My Bitcoin Mining Experience

As we all know, mining changes quickly no matter what currency you're looking at. For a while, scrypt mining really dropped off my radar with lack-luster hardware, it just didn't seem like a viable choice. Recently, however, there has been some great hardware released with very reasonable power consumption. Enter: Antminer L3+ This miner is an absolute beast with some of the greatest ROI in the current mining marketplace. Here are the specs: Power: 800 Hash Rate: 504.0 MH/s Mines: Litecoin Power cost per day: $ 2.30 Return Per Day: $ 39.35 Profit Ratio: 1708% Return Per Week: $ 275.48 Return Per Month: $ 1,180.61 Return Per Year: $ 14.36 K Cost per MH/s: $ 3.26 Payback period: 41 days Annual Return Percentage: 873% Theses units sell for about 1600USD a piece and at the 800W power consumption, you may be able to run 2 comfortably off of one circuit.  The one drawback is the purchasing/delivery. Each unit is generally a pre-order or if it's n...

As a good chunk of the bitcoin community is very aware, the bitcoin mining reward will be getting halved very soon, and this could mean a few different things When About 31 days from now (check  http://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/ ) the bitcoin mining reward will be halved from 25 to 12.5 bitcoin (this occurs 210,000) for each solved block, this means that the supply will lower significantly for bitcoin world wide. What does it mean This means things to different people. For an opportunist, I think quite a few people will buy a few BTC now, and dump after the halving because a lot of people are speculating that the price will rise because of simple supply and demand. For miners, they will probably be making approximately the same  (in USD or CAD) as they used to, however the actual amount they receive in bitcoin will be half of what they received previously. If the price remains constant, and does not rise, that could mean the majority of miners shutting ...

Forget the heat, lets mine in the snow So, I've been mining inside for about a year, normally with one or two pieces of hardware. I lived in a one room apartment then, so the heat and noise was a bit crazy. Luckily I live in a proper several room flat with a fairly large balcony, which will now be the new stage for my small mining farm. What's involved So all that's really involved is as follows: 1 x large rubbermaid storage unit 2 x 6 inch vents 2 x 4 inch vents 1 x 6 inch blower fane 1 x 4 inch blower fan 2 x 3 slot extension cords 1 x router 3 x ethernet cords 1 x piece of cardboard for a divider 3 x miner PSU 3 x Antminer S5 Here's a little video of the rig that I have set up: So now you should have an idea of exactly how it's set up. There's many ways to build an outdoor unit like this, but this was just my vision. I just wanted to go through some of the reasoning behind how its set up, to help educate some of your decisio...

Overview Recently I picked up a Antminer S5 from the great folks over at BitcoinWare . The unit works fantastic at the rated 1155GH/s at factory settings. The unit really has a simple set up, and are basically plug and play. Specs: Hash Rate: 1155 GH/s ±5%  Power Consumption: 590 W (at the wall)   Power Efficiency: 0.51 J/GH (at the wall)   Rated Voltage: 12V   Dimensions: 298 mm x 137 mm x 155 mm   Cooling: 1x 12038 fan   Operating Conditions: 0 °C to 35 °C   Certified By: FCC / CE   Network Connection: Ethernet   Hardware Setup What you need: Power cord Ethernet cord PSU (power supply unit)  I purchased a PSU  ( 900/1200W PSU ) and the Antminer S5 from  BitcoinWare , so the only bit I needed to have was an Ethernet cord ready.  Plug the 4 PCI-E plugs from the PSU into the miner, grab your ethernet cord and plug it into the front (side with fan), then just plug the PSU into the wall and...

Cloud mining is a very shady beast. Unfortunately far too often people cut and run with investors/customers money and that's it, no recourse, nothing to do. This article will cover legitimate cloud mining, companies that I've personally done business with and a summary of their service. I won't be going into price comparison because in my opinion, you need to look through all the candidates before making any kind of purchase. You need to have the final decision on which company you trust the most. Hashnest Hashnest is my up-most trusted site. If you know bitcoin mining, you've heard of BITMAIN , a fantastically honest company that really strives to make great mining hardware. If you don't want to buy hardware and run it locally, you can purchase shares of their co-location units and start mining right away. Transactions are done on a P2P basis generally so the price of hashing power can vary a fair amount. If you haven't already made an account,...

Overview This article will be about the basics of bitcoin mining for finding a bitcoin miner and understanding some of the concepts that differ from miner to miner. Hashrate Hashrate is a pretty simple concept. It is literally how many hashes the miner can complete per second. In modern bitcoin miners you'll be seeing a lot of stats like 100 GH/s or 1 TH/s. It's still a hashrate, but at a much higher speed. For instance, 100 GH/s is actually 100,000,000 hashes per second. Examples: 1 kH/s is 1,000 hashes per second (sometimes mistakenly written KH/s). 1 MH/s is 1,000,000 hashes per second. 1 GH/s is 1,000,000,000 hashes per second. 1 TH/s is 1,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. 1 PH/s is 1,000,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. Power Consumption Before looking for a miner, I strongly recommend you test or look up (as long as your home/flat is up to code) the wattage of your wall outlets. Each miner has a different consumption as well as effici...

