MINING AT HOME: BACK IN BUSINESS!
When I was at SteemFest2 in Lisbon last November, I was surprised that quite a few people asked me questions about my ongoing home mining experiment and wanted to hear more about how it was going. Well, if the people like to read about this stuff, I am here to deliver!
Back then my Bitcoin miner was taking a summer break, and I was only mining Dash. But, as the proper Swedish winter gave us temperatures below –5°C / 23°F in the past month, I decided to bring back the old beast from its early retirement. Since January 30th I have been mining Bitcoin Cash, while continuing to mine DASH, as usual. Thanks to the heat that this machine generates my place stays comfortably warm, even with the balcony door being cracked open at all times. And, for all of you who are concerned about the environmental impact of mining – I hope I’m not the only one here! :) – my local electricity providers supplies only “green” electricity to my house (from small-scale hydro, wind, solar and burning household waste).
On average my Bitcoin miner mines between 0.002 BCH and 0.004 BCH per day (see the graph below). When the temperature outside rises close to 0°C / 32°F, I shut one of the two mining circuits off and mine at 50% capacity (~2 TH/s) to prevent overheating. When the temperature falls back down, I plug the second board in and mine at full power (~4 TH/s). And on some nights I turn off the miner completely, if I want to have my place really quiet for a change.
My Dash miner has been showing relatively stable profitability in the past three months, earning about 0.05 DASH per month. Together with my monthly earnings from Dash Masternode Shares being approximately the same, I withdraw about 0.2 DASH every two months.
As you can see, I’m not earning huge amounts of money from my home mining project. Still, it’s a fun experiment and I’m learning about Blockchain thanks to it. Also, I like the fact that my place is hosting some productive (as in money-generating) activity.
Please leave your questions and comments down below, if you got any. I will be happy to respond! And I will especially happy to hear from other folks who are mining on their own hardware (e.g. not cloud-mining).
Awesome! What you gonna mine? :)
Read the post.
I believe that I was one of the people that asked you. :D
This is a great update Oleg as I am ever curious of different potential moneymaking ideas.
Haha, you surely recognised yourself, @getonthetrain! Indeed, I had you in mind, when I wrote that line, my friend. :)
The sound of today’s stuff would just drive me up a wall. Not to mention Florida not really a great place to create more heat in the house! Just imagine having that kind of horsepower a few years back –oh my!
I really like the fact you are heating your place and making some cryptocurrency. I’ve not minded in forever and a day with hardware and I have no intentions of it.
Ah to the glory days . I would never dare to plug in these tinny wasteful little things these days.
Cool! How much did you manage to mine on those babies, back in the day?
You know, if their energy consumption is low, you could still plug them in and direct them to solo mining – for a looooong shot of finding a block and scoring 12.5 btc.
I’m fortunate to have my electricity costs included in my rent at a flat rent (independent from the actual consumption) and to be living in a cold climate. Without these two special circumstances my mining operation wouldn’t be economically sensible nor practical.
Been so long i don't even recall what verson these where. I want to say back then they had something like 333mb-666mb mining hash rate. I know for certain they where less then a gig each.
Back in the day it would have taken me (if i recall) 784 days to mine a block solo and i think that was in 2012-2013. Let's just say me buying lotto tickets for rest of my life have a better ROI then trying use these things in today world.
I more then broke even on them but nothing insane. I never had enough to have hashing rate to get anywhere. It was always a rat race. You would be lucky if mining equipment you bought showed up within a year of when you paid for it.
I've been tempted to try but then i look at price of gcards and i'm like NOPE NOPE NOPE.
interesting, that explains a few things. I did a calculation a few months ago here in Germany and came to conclusion it would be ridiculous to mine by myself because it's simply to expensive. Electricity costs are on a extra bill and about 0.25 EUR per kWh. Competitive Antminer was also too expensive plus possible damage with weeks of replacement if i would send it back and the exponential growing difficuilty would make that thing outdated in a year. It is simply more profitable to just buy BTC.
But maybe someone does this to run a full node for the network for more idealistic purposes? I'm not sure but understand that you have real good constellation for private mining 😊
Currently you would made about 1 BCC per year or current snapshot about $1,000. You would say with your hardware costs and possible downtimes, rising difficuilty and price prediction it is profitable? I think for me it would without high electricity costs. Mining calculation is always quite difficuilt, Genesis Mining is also highly speculative.
It can be profitable for me, since I don’t pay anything extra for electricity, if I run my mining hardware for longer than a year. I managed to mine about 0.5 BTC (yes, I mean Bitcoin) in six months in 2016–17, so it almost covered my initial investment in the mining hardware (I bought it on eBay for 0.55 BTC).
In general, I would say that home mining on a small scale with specialised mining hardware (ASIC miners) is almost never profitable. It can be a fun hobby, but you won’t make any serious money with it. Buying coins and holding them long-term is a way better investment strategy than cloud-mining or home mining.
