Topic: Regarding Steamtyme's list of competitive hardware - page 2. (Read 457 times)

Home mining has effectively been dead for years.
Home power costs WAY more than the large miners and datacentres get and it has been that way for a very long time.

The point of the request was to make it clear which miners are available to use at home for the average person and give a push to the manufacturers to actually produce home miners rather than finalise the push of Bitcoin in the direction of only having centralised companies mining ... the way the mods here seem to want it to go.

FYI, check your January 2020  electric bill. Mine just went from 10c kWh winter rates to 12c kWh winter rates. Last summer my rates were 17.6c kWh. Sh*t. This would have hurt like hell even when I was home mining a year or so, back in the day. So equipment may not be the issue anymore with home mining.

Well, you are lucky if you get 10 cent power here in Serbia...

It's usually around 12 cents for homes and I use commercial power which is around 6 cents before additional costs.
So yeah... Home mining is gonna die faster here than in states...

Here in the states most home miners don't have cheap power.

A s17 pro  at 53 th pulling 2250 watts.  uses 54 kwatts a day at 10 cents that is 5.40 in power cost.

It earns 7.66  the net = $2.26

Very marginal but doable if you need it to heat home 4 or 5 months a year.

We could say home mining is dead in usa.

Or not.  But with out much other choice for a home miner With 10 cent power a risky move at best I would say yeah it is dead.

I think that home mining has been dead for almost a year or even more. S9's have been the last of so called "smaller miners". I remember when I was making space for my "farm" to grow and I had to take separate fuse box and make ventilation holes in wall for all my miners, but it was just a hobby then. And I ran around 10 miners there without any issues. Now I am having trouble running more than 4 S17e/S17+ in that same place due to heat, power usage and overall amount of cables. And soon I will have to request another fuse box and search for a whole new storage hall so I can accommodate new units.

From home mining it turned to "big fishes" only really fast... And it is just going to get worse as years go by. I wouldn't be surprised if next miner had to use 3 cables instead of 2 like they do now.
Also, as far as I remember Bitmain used to have equipment for handful of different coins. Remember DR(D)/Z/E(G)/X/A/B/L models? They were all a bit cheaper than V/T/S models as far as I remember, and they could have easily been home miners. And what happened to them? They stopped producing them... For unknown reasons (but probably due to regulation or profit margin).

Home mining was much easier in past. Now it is harder and harder to find buyers even here in Serbia for such a big models (even tho they are more profitable than other smaller miners). And as time flies, all smaller miners will sell their equipment and farms are going to get bigger and bigger. Decentralization of Hash power is become more and more centralized day by day. And you can quote me on that.

im out of btc miners entirely for that reason: anything that might be profitable is not usable in my house. too loud (not that big a deal to a point), too power hungry - needs to be configurable to some figure, say, 500 watts or so. this figure would allow spacing rigs out in ones home too, both to spread waste heat out to manageable levels (no need for industrial fans and large scale heat management when 500 watts per room is all that needs to be dissipated) and no need for dedicated 120/240v line for every miner.

hey i loved mining on gpu/early FPGA/early ASICs. donated to both -ck and kano for their work on cgminer. but now? i mine shitcoins with gpu/FPGA to exchange for btc. which does nothing to secure the network

yes, i realize that btc mining now is vastly different and its for the "big boys" now. fine. but to run even  ONE decent btc miner at home now? probably have to run another dedicated electric line and build some sort of special space with soundproofing and ventilation/ducting.

lower noise, lower power units that can be spread around the home.. is it that hard to do? genuine question. i would love to have a home friendly btc miner back in the home. mining shitcoins just seems... dirty heh.

Yeah the only really good new home miner is the s17 pro set to low speed.

It is quiet
burns under 1400 watts set to low.

I have the bigger spot with a lot of 3000 watt units they scare me. 
We use every thing correctly  proper wires proper cooling proper air filters still make me nervous.

Modded s9's set low are good to heat a home.

But you would think a s17 variation burning 1000 watts or so  would be desirable.

It would be great if the industry was similar to the GPU industry, where the chip manufacturers may come out with a reference design but leave most of the mass production and end-user support to other companies.

The other factor I think coming into play is support.
Do you think Bitmain wants to support 5000 users who bought 1 or 2 or 3 miners each. Or one big player that bought 15000?
Customer service and support is not cheap.
Then add on the fact that now you are dealing with home users who may or may not have as good power as a big industrial data center so now you have to deal with more repair issues.

The R4 was great, the a741 was great as was the a821. But sadly I think those days are gone.

What I would like to see is them partnering with someone like sidhack who they sell all their last generation chips to who produces a slower but quiet miner.

That or towards the end of the run start making the same miner with fewer boards (like many of us are doing with the S9) that can run cooler.
Sell them cheap to move stock of the old boards and chips with a 14 or 30 day DOA warranty and be done. You can get away with that with an old gen product for $249 you can't do that with a current gen for $2999 because, nobody is going to buy something that expensive that they plan to run for 18+ months with no support. For $249 a lot of people will roll the dice.

Just my view.

-Dave

Yeah I have one of the R606s (and 4 NewPacs) but they are just toys that already run at a loss.

But I mean all the new models coming out, that will make many of the current or older miners obsolete or close to it in the not too distance future.

I've even asked Canaan about it directly, and they've said they wont be making smaller miners since they see no market for it.

i.e. there needs to be some community response to tell the manufacturers to make home miners, and this thread probably would help with that.

With the specs of these new miners, making one half the power, thus requiring much less cooling, would even make them usable at home due to much lower noise - which also leads back to using them as home heaters like I've been doing for many years and told quite a few about how to setup the old A741 years ago for that and since then there's been threads about that also.

Using them as heaters is a very smart use, but secondary to the issue of actually getting new miners you can easily use at home.

So any current say "product' that you get now from Bitmain or from whomever (besides maybe the Sidehack 1TB miner) you'd get when? Say 2nd week in February? At the very prompt best? (assuming, as usual, the Chinese new year does not mess up shipping for any China ASIC's as was done in the past)

Anyway, you are still faced with:

(1) 5nm miners coming out at the end of Q1 supposedly. Call such as April 1st, 2020. Again a very optimistic date.

(2) Then about say at best, 6 weeks later, the BTC Halving happens currently May 12th, 2020. https://www.bitcoinblockhalf.com/

I mean to get any more signs for not mining, you'd maybe need a mountain top with stone tablets made. Just saying, this does not look like anything that will change for the better and I'm not talking Home miners, IMHO, they are mostly out, I'm talking it looks beyond 'ugly' for the big miners that have to 'buy' equipment. Interesting Times. Though I must say, it is rather tranquil just selling crap on eBay and then buying dust BTC for HODL mode. Calm, compared to getting a miner these days.

Anyway, my take, others may have better angles or electric or whatever, we are all 'limited' by above and circumstances.

The s17 pro is pretty good for a home miner.

The a1046 is pretty good for a home miner.

but that is about it.

sidehack has a 1tb miner which can be some fun for people.

I would suggest you add info about decentralisation of the miners ...

You see, lately ALL the miner manufacturers have been making models that preclude home mining.

Requiring 3kW or more connections on a single miner, is, in general, not what most people would have available at home.

Thus they are forcing out home miners and thus CLEARLY going against the decentralisation of Bitcoin.