Slush pool has a nice open beta web client that is so much better than the old one, it's mind blowing. It has new charts that give you good insight into hardware performance and up time, as well as a good log of your payouts, and block rewards. They have implemented a rewards system called the scoring hashrate. Dashboard Scoring Hashrate User participation to pool's mining power is measured by  scoring hash rate . It reflects how much work the user did in recent hours. You can understand scoring hash rate as an  exponential moving average  from hash rate of all user mining devices connected to the pool (see   EMA on wikipedia ). The averaging smooths out short hash rate drops or increases and makes rewards calculation more stable and fair (the exact mathematical definition is provided lower). For example, if your scoring hash rate is 1% of the whole pool, you receive 1% of the block rewards. If you own 0.031% of hash rate, you receive 0.031%...

Hashie.co is a bitcoin cloud mining platform with very standard features. If you've seen other cloud reviews I've done, this one won't wow you with features, but the price-point is pretty amazing and you get 10GH/S for free upon signup. Their current price is $4.90/10 GHS of hashing power, with a minimum of 20GH/S for buying more GH/S. My trial of this service is with the free 10GH/S and 20GH/S of purchased mining speed. The miners have capabilities to be renamed or merged (no merging the free hash power). No miner is currently transferable as of yet. They also include the option to "auto-buy" so the proceeds go to buying more hashing power based on a percentage you set. The dashboard pictured above, has little readouts for each miner on their current and past mining speeds. Handy, although there are statistics I would like to see implemented. For instance, seeing an estimated payout/hr or /day. Perhaps a total payout for each miner so you know how m...

Overview and SHA-256 Bitcoin Mining is the in essence, the completion of mathematical equations by hardware (asics, GPU's, or CPU's). Bitcoin (and other currencies) are found in a block, each block contains a set amount of coins. When the block is solved, you are given the amount of bitcoin that is calculated through "proof of work". Depending on the "difficulty" of the shares you submit, as well as the amount can determine higher or lower payouts. Now, since the difficulty for bitcoin has exploded, obviously a GPU or CPU won't be fast enough to really earn you anything. This is where the almighty ASIC comes in, an ASIC is a  application-specific integrated circuit, which basically means a chip that is programmed to complete a specific action. Once you have some form of worker(Any of the above hardware) you can hook into a pool of your choice, they have varying fees and pool si ze. The pool pays the worker out due to how much proof of work/acc...

HASHNEST is a cloud mining service in the same realms of ZenMiner Cloud. It encompasses some capabilities of both CEX.io and ZenMiner, where ZenMiner has good ROI's and CEX.io allows you to basically resell the cloud hashing power that you previously purchased. When you aquire hashing power, you of course need to pay a maintenance fee, but HASHNEST does a nice thing where it equates what percentage of your earnings are actually put into the fees. For instance, per GH,  37.42% of your profit goes into maintenance fees (electricity, internet, and repairs). Purchase page for mining farm hash rate HASHNEST doesn't allow the resale of this hashing power but if you purchase hasing power from "mining rigs", you can resell it if you no longer feel that the miner is being profitable enough for you. They also support scrypt mining hardware, that mine, and can be purchased with litecoin. Both SHA-256 and Scrypt algorithm hardwares have varying mainten...

If you've been mining for a while or just been looking through different retailers to get a miner for a deal, I've got to recommend OneMiner.com . OneMiner updates "daily" deals on mining hardware. Daily is used loosely, sometimes new deals don't happen when it's advertised for, but I assume that's because the hardware hasn't sold out. This a great site to get into the crypto mining industry, and actually has a shot at an ROI at the same time. OneMiner Home Page Next time you're looking for hardware, give OneMiner   a look and maybe you'll find a piece that will fit your budget!

So if you've been in the loop with the happenings of GAW Miners you'll know that they're hashlet have been out for a couple days now. Today, or rather, last night (12am Eastern) they released the capabilities to convert your hosted hardware in ZenMiner Cloud into Hashlets. Why this is good for you, and GAW Miners So the big benefit for you when you convert is the lower cost/mh/day as well as a more efficient ZenMiner pool that boasts 50%+ mining payouts, with a great 0% mining pool fee. Also, GAW can increase the hashing speed they offer with less space taken up, compared to something like a war machine. They're built optimized for data centers, to reduce space needed. But hey, don't take my word for it, check them out yourself at GAW Miners  or their announcement on hashtalk .

To start... What is ZenMiner To give a rundown of what ZenMiner cloud hosting is, it's basically a service that will host your mining rig for a cost per day. There are promotional deals at stores like  GAWMiners  where I got a 27MH/S scrypt machine with a free month of hosting by ZenMiner. Once I don't want them to host my machine anymore, i notify them and then they send it out to me with free shipping. Payouts Payouts are daily and are obviously based on your hashing speed as well as the pool you choose. Pools As a scrypt miner you have the option of choosing between COINKING, CleverMining, Multipool.us, NiceHash, and WafflePool. Now obviously these are multipools because the payouts are in Bitcoins but each one varies in payouts. If you see the "Miners" image above you can see it estimates what your miner will output per 24hours on the pool you selected based on previous payouts on similar miners. You can select these pools on the fly instantly, so ...

A quick word of advise to someone that's new to bitcoin mining, or even just thinking about starting into it. One thing I've learned through experience is that you don't want to invest into "USB Miners" these are mining hardware like Block Eruptors, Red Fury's Antminer U1's and U2's. It may seem like they're a cheap way to get into mining, but i can honestly say, it's just not worth it. Around 7 or 8 months ago when i started into mining, I began using my computer at home and then setting up mining software on 20 or so computers in my college for 8-10 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week. I figure, the computers are going to be on anyway. Either way, This was an interesting way to get into it, I say interesting because obviously even months ago this wasn't what some people like to call, "profitable", although I was intrigued by doing it and monitoring how much yield i could get out of them and maybe if i expanded to 25-30 computer...