Stuff to know before starting mining

With the new all time high Bitcoin price, there's bound to be lots of people asking for mining advice.

First, you need ASIC mining machines to mine Bitcoin.

You can't mine it directly with a GPU. There's services that let you mine alt coins and convert that to BTC, but this advice below is if you want to mine Bitcoin directly.

On average, the two best in class miners as of this post are the Canaan Avalon 741 and the Bitmain S9.

Second, mining requires lots of consideration.

The 741 costs $800(US) and produces 7 TH/s at 1200 watts (~29 kWh of power.) The S9 costs $1500(US) and produces 14 th/s at 1500 watts (~36 kWh of power.)

Both will require PCIe cables and power supplies, which are an addition $100-$150 or so.

Neither will be in stock for the rest of the year, so if you want them NOW, you'll have to pay a larger mark up on eBay or to a person selling them.

Those watts translate almost 100% into heat, so the more miners you have, the more heat you'll have to deal with (either exhausting/venting it, or using active cooling like AC)

Each miner is a little bit bigger than a shoe box, so you'll need racks to store them - and they're pretty loud, putting out about the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

Many people use a separate space to store them - whether its their garage, a shed they've built/modified, or a warehouse.

The S9 can be unreliable, and while under warranty, your only option is to ship it back to China for them to repair it, which takes weeks at least, months at most.

The Avalon is a little more reliable, but less overall hash rate.

Finally, the difficulty increases every 2016 blocks, or roughly two weeks. This means your miners get less effective all the time. Eventually, new miners come out to replace them, so you're hoping you've made enough coin to pay for those so you can keep up.

Submitted November 02, 2017 at 09:49PM by deadwavelength http://bit.ly/2z8CoTy