With a heavy heart, after 2 years and 4 months of exclusive mining with Bitminter, I shut down my Jupiter today. It had barely been breaking even (or probably losing money) for some time now and I needed the space back, plus, with the weather warming up I really didn't want the heat in the house anymore and my shed is full of other things. I sold it cheap on Craigslist and hoped to recommend the new owner use Bitminter, but when he picked it up he only wanted the power supplies and actually left the Jupiter with me. It now sits, lonely and cold, in it's original shipping box.
I started mining in December 2013. The difficulty was 707 Million and my 675 GH/s was making almost half a bitcoin a day! With the price bouncing around $1000 US, every minute of downtime would have been expensive. Bitminter was, and always has been, solid. Back then we were finding 10+ blocks a day. Four months in, I found my one and only block: 290714. It was a green block with 20.5% CDF, 2h33min. The feeling when I checked the Blocks list and saw my name was amazing.
Newer firmware, which I didn't want to install because it would mean downtime, bumped me up to about 720 GH/s. A major power outage last fall knocked out one of my 4 modules, reducing me to 560 Gh/s, but it didn't really matter anymore. Today, at the current difficulty of 166 billion (an increase of more than a factor of 200 since I started) my Jupiter was making about 0.05 bitcoin a month, and dropping all the time.
Mining has been good to me and I have no regrets. As great as it was to be "in" when ASICs were first appearing, it seems to me that it marked the beginning of the end of the hobbyist miner as it meant data centers of miners became practical, well, that and the huge increase in the value of bitcoin meant it was worth doing. I fear for bitcoin as the mining becomes more centralized and more geographically localized: it's losing the distributed nature that is central to it's security.
My intention for writing this is not to bring anyone down, I just wanted to share my melancholy with people who would understand.
Best of luck to you all, and a special thanks to the Dr.
What are you doing with that miner man i got frrr electric. You want to sell it? If so what you want for it. I got psu man.