What is this thing?
Topics:
1. DisclaimerBefore even starting to read this thread, read carefully the following statement:
VERY IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER
This is a non-profit project. That is a no profit for the user. With such a setup, you won't probably mine a single satoshi in your lifetime. This is NOT for economic profit. The total loss of monetary funds invested in this project is almost inevitable.
2. What is NerdMinerNerdMiner is a project that originated from Valerio Vaccaro's idea of HanSolo mining.
Valerio is the ideator of "Satoshi Spritz", a format for informal local meetups of bitcoiners that is now spread all over Italy in more than 20 instances.
During these meetups, typically held in Bitcoin-friendly pubs, Valerio presented some gadgetry: Bitcoin nodes, LN nodes, and LN ATMs, but a proper mining device was missing. So, he decided to close that gap and started coding. He used some commodity programmable board and assembled the very first instance of his portable mining device. As he is, of course, an übernerd, he dubbed his device HanSolo Miner.
That was essential software with an uncanny graphical interface and limited features.
Bitmaker discovered the project and, in the spirit of pure Open-Source Software, forked it, rebranded NerdMiner, and added a friendly graphical interface and a few more features.
NerdMiner can run on a variety of boards, but the most common one is the Lilygo S3:
The following is the full list of boards capable of running firmware 1.61.
- -- LILYGO T-Display S3
- -- ESP32-WROOM-32, ESP32-Devkit1..
- -- LILYGO T-QT
- -- LILYGO T-Display 1.14
- -- LILYGO T-Display S3 AMOLED
- -- LILYGO T-Dongle S3
- -- ESP32-2432S028R 2,8"
The latest release of the firmware added support to other boards, and many more are coming.
This board has a power consumption of less than 2W, meaning that you can power it for a whole year for way less than 5 EUR.
With the latest firmware, the total hash power of this device is 55Kh/s maximum (peak value, not sustained).
This means that the NerdMiner has an efficiency ratio of 36,360 J/GHs. An
S19 XP Hydro has an efficiency of 0.021J/GHs. The NerdMiner is 1,500,000 times less efficient than a S19 miner.
Once online, this is the Pool where the NerdMiners connect to:
https://web.public-pool.io/#/Many pools would reject NerdMiners or similar low hash power devices because of the too-low hash rate. Publicpool will accept even the smallest mining machine without any fees. Only miners above 50 TH/s will incur in a 1.5% mining pool.
Please note that the 4,500 NerdMiners have a hash power 10^-10 times of a single Antminer. This means that it would take 2,750,000,000 S3 NerdMiners to make a single S19. Imagine giving every person on planet Earth 1 NerdMiner: this would equal hash power to just three S19.
Remember that the Bitcoin network is currently powered by 2.5 million equivalent of those machines. This means that a single S19 is expected to mine a block a block every 46 years.
If 2,500,000 S19 are able to find a block every 10 minutes on average, a single S3 NerdMiner will take 125,570,776,256 years (basically 10 times the age of the universe) to find a block.
This should persuade you that you won't mine anything during your lifetime with this setup.
If you want to further deep-dive into this, I suggest you to read the following link:
Bitcoin – Are NerdMiner and BitAxe profitable?In addition to that, I worked on an Excel spreadsheet:
3. Why it is relevantWhy all this fuss if the prospected earning is null? Why lose money and time if the Pool won't mine a block in our entire lifetime?
Well, the reason is twofold:
Learning
Bitcoin mining is a capital-intensive, ultra-competitive industry. Many users wouldn't consider participating in this part of the Bitcoin protocol.
With NerdMiner, you can mine in production with a little initial and running cost. This will allow you to deal with the actual and fundamental dynamics of mining: running the hardware, managing the pools, interacting with mining protocols, etc. The learning curve is steep, but this device can allow you to practically learn something that would otherwise be extremely difficult.
In addition to that you will learn something about the basic mining operations, temperature management, compiling firmwares etc.
In this project Learning something new vastly overcomes the financial aspect of the whole project.
Bitcoin canary in the mine
Bitcoin is an open-source and distributed technology. As long as every user can run the network's primary function in an open-source, affordable manner, the assumptions of the Bitcoin technology will be maintained valid.
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| My personal DIY setup for basic Bitcoin Protocol Functions (credit card for reference)
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