We’re Out!

Well, it was a good ride that served it’s purpose.  As of this morning, we are officially out of the mining business. It started out great and we made our ROI and quite a bit more, but sadly, the state of the coin has just been too stagnant for too long.  Of course we all loved when it soared from $12k to $15k and then peaking at $19k and then cringed when it fell more than 70%. Still, it’s the name of the game.  I’m very optimistic that Crypto will rise again in the future but I’m not confident that it will happen before the L3+ miners hit their end of life.

We finally hit the mark where our cost of operation was more than the incoming coin so we turned them off and put them up for sale.

As you can see, running 5 of them wasn’t doing too hot for us. Hopefully the buyers enjoy them. For added benefits to them, I gave them my 120mm to 4″ duct adapters that were on there too. I love those things so much and I strongly urge anyone who is mining to look into them. If you want some, I can print you some as well.  I think they take about 4-6 hours to print so beyond that, shipping would be quick.

If they come out with new hardware and it become profitable for us again, we’re likely to jump back into the business, but right now, it’s not financially feasible for us to continue even if we do want to support the network.

Happy Mining Everyone!

~A

 

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Mining Update #3

Okay, it’s been a while but I thought I would take the time to write up another earnings update. We’ve had a few miners move in and out and I’ll put those in here as well.

We started with order two D3’s and both of those were flops by the time we got them. Luckily, I was able to sell them for about what I paid for them so that wasn’t a big deal. I ran the A3 for a while and collected a few thousand siacoin before feeling it just wasn’t producing for me so I sold that as well. Thus, we are down to the original 5 L3+ miners in our closet.

As you can see over time, as expecting, the miners have dropped dramatically in their daily earnings.

Earnings since we started:

Earnings from the last 7 days:

Keep in mind that this is for all 5 of our miners running 24/7.  This is quite a bit less than the $50-$100 run from my last update back in December. Still, we are making enough to cover the electricity costs as well as paying a few bills with the remainder. Unfortunately, Bitcoin hasn’t been able to bounce back from the boom of 2017 like we all hoped. I recall hearing of how there were people who were taking mortgages out on their homes in order to buy some coin and enjoy the ride up. Some bought late…as late as buying in at the $17k mark. Then to watch that plummet down and down for days must have put someone in the hospital.

I haven’t gone back to Nicehash (NH) yet but ever time I go and try their mining calculator to see what they are pulling in and they haven’t matched up with Prohashing. The good news is they are slowly paying everyone back what was lost!  That’s I’m pretty stoked about.

If you’re looking at buying the L3+, know it is still profitable, but not nearly as much as it used to be. We can all hope that the price of the coin will go back on the rise in the future so we can mine for longer!

Happy Mining!
~A

 

 

Mining Update #2

Well, it’s no surprise that Nicehash has taken a severe hit to the crown jewels with this last hack which left them a victim of the largest crypto theft to date.  The Nicehash wallet was purged of more than $60 million USD.  From the information that was released, it was stated that the attacker gained access to their network via an employee’s infected machine. From there, they analyzed the network, make a few test withdrawals and then hit them where it hurts. Ouch. Now, it’s been a week since the heist but life for miners must go on.

Nicehash (NH) was my primary connection and as such, I did lose a few hundred dollars during this heist.  Luckily, I have a habit of moving the balance weekly at minimum to a more secure wallet.  One of the things I love about the miner setup is that you can configure multiple connections in case one is unreachable. It will automatically try the next. So when NH took their network offline, my miners simply went down the list and hit the next connection.  In my case, it was (PH).

I enjoy PH nearly as much as NH in that they basically use your hardware to mine or verify transaction of any coin that your miner can handle.  They don’t focus on just 1 like litecoinpool.org ( LCP).  PH has a definitely pro and con vs NH which makes it very appealing to me. First, the con, the connection.  I can only assume that they don’t quite have the infrastructure to handle the amount of connections pointing to them because it seems like they suffer from dropped connections pretty frequently compared to NH. Why? Not sure. I never asked. The definitely PRO over NH is that PH will pay you in whatever coin you choose in any breakdown you want. For Example, for 100% of earnings, you could get paid 50% in Bitcoin, 25% in Litecoin, and 25% in Ethereum. This worked out pretty well considering Litecoin jumped by 200% in the last 48 hours.

