Much as I'm not a Pool Hopper ( I'm a bet-spreader, not a luck chaser ) I can now no longer make a profit mining BTC.

I bought at £1 / GH, and mined at 1w / GH, but this price crash ( £380 is now only £230 ) has got me.  I'm having to switch off.

A 40% price drop is a killer.  Even with kit only 2 months old.  I mine at break even now.  And all that running around for zero cash seems pointless when there are bills to pay and other sources of revenue I can chase.

Very disappointing I have to say.  Let's hope enough other miners survive.



Thanks for the good service Doc!  I know that my wording is not ideal, but averaging over a months is how this pool does best

I'm confident that Silk Road was part of that. BTC prices have dropped 40% of late, so people have less room to gamble now.

Your meter should give you kwh.

This is kw * hours.  So 100w over 24 hrs is (24 * 100 )/1000 = 2.4 units per day = 2.4 kwh per day.

After that you then apply a Tariff based on who your provider is.  And VAT if you're in The UK.  And that's the Electrical Cost for adding your Miner.

For example:

Antminer s3 at 370w is ( 370w * 24 )/1000 = 8.88 units per day.

As long as you make enough BTC to pay off your energy bill you tick over.  Profit is when there is cash left at the end of the month after electricity.  Really you want profit if you use bigger miners, but that's quite hard with the current BTC slump.


If your Electricity Provider is not the cheapest one you can get then shift to a cheaper one.  You won't be able to wing it, as mining uses A LOT of juice.



There are 2 ways to see what your miner drains at the wall per day.  One is to work out how many units your place uses normally per day before you switch it on.  The other is to use a plug-in watt-meter.

The best quality watt meter you will have in the house is most likely the Electricity Meter that came with house.  So I prefer to count units, and use my watt meter as a more general indicator.

Yeah. The low BTC price at present is proving a problem.  I seem to be seeing a lot of small miners struggling.  Only the Icelandic Crowd are gonna ride this one through if this lasts too long ( as they get cheap electricity ).  I'm still in the game, but it is not proving easy with such a low BTC price.  I paid £1/GH, I run at 1w/GH on both rigs, and I have one of the lowest Electricity prices you can get without having Solar Panels.  And this month I will break even if this first week is anything to go by.   Silk Road did not help at all.

All a bit pants really :/


Maybe see you on the flip-side dude. At least it's been an adventure

Yup.  As people switch off their S1's many pools have shrunk a little.  And that will effect performance.

I just hope they broke even.  With BTC prices so low at present being a Miner is not easy.

UK Banks will not fund anything that is classed as Financial, as they want to protect their Monopoly.

So you'd need someone with a lot of cash to cover the hardware.

And mega-cheap electricity to do it.  Like the Icelandic Datacentres for example ( Geothermal-central ).  Or someone with access to a ton of Solar or Wind power.

I've added a couple of pikatures of the arse-end of the PSU ( Dell Power-edge 750w ) to show you what you need to do.  There is soldering involved.

http://gothfiles.org.uk/images/ServerSelfie1.JPG

http://gothfiles.org.uk/images/ServerSelfie2.JPG


With those cables in place all 3 rails can be tapped for 20a each at 12v.  The cables are 1.5mm twin & earth cores ( UK ).

The grey cable links the 3 pins that are needed to trick the PSU into turning on.  This was made out of a ribbon cable for a floppy drive.  Hacksaw off bits of connector to make a block of 3x2 and a block of 2x2.  Remove all the metal bits ( teeth ) bar the ones needed to access the 3 pins.  Push the blocks you've made onto the pins.  They'll fit snugly.  3x2 at the left in this case ( with 2 teeth left as there are 2 pins to access ), and 2x2 on the right ( with one tooth left for that one pin ).

Then link them ( the 3 teeth you've kept ) with a bit of ribbon cable, by pushing the cable between the teeth ( which breaks the insulation and makes the connection to the cable ).

You should only have 3 teeth total across the 2 blocks if you've done it right.  Plug in a kettle lead and she'll fire up.

Continuing the Pencil-modding an S1 thread we have...

Playing with Server PSU's!


