Topic: Next consumer model miner - page 2. (Read 8926 times)

The way I'd see such a business model work - somewhat - is if the miner is indeed a small miner (low hash rate, but also low heat, probably passively cooled and potentially using the excess heat for work), but playing the lottery.  The miner itself can be a minor cost (doesn't need to be the latest design, doesn't even need to be custom designed - buy an existing declared-obsolete one) relative to the appliance.  The electricity cost is entirely for the user.  Any found blocks, you get to keep the reward and you may or may not decide to split that with the user.  Even at slim chances, this could theoretically be profitable.
Even if the mining itself ends up being useless, you could still try to monetize it by requiring users to connect to a specific pool - this alone gives you things like IP data. Add an appliance ID and a unique ID and now you've got things to sell to marketing groups.. "User X has appliances A, B and D and research shows they might be interested in G".  But all of that has very little to do with putting mining in the hands of users as a direct cause; any IoT (ew.) company can do that, so the mining bit would only be the schtick to try and lure people into buying your device, and not a competitor's.

Crazier things have happened, but it still seems highly unlikely to be a model pursued anytime soon (if anything, this would have worked better in the past).

Whenever I hear about toasters, microwaves or fridges mining bitcoin I assume its an April fools joke because I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.

We all know how difficult it is to mine now even with dedicated latest generation hardware consuming lots of electricity and generating lots of heat.

So how anyone thinks a toaster or fridge will do the same is beyond me, the only scenario I can think of is that it's got a small miner built in which at best might make you dust everyday in which case it's pretty much useless.

Just to get this out of the way... this isn't really a "The Financial Times" article.  It's a blog entry - from Alphaville - at FT.com .  You should view it as several ranks down from an op ed piece.

There's several threads on the 21 Inc. as interpreted by Alphaville thing already, so I'll leave discussion there

Do you the FT guys has any concept of what a "reasonable" mining rig looks like these days?

Is my toaster oven now going to be "on" a lot of the time when I am NOT making toast (i.e. about 23.9 hrs/day)?

I generally think of Financial Times as being pretty good, but the general concept makes almost no sense. While this "mining for free" stuff sounds great the reality will almost certainly fall massively short of anything useful for anybody except possibly the ASIC toaster manufacturer selling $300 toaster ovens.

Anything which tries to hide it's electrical consumption is likely to be an utter failure. It's almost an impossibility that the electric company in any US locale will try and promote any such thing. If anything they want to reduce electrical consumption, particularly during peak times, to avoid having to make the needed infrastructure investment in terms of plants and distribution. I can almost buy into Phillip's idea of an "ASIC portable heater", but beyond that there really isn't anything that makes sense. Look at all the promotions for switching lighting to CFL's or LED bulbs. That's intended to REDUCE consumption, not increase it. Here in MN most companies have one form or another of "load shedding" which allows them to turn things off remotely during peak power demand times. For that you get some kind of credit or reduced rate for the specific kind of load they can shed (e.g. Air Conditioning on the hottest days, Irrigation on farms).

That 'free' needs an asterisk; part of FT's conjecture is that they'd be keeping a good chunk of the mining proceeds (whether that's pooled or solo, unspecified), while of course you would still be stuck with the electrical bill (the height of which is also unspecified.. as is the hash rate.. or just about anything else. That 'If' is a big one. )

The next consumer model miner is still most likely to come from one of: SFARDS, GekkoScience, Avalon, Bitmain (more or less in that order depending on exact timelines).

If FT.com's finding are anywhere near correct, then the next consumer model miner could be in a toaster oven and possibly even free:

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/04/30/2127543/meet-the-company-that-wants-to-put-a-bitcoin-miner-in-your-toaster/

Need hard confirmation from an official source before passing this as anything beside rumor, but then again 21 inc did partner with Qualcomm and got $116 million worth of venture funding, so maybe there's some truth to this.

Mining in everyday appliances...sign me up!

how will if the above stuff dies effect the use of miners for transaction fees and/or just verifying transactions if the network eventually goes 'poof' in size more or less network size wise?


how small a network of mining do you need to 'float the network' boat so to speak?