Litecoin:

Another con about PH is that the earnings are not as much as what I was making on NH. Earnings are earnings so I really can’t complain, BUT, a decrease is still a decrease. I was making $80-$95 a day on NH.  Here are my latest earnings from PH:

Not horrible…not great. Still, it’s earnings. Litecoin is starting to draw back now as it’s dropped below the $300 line.  I’m hoping it’ll push to new highs soon.

I will likely try to point one to different pools to compare and contrast them one day, but today is not that day. I do hope that NH comes back online soon with enhanced security so we can continue to mine with them. They have a great platform, but this can be a lesson to myself and to other users who lost more to keep up with moving money into a more secure storage solution.

Until next time. Happy Mining!

Mining Update #1

In case anyone has been following, you’ll know that I’ve only been involved with cryptocurrency mining for a short period of time – 85 days to be exact. 85 days ago, I received my 1st of 5 miners. Then, within 3 weeks, I had all 5 of them. Since then, I’ve been keeping track of how much I’ve been making daily.

Like many of us out there who weren’t sure on if or when they should get into mining, this might help you figure things out. One of the main questions I see on Reddit is “Should I buy coin or mine for coin?”  Well, here are my results…take from them what you will.

When I first started, I was averaging Approx $20 per miner per day in September which you may have seen from an earlier post. How has it held up? Well, it’s been pretty steady. Check out the graph below, ignore the initial jump and the middle jump. These massive spikes are because new miners came online. The blue line is the total amount of money I made per day. The red line is the average income per miner per day.

Okay, but what about how much coin we’re making? See below:
[Note: Coin is measured in BTC as the miners are pointing to NiceHash]

Remember, the initial spikes are from where I added miners. But you can see, when I had 2 miners, it made the same as when I added the next 3 (close enough). So why am I making the same with 5 as I did with 2? DIFFICULTY!  This is exactly what we talked about before in a previous post.  Over time, difficulty will only increase (90% of the time) which means you’ll make less and less coin.  But if you notice the red line, it’s stayed pretty steady. For 85 days, my avg is $19.89 per miner. 7 days ago, my daily per miner was $17. 2 days ago, $18 per miner. Today, $21.47 per miner. Why is it going up and why is that red line not going down even though the number of coin we’re earning is going down? PRICE!

In the last 24 hours, the price of Bitcoin has jumped by more than $1000. When I started, the price was at $4600 USD. Now, (as I’m writing this), it has cleared $11,200. It’s this increase that has kept my daily earnings stable.  Will this continue? Not at this rate. I can only HOPE that BTC increases by great percentages like what is shown here, but there will be dips and drops which will have an effect on my daily earnings and my BTC wallet.

Now, what would have been better? Let’s see.

After 85 days, we’ve earned back about $6,500.  Our initial investment is $10k (after all parts, miners, power supplies, A/C, etc). That figure is before expenses for electricity.

Change it up. Say I did the buy and hodl route.  $10k would have given me approximately 2.1613583 coin. The difference between starting and end prices is  approx 243%. Now, that 2.1613583 coin would be worth $24,207.

So it’s up to the individual on which route they would like to take.  The buy and hodl route is much more appealing except your amount of coin never increases like it does with mining.  Sure, it’s only going up a small bit, but even 1% of $11000 is $110.

Happy mining!

 

Pushing Her Buttons. . .

She’s likely going to laugh and decide to kill me in some wild inner dialogue but I can’t resist this.

Anyone who has ever been in a relationship knows how important it is to know the buttons of your significant other. And if you don’t know them, start paying attention!  Women have buttons (more than just of the belly variety). Men have buttons too.  Women tend to have a lot more of them as it’s no secret that women are more…I’ll say “complex” to not rile up too many of them out there. LoL.

As a guy, there is really only one set of buttons that we focus on the most. The ones that get her sex drive into that gear that is going to end up in a wild night intense sexual fun while trying not to wake the kids. We all love those nights. Getting her going is almost literally like the image above. There is almost always a sequence of events that have to take place before you get it right. Are the stars aligned right?  Were you facing west when you last kissed her? Has it been at least 98 days since the last blue moon?

Did you know there are shortcuts? Here are a few things guys can do to get her toward your final destination. And as a guy, we prefer pictures over words so here you go.