Pencil-modding thread is here:

http://necellularsites.net/go-Cj9hgoUnpTc/undervolt-bitmaintech-antminer-s1-pencil-mod-technique-bitcoin-mining.html

By pencil-modding you change the power factor from 0.42 GH/w to about 0.5 GH/w.  But...

If you use a server PSU as well it takes the s1 to about 0.55-0.6 GH/w.  Which is handy stuff.  And if you want it even better marry it up with an s3 ( non-overclocked ).

I've got this rig now running.  I have a pencil-modded s1 and a non-overclocked s3 running on a 750w server PSU ( not crappy ATX's/Desktop supplies ).  It's a Dell Poweredge 750w.

- I get 370w for 440GH on the s3 ( used to be 440w running 2 ATX's to power it ).  That's 1.18 GH /w.

- I get 205w for 110GH on the s1.  That's 0.54 GH/w.

Average it across the 2 units ( using 110GH slices of hash ) and you have:

4 slices of 1.18 GH/w
1 slice of 0.54 GH/w

Do the math.  If you combine it you get 550GH at 575w.  Which is 0.96 GH/w.  Which is the same factor as my Coincraft Desk at Turbo M mode ( overclocked ).

So that's another 3 months out of your s1 you can squeeze before you have to switch it off?  It'll be something like that.

Handy eh?


Server PSU's require soldering to fit cables you can then connection block to, and you need to trick it into thinking it's on.  This site does the tricking bit:

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1292514


I use uk 1.5mm flat cable, as it's rated at 20A when exposed to air.  The Dell unit I have has 3 rails doing 20a each.  So 2 rails go to the s3 ( one per side ), and 1 rail covers the s1 ( 1 going to both sides ).

Et voila.  A bit more hash out of your unit.

And if you turn down your s3 to 175 freq you can get the power factor up to 1.55 GH/w for the s3 whilst still pumping out 340 GH from it.  It's a pretty flexible rig.  Which is handy with BTC price low at present.



Enjoy

The hardware error for an s1 or s3 is calculated thusly:

( HW/ ( HW + DiffA + DiffR ) ) * 100.

So if your HW says zero you've had no f-ups

Yup, just ordered one. Cheers dude!

Erm, I was googling and not getting very far. I think we're on crossed wires here. I'm not disagreeing with you; I'm learning from you.

Thank you for the info

Nope, I'm the victim of a bad website it would appear.

So the Poweredge 1950 HY104 can pump out that much juice? Blimey.

Where do you get the specs from?

Both of those do not have enough juice to run an s3. The s3 needs just over 30A on the 12v to do 370w at the wall, and I'd rather the supply do 40A so I have room to move.

What server PSU's do you use to power one s3? And what does it drain at the wall?

Actually, the graph is getting back to something sane now. I might send the good Doctor some more hash on Monday.

Most likely I'm not using anywhere near as nice a power supply as you.

Multipool Mining:

I got this from Bitmain.


--Balance: In balanced mode, the amount of diff1 solutions per pool is monitored as a rolling average per 10 minutes and if pools start getting more, it biases away from them to distribute work evenly. The share count is reset to the rolling average every 10 minutes to not send all work to one pool after it has been disabled/out for an extended period.

--Load Balance: Change multipool strategy from failover to even load balance.

--Failover only: Don't leak work to backup pools when primary pool is lagging.


When I use Load Balance I have 3 pool slots used.  2 are the same pool, and one is for a different pool.

I get about 80-gig on the single-slot pool, and the rest ( 360 gig ) on the double-slot pool.

I have it set to:

Load Balance, with...

Slot 1 - EclipseMC
Slot 2 - Eligius
Slot 3 - EclipseMC

Eclipse gets the 360 gig.


It does not like pools that update their hashrates quickly.  So you have to ignore the 5s and 15min figure.  It's the 1 hour figure you have to look at.

And it hates GHash when mining 2 pools ( or more ) at once.  It really messes up the stats.   Loads of low difficulty stuff, and it tricks GHash into thinking it's mining at 1TH or more.  A real mess.


Apart from that it's fine.



Clock-wise I use 2 cheap-ass supplies in a case mod ( because of the 12v rail issues ).  Each supply can put 26A minimum down the 12v.  I use 440w at the wall ( as they are cheap, so easy to replace if they blow; and there are 2 of them ) to get 440 GH/s.

