Mining Rig from Scrap?

That's a really interesting idea. I've always found cryptocurrency fascinating, but unfortunately my knowledge on the subject isn't all that great either so take what I say with a grain of salt. From what I understand bitcoin mining is really hard to get into now days. I think the biggest hurtle for you with bitcoin would be power consumption. That is the biggest cost in it, and older electronics are of course less efficient than newer ones. Here is a good video on the topic.




If you are going to get involved you might want to try a different cryptocurrency. Another cryptocurrency that might interest you is called Burstcoin.

The Burst mining system is unlike any other coin in existence: it uses your existing free space on your hard drive to mine coins. Because of this, it is naturally more decentralized, and very low on power usage. The difference between mining and simply running your computer not mining is so negligible you will not notice a difference on your power bill. Due to the nature of the mining process, and the fact that it is mineable most efficiently and cost effectively mined on consumer grade storage hardware, the coin lends itself to being much more decentralized by design. Everyone has free hard drive space, and purchase of another drive specific for Burst mining represents a small cost. Since the mining process itself doesn’t take much power (as hard disks only average <5W power, just like charging a mobile phone) it makes sense to mine just because you can.

This opens the door to the general public in a way that had never been possible before with other more ‘traditional’ style mined crypto-currencies. The mining process is very easy on hardware, and to date not a single piece of hardware has been reported to have issues due to the BURST mining process running on it. This means that you won’t have to worry about burning up your CPU or GPU like you would if you were mining the other types of cryptocurrency.

https://www.burst-coin.org/proof-of-capacity

For people who can get a hold of a lot of old hard drives this might be something to look into. Here is a great video on the topic.

At any rate good luck with it whatever you do.