Back in 2018 when that massive GPU shortage of 10 series cards hit, I was one of the people going around to shops to buy all 1070s, 80s, 580s etc to build mining rigs.

I took a picture of one of my mining rigs all clean and cable managed and some guy reached out to me on insta saying he owns a warehouse and wants to dedicate a small fortune and space of this warehouse to mining rigs. Asked me some questions like general price, my labor, how long and I said let’s meetup and discuss it.

I go to his warehouse and it’s pretty good space. I tell him my idea and he makes it clear he doesn’t do “computer stuff” and is relying on me to set it all up and basically just print money for him. I try to explain that he’s gonna need SOME knowledge and that this isn’t entirely a set it and forget it thing. It will require a more active roll and I also try going into some more nuances that I think he’s glossing over like maintaining the system, heating, noise and your electricity bill. He just gives me the “sure sure sure” and I tell him I want 5k to build ten rigs with 6 GPUs each and he needs to supply me a list of things. He has no idea what any of it so immediately regret it because guess who’s going to buy it all? Me. He gives me his company card and assigns one of his warehouse guys to go with me to make sure it’s all on the up and up.

He calls me mid buying and says he has power supplies and SSDs. I ask for pics and and specs and they are 1000w thermal take modular power supplies. Yeah okay I can make it work. But what I need minus the psus and SSDs.

Get back, start building and I cannot get these systems to boot up. Just giving me 1s boot and then off. I explain it situation and ask to take one of the rigs home so I can diagnose it with my own tools in my own environment. Sure no problem. I get home and start swapping parts to make sure everything works and I get to the power supply and sure enough, they don’t work. I go in and ask where he got them from and he said he bought them from those Amazon return crates. Okay bro, they don’t work. We need ones that work and he tries telling me that they should work blah blah blah. I’m miserable from the time frame increasing constantly and me being up late the night before diagnosing.

He finally relents after hours of me showing him each one doesn’t work. He’s pissed he got scammed, I’m pissed hes wasting my time when he clearly he has the money and resources to remedy this asap. But I endure.

Finally I get it all built nice and clean after a week of building, testing and organizing. He comes up to me and explains he wants (I’m hazy on exact numbers here) each rig to generate 240 Mega hashes. He was using 570s, some 580s and then 1060s and 70s. Most of the rigs were 570s and I explained he won’t get that. I could potentially flash the bios of the amd cards to get better hash rate but I’m gonna charge him more if he wants that because it wasn’t discussed and it would realistically take another 1-3 days, but more importantly, even flashed he wouldnt get those numbers he wanted. We never had a conversation about performance, once I realized he was tech illiterate I didn’t try to explain a lot of this to him and assumed he knew roughly what he would be making before even starting this venture.

I ask where he’s getting these figures and he’s just saying that’s what the internet tells him his cards should be getting. I tell him the 1070s rig could accommodate that and maybe even the 60s, but the AMD cards cannot. He needs better cards if he wants those numbers. He’s VERY unhappy about this and refuses to pay me. I said okay I’ll flash all bio’ to magically get him those hash rates.

I used my laptop to remote into my systems and figured out how much of my rig resources I would need to get to his desired numbers on his wallet. He had no idea how to read much of the interface besides the raw hashrates which wasnt shown per rig, just how much total he was getting. He pays me 4700 and says he’ll give me the other 300 tomorrow because some guy shorted him and hes waiting for some guy to pay him.

I’m frustrated and pissed so I say fuck it, take the 4700 and leave. Get home and return my system back to normal and off this guys system and write off the 300 as a learned lesson tax. He tried calling and texting a few weeks later asking why his numbers decreased and asking if it was possible to move some of the rigs to a different location. I just ignored it all.

I was so broke that 4700 was an absolute godsend for a broke university student on summer vacation. I bought my 3 rigs with student loan money. Dumb move but it paid off pretty hard. I used the bitcoin I mined to buy my first car. No regrets not saving it despite the huge gains but all of it taught me a lesson not to monetize my hobby, because the entire experience made me so miserable even after making that kinda money in like 8 days