If I dial back the clock to 200m I get 1.05 GH/w at an average of 400 GH/s.

If I dial the clock back to 175m I get 1.17 GH/w at an average of 340 GH/s.


Which is the same as if I dial down my Bitmine.ch Coincraft Desk.  Certainly interesting stuff, and it means that as difficulty rises you can adjust the power factor and squeeze a few more months out of your miners before you need to upgrade.

Power to hash ratio is adjustable, and that is certainly good news in this climate ( what the hell happened to BTC price of late?  Is this the Silk Road sale knock-on effect happening? )

You're over-analysing things.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with checking things over; but you need to relax a bit.


Bitcoin mining happens in phases.  Each phase so far has been around 6 months ( ish, near enough ).  During each 6 month phase difficulty continues to go up.  So, slowly but surely, your mining kit gets less effective.  An S3 will probably last about 7-8 months due to how well it's designed.  The old S1 is now winking out after 8 months-ish.

It's just how it is.

So planning for the next fortnight ( or it's Doomsday ) is not the way to do it.  You average over a month.  And ideally you buy hardware that will pay for itself over the next 4-5 months and has a power-profile over 1.05 GH / w ( based on today's tech ).   The S3 is a good example here.


However, it's undeniable that Bitminter is having a bad month ( it's been 3 weeks as the bottom performer of my 4 mined pools so far ).  But then Bitminter had 3 months of pretty ok luck before ( we were regularly ahead of the curve ), so having a correction is quite natural.

There's no need to abandon Minter.  Just leave less hash here until this Storm passes.  If you leave some your account will remain open, and that means you'll get instant returns on your work when it's safe to move some hash back.


And, being honest, if you can't handle the peaks and troughs of Bitminter then permanently leave some of your hash on a much larger pool ( so that you get regular payments ).  That will smooth the ride for you.

I only have 1/6th of my business hash here at present ( it was 2/5 before ).  Due to this past month being rotten.  But then that's life.  If I ditch Minter entirely I'll have to spend a few days warming my account back up etc etc ( based on Doc's statements about how Mining Pools have some defence against luck-chasers ).

I predicted a 2 week bad-patch a few weeks back, due to how well we were doing.  I was one week out on when it would hit, but so far my hunch has held true.

IT'S JUST A HUNCH, THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES, BUT EVEN SO.  As a miner you always get final say on where you put your hash.  You make the call.

As such I'll make another prediction.  Another hunch:

- I'm guessing that by the end of this week we'll be back on an even keel, and performing at an average rate ( not the regular good luck we had in the past, but certainly ok mining ).


Obviously I might be wrong, but Doc's graph shows the peaks and troughs I always mention ( including how long they last ), and this trough can't last forever ( due to the Law of Averages ).


Bitminter won't be in a bad way forever, and don't panic about difficulty.  If you've bought decent kit at a reasonable price ( like S3's and Coincraft A1 units ) you'll be fine


As a poker player you'll get this:  I'm only a grand in.  It pays for a few IT repairs for me at present, which is handy.  So there is some profit.  But if Bitcoin ( the product ) dies tomorrow then I only owe the Bank a grand.  Which I can cover with my normal earnings.

And when Minter is playing a bit nicer I'll shift some more hash back here.  Once I believe the storm has passed.

I leave my personal mining here anyway ( as I have done so for the past 6 months ), so I know the Law of Averages will cover that one.  But business is business, and I have to consider my return before I take the plunge etc.

This week's takings are in, and they're good enough.

Out of my 1.2 TH only 210 GH has been with Bitminter for obvious reasons ( The bills! The bills! They haunt me! *swings from a rope whilst being all bent over* ).

The other 0.99 TH was 'elsewhere'.  3 other pools.


Yeah, takings were good enough.  So bet-spreading is seeing me through this without having to abandon Bitminter.


I don't have to cash in for another couple of weeks, so hopefully the Bitcoin price will have improved by then.  Life eh?

I haven't had to dial my miners back to better power profiles yet.


Hang in there people.  Think the Falcon vs a Star Destroyer.  We can't out-hash a big hasher, but we can out-think it

Heh! I have a single U1 set up for solo-mining as the odds are so bad. I call it my Lottery Ticket

No idea, but someone snapped up the Silk Road BTC a month back, so that might be it.