There you have it. The shortcut. Cook…clean…take care of the kids…and take care of yourself. I’ve been told a few times that the sight of a clean house or the smell of recently applied deodorant or the feel of a freshly shaved face begins the spark of a potentially exciting night.  Does this work every time? Of course not. But if you need to up your chances for a horizontal mambo…get to scrubbing something.

THEN, the trick is to keep her motor revved. Don’t skimp on making her feel amazing. Complement her. Grab her butt (if that works for her).  Play with her feet. Get her ice cream. Keep it up the rest of the night and if you’re lucky (meaning she didn’t fall asleep on the couch at 9pm due to a long day with the kids), you can do your best to make her toes curl on the couch, kitchen counter, table, floor, office desk, etc, etc, etc (I’m married, so….in bed where we have a 50/50 chance of not plopping down on a kids toy).

However, things can go south if you aren’t aware of the other set of buttons. You know that big red button people tell you not to push? Well….women have entire panels of these which you need to watch out for. Some are bigger than others. If you push too many small ones, you’re sure to seize her motor and find it impossible to get turning again for the rest of the night (if not days). If you push a big red one, expect weeks or longer of unhappy wife, unhappy life.

I’m horribly guilty of the little things.  Yes, I’ve dropped clothes on the floor about 15″ from the hamper (I know because she sent me a picture of it with a measuring tape saying I must have set a personal record).  Yes, I’ve put empty dishes in the sink rather than in the dishwasher.  Yes, I’ve forgotten numerous times the kids milk bottles that started to sour and get all clumpy which she had to clean out (she HATES that). Yes, I’ve found myself not cleaning as much as I should while she’s also up cleaning after a long day. Oops. Yes I’ve elbowed her in the face after promising not to beat her anymore (this was in good fun and it really was an accident…I swear…)  Needless to say, all women have their buttons both good and bad.

Turns out, there is another I didn’t know about. I mean, I’m sure it existed, but I’ve never pressed it until recently.

So the day is at it’s end. The kids were in bed. We had our dinner. Spirits were high.  She seemed awake enough that she may not fall asleep on the couch and I might be able to coerce her for some bedroom entertainment later on. She sitting/laying on her side with her legs on the couch and I crawled over to her. Started to get a few green lights on the mood on we kissed and made semi-joking comments about what we could do to each other. . .when I somehow laid on that button I wasn’t aware of.

It was a purge valve. It made a lot of noise and sounded like a semi jake brake. . .And it did not smell like roses. . .

Hellooooooo married life.

Long story short, LEARN HER BUTTONS!!!

Mining Necessity

If you ask me, mining Crypto-Currency at home is very easy.  Essentially, you treat your mining equipment like a computer and take care of one as such. This post is about heat extraction.

Mining equipment, like most computers, run best when they are cool.  The cooler you can keep them, the happier they are. If you have followed my posts of me building my crypto room, you will see that I have a divider between the hot air and cool air of my miners.  And in doing this, I needed a way to funnel the air from the miners to the other portion of my separation.

I have a few ways to do this but I choose to cut a 4″ circle into the back insulation wall and then use some duct work purchased at the local hardware store to help with the air flow. The first attempt didn’t work so well. No, I can’t say that. . .it worked but it didn’t work as efficiently as it could have. I had basic 4″ duct and some duct tape.

 

It kind of worked, but it was far from perfect. You can’t get a really good seal when connecting a 4″ circle to a 120mm square case fan.  Keeping an eye on the miners, I noticed that they were operating at a hefty 64 degrees Celsius.  Granted, they are running my garage and during the summer it’s not the coolest portion of the house. I’m okay with them running a little warm, but this seems a little too warm.

So I went out and found an adapter online. I was able to find one on Amazon and I ordered two. It took me a while to receive them though. I got them and they were also a little flimsy. A friend had a 3d printer he let me borrow so I decided to make a version I found on thingiverse. This was much sturdier than the one I found online and the fitment was perfect!

The designer also put a lip on it so if you used a duct with a clasp, it would have something to prevent it from slipping off. As you can see in the picture, now the air has a nice smooth pathway rather than the jagged one before. I put it back in the hole of the wall (which you can see above the power wires on the right image if you look closely).  The seal is good and immediately, my mining software could see a difference. It dropped to 58°C within minutes.  At night when it cools off, it cools down even more to about 51°C.

