Workin’ in a Coin Mine

My girlfriends son, primarily through the influence of his friends decided to get into cryptocurrency, and more succinctly mining it.

Little did his friends know that I’m a bit of an OG when it comes to such things. So I gave Tyler my old Block Erupters and Antminer U1. Set him up with the next to latest release of cgminer, and let him go to town.

There’s another hub full of the block erupters and the non pictured Antminer U1.

Something about the excitement did something to me, because I did something pretty crazy, I decided to buy an Antminer S9. This thing is insanity when compared to the mining equipment of my younger days, which was the first equipment specifically designed for the task. ASICS, short for application specific integrated circuit. Aka, they only do 1 thing but they do it extremely well. At my highest level, I was mining bitcoin at a rate of 26 GH/s but this S9 mines at a rate of 15 TH/s. GH means gigahash, TH means terahash which is 1000 times greater.

As you can tell from the design alone, this means business.

That said, it comes at a cost. You see, with great power comes great need. I’ve been doing some calculating. This miner will probably use more electricity than I use in a month in my home.

My last two days of electricity usage are showing as 53kwh and 49kwh. By doing the math on the lesser of the two days, that brings me to 1470kwh a month. Which is often more than double what I use.

The other factors are the noise and heat. This machine makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 db of noise alone. I have seen youtube videos and pictures of people putting them in coolers. There are people selling pieces to put on the fans to “quiet” them. This brings me back to way back when, all of the “accessories” you could purchase for your gear.

The heat this machine emits is kind of nice seeing as we are coming to a cool part of the year. I had placed it in my utility room, with the door closed and could still hear the fans winding away at 4000 rpm. The exhaust blows at roughly 10mph. When I opened the door, the room was at least 20 degrees warmer than it had been.

I’m unsure if I am going to move it to a location where I can have it running without paying for energy, or resell it. I’m currently mining on the pools I used to use to get the small amounts I could not withdraw out.

So right now, it’s fate is unclear. But it certainly has been fun.

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