Topic: [Announcement] Block Erupter USB (Read 251993 times)

If you want a 100GH USB miner but you don't want it to run at 10W, it's currently physics and the state of semiconductor technology preventing its manufacture. The best chip available right now could get you about 30GH from 2.5W USB power. I'm currently developing that stick. Take a look at the recent posts in my GekkoScience 16nm dev thread.

I don't know how much demand there is but I wonder if you could sell 10,000 100GH usb miners if there was such a thing?  Must be economics preventing the manufacture of this product.

My stuff isn't exactly "mass production" on the scale of Block Erupters and U1/U2, but my stick miners will run about as cold as you want them to. The 2Pac will get about 8GH at stock USB power if you set it to baseline voltage and 75MHz.

The reason there are no mass-produced stickminers at all right now is because the industry doesn't care about anyone except themselves and high-dollar commercial customers. That's why the only miners made in the last two years are >1KW 80db monstrosities requiring industrial power and exhaust. Why should they focus efforts into a $30 miner and get a thousand annoying customers to wrangle when they can make a $2k miner and sell a thousand to one guy?

I know you have done some usb miner projects, but why isn't there a mass produced usb miner with whatever whatever specs that can run less than 10-25w of power?  I would totally be mining right now if it wasn't for the heat and noise.  A small lottery ticket is better than none at all?

...huh? There were some BE200 stick projects in 2014, but as far as I know the BE300 never saw production. Engineering samples were tested and data released in December 2014 with efficiencies between 0.2 and about 0.35J/GH, making them almost equivalent to the BM1385 which appeared something like 8 months later.

My BM1384 Compac was originally a dev step toward making a pod. There was never intended to be a stickminer product, but the first step was to make sure we could talk to one ASIC. Enough people wanted a stickminer that I went ahead and finished designing it. I kept working on pod stuff on the side, but honestly I was limited by drivers. Novak's Compac driver was a rehash of U3 support in Icarus and we had no real idea how to support multiple chips natively. VH spent weeks reverse-engineering the signals coming out of an S5 controller to do it and now has a driver that works for an arbitrary number of BM1384, from 1 to a couple hundred. That's the real key that makes my job as the hardware designer not necessarily easy but a heck of a lot more possible.

It would have been nice to have worked with BE300 instead of BM1384 in 2015, if ASICMiner had not evaporated. Those looked to be some pretty solid chips, and with ASICMiner's open support of third-party dev with BE200 - compared to Bitmain's hostility toward everything and everyone that isn't Bitmain - everything would have been a lot easier.

Anyways, USB Block Erupters.

I remember the hype surrounding the sticks back in 2014 for those BE300 sticks, apparently they ran too hot even with a large heatsink so they were scrapped. Good thing you guys are working on even more sticks now, never knew that little project was the catalyst for these even more hyped projects!

That BE300 announcement in December 2014 was what got Novak and I seriously considering designing our own miner.

Wow, that was a throwback to the good old times in bitcoinland when ASIC development felt like a race.

If anyone is looking to sell Rev2.0 green board Erupters (I guess they called them Emerald Siries), PM. Would love one for personal collection.

I have a few Friedcat miners.  PM me if you want them.

Holy Resurrection Batman!

if you Really want one of these little miners (remember, these are 333MegaHash/s most miners are in the Peta, I ment, Terra Hashs, and the latest sticks are from sidehack at 10GH/s+ https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/general-sales-closed-gekkoscience-2pac-2x-bm1384-usb-stick-miner-1718358) you can keep an eye on ebay (one here at http://www.ebay.com/itm/132032003324 but i cannot vouch for this person, it was a quick search on ebay).

friedcat got fried, he will probably Never show up here again, last thing he was dabbling in was the BE300 chips, and then went bankrupt, a few people still want his tail..

You can't. They stopped making them about three years ago.

How can I buy it? and the price? please.

This is now fixed

Yep.  At BTC1.99 ($220 at the time) to purchase at introduction, their return in BTC didn't cause break-even, but if you sold the BTC you had earned from them at peak, it would have ROIed ~500%.  Not bad (holding on to the BTC1.99 would have even better, of course).  Your experience may have varied, especially after price drops

From: An Homage to The Block Erupter USB

I've switched my 30-odd block erupters to solo mining, and I'll probably take them offline in June or July. Though honestly, they're so cheap to run I may keep them going anyway, even knowing they cost more to run than they'll generate.

They've more than earned back their cost in dollar value (due to the monster rise in bitcoin price), though in BTC value I don't think they broke even. But the value I got from them, in learning about the mining process, pools, Linux, and all kinds of other random info is invaluable. Tiny they may be, but they made an impact on my BTC life.

I've a few of mine on ebay ... http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=321399833009

Shame the postage to the UK costs so much! I'd buy a load.

Their bulk discount thing has been broken since approximately forever.  I should send them a PM about that 

Someone want to explain to me why the unit price jumps to $30 when you put 20 or more in your cart?