If you are running a home mining setup and you aren’t expelling the hot air separately, you’re cooling system is likely doing double the work than it really needs to. These little miners put out a ton of heat. At night when it’s 65°F (18°C)  outside, our two car garage is a toasty 85°F (29°C) from only 3 miners. The little room we have in the garage housing the miners doesn’t run that hot as it’s air-conditioned, but it’s a little idea of how much heat these miners produce. I’m sure if we left the door to the house open from the garage our home will be kept pretty warm through the winter.

I did a search online for some other cooling solutions and I found this setup: 

You can see he’s taking all of the hot air and running ducts to a central tube which has a single high-flow fan to expel the hot air outside of the room completely. He’s got the right idea for sure when it comes to keeping his miners cool.  He uses insulated duct which will also help with noise reduction as well. These are S9’s I believe but the principle is the same. I don’t have a way of extracting the air out of the room completely or I would have a similar setup. Also, using the same adapter I found online would be perfect for the connection of duct to miner as well.

So if you’re planning on doing something like this, definitely spend the $10-$15 online for one or have some printed by a friend if you have someone with a 3D printer.

Bitcoin Earnings

Okay everyone, as planned, I wanted to do a post that showed the earnings from my miners. My experience thus far has been pretty positive and I’ve had no issues out of my miners. I have had issues out of my mining room but those have since been temporarily resolved. It just had to do with no air intake into the room mostly (oops).

Anyway, We’ve been running for 8 days now and things are going pretty well. Here are my results:

On day 1, we didn’t make much but that is because we weren’t able to run the miner for a whole day before the payment was made. These miners were all connected to NiceHash.com for their pool. They pay out at roughly 6 AM Eastern in the US. I made sure to pull the actual price of the coin at the same time so the figure would be static each day. The .5 entries mean that during the day, another miner was configured but didn’t run the whole day so the number was skewed a bit. But from the majority, you can see that a single miner averaged between $30-$32 for the bulk. But on the 13th, the price of the coin started it’s skydiving impression so profits started to take a hit as well.

We now have 3 miners going full time and they’ve been running for a full day now, but I think with this fall, the number of bitcoin transactions have flooded the network due to the fall in the price. As a result, I think the system is a little overloaded as I’m still waiting on my last payment (it’s usually here by now).

[Update] I’ve updated the image to show the profits of 3 miners running for the full $24 hours. The drop in price (more than 25%) has really affected the numbers. [/Update] 

So let’s look at this from the “should I get into mining?” or “is mining profitable?” standpoints.  First, how much does it cost? When I bought the first one, the price of a miner was $1250 (more like $1800-$2000 now) from Bitmain.com. However, even though you buy it right then, don’t expect to get it for 2-3 months as that’s their current wait time for delivery.  The power supply that goes with it (APW3+) is $105 through the same company. Then you pay for shipping, $120 (roughly). So let’s call it $1500 to get it to your door after taxes. Then you need to make sure you have at least a 220V outlet. You can get the APW5 which can run on 110V, but it performs better and more reliably at 220V. If you don’t have one installed, add in a cost for that from an electrician. And then factor in how much it costs to run your machine. I think mine is about $80/mo for 1 machine.

From the numbers above, you can figure your ROI is roughly 50 days ($1500/$30d=50d).  That’s really not all that bad.  For now, you’re really looking more like 56 days to account for the electricity.

There is one VERY crucial part we’re missing through. Difficulty!  As a miner owner, the difficulty is easy. As a miner itself, the work is not. Sure, it can process transactions all day long, but hashing that algorithm to start the next block in the blockchain and get that reward, that’s VERY hard work. And the more miners out there, the harder it gets.

Think about about if you had a $100000 dollars to give out for every person who can guess the word you have in your mind. The game HAS to last at least 10 days (no more, no less). It starts with 10 people. Well, there are a ton of words out there so you decide to keep it easy. You start with 3 letter words. One person guesses right. That person earns a $100. You change your word and they start again. Sure enough, every few minutes someone guesses it right. Word spreads that people are guessing words and earning $100!!!  Another 100 people come. They keep guessing right and now they are guess faster than you thought. A little head math and you figure out that at this rate…you’ll blow through your $100k before the 10 day mark. So what do you do? You make it harder. Now it’s 4 letter words. Sure enough, it’s hard for them to guess. The rate of the payouts start to slow down again. More people come, the payout rises. So you increase the difficulty.

