Commercial Property Rental

[Scouse]

Anyone got any experience of renting commercial property?

I'm after a lockup for a number of bitcoin mining rigs. Need 'leccy, internet, good passive cooling and security. Nothing more than that.

Any advice? What should I be looking for at what sort of price? Options and ideas is what I'm after

 

[Moriath]

Hasnt the bitcoin ship sailed like years ago?

 

[Raven]

Spare room, garage?

Unless "a number of rigs" = 100s/1000s of rigs, why spend the extra in rental, tax, security, insurances etc? A lock-up probably won't have the electricity supply to run much more than a light and a power drill, they are just garages.

Passive cooling on a commercial property in the UK would be along the lines of "open window" elsewhere, you're after arctic circle.

 

[Scouse]

Outgrown spare rooms and garages. Theres enough of us going in to require enough ventilated space. We're scaling up.

Anyone got anything to say about the original question?

 

[caLLous]

Don't do it would be my first idea or, if you insist on doing it, then have a pop at perfecting time travel first and go back a few years to when it would've been a more viable idea.

You're going to need a hell of a lot more cooling than "passive". When you say you "need 'leccy", you're going to be pulling potentially dozens of kilowatts (depending on how many rigs you run and how aggressive a cooling system you then need) so it'll probably have to be a proper commercial unit that's outfitted for high-usage rather than a lockup or something (and it's not cheap in the UK although I don't know about commercial rates).

Also, the thing with having it in a remote location is you need someone on hand to look after it all, or at least stop by multiple times a day. Remote monitoring is easy but there is often a case where you need to be onsite to reboot a troublesome rig or to sort something else out. You'd also need to think about security of the rigs from theft and from hacking attempts (ie firewalls) and mining into a wallet and then moving the rewards on to proper cold storage asap.

It's getting more and more difficult to mine so you'll need more and more hardware to maintain a reward level. I don't know enough about Bitcoin mining to say it's definitely not worth it at this point but I definitely don't *think* it's worth it at this point. The ROI on an Antminer S9 is mildly terrifying given its price.

 

[DaGaffer]

Outgrown spare rooms and garages. Theres enough of us going in to require enough ventilated space. We're scaling up.

Anyone got anything to say about the original question?

@Deebs is your man. My knowledge on this is well out of date at this point, but he'll still be up to speed. Having said that; I'm with @caLLous on this; everything I've read up on BitCoin suggests the economics of mining don't stack up anymore unless you have access to really cheap (or free) energy; capital costs can be sliced up in all kinds of ways to make the scheme more attractive, but you can't get away from the OpEx costs.

 

[caLLous]

All I know about mining is from an Ethereum angle and there are distinct differences (the main one being there are no dedicated ASICs for Ethereum, because it was created to be resistant to them) but the basics are the same. The difficulty increase cannot be ignored (which has seen a flood of new people started to mine Bitcoin after the price rises this year in the exactly the same way as happened with Ethereum in ~March) and many new miners don't take it into account. There are any number of profit calculators online that are misleading because they don't take into account the increase in difficulty over time. MyCryptoBuddy is a good one - wang some data in on the left, switch the graph to "Total Profits" and then see what difference it makes with dynamic difficulty toggled on and off. I've gone from receiving 1 ETH per day last year to having 4 times as much hashing power as I did then and "only" getting 0.1 ETH per day at the moment.

If you're mining to sell instantly as an "income" then it's a shit idea but if you're mining to speculatively hold the rewards until the value goes up then there's some sense in it still. Having said that, I wouldn't do that with Bitcoin now, because the general belief (outside of the safe space of the crazy Bitcoin shills) is that Ethereum is fundamentally better than Bitcoin, has many more usage scenarios and much more potential for the future. It just has to overcome the hurdle of Bitcoin being the daddy.

Energy costs really catch people out, it's why those big mining farms set up in Iceland; abundant, cheap geothermal energy and it's chilly most of the year so cooling is less of an issue.

 

[Scouse]

Mate of mine is still making plenty. Mining ethereum and converting to bitcoin. Recon 25% ROI after 12 months, including reinvesting a percentage back into hardware to keep pace with difficulty jumps.

Nothing ventured nothing gained. I can afford to take a hit if it all goes to tits, but he's 50k up in the last 18 months and wants to expand.

50 of takings will go into my pocket, will keep the other 50 in a couple of denominations and flog if they jump, keep if they drop.

High risk? Yep. But who cares.

 

[caLLous]

Well, that's not Bitcoin mining... it's Ethereum mining. This is the problem Ethereum has, you say "crypto currency" and people automatically make the leap to Bitcoin as if they're one and the same thing. Also, if he's mining Ethereum and converting it straight to Bitcoin then he's a lunatic; Ethereum is up 3000% this year where Bitcoin is only up 400%. There is definitely money to be made by trading between the two (and in and out of fiat money) but automatically converting one to the other isn't how you would go about it.