgres

Caching: Redis

Indexing: MeiliSearch

Most of the traffic comes from organic search. It took me more than a year of SEO work to get any traffic at all from search engines. I was a bit naive about how much marketing I actually needed to do - I almost gave up several times.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#157
post #108
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you ELI5 how making small amounts of money in crypto works? I thought it was a "winner take all" kind of arrangement where whomever solves the "puzzle" (for lack of a better word) first gets all the bitcoin as a reward, until the next block is up and ready to be solved. You're talking about making $100 a day - a very tiny fraction of one bitcoin - how does that work?

Bitcoin is highly divisible. When I say $100/day what I really mean is something around 0.0016 BTC per day. This number fluctuates a lot so it’s best to look at the average over a week or month. The best way to learn IMO is to try it yourself with your gaming computer. I personally use a platform called NiceHash (not sponsored, nor am I advocating for them, there are alternatives) which pays out in Bitcoin. Try it ou…

So you are part of a collective then - you have a small mining/compute farm in your home that contributes results to a much larger group?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#158
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate what you do (the very idea of all those KWs going to solve sudokus to get monopoly money) but at the same respect you. In the end if someone buys, why not sell.

The people in my house use space heaters in their rooms. 1500 watts of electricity produces 1500 watts of heat whether you do it via a space heater or a computer. The only way OP's method is worse is the capital costs of the processors. The energy spent on the actual heating is converted with 100% efficient either way.

Well, except that only works in the winter time.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#159
post #45

I mine cryptocurrency and make about $110/day. I have two L3++s, an AvalonMiner 1246, six RTX 3080s, an RTX 3090 and a couple older cards. It more than pays for the mortgage, and after electricity (residential rate) my profit is about $100/day. I also have the GPUs in a grow tent (designed for growing marijuana) with an 8 inch in-line fan hooked up to the supply of my home’s HVAC system. I’m heating my whole house wi…

For that setup, what is the up front investment in equipment?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell

#160

My little hardware book, Computer Engineering for Babies launched on Kickstarter a few months ago and blew my mind by raising almost $250k. It’s a simple book with buttons and LEDs to demonstrate different logic gates. I just shipped out the first batch of books a week ago and now waiting for the next batch of books. It’s gotten pretty demanding pretty quickly but I’m really excited about it. I’m hoping I can soon em…

When I backed this, It is the first book I ordered for my future kid. The day the campaign ended my wife told me she was pregnant! Very much looking forward to it. Great work!

That puts the term 'just in time delivery' on a completely different footing :)

Congratulations!

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