This is exactly how Bitcoin works. The more miners that are put on the network, the harder it is to earn the reward. How does this affect you? This means you’ll slowly see your daily intake dwindle as the weeks / months go on. My initial calculation doesn’t take that into consideration. How fast does the difficulty increase? “It depends.”  If your game started to come to a standstill and nobody is getting payouts or people start to leave, your only choice to stay in your window is to lower the difficulty. The rate of reward is what drives the difficulty. Typically, it goes up, but how much fluctuates. In some instances (rarely) it goes down. Either way, your ROI (Return on Investment) is actually quite a bit higher than your initial estimation.  Even though you run a calculator on the day of purchase and you like the results, do NOT expect those results 2-3 months down the line when you actually get your miners.

Are you okay with that? If so, hop on board and give it a whirl. Are you okay with possibly never getting your ROI due to coin price collapse or a difficulty increase to the point where you’re making $2/day vs  $30/day? If not, stay away.

For the moment, I’m excited for the venture.  If you have any success or horror stories, comment below.  If you have more questions, do the same. Until next time. . .

Happy mining,

~A

Pool Settings for L3+

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog then you’re more than aware that I’m new to this. I’ve been up and running for a whopping 4 days (and loving it). No matter how much I did, I still had issues figuring the exact settings to put into the miner to get it to connect to the appropriate pool.  So, here is a step by step according me:

1.  Unbox your miner.  Plug in the power cables. Plug in your network cable.
2. Log into your network router / switch.  I say this because most smaller home miners are likely going to have the DHCP set up via their home router. In that router, go find your list of IP addresses that are currently handed out.  It may be listed something like DHCP Client Table or something. Bring that up and you’ll see a list of IP addresses currently issues out, the device names, and the device MAC addresses.
3. Plug in the miner and let it start up to completion (usually takes a minute or three).
4. Refresh and review the DHCP client table again and you should see a new entry that says Antminer as the device name. This is the ip address you will need to enter into your web browser to connect to your miner for configuration.
5. You will be asked for a username and password. Enter ‘root’ into both the username and password. This is the default login from the factory.
6. Click on ‘Miner Configuration’ in the top left of the tabulated menu to bring up your pool configuration. Next, you’ll put in the following:
   • Nice Hash
     URL (US) =      stratum+tcp://scrypt.usa.nicehash.com:3333
     Username =   3EJnidmejUDYEKWPlkdeEnYEWukb7.L3P1
     Password =    x

     The blue is your Bitcoin wallet address found under the wallet menu option when you log into NiceHash.com.  If you follow it with a period and a name (in this case I used L3P1 to indicate it was L3+ miner number 1) it will show up in your miner statistics. I suggest doing this if you run more than one so you can more easily differentiate which miner is doing what in NiceHash as show here:If you don’t put in the orange portion of the address, your miners will still connect, but you will be missing the names in this list (at least at the time of this writing they weren’t showing up).

   • Prohasing
     URL (US) =      stratum+tcp://prohashing.com:3333
     Username =   Avekilo
     Password =    n=L3P1

     The Username in this one is the one you configured when you created your account. It’s NOT your email address. If you aren’t sure, simply log into prohashing and look at the top right of your screen as shown here:There is no password required but I highly suggest you use the n argument which will send the name of your miner. In my case, I’m using L3P1 to designate this is L3+ miner number 1.

7. After  you configure your pools, apply the changes. I also highly suggest updating your password to something other than the default but that’s just me.

That’s all there is to it for the most basic of configurations. You can get fancy if you want, but to just get your miner online and hashing with these two pools, that’s all there is to it.

Happy Mining!

 

He gets a friend!

I wasn’t expecting number two for a week. So imagine my surprise with UPS sends me an email that my second L3+ was going to be delivered today!  I got lucky this time because it came within the delivery window and was waiting for me when I got home (wife signed so don’t think they’ll just drop it at your doorstep).

