Mining Cryptocurrencies

The Background

Ever since I started using bitcoin (which only happened less than 5 months ago, mind you), I considered starting my own mining operation. I tried to do my own research, learn as much as I could about different mining hardware, pros and cons of cloud-mining (some would say it doesn’t even count as a real mining), costs and ROI calculations and so on. In the end, I decided to tread carefully and to diversify to approach to mining.

Mining Bitcoin, a Failed Start

I almost bought a new Bitmaintech AntMiner R4 (pictured above, photo courtesy of Bitmaintech’s website) when it was first announced and released. I liked its power efficiency, its relatively low power consumption and especially the fact that it was advertised as “quiet”. I was ready to cash out the expected price of $1,000, plus the cost of shipment and of a power-supply unit, PSU. But when the actual retail price was unveiled – a staggering $1,400 – it was obvious that the miner was overpriced. So I had to postpone my plans of getting one. Maybe wait for the next Avalon A7 or not mine on my own hardware altogether.

Cloud Mining

So I turned to cloud mining. I bought a contract for a small amount hash power for the X11 algorithm from Genesis Mining as they seemed credible to me and I liked the fact that they used renewable geothermal energy to power their mining operations.

Monero’s exchange rate was spiking in the early September and going over 0.02 BTC. ‘A great time to start mining this coin!’, I thought. So that’s what I started mining. In the past six weeks I’ve mined 1,2 XMR – a meagre amount, but still satisfying for my little experiment. With Monero’s price slashed by more than half from when I first started mining, I’m going to hold onto it for the time being and not change it into Bitcoin. At least not until (and if) it goes back to 0.02 BTC/XMR.

A fun fact: did you know that the word monero is Esperanto for ‘coin’?

CPU Mining at Home

I also started to mine Monero on my home laptop’s CPU. The results have been even less spectacular than from cloud mining. In the past six weeks I have only been able to mine about 0.2 XMR. I don’t run the miner software continuously, 24/7, as my laptop overheats easily. I don’t run the miner also when playing games or doing some computationally intensive tasks on it. So, I don’t have great expectations for this approach either. Maybe when ZCash mining starts, I will try to mine some on my laptop, as it has 16 Gb of RAM – and RAM is what matters when mining ZCash.

Oh, and I have already pre-ordered a very small amount of hashpower from Genesis Mining to mine ZCash from Day 1.

Mining Bitcoin, a New Attempt and a Real Start

Still, my dream of running my own home-based mining operation was not dead and buried. As I was browsing listings on eBay the other day, I caught a lucky strike. A guy in Greece was selling his used Spondoolies Tech SP35 Yukon (pictured above, photo courtesy of Spondoolies Tech’s website). It is discontinued now, as the company that created it went our of business, since it could not compete with cheaper miner from Bitmain Tech. But when it was new and hot (pardon the pun), it was selling for about $2,235. The eBay seller wanted $400 for it, plus shipping costs. In the end we agreed on 0.5 BTC for the miner and 0.05 for the shipping from Greece to Sweden. The Bitcoin price was about to spike shortly after that, but I still think it was a bargain. Especially since the miner comes with two built-in PSUs, so I won’t have to invest any extra money in that. And my electricity is virtually free, as I live in a rental apartment with a fixed monthly fee for electricity, heating, water and the Internet connection. And, as I live in Sweden and #winteriscoming, cooling will be as simple as opening a window just a crack.

I was really hoping to have the miner arrived by this weekend, but unfortunately it’s still in transit, making its slow way through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary (and, by now, possibly somewhere in Germany). However, as soon as it arrives, I plan to review the entire installation process and to write regular updates about running a miner at home and how much Bitcoin it is able to generate. Please let me know what other aspects of running a tiny-scale home mining operation you will be most interested in reading on my blog.

All your comments, questions and tips are very much appreciated, as always.