Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

1 Month With a Bobcat Miner 300 Running on the Helium (HNT) Network

29, Nov 2022

The Helium (HNT) project is something quite interesting with a lot of potential in the future. It is an effort to create a global wireless network by utilizing Proof-of-Coverage as a work algorithm with dedicated Hotspots (miners) that are providing legitimate wireless coverage to expand the network. Helium’s LongFi combines the LoRaWAN wireless protocol with Helium blockchain so any LoRaWAN device can transfer data on the Helium Network. Helium’s Technology allows anyone to build out massive, cost-effective wireless infrastructures in an entirely new business model that benefits everyone. It opens the doors to many new ideas for low power devices with long battery life and network connectivity regardless of their location. The network relies on people to build and maintain the wireless coverage and as a result the participants are being rewarded the native HNT token of Heli and the company behind the project is already working on building a 5G network as well.

Helium started very strong, creating a big demand for Helium Hotspots or miners, and with price of the HNT token peaking at about $44 USD during the last crypto bull run it is no wonder it got very quick growth worldwide with users buying and installing compatible hotspot devices all over the world. Since this happened at the beginning of 2022 the price of the HNT token has been going down and it is currently at just around $2.5 USD and the big question is now if it is worth joining in now by getting a Helium hotspot and installing it at home? There are a lot of second-hand Helium “miners” on the second-hand market (even unused devices) at a significantly lower prices and manufacturers are also not having trouble keeping supply as the demand has significantly subdued from the peak demand earlier this year.

We got a great deal on a brand-new Bobcat Miner 300 and decided to give it a try and see what it can earn in a month. So, we just plugged in the Bobcat and connected it to the Helium network, placing the device near the window and the antenna on the window so that it has better signal coverage. We do that in a densely populated area in Los Angeles with a quite a few other hotspots around, so the transmit scale is far from optimal (0.19 to 0.38)) and our earnings are not the maximum that is possible. However most home users are not very flexible on where they can put a Helium miner and if you get the device to use at home, then it is highly likely that your transmit scale will not be 1.0, so your earnings will be lower as well. The Bobcat Miner 300 is one of the most popular Helium hostpots out there and while it may be better than most other cheaper alternatives, it does not come cheap at $429 USD at the official website, although you can probably pick it up elsewhere for half that price. Just make sure that you either get an unopened device that has not yet been initialized, or one that the seller used but can and will transfer to you once you purchase it, otherwise you will not be able to use it!

So, after a month of use our humble LA Bobcat Miner 300 has managed to earn just 1.059 HNT or about $2.62 USD at the current exchange price. Not much for sure, but more than enough to cover the power cost of the device at just around 5W on average (rated at 12V 1A maximum), but also will take quite a while to even pay back for the hardware investment before starting to make actual profit. Of course, the crypto market is not great at the moment, near its current bottom, so there is a lot of room for the price of HNT to grow back up in the future. Not to mention that here you are helping build something useful in the longer term and there is not much that the Helium hotspot needs besides a little power and internet connectivity and you can just forget about it for a couple of months or a year. Give it a go if you are interested as now it will be easier to get into Helium (HNT) mining than when the next bull run starts and the demand for Helium hotspots picks up once more with the growth of the price of the HNT token. You can also use the Helium explorer linked below to look around you and see how many competing hotspots are available and also how much HNT they are earning daily, weekly and monthly to get a decent idea on what to expect.

– Explore Helium hotspots and see how much they are earning…

Upcoming JASMINER X16-Q High Throughput 3U Quiet Server Ethash Miner

28, Nov 2022

A few days ago, Jasminer has teased with an upcoming new Ethash/ETChash miner called X16 and now there is more information regarding the specifications and pricing of the new device available. Jasminer and their X4 chips are currently one the most efficient solution for mining ETH-based DAG coins and their upcoming X16 chips should be capable of delivering even better performance. The newly released information form Jasminer states that their new Jasminer X16-Q (an upgraded version of their X4-Q quiet miner) is supposed to be capable of 1845 MH/s hashrate for Ethash/ETChash with 630 Watts of power usage or 2.93 Megahash per Watt (0.34 J/MH efficiency). As comparison the X4-Q does offer 2.17 Megahash per Watt power efficiency (1040 MH/s at 480 Watts or 0.46 J/MH efficiency), so a nice improvement in power efficiency and is is not only higher hashrate with lower power usage apparently. The new X16 miners should also come with 8GB of memory available for larger DAG coins as compared to the just 5GB available with the current generation of X4 devices.

