6:15 PM on a Tuesday, and my garage smells like cardboard and old thermal paste. Six graphics cards stand in a row on a folding table, each one in an antistatic bag, each one dated by a strip of masking tape I wrote in March 2021. A stranger's van idles in the driveway because he drove ninety minutes for this table. He counted out $880 per card in cash while the fan on card four still spun on his test rig. $5,280 for the row. My mining career ended at a folding table.
Here's what that money meant. $5,280 was three months of my daughter's preschool tuition, or a garage door that doesnt sound like a horror movie, and it came from hardware I'd already mentally written off to zero. The same six cards had earned me about $11,400 in ether across 1,204 days of continuous fan noise before the Merge turned all of them into space heaters in September 2022. Since then they've been boxes. Boxes with a resale value I stopped checking in 2023 because it hurt.
Here's the twist worth the price of admission. Every forecast in my mining group chat said keep the cards running, cuz the AI boom had spilled over into altcoin mining and the dashboards promised real money. The dashboards were wrong by a factor of six, and I have the receipts from both directions. One decision, made at a kitchen table with a calculator in April, put $880 per card in my pocket instead. The next few sections are me showing my work, cuz the interesting part was never the price. It was what I had to subtract.
six cards, 1,204 days of fan noise
Brief history, so the arithmetic has a floor. I snagged the cards in March 2021 at $699 each, ran them in an open frame with a box fan aimed at the intake, and paid $0.19 per kilowatt-hour to a utility that never once sent a thank-you note. Mining paid the power bill, then the power bill plus a little, then the Merge arrived and the whole hobby died in an afternoon. 1,204 days of runtime, four replacement fans at $18 each, one replaced power supply at $89. The cards never owed me anything. They were employees who worked overtime and never called in sick.
$14 a month, before the electric bill
The group chat forecast, the one everybody kept posting screenshots of, said a 3080 would net $14 a month on the profitable altcoin of the moment after pool fees. Before electricity. My actual test, one card, one metered power strip, one week in April: gross $21.40, power at $0.19 per kilowatt-hour pulled $9.86 of it, net $11.54. Call it $12. The forecast overshot by a sixth and I was generous rounding. Now do the division an AI-era used price forces on you. $880 divided by $12 is 73 months. Six years of 24/7 fan noise, on cards whose fans had already been replaced twice, to earn back a number I could pocket on a single Tuesday afternoon.
the preschool tuition test
My wife needed exactly eleven words to settle it. I showed her the two columns, mining math versus sale math, and she said sell them, preschool is due in August. That was the entire household debate, and it embarrasses me how long I had stayed stuck before asking her. The cards had slowly become furniture. Furniture you feel guilty about moving, which is the worst kind. The metered strip kept delivering its verdict every week while the group chat kept forecasting a comeback that lived permanently two more weeks in the future, forever out of reach but never out of print.
the invoice from March 2021
Taxes get a seat at this table too, the way I understand it. I dug both invoices out of an old email account, March 2021, $699 per card, $4,194 all in with shipping. Selling six cards at $880 each means $5,280 of proceeds against $4,194 of basis, which is approximately $1,086 of gain sitting on a folding table in my garage. Whether that's taxed like a collectible or just falls under capital gains tax at my ordinary rate is honestly above my pay grade, so the spreadsheet column labeled tell the accountant got a conservative number that evening. Overpaying a modest bill beats discovering a sizable one in February. My brother-in-law calls this pessimism. I call it the price of sleeping well.
the forecast my group chat swore by
Two days before the sale, the group chat found a new prophet. His spreadsheet projected $22 per card per month by July, cuz difficulty was supposedly resetting and the coin's price was one exchange listing away from liftoff, and every one of us wanted to believe it. I asked one question in the chat and got eleven replies, none of them numbers. What happens to your forecast when difficulty doesnt reset? Silence, then a meme. Meanwhile my metered strip kept reporting $11.54, week after week, like a witness who refuses to join the story. Forecasts are free. Electricity invoices arrive monthly.
90 minutes of highway for a folding table
The buyer found me thru a marketplace listing with photos of the actual masking tape labels, which I suspect is what convinced him I wasn't selling bricks in antistatic bags. He drove ninety minutes each way on a workday and unloaded his own test bench from the van, a monitor, a rig in a suitcase, the whole traveling circus. Every card got twenty minutes of his time. All six posted video. All six fans spun. Watching a stranger audit your stuff that carefully does something funny to your head. By the time he handed over the cash I'd already decided he was the right owner for them, which is not a financial metric, but there it is.
a quarter aside, labeled for the accountant
The tax column got its number, then the cash got its plan, written on the same masking-tape energy as the original purchase. Approximately a quarter of the $1,086 gain sits in a sub-account marked for whoever wants it in April, the way I understand my obligations, which is to say awfully conservatively, cuz capital gains tax doesn't care that the buyer was nice. That leaves $5,280 minus a boring reserve doing something useful. Half the proceeds, $2,640, auto-swept into the index fund on the first Friday of June and snagged the same boring total-market slice it has snagged every month since 2019, no ceremony, no timing, no opinion. The rest waits in checking until the garage door people call back. Still waiting. Machines that mined fake money now fund real tuition. There's a poem in there I'm too practical to write.
the garage at 6:15 PM now
It's 6:15 PM as I write this, five days after the folding table, and the garage is quiet enough to hear the refrigerator thru the wall. No fans. No metered strip reporting $11.54 a week. The open frame is gone, the boxes are gone, and the shelf where they sat holds three sealed totes of preschool art that we still havent sorted, which is its own overdue project. The forecasts said the cards would pay me more by July. The invoices said otherwise, and the invoices won $5,280 to the good. Some nights I still hear phantom fan noise out there. That's just the garage door, waiting for its quote.
