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 29^th. 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 31^st 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 29^th. 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 1^st, 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 28^th and 29^th, 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