The price cited on the official Jasminer website for their upcoming JASMINER X16-Q High Throughput 3U Quiet Server is $2799 USD, though there is no stock and you cannot apparently pre-order the device… it has not been released for sale yet. The device is rated at just 40 dB as noise level thus it continues the legacy of the X4-Q for a quiet miner that can be used at home as a space heater, however the release timeframe for the new model does not make it very attractive for such use as it will apparently miss the cold winter days. According to Jingle Mining, an official Jasminer reseller, the expected delivery date for the new X16-Q devices is somewhere in between May 1st and May 31st next year, so quite a bit of time before these make it on the market apparently.

There is currently no word regarding support for Nicehash and Dual-Mining Ethash/ETChash coins with Zilliqa (ZIL) however for the new X16 products as currently one of the main drawbacks of the Jasminer X4 devices in realizing their maximum potential and profitability is the lack of support for these. It will be nice to see a solution for Nicehash and Dual-Mining with ZIL as they can improve profitability of the existing and upcoming devices significantly at the moment and make them more interesting for miners in the current not so favourable mining conditions where even being able to cover for electricity costs is a challenge. Guess we’ll have to wait a bit more and see if these will be addressed or not, and by the time the new miner is released on the market it is also possible that even without these available the profitability might make them not much of a problem like they are currently.

– To get more details about the Jasminer X16-Q on the official website…

How Much Does a Goldshell Mini-DOGE Miner Earn a Day Currently

27, Nov 2022

The Goldshell Mini-DOGE ASIC miners for mining Scrypt-based crypto coins such as Litecoin (LTC) and DogeCoin (DOGE) are quite popular topic among the home miners with the recent spike in the price of both mentioned coins. The miner has the DOGE in its name, but you can mine any Scrypt-based crypto coin and there is actually no point in mining only DogeCoin with it as DOGE is merge-mined with Litecoin, so you are essentially mining Litecoin and DogeCoin together and not only one or the other. Of course, there are quite a few other crypto coins out there that use the Scrypt algorithm, it has been one of the earliest alternatives to Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm, though probably mining for LTC and DOGE is the most popular way these are being used.

It is interesting to note that the Goldshell Mini-DOGE Miner is no longer available for sale by Goldshell as it has been replaced by a slightly faster in terms of hashrate and better in terms of power usage Pro version (205 MH/s at 220 Watts or about 1.1 Watt per Megahash), however you can easily find the non-pro version on the second-hand miner market. And you will be surprised to see that these small home miners do not come very cheap, even though they are not that profitable at the moment. And if you are buying one, just make sure you get the WiFi version as it makes it much easier for home use as there is also a non-WiFi equipped earlier model apparently. If you manage to get a good deal on a Mini-DOGE Pro miner (they come with black cases, so they are easy to differentiate) you better go for that one, though it is not that much of a difference to justify a big price difference.

The official specifications of these small miners are 185 MH/s Scrypt mining hashrate and 233 Watts of power usage, or with other words about 1.26 Watts per Megahash as power efficiency. Just as a reference the quite old already and still quite popular Bitmain L3 Scrypt ASIC miner offers around 1.6W per Megahash and can be optimized to work with around 1.3 Watts per Megahash which is very similar to the Mini-DOGE. So, if you are looking at buying a Goldshell Mini-DOGE you might also check out the options for a Bitmain AntMiner L3 with a custom firmware, it might come cheaper with higher hashrate, but also a bit bulkier and noisier and no WiFi option on that one.

But let us get back to the main question and it is how much do these Goldshell Mini-DOGE Scrypt ASIC miners able