If industrial mining with mega cheap electricity will soon be finished, then the only mning left will be people with free electricity? Which knocks out even the manufacturers themselves and their self/cloud programs?

Though to be fair, if the only mining remaining is manufacturer solo mining (with some cloud allocations) the overall economy will probably start tanking fast which might take the wind out of any mining at all.

I don't think there will be an efficient consumer affordable accessible miner available in the near future.

I think all the big hardware manufacturers will start making products only for cloud mining or solo mining of their own farms.

Home mining is finished, commercial mining with cheap electricity will soon be finished, industrial mining with mega cheap electricity will soon be finished.

Hang on or buy more bitcoin if you haven't got any already.

I'll be back to refer to this post in a few years to prove myself right.

Buy now or be sorry.

EDIT: Sounds sad from a hero member, just trying to point the non believers in the right direction .

Think of something like the Raspi of miners.

People can utilize it for any number of educational or developmental purposes.

I imagine a small, quiet, low powered miner that could operate on DC with a battery pack and solar array. Hobby powered miners.


Pools are on the decline. I doubt that many will survive longer term. They might hang around for 12 months tops my guess if they are populated with die hard miners with only a few TH/s at home. The death of small scaled mining has started and the weaker pools are the next to fall.

this is a good question.

A 30 amp 240 volt circuit  = 7200 watts de-rate to  5760 watts . Why not have the  units at this size 5500 watts  and  16th 6u high.

I could do this and I know many home miners can step up to this. 

 But as sidehack said  this would knock  a lot of miners out.

F2pool has around 9000 miners actively mining.
Btc guild has more then 4000 miners actively mining.
Bit minter has many active miners. over 1000.

Lots of them are under 1th why shut them out?
I think we need thousands of little miners. Far more important to the system then 4 or 5 giants.

What I'm interested to see is why exactly those machines don't scale down, or are modular. What is the functional unit that is 16KW and 12U exactly? What becomes more expensive when you try and make it 8KW and 6U? Sure would be easier to move. Even Bitfury went with ~4U and 2-3KW in the previous gen.

I think 220/240 is spreading slowly.  Which is giving a nice opportunity for home miners.   It allows for much more power and bigger machines.

Yes there are those on 110/120 that will always be there.  Some will never upgrade and put in the higher voltage.   I think home miner's at this point are still mostly 110/120, but I do think it will keep changing.

Right, but that's you. How many people for whom the "home miner" label is appropriate know anything past 120V 15A wall sockets? This thread has already debated what "home miner" basically means, and a 9KW box is pretty universally not included.

I could run an 8 kwatt unit  but just 1. 

It would need to be able to go as low as 4kwatt and say 12th-14th

It would need to max at  9kwatt  and say 20th.

I can handle up to 9kwatts 7 months of the year.

Except 12U 16KW machines.

I agree, but 'home' does quickly become 'the garage' and 'this mostly empty storage space at work' - at which point almost any gear can be considered home gear.

I'd be interested to see what Avalon comes up with as far as new chips. If the efficiency and price don't suck, we'll have to look pretty seriously into working with them. SFARDS really seem proactive (so far) on assisting independent development, which is great, except high-current BGA and dual-algo are both things I wish to avoid. More so the package, really.

Yeah, small miners below several hundred GH/s would be useful mostly as learning tools to get noobs in and understanding what the whole system is about, and how much fun it is to tinker with stuff. Not a lot of intrinsic profitability, but nonintrinsics abound when you consider how much knowledge can be gleaned from a sub-$100 hardware purchase when the hardware is designed to be flexible.

The new chips are the key for either.  Without new chips it wont get much traction on sales.   

I think the market for 100 GHs or smaller is getting smaller and smaller.  With btc hash rates and pay, I think these models are better for learning.    But as far as setting up much mining at homes in most cases bigger hash rate miners make sense.  That is my opinion though.

Avalon is or was planning a 100Gh/s model, which should be a small miner.  SFARDS is also willing to work with integrators for smaller miners.  Both would be based on new chips, though, so have to await availability.  SFARDS's chip should be out Soon™