My Bitcoin Mining Experience

Bitmain has begun making hardware for different algorithms aside from sha-256 (Bitcoin algorithm). They created one for scrypt and now, they've created an incredibly fast miner for the X11 algorithm. Antminer D3 - Specifications Hash rate: 15 GH/s (Variation of ±5% is expected) Power consumption: 1200W (at the wall, with Bitmain’s APW3 PSU, 93% efficiency, 25°C ambient temp). Dimensions of the miner: 320*130*190mm Hashing algorithm: X11 Antminer D3 - Profitability Check these links for the latest profitability data: CryptoCompare CoinWarz As a summary, it looks like ROI for this hardware is about 11 days. This is an incredible value for new hardware and i hope we see more ROI's like this! Summary Very interesting new miner on the block with very, very high ROI. Definitely, something miners should consider if you're looking to upgrade your current gear, or even coming into mining for the first time!

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...

Problem I run a 125MH/s ETH GPU mining rig but I was having issues where it would restart intermittently and when it would come back online it would obviously stop mining and i would lose mining time because of it. Solution Automatic restart  Run your miner automatically on startup This is actually a very simple way to keep your miner in check so you don't encounter much or any down time. As an added bonus, it's very simple to set up. Automatic restart Search for "task scheduler" in your windows search bar and open it. Now select "Create Task..." from the right side panel. Give your task a name and check the "run with highest privileges" checkbox Go to the "Triggers" tab and click the "New..." button. Here you should select "Daily" and select a date and time you would like this task to be run. Once you're done with your selection, click "OK" Go to the "Ac...

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...

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...

MinerGate is very interesting Mining pool with it's own mining software AND web mining (something that I've personally never seen). It is primarily used for mining cryptonote coins. If you have a slower CPU/GPU machine, it might be something you can get a reasonable yield out of. With much lower global hash rates, you have less competition for shares. Some cryptonotes have to be exchanged into a different coin before bitcoin but some like BCN can be exchanged straight into BTC (if that's what you're looking to do). Start Mining Simply download their GUI miner, and you can start at least mining with your CPU almost instantly. The second route is to navigate to their home page and scroll down past their GUI and download their open sourced mining software (if you dont like using these, just stick with the GUI). Fairly easy to set up, they're basically plug and play. Here's a simple set up for the  Claymore CryptoNote GPU : setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT...

I recently reformatted my computer and decided to try out Ubuntu as my OS. I'm pretty new with a lot of Ubuntu but I decided to figure out how to mine using the .sh files as opposed to the .bat files used on windows OS's. To help other miners through this process, i'm hosting some files in my DB account that you can use as a boiler plate. Mining software files are here . Download and extract. Alter these .sh files with your credentials. Run scripts by goingto their directory and typing ./mine.sh and ./minecpu.sh in separate terminals And there you have it, It's that easy! You'll be mining in seconds.

What Is Pool Warz? PoolWarz is a pool (with a collection of different mine able coins) that has a little bit of a different approach to the set up of your miners. Creators of this site also bring you CoinWarz , and RigWarz , now have their own pool, they're not linked to one another however. Within PoolWarz , when you create a worker, you only point your hardware at one URL, as opposed to multiple different URLs for separate coins. At anytime you can alter what coin this worker is mining by changing where it's pointer (or "assigned" to ) on your dashboard in your PoolWarz account. Subscription There is an option to pay a monthly subscription fee to PoolWarz for a 0% fee (as opposed to their standard 2% fee) and also getting the ability for "auto-switching". If you've been mining for a while, you'll know the concept of "auto-switching" because it's the same as a multipool basically, except you keep all the coins you mine. ...

Paycoin Paycoin is a SHA256 algorithm coin released by GAW Miners a couple days ago. The coin is now open to be mined by anyone with SHA256 hardware with a few possible pools to choose from. I'm personally mining it with 2 antminer S3's and mined 1.5  XPY(paycoin) within 8 hours. Paycoin is currently in it's POW (proof of work) phase, but then will phase into it's POS (proof of stake) stage in the upcoming weeks. GAW has stated no 100% promises of the coins value, however on December 19th 2014, they are releasing their Paybase platform and doing a coordinated launch with "many" large currency exchanges (Something like Cryptsy I imagine). GAW and the community on launch expects a price of approximately $20 USD, and through this launch they intend to actively try to moderate the market price. Current Market Paycoin Pool Wallet

Overview This is for the Antminer S3 , mine are batch 11. So to get started, the units are very nicely made from my experience, and actually not too bad to get started with. You're going to need your miner, a PSU (power supply unit, like the one in your PC) and an Ethernet cord. S3+ Specifications: Hash Rate: 453 GH/s±5% with great OC potential   Power Consumption: 355 Watt at the wall    Power Efficiency: 0.78J/GH on wall   Power Supply: 12V DC Size:  331 mm x 137 mm x 160 mm  Fans: Two 14038 fans mounted on both front and back ends   Operating Temperature: 0 °C to 35 °C   Complied with: FCC / CE Network Connection: Ethernet   Power consumption: This figure depends on the PSU efficiency, ambient temperature and the accuracy of the power meters. Step One: Network Let's prepare your network. You need to have your routers IP address to look something like 192.168.1.X. The x can be reall...