I was excited but also nervous as only two boxes came. I was expecting 3 since I ordered two APW5 PSUs. Well, apparently, one is being held in a warehouse but I think it will be delivered today. Let’s hope.

I knew what to expect with setup and configuration so installation took little to no time at all.

As you can tell from the picture, using the APW5 is much cleaner and more straight forward than using two PSU’s. It’s cool that you CAN use multiple power supplies to power them though. This means that a backup plan for a failed power supply has been tested and proven. I’m all for that.

My first miner has been going for a full 24 hours and I’m happy to say it it payed out a decent 0.00774131 BTC ≈ $35.75 USD. Not too bad. This was done on NiceHash.com.  To see the difference in profitability, I set up number two on Prohashing.com to see who pays out better.

Also, I never put up a picture of the finished mining room we set up in the garage. Our garage gets hot in the summer so we rigged this up to keep them cool.

More to come!!

Crypto Room Build Pt. 4

What a day. Not sure if I mentioned it or not but when we initially looked into mining months ago, I was doing all kinds of research and looking at reviews and how-to’s and blah blah blah…basically everything I could do to learn about it and prepare and sell it to the wife. Well, one day I bought one…but didn’t know if I’d be able to pay for it in time. Then, 2 days later, we plan to go in on two. Sweet! I go to buy two and they’re sold out. {Expletives} flowed. But wait, I had bought one (with no power supply), and it was within the 3 days for a wire transfer so I rushed to pay it. Paid…done.  A few days later, the L3+ batch is available again and we snatch one up (along with 2 power supplies this time). Rush to bank…paid…done.

Rush forward a few months…

So delivery is happening but I’m still without a power supply. They are delivered on a first come first served basis. So my first miner is on it’s way and we have no power supply!  So I go and buy two smaller power supplies to get me by until my next shipment arrives (supposedly a week later). I end up with a 1000 watt and a 750 watt. This works out because when I build my next PC, I already have two awesome power supplies to choose from!  And if a miner power supply breaks, I have a backup solution.

Fast forward to getting home from work…

Okay, we’ve got our first miner!  And man was I stoked. Actually, I was a little bummed/peeved because my delivery window from UPS was between noon and 4pm. 4pm comes and…nothing…5pm…nothing…6pm…nothing…7pm…nothing…nearly 8pm…he shows up. WOOT! Too bad I can’t just jump into setting it up because the kids need to be put to bed. That doesn’t stop me from opening it at least and seeing it in it’s sleek aluminum glory.

Anyway, we get the kids to bed and then it’s game time.

The first thing I do is unscrew the exhaust fan and fit on the 120mm Fan Duct Cooling Shroud to 4 Inch Vent Hose I purchased off Amazon. Fits perfectly. (images taken from Amazon). 

Next, it’s hooking up the 9 PCIE VGA power cables to this beast. And then plugging in the 1 CAT-6 cable I have tipped and working. Haha. I should really finish tipping the rest of them.  So, I power on the PSU for board 4 (the 750 Watt PSU) and then power on the 1000 Watt which powers the controller board and the remaining 3 boards. It’s relatively quiet at first as it boots up and then it starts it best impression of a vacuum cleaner. Not too bad. 

You can’t see it, but I cut a 4″ hole behind it and shoved the adapter plate through it for now so the hot air is blown outside of the cooled portion.  Seal is pretty good too. Okay, it’s up, it’s running, now to go configure it.

Configuration was really easy but getting the pool parameters was a pain. Getting it to connect to nicehash was easy. Connecting it to prohashing was a little harder but that’s only because I confused myself and got it wrong. Connecting it to litecoinpool.org was also a pain which I cause myself. Must have been a long day. It took a while, but it eventually got up to it’s 500+ Megahash speed and it’s been chugging along since. I’ll put up a post about configuration tonight or tomorrow if I remember for those who have some issues configuring them.  After I get some figures, I’ll let you know how that goes too.

I plan to run this second one on prohashing for a while and compare it with nicehash. I do like that prohashing allows payment in about any form you want to include linking with coinbase to deposit directly into your bank. I might try that and let you know how it goes.

Hope you enjoyed. I’ll post some final pics up here soon. The pictures mostly sucked because our garage was trashed and I didn’t have much room to move around. It’s better now so maybe I can get better pics for a final show and tell.

Happy mining mis amigos.