An Alternative to Mining: Leasing

This continues from where I left off yesterday, where I mentioned there are potentially ways to make far more than 0.015 BTC per MHash on scrypt coins. Or, if you find a hot new coin and you want to throw everything you have and then some at it, you can do that as well! The service is called LeaseRig.net, and in the past two days I've played both sides, leasing my rigs to others as well as paying rent to get more hashing power.

Before I get into the details, let me be frank: paying 0.03 BTC per MHash to rent somebody's rig seems awfully crazy to me. I rented roughly 50 MHash of power yesterday to try and grab a whole bunch of LEAF coins, and while I definitely ended up with a lot of LEAF, at the current value it was a losing gamble -- I could have spent 2 BTC and purchased 10 million LEAF, whereas with leasing and mining I only earned about 70% of that target.

On the other hand, I actually learned about LEAF through the leasing program, as several of my rigs were rented and ended up mining LEAF. "What's so hot about this new coin?" I wondered, so I went and checked it out and found that the previous day, people were earning nearly a million LEAF per MHash, and at an exchange rate of 0.00000015 BTC per LEAF that worked out to 0.15 BTC per MHash. Naturally, that brought in a whole bunch of miners and difficulty quickly ramped up, but even now LEAF is generating pretty decent returns. Other coins I've seen being mined: Coino, PXLcoin, Tittiecoin, Potcoin, and Swagcoin -- but I'm not going to explicitly recommend any of those and in particular the launch of SWAG was a joke.

Long story short, you can play both sides of the LeaseRig "game" -- actually paying others for the use of their rigs is a bit more risky, whereas if you want to be conservative but still generate a higher-than-normal rate of return, it's not unusual to get upwards of 0.02 BTC per MHash, and if there's a popular new coin you could get 0.03 or higher lease prices. The great part is that when your rig isn't being leased, it can go back to mining for you, and you can even manage the pools remotely through LeaseRig. The bad news is that at present the interface only allows you to list up to two default pools -- I'd like at least three or four.

Now if you're interested, I'm not going to spend a ton of time explaining how to get things working with LeaseRig, as there's a How To Guide already. The process involves PM'ing the operator of the site, djeZo, on the Bitcointalk.org forums, potentially making a security deposit with him (if you're new), and then you need to set up an account with some place like NoIP. From there, you also need to configure your router via Port Forwarding, and edit your cgminer.conf settings to allow his server to talk to your rig. Let me also suggest that you back up your current cgminer.conf file (or if you're using some other file name, copy that to cgminer.conf and use that instead). You can still use CGWatcher or other utilities in most cases, and if you know enough to figure all of this stuff out, you're probably ready to get listed on LeaseRig.

If you'd like to try the service out as a renter rather than leaser, feel free to try one of my systems (trogdorjw73) -- I've kept them reasonably priced right now, at roughly 0.025 BTC per MH. And as usual, let me end by saying at that rate, a $2000 rig like the one I listed yesterday that does 2000KHash could generate 0.05 BTC per day and 1.5 BTC per month. If you can consistently get that sort of ROI, you'll pay for the rig in under two months!

BTC: 1GGJUb1gFpydygpeKzd6oFoShLRUSyThV7
LTC: LfCLyykrNFftzpdWejR73hf478ZtBzQ9jE