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...

I didn't get any scrypt miners until recent, and I know these have been around for a while, but they yield some pretty serious bitcoin. So I'm currently running 2 13MH/s Black Widows, and getting in and around 0.01BTC/day. They are a fairly noisy unit, but I've found that purchasing fairly mid-grad computer fan, and subbing it in for the factory fan, reduces noise massively and also doesn't result in heat issues (take this with a grain of salt, make sure you do get the appropriate fan for the unit, size, and speed). A good suggestion also, for running units like this is to get a high efficiency PSU to help reduce heat in the wires, as well as noise of the PSU. I'm running a 1300 Watt EVGA PSU with no issues, powering both of my units. CleverMining I've set my pool up with CleverMining because of their profitability and auto conversion into BTC. Now, before people hate on multipools because it essentially can end up increasing sell pressure, I'm ...

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. ...

Give Me Coins ! But actually, Give Me Coins is my favourite pool out there. They pool for LiteCoin with DogeCoin, SysCoin, Umbrella-LTC, and PesetaCoin all merged. You still get all the LTC you normally would, but you get a whole lot extra! Now, as you know, these are all scrypt coins, unfortunately they don't have any pools for SHA-256 and it doesn't look like they any plans on expanding into the SHA-256 realm. Although I think more pools will since BTCGuild closed it's pool very recently. They also mine FTC, VTC, and PPC. So if you're looking to switch up pools at some point soon, or just give a different pool a whirl (ahahaha, pun.), give Give Me Coins a shot, with 0% pool-fee and automatic  withdrawals  there's no downside. I mean, just look at it!

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 ...

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 .

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.

As you may know, I'm a pretty big fan of ZenMiner Cloud. It's a great service and now that it's been acquired by GAWMiners, it's become just a little more "GAWsome" as they say. Great Update Features ZenMiner Cloud is one of the very few services that releases new features or updates that I'm actually excited about. They go out of they're way to make a more compelling cloud mining platform. Companies like CEX.IO just get complaisant because they'll make money no matter what, in my opinion this is no way to increase your companies revenue or keep your existing user base engaged and coming back for more. ZenMiner Cloud's last update: v1.3.0 New Features Introduction of ZenPoints Introduction of ZenMarket Ability to purchase items with ZenPoints and/or BTCAutomatic (one-click) purchases Balance now shows ZenPoint Activity Ability to invite up to 3 users Bug Fixes Improved Two Factor Authentication Enabled customer BT...

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...

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 ...

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...

CleverMining is basically a multicoin pool that trades all mined coins into bitcoins. The payouts vary from day to day due to exchange rates of both bitcoins, and the mined altcoins. It has great statistics to back it up as well as data while you mine that keeps you informed on everything about your miner, and even the averages of rejected shares so you can see if you're miners are being efficient. So far i've made over 0.004btc in a few days with a rig under 2Mh/s. These margins are pretty good even for multipool algorithms. It covers all the work and then payouts daily when you reach a certain amount of btc. The interface is simple and appealing, and quick to setup. If you're looking for a great way to profit off your scrypt mining id have to reccomend CleverMining

So this week I bought a couple Gridseed units, I've always wanted to try them out. Gridseed units look like this and can mine scrypt, SHA-256, or both at once. The hash rates vary from each mode but as I've read 100 times, it's recommended to just run in scrypt. Surprisingly, the setup is incredibly easy. 7 Ultra-Quick Steps to get Mining Plug your unit into it's power source (Either to your computers PSU, or a wall outlet). Plug your USB cord into your unit and computer. Download ZADIG  and open it. Go to options, select "List all devices" and click on your STM32 Virtual COM Port from the drop down list, then replace drivers. Download CGMiner  and extract it. Go into your CGMiner and edit LTC_ONLY.bat and change the pool settings to your own. Save the .bat and run it. That's it! All done! Your hashrate in sctypt only mode should be anywhere from 300-400KH/s, generally mine stays from 360-400KH/s but there will likely be a bit of va...