I’ve been cautiously optimistic about BlockChains since Boulder Startup Week 2016 when I had core contributors of both Zcash and Ethereum presenting at one of the Future of Tech Events.  Trustless decentralized financial instruments have the potential to be an ‘internet of money’ and massively disrupt the financial system.

Several months ago, I wrote and open sourced pytrader — a cryptocurrency trading robot.   That was a fun experiment in crypto trading, but I’ve been looking for ways to learn more about the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies.

This weekend, I doubled down on my cautious optimistic of the blockchain-enabled version of the future by building a GPU mining rig.  This was my first time doing a major computer build, which felt like going from 0-60 very quickly.  Luckily I largely followed this materials list and that helped a lot.

Without further adeau, here’s a shot of the final rig:

The rig is currently tucked away in a room with good ventilation, where noise and aesthetics don’t matter.   I’ll be using the rig primarily to pay for itself mining cryptocurrencies.   (Here’s a tool I used to gauge the productivity of various mining options) .  When I’m not mining on various blockchains, I’ll be using this rig to do some deep learning experiments — It just so happens that a multi-GPU machine is good for that type of operation too.

Monitoring

If anyone else is building a similar rig, here are some munin scripts I wrote that you can use to monitor your rig’s utilization, temperature, productivity, and more.  You can get them here. The scripts create graphs like this:

Productivity

Heat

More

 

Any comments, @ me on twitter.