This post may be a bit of a rant. So as many of you know, the bombshell that zeusminer was no longer providing new hardware to it's customers, and instead is converting everything to cloud mining thing... Well, it got me fired up. I'm sure there was a reason (hopefully not what I believe to be unbelievable greed), but a pre-order customer has to feel shafted. I love this community and this is, in my opinion, on the same level as that KNC garbage that was pulled a short while ago. If you're a normal reader of this blog, you know I'm a fan of cloud mining. Great service to have, and competition in the market place helps the cloud miners get a  competitive  deal on hashpower. THIS BEING SAID. Enough is enough, if you're a miner looking to get some hardware for home on at least a moderate level, it's impossible. The only company that I still trust in the mining community for hardware is the rocket-surgeons over at Bitmain . Bitmain lau...

The new miner from Zeus is upon us soon You'll be seeing a lot of new higher-speed scrypt miners coming out with similar power consumptions because of the newest generation chips. The new chips are much more power-efficient, and because of that you're going to cut operating costs to help increase revenue and rate of ROI. Statistics -300Mh/s @ 1000W -Next Generation Chips (1.2 Mh/s per chip) -Perfected heat and noise control -State-of-the-mining-art design -PSU not included -1200W modular 80PLUS Gold or Platinum PSU recommended -Worldwide delivery starting: End of Q4, 2014 -Shipping fees may apply -Import duty and taxes may apply ROI Whenever you look into a new miner, you need to realize the cycle until you reach your ROI (return on investment) to ensure you're not just chucking cash ...

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!

Yesterday during the release of GAW Miners' brain-child, the hashlet (digital scrypt miner), overloaded shopify servers with a natural DDOS and shut it down for some time. Here is the full write up GAW Crashes Shopify . This release of the hashlet had a huge following that waited with baited breath for a good deal of time. With many features also released on future plans lead more people to rushing into GAW sites to see what's changed and available. making the launch of the hashlet judgment day for those unsuspecting shopify servers.

Its Here At Last! thats right, the folks over at GAW have finally come out with the semi-mysterious Project Prime . I've been looking forward to this for quite some time so here's the down low on what Project Prime really is. Hashlet A huge part of this announcement is the hashlet, which is basically cloud mining on acid. A hashlet is, upgradeable, high ROI, and diminishing running costs. They also plan on implementing a way of Turing your old ZenMiner cloud hardware into hashlets making them more power efficient in turn increases the rate in which you get your ROI. Read more ZenMiner Cloud ZenPoints Another great upgrade for GAW is the use and accumulation of ZenPoints. They help you get an interest rate on top of your payouts while you stockpile them and now you get to pay with them! You will be able to pay those pesky maintenance and hosting fees with your ZenPoints so your payouts don't feel the pinch! Read more Read the details yourself! T...

It's no secret that GAW Miners is a big-time player in the Mining hardware department, and a solid partnership with ZenMiner Cloud makes this company something to be reckoned with by it's competitors. Not only are their price per mining speed ratios hard to compete with, GAW Miners just got a facelift, but not in the droopy BOTOX injected kind of way. Easily put it just looks better in basically every way... Home Also, the interface for the store end of the site is FAR more easy to navigate and filter properly. Laid out in a clean grid format with everything well contained so you can see where things start and end very obviously with no guess-work. Miners If you haven't shopped or checked out their store, I suggest you give it a  look . Coming from a wed developer/application developer standpoint, this is a huge UX upgrade and will no doubt increase their client base, I have no doubt about that. *Note: If there is an issue seeing the new site, you may have ...

A War Begins to Stir Between GAW Miners & KnC "Scrypt ASIC War: GAW Miners Takes Aim at Rival KnC In a bold move, CEO Josh Garza of GAW Miners made a  public guarantee  that his company will ship their flagship scryptminer The Vaultbreaker before their last remaining competitor, Knc, will ship their Titan. “For too long, ASIC companies have taken advantage of their customers” said Josh Garza. “I want to fight for the individual miners who want the best chance to ROI”. Both companies began taking pre-orders earlier this year. Despite the Vaultbreaker’s lower cost over the Titan, it boasts considerably more powerful stats, including nearly double the hashrate, at 750MH/s vs the Titan’s 400MH/s figure. With batch 1 orders $1,000 less expensive and nearly double the hashrate, the LitecoinNews.org reported that the Titan’s only chance was to ship earlier than the Vaultbreaker to make-up for it’s deficit in power and price. Recently, GAW Miners has been  asking K...

I purchased a set of 5 Gaw Fury Miners a week or so ago and they came in today. These miners are scrypt-based and run in and around 1.3MH/S each. Also, to set them up was so much more simple than i expected. The first thing that happened when I got into cryptocoin mining is i realized that i knew nothing. So any chance you get to learn or read something out there that you don't know entirely about, do it. But these neat little boxes were a breeze to setup and get running. What you need Hardware wise, you need to have a GAW Fury, 1 12V 5A power supply, and a USB cable. Now, simple enough, you plug in your fan line, then pop in your power supply cord into your unit and finally connect your USB from your Fury to your controller (PC or what have you). All done? Great! Now comes the fun bit:  Once plugged in you need to download a driver called CP210x USB to UART Bridge VCP Driver . Select the proper version for your OS and install it. Once installed, restar...