You need to be aware that mining depends a great deal on "luck" and "difficulty". I mine with a full unit and one standard and track my results on a daily/weekly basis. My "best ever" week was March 30 - April 5 when the two units "mined" 0.00020829 BTC. The average with 2 units has been 0.00017008 BTC per week. At the current USD price of BTC that's about $5.00.

Obviously your "profitability" will depend on your cost of electricity (200 watts per unit) and how you choose to account it. I suggest that you treat these miners as variable rate foreign currency bonds with a *very long* duration. The simplistic "ROI" you see everywhere is really only relevant at the commercial level of mining.

Good Luck!

This thread is 9+ years old when BTC was MUCH easier - see the comment above: BTC was around $100 or less then.

Things are very different now.

As an example, I have a dual FutureBit system running (one full node and one standard) which averages a bit more than 6 gHash or (about) 6,000 mHash. That rig generates about 0.00017 BTC per week or about $5.00 USD. At current BTC prices that's a few cents more than the electricity it costs to run. A single FutureBit full node costs $899 for 3 gHash or about $0.30/ mHash. At this level it's basically a hobby with the hope that "stacking sats" will pay off sometime in the indefinite future.

Bottom line: DIY FPGA mining at that level is a lot of work for zero return.

All that said... if you enjoy DIY electronics (I build Eurorack synth modules "for fun", LOL) and are reasonably competent/confident with modern software development tools, building a small miner could be an interesting project. There are a number of reasonably recent videos on YouTube documenting such projects and you can find PCB layouts, software, etc. on github.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AocgfvTIs&t=290s

Good Luck!

The power outage may be the issue here. These miners want to be shut down properly so it may be that you'll need to re-flash the SD card. There are instructions and links to image files back at the beginning of this topic.

Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrency) is based in cryptography. There are tons of articles available online that explain things fairly simply, e.g. this one on Investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/tech/explaining-crypto-cryptocurrency/

Obviously you don't have to understand it to mine successfully, but it is something more or less useful to know and gaining some mastery of the field could lead to opportunities in the software side of the industry.

First, know you will never "get rich" using household/hobby mining hardware.

What you will do is acquire a hobby that has the potential to motivate you to learn a *LOT* of mathematics, much about the how the internet works, software development, and most of all patience (possibly the most important skill for any investor). At some point you'll even learn a bit of electronics, at the very least the relationship between volts, amps, and watts (and what the latter cost).

Meanwhile, think of investing as developing strength (or losing weight). You don't test everyday; you develop a plan and stick to it. Then at intervals you test (your plan) and make any changes you need.

Good luck!

Exactly - you'll see it run up to 31 or 32 once you're synced.

I think some more information is needed here.

First, just to verify:
1) you have 2 "full" units and "several" standard units
2) the 2 "full" units have dowloaded the blockchain and are running as nodes
3) None of the units, full or standard are mining
4) You're using the supplied PSUs or have one or more PSUs supplying at least 250 watts per unit (80% rule)

If all that is correct, then the first thing I'd try is to simplify everything:
1) shut everything down using the web interface, then disconnect everything
2) select one of the full units and connect it to internet and power
3) Turn on the selected full unit
4) Describe the selected unit's behavior as it powers on including the "main" LED and the colored ones inside the unit. There's a description of what should happen way back at the top of this thread.

I'm running a Batch 3 Full and 1 standard for about 6 weeks now and haven't noticed any drop off. So a couple questions just to get some focus:

1) Is the reported hashrate from the Apollo web dashboard or your pool?
2) Are all 44 ASICS running on all 3 hashboards?
3) How do your hash board temps look? Mine have been right around 65°C since day 1 in Turbo mode.

The "designed" hashrate is an average and can vary by around 5% so dips down to 5.7ish Th/s on the dashboard should be expected.

Someone here will certainly have more information for you than I do.

If by "ROI" you mean "pay for itself" the answer is unknowable without knowing one's cost of electricity AND the price of Bitcoin at some future date. You should know your price of electricity so you can easily compute your monthly cost of operations, then project BTC however you care to.

As far as the machines themselves I have 2 Batch 3 machines mining Slushpool. They generate about 0.00021 Bitcoin a week, or 0.01092 annually. At today's price that's about $467.50 per year. If you buy ARK Investment's call of $1,000,000 by 2030 you're looking at about $87000 over that period. That doesn't take into account the expected 2024 "halving", BTW.

After all that, as an investor first, I look at these home or hobby miners as foreign currency bonds. So the $1400 I have in my two machines (a full and a standard) yield about 33% annually in USD.

In the United States, any assets "that represent the proceeds of, or were used to facilitate federal crimes" are subject to seizure. If you;re looking at "years", chances are good local, state, and federal enforcement will be going after assets at the very least for victim compensation.

Otherwise, as the saying (slightly updated) goes, "keep your friends close and your keys closer".

It's 80% for reasons of long (way before crypto was a glint in Satoshi's eye) painful experience. There are tons of examples of "not quite enough" PSUs (especially see the older Goldshell Doge Mini burnt connector issues) being bad news.

LeftLane10Under replied to your earlier PSU post and provided a bit of clarity on temps and hash rate about 4 posts above.

Specifically:

If you follow the 80% "rule" there's no leeway. There are some discussions above regarding more powerful PSUs but keep in mind potential thermal issues.

The miner and the pool rates will never exactly match. The miner hashrate changes constantly as does latency between miner and pool, the rate of the pool's UI updates, and so forth.

If you have a "Batch 3" unit, the 1TB SSD is currently less than half full, so it's good for a quite some time.

If you have an older unit with the (now) nearly full 500GB SSD, just buy a 1TB NVMe SSD, shut down and power off, replace the 500GB SSD (it's obvious when you turn the unit over), and fire it all up again. It will take a couple days to sync again of course.

There is no way to to realistically estimate this. Everything depends on how "lucky" the pool gets. In Turbo mode on Slush Pool I'm seeing about 0.00000170 (plus or  minus a couple) BTC per block found. Figure about 1/3 less for your setting. Today so far Slush Pool has found 5 blocks, a few days ago it found 13 in one day. My last daily reward was 0.00001433 BTC.

Profit margin will, of course, depend on your cost of electricity and to a lesser extent internet bandwidth.

And... you don't really need 2 full packages. One "Full Package" can run 2 (maybe more?) "standard" units.

Good Luck!