I’ll admit it – I’ve been bitten by the coin mining bug!
Whilst many would argue that the ‘horse has bolted’ for bitcoin, there are still PLENTY of opportunities to make profits on selected coins.
For Instance – MazaCoin … the first coin to be adopted by a sovereign nation – the Traditional Lakota Nation. As a SHA-256 currency, Mazacoin can easily be mined by a variety of ASIC miners (that has become the only profitable way to mine due to the reduced power costs)
The Antminer U2+ is a little bigger than a USB drive due to the attached heatsink
(The previous model did not have the heatsink & suffered from hardware errors when overclocked)
Currently I have 36 of the little beasts happily mining away in a ‘Block Erupter’ 49 Port Hub which is powered by a single ATX power supply (I need a larger PSU before adding too many more)
They’re mining at an average of 2.2Gh/s whilst only being set on the 2.0Gh/s clock speed – so I’m pretty happy & just looking for the most profitable coin to mine – CoinWarz is most helpful in this regard.
However, I have another 450 of these sitting in my office, gradually being reduced via eBay, Locanto & personal contacts – so if you’re looking to get into mining at the ground level, why not give these a try.
Update:
Not long after this post the market was flooded with thousands of these from Hong Kong & China at prices WAY under the supposed ‘discounted wholesale price’ I purchased at. So reselling ( especially after eBay & PayPal gouge their fees ) became a losing proposition. SO … I decided to see if I could make them ‘pay their way’ & set-up a mini-farm in the Garage.
As you can see, the result was NOT pretty, but I was mining at over 1 TH/s and it looked as though that ROI (Return on Investment) may be possible … but power bills started to sky-rocket whilst the value of Bitcoin dropped from around US$750 to under US$300 and the writing was on the wall!
I had already installed 5KW worth of solar panels on the roof and hoped the approaching Australian Spring & Summer would offset the power use – but the BTC value kept dropping & it was hard to see a break even point ever eventuating.
Not to mention the time it takes to maintain 450 odd USB miners – the power draw on the USB hubs kept fusing the wires & either burning out the Hub or the Power Supply … neither was cheap to replace. So eventually I had to ‘call it quits’ whilst I could still get a reasonable return selling the hardware.
Now Bitmain’s latest miner the S7 has been released & a unit the size of just one of the black boxes pictured in my retired ‘farm’ produces 4.05 TH/s (approximately 4 times the output of my entire ‘farm’) at a power ‘cost’ of 1042 W.
I’m tempted … But I think I’ll just lease them online & let someone else take care of the maintenance & power bills.