Mining Bitcoin at Home: Week 10 Update
Hello everyone!
This past week has been another solid way, albeit with less-than-stellar performance due to two unfortunate circumstances (more on that below). It still stands out in the table of my weekly profits as a pretty decent week – again, due to two other more fortuitous factors.
The first unfortunate thing that happened this past week was that my hard-working miner decided that it had a right to take some time off, while his master was enjoying his vacation in Finland. Meaning that it unexpectedly stopped working on December 29th. I could see that sudden halt on my smartphone from Finland, via Chrome Remote Desktop plug-in (showing me my home laptop connected to the miner). I tried remotely restarting the miner, but it didn’t happen. Only when I had finally gotten home on December 31st did I discover the reason. Turns out that a particularly strong gust of wind pushed open the balcony door, which it turn hit the miner (it stands close to the balcony to facilitate the inflow of cold air) and cause one of the cables powering the control board to fall out. So the miner stopped working and it had to be fixed manually, by plugging the cable back into its socket. Since then it’s been working like a charm again.
In the table below you can see the drop in daily earnings after December 29th. Luckily the two previous days were very good in terms of my mining pool discovering new blocks:
Table 1: my daily earnings during Weeks 9 and 10 of the home mining experiment
The other unfortunate circumstance was that from January 1st, when I had gotten the miner working again, my pool hasn’t been so lucky in terms of finding new blocks. It had actually had an honour of discovering the very first block of 2017, according to BTC.com: https://btc.com/block?date=2017-01-01, but since then it only averaged 1 new block per day. You can also see this unfortunate fact reflected in the table of daily earnings above.
The pool’s luck turned this afternoon, however, when it found four new blocks one after another in the span of a few hours. The earnings from these blocks aren’t shown in the Table 1 above, but I have included their rewards in the table of weekly earnings below:
Table 2: my weekly earnings since the start of the experiment, disaggregated by mining pools
This afternoon’s lucky break in the pool’s productivity, together with higher-than-usual earnings on December 28th and 29th, represent one of the two fortuitous circumstances that I mentioned in the beginning of this post. The other one was a drop in the pool’s total computational power just before the Christmas holidays. It went down by third: from roughy 60 Ph/s to 40 Ph/s. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe the holiday season? Anyhow, thanks to an increase in my miner’s relative individual contributions to the pool, my mining rewards per block got back to the level of about 0.001 BTC – back from 0.0007 BTC I endured when the pool was mining at 60 Ph/s (Weeks 8 and 9 in the Table 2 are representative of those low rewards). I hope this situation will last for a little longer, allowing me to earn a little more every week.
This past week has brought with it another milestone: as of this afternoon the miner has earned exactly one-third of its price (33.4%). If it continued at the present level of earning performance, I can expect to break even in 20 weeks (or about five months) from now. Or maybe I’ll sell the miner before that, making some modest profit. In either case, I’ll be keeping your posted via these weekly updates, so please stay tuned!
Previous Updates:
Week 0: Arrival | Week 1 Update | Week 2 Update |
Week 3 Update | Week 4 Update | Week 5 Update |
Week 6 Update | Week 7 Update | Week 8 Update |
Week 9 Update |
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://www.wakeupcall.se/images/oleg326756.png)
mining at home? very cool!
…or, rather, very warm. :)) The temperature outside is cool –10˚C / 14˚F, but thanks to the miner it’s cosy and warm in my little apartment. ;)
haha i bet@!
Awesome, this is a great experiment! So have you calculated what is your net profit is compared to the startup cost and electricity so far?
P.S. Also there is a bug in steemit that make it where only one tag show up when you use five. Not sure if it is finally fixed or not but I would use only four tags in the mean time for more visibility!
Yes, currently the net profit is at –67%, as I have only recovered one-third of the initial investment, which was 0.55 BTC. My electricity costs are essentially zero (included in my monthly rent at a fixed rate, independent of the actual amount of electricity consumed). I hope to have a positive net profit, once I have sold the miner. Or have mined long enough for it to recover its original cost.
That is ok, you actually started mining at a really good time, right before it starts to skyrocket in price! Wow that is cool, that is a perfect strategy that I never thought of. Get a fixed rate place and fill it all with miners to burn as much electricity as possible :p You will recover it, especially when it goes up in price!