Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

BitChimney Space Heater Based on a Single Board S19 and Working on 120V

3, Oct 2023

With the colder weather incoming we are getting back on the topic of using crypto miners to heat our homes and take advantage of the excess heat that these devices produce while mining your favourite cryptocurrency. The Antminer S9 and or L3-based ASIC Space Heaters are still nice and all, especially if you already own some of those ASIC devices or want to get one pretty cheap, but things are moving further and we are starting to see designs based on newer ASIC hardware such as the BitChimney Space Heater that is based on a single Antminer S19 hashboard and capable of running on both 120V and 240V (US and Europe compatible). A silent and efficient device by Altair Tech that hashes nicely, stays silent and produces enough heat to also help you with heating at home… and it even looks quite nice with a cool 3D printed enclosure. Bit-Chimney Single Hashboard Space Heater is WiFi ready, runs on 110V-240V input Voltage, utilizes the Loki Kit by Pivotal Pleb Tech, runs at 23 TH/s at 750W or 30 TH/s at 1000W and at up to 60 Db noise level, so pretty silent. The first batch is expected to start shipping on October 30th priced at $699 USD. And if you are feeling more DIY-ish you might want to start tinkering around an S19 and make your own design as well.

The 3D printable case files for the BitChimney Space Heater by Altair Technology have been released online and you can download and print the case for the space heater yourself and build the miner if you do own a 3D printer and get the rest of the components you need such as the S19 miner hashboard, a suitable Bitmain power supply and a Loki board (if you need to run on 120V power in the USA or other country that uses the same lower voltage). Just go to Thingiverse to download the 3D STL files for the BitChimney Space Heater case and get on the route to building your own single board S19-based silent home Bitcoin miner.

– For more information about the BitChimney Space Heater…

Bitmain’s Upcoming Antminer KS3 ASIC for Kaspa (KAS) is Crazy Fast

16, May 2023

Bitmain’s upcoming Antminer KS3 ASIC miner for Kaspa (KAS) has been announced and it boasts some crazy specs for sure, especially compared to what is already available on the market. The hashrate of the KS3 ASIC miner is supposedly 8.3 TH/s with a 3188 Watts of power usage, meaning a 0.38 J/GHs power efficiency. As a comparison a single RTX 3070 GPU optimized does something like 600 MH/s at 90 Watts of power used, so a single KS3 ASIC miner is equal to around 14000 Nvidia RTX 3070 GPUs in terms of hashrate and is going to be way more power efficient. With the current total network hashrate of Kaspa (KAS) at around 1.16 PH/s at this very moment, doubling it with the Antminer KS3 ASIC miners would only take just like 140 devices and Bitmain should be producing way more than that for sure…

There is no official price announced yet and Bitmain is running a competition for users to guess the price, but you can expect it to be in the tens of thousands for sure. Bitmain plans to start shipping the KS3 miners in August, meaning that you can expect a huge spike in difficulty around that time as the new machines start going online. There will be a couple of reductions of the block reward of KAS by that time and with the massive spike in the hashrate the crazy high profitability of over $2500 USD per day at the moment for the KS3 should be much lower by the time you can actually get your hands on a miner. Bitmain of course wants to take your money now for the KS3.

So, FPGA mining and GPU mining for KAS will start to fade out with ASIC miners hitting the network as it will become unprofitable for sure, even with the price increasing it will still be unreasonable to think that you’d be able to compete with significantly faster and much more power efficient in terms of hashrate ASIC miners. You still have a little more time left to mine though, so do not be quick to switch to another coin just yet. Or use the opportunity to stack up on some KAS coins while the price is low.

More Kaspa (KAS) FPGA and ASIC Miners are Coming on the Market

10, Apr 2023

The Osprey Electronics E300 14 GH/s kHeavyHash miner might have been the first FPGA miner on the market for KASPA, but it apparently won’t be the only one with more FPGA and ASIC miners for KAS incoming. The E300 was initially priced at $4999 USD and is currently available at $5199 USD with end of May delivery with 400-500 Watts of power usage, but it seems that the device is now facing competition with the MultMiner M2 FPGA miner (apparently a rebranded Blackminer FPGA from HashAltCoin with kHeavyHash support) offering a hashrate of 8 GH/s at 1 kW or 10.5 GH/s at 1.3 kW as well as DigyByte, Tellor, Qitmeer and Kadena support with a price of $2000+ USD. The other new option is apparently called SuperScalar K10 kHeavyHash ASIC miner that promises 30 GH/s hashrate at 1700W of power usage with a price of around $8500-$10000 USD.

All of these FPGA and ASIC miners for KASPA (KAS) are quite expensive and although they do outperform the GPUs that most of us use for mining KAS at the moment, they still might not be a good investment and the reason for that is pretty simple – KASPA (KAS) is the only coin that currently uses the kHeavyHash algorithm and its block reward is decreasing steadily each month (check the emission curve for details) and constantly rising hashrate and difficulty. So, going for a very expensive kHeavyHash ASIC miner that cannot mine anything else is very risky and can easily get you to lose money, it is much wiser to invest what you would pay for the hardware to buy KAS instead, that could turn out to be a much better investment. The situation with FPGAs is a bit better as they could in theory be reprogrammed to mine other algorithms and coins, but there is no guaranteed that they will be, so still quite risky and again might be a better choice to go for directly investing in KAS than to buy FPGA or ASIC miner to mine it with it.

Now, if you happen to have an old Blackminer F1, F1mini, F1+, F1mini+, F1-Ultra or an F2 purchased back in the day from HashAltCoin, then you might want to pay attention here as these got a firmware update to support KASPA (KAS), although the bitstream to support the kHeavyHash algorithm is strangely called “Kasper Bit”. Head on to HashAltCoin’s support section to download the new firmware updates for these devices that will bring you KAS support and depending on the hardware you have you might be lucky to get a “free” MultMiner M2 capabilities. Surely it will be a good enough reason to revive these miners from the dead even if it is just a small mini that is not that much powerful it could still mine you some Kaspa coins at profit due to the great power efficiency of these FPGAs.

Do note however that you might need to use proxy or a VPN if you are based on USA (maybe some other countries as well) in order to access HashAltcoin’s official website and be able to download the firmware updates for the Blackminer!!!

– To the HashAltcoin Support Center with KAS bitstream updates for Blackminer FPGA miners…


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