Mining with GPU rigs is a different story – it can be profitable, if you mine the right coin and your timing is right. Plus, you can always resell your hardware later for a good fraction of its original cost – which is nearly impossible to do with old ASIC miners. Running a masternode at home can be a profitable thing too, if you can afford the initial investment.
I do this as a hobby and to learn more about the inner workings of Blockchain technology. With an additional benefit of heating my apartment in winter months. :D
Thank you for explanation. I think your profitability is similar to my experiment with a mining service. I calculated a small profit of maybe +20% and maybe in best case +40% but there are factors like you mentioned nobody knows. Mining services try to cover such facts with cool diagrams of USD payouts, especially if the price for crypto grows it looks very profitable. But the truth is if you invest 1 BTC in hash power than you must get back at least 1 BTC not a fake calculation in another monetary system.
The fun factor is value for you. I understand that and it can be described in numbers.
Multi-purpose GPU is a good point. If someone want a 2-3 year old high end GPU for gaming it is better than the ASIC just for mining gives you an edge. I know someone in my town who build a rig with 5 or 7 Radeon boards for mining. Wish you happy mining!
Another interesting fact of my experiment with mining service is that i started right after the BTC halving at a relatively low price in 2017 and i watched also the cost per GH/s which increased with the peak in December a lot. I think people invested at this time have now a hard time to stay profitable.
Jimmy Song published a interesting article about the Bitmain production costs in 2014 which shows a high margin on the "shovels"
That is one of the main reasons why it's not profitable for private miners with ASICs like me.
Thanks Oleg
I always wondered what mining equipment looked like. Great to know you're earning money from it too.
Brrrrrr
thanks for sharing
cheers
Anj :)
It is not a huge sum of money like your mention but at least you are doing it for fun and learning blockchain.
Indeed. And, hopefully, it will be worth more in the future, as the price keeps on rising! ;)
This is the way we need to see crypto and never in the short term ;)
When I saw the phrase about the green energy, at first I thought that you had your own solar installation ... then I reread the article completely.
In this regard, there was such an idea, would it be profitable to mine with own solar panels and use the heat from hardware to heat the room?
I think there are some people trying to integrate ASIC mining hardware with a solar PV panel on top. And I also know of some home enthusiasts who mine cryptocurrencies with their own electricity produced by solar panels on their roofs. But, as I'm not a home owner, I don't have a roof of my own where I could PV panels. The building next to mine has a roof-top solar array, however. I'd love to tap into their energy, hehe! :D
Wow, I had no idea you were into mining.What keeps you from becoming a steemit witness?
Oh, I’m not ready for that type of a major commitment, Kubby. :) Besides, I don’t have dedicated equipment on which I could run a Steem node. But thank you for even suggesting this idea, friend! :)
Not yet at least, thanks for being honest about it. :) How is the job search going for you?
Still working on it: sending out CVs, applying for different positions… Although, to be honest about it (which seems to be my constant schtick ;)) – I’m not sure I want to get another salary job… Lately I’ve been pondering a move to Portugal (to Lisbon or close enough), where I could be doing some freelance gigs and/or blogging on Steemit. I have enough savings to afford it. I’m going to Lisbon again in July, staying for 10 days to check it out properly (the time at SteemFest last November was lovely, but way too short!). And, if I like it, I might come back shortly afterwards and make it into my new home base. Say, does it sound too crazy to you?
What about your job hunt, how’s it going so far?
Wow! No do it, you only get once life and you could always find a job and move back. I have had a few interviews and am excited about the one on friday! Keep us updated!
I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you, Kubby! I am going to a Jobs&Studies Fair at our local community college on Friday (and bringing my students with me). Who knows, maybe I’ll find some interesting opportunity there… Good luck to both of us on Friday, right? ;)
I can understand that. All the ram it takes to run one is way over anything i would be willing to put together.
I experimented on my computer but I haven't had a spare piece of hardware I could use to do it full time. I'd like to give it a go though just to learn. Have you considered running a witness node?
I haven’t seriously considered it, now. But I imagine I would have the same issue as you do: I don’t have a piece of hardware I could dedicate to the node. Are you considering it?
I think most witnesses (the top guys at least) use cloud servers to host their nodes but that turns it into a business. Not really much interest to me. I would like to try it out as an exercise to see how it all works and to get to see inside the Steem Blockchain. I could also do with some more heating in my apartment its really cold in Ireland today :)
I may give it a try if I can pick up a piece of hardware to play around with. I run lots of analysis on the blockchain too so if nothing else it would be handy to have a local node I could query.
There will also be opportunities to mine other graphene blockchains; peerplays, golos, bitshares, and possibly EOS? as well as the multitudes of coins where you can mine with different scrypts. Some of these could be profitable.
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STOPim really thinking of trying to find one of those baikal cubes, they look awesome. Are they quiet and cool?
Yes, sir. Correct on both counts. What do you think a fair price for one would be?
haha i dont really know. i saw one on ebay for like $1000, and i think they were selling for like $500 when they first came out.
They were $800–$1,000 when they first came out and much more expensive than that on eBay (over $2,000).