Thank you both very much for your advice! I will look into Sidehack projects as well as substitutes to bring the costs down on what I listed above.
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.
Sidehack sticks are well worth it- bought one so far and I plan on buying one of the BF16s (if you want better bang for your buck wait for the BF16 as it's cheaper per GH and more efficient). You're also supporting the community instead of some company more focused on profit than the miners.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.
I started with S3's in 2015 and now I have 2 S7s and a S5 in my house hashing away. Glad to see someone taking a similar path as me
I started with CPU/GPU mining in late 2011/2012 at the cusp of FPGAs and ASICs in bitcoin, but went down the path of litecoin which I could mine with my computers with crappy GPUs. I came back to the bitcoin world about a year ago and now have a Gekkoscience BM1384 Compac and a Bitmain Antminer S7LN that sidehack tweaked to adjust the power so it draws 450 Watts and generates 2 TH/s relatively quietly (fans at 20%). I, too, will be looking to purchase some of the BF16s as well.
I'm waiting for a full bitcoin node to complete downloading/syncing the blockchain and then I will start my own P2Pool node where I will point my miners.
Welcome to the club of hobbyist miners. Supported by sidehack and others.
Cheers,
- Zed