Mining Bitcoin at Home: Week 3 Update

Week 1 update here
Week 2 update here

Hey everyone, how’s it going?

I am one day late with the regular weekly update on my mining adventures and earnings. I had to wait for the earnings from yesterday’s blocks on Bitcoin.com’s mining pool to arrive, to make my reporting more accurate. Sorry about that!

This past week has been filled with continued experimentation, a few new useful findings, as well as a few frustrating moments.

New things – and a few screw-ups that came along with them — that I tried in the past week:

• Mining on NiceHash. It started great, with mining rewards almost double (0.008 BTC per day, in my case) compared to what I could’ve gotten on most other pools. However, after the first day the reward fell back to more “normal” levels of 0.004 BTC per day. Meanwhile, my usual pool, CKPool, found 6 blocks in one day — on the same day as I was mining on NiceHash. Which meant that I missed 0.002 BTC on that day…
• Trying to keep the miner on at nights. I decided to try to increase my miner’s productivity by keeping it on during the night. I got a pair of new premium-quality earplugs and tried to sleep despite the white noise from the miner. I must admit that it worked only so-so. I did manage to sleep, but the sleep quality was poor, I would wake up for brief moments throughout the night and in the end I would turn the miner off after 3 am. After two such nights I had decided it was not worth it and now I’m back to the 16–17 hours/day operational cycle.
• Switching back to CKPool. As soon as I had done it, it stopped finding blocks, of course. The pool’s collective hash power has fallen dramatically since the last Saturday. At the same time, Bitcoin.com’s mining pool has been smashing its previous records in terms of mined blocks per day. All the while I have been wasting time mining on CKPool. And all that night-time mining was for nothing. So frustrating!!
• Reducing the fans speed. I tried to fine-tune the miner's fans and managed to bring their speed down to 40 RPS. It significantly reduced the noise and brought it down to a level that is tolerable even when I’m not wearing my stylish turquoise ear defenders – without compromising the miner’s productivity. I am very happy about it. I observed increased temperatures on the miner’s air-exhaust end, but simply opening the balcony door a little wider than usual helped mitigate this problem. (Yay for Swedish winter!)

So now I am back at mining on Bitcoin.com’s pool. As long as it keeps finding 4–6 blocks a day, I’m a happy miner. 

Here’s the summary of my weekly earnings for the past week:

0.019655 BTC in Week 3 earnings, of which:

• 0.00579821 BTC came from mining on NiceHash,
• 0.004091  BTC from mining on Bitcoin.com’s pool and
• 0.009767 BTC from mining on Kano’s CKPool.

…which means that the miner has so far earned about 9% of the cost I paid for it. Yay! 91% to go! ;)

Stay tuned for more updates on my mining (mis)adventures next week!

Previous Updates:

• Week 0: Unpacking and Setting-Up
• Week 1 Update
• Week 2 Update