Quote from: wrxodus on January 02, 2017, 02:25:11 PM

FWIW, I forgot to say in the OP but I plan on joining a pool for either Bitcoin or other SHA-256 currencies. Also, my plan would be to start off with one USB miner and pick up miners along the way.

Good luck. The challenge with most of the USB stick miners is that they don't have a high hash rate. Yes, multiple gigahash may sound like a lot, but in the grand scheme of the bitcoin mining universe it's almost unnoticeable.

This site gives you a reasonable idea of what the bitcoin network looks like:
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

In the top left corner is the bitcoin network stats, and in the top right is a way to estimate how much you might earn before factoring the cost of your electricity. Here is a screen capture of the details for my Compac that has been overclocked to 325 MHz and turning out ~17.8 GH/s:

I updated the price per bitcoin (BTC/USD) to 1021 which I got from this web site:
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/all/

As you can see my Compac miner might earn me 10.07 US cents per week before I factor in the power to run the hardware miner and the power to run the computer where the mining software runs. If you look at the fraction of a bitcoin/day, 0.00001409, please note that's not much at all. It's considered "dust", and in fact wouldn't be paid out by most pools.

So what I, and a number of others do is use these Compac miners as "lottery miners" running them on a solo pool, I use solo.ckpool.org (see the link in my sig) and "play" in the gekkoscience fun-run on gekkorun.de:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1452817

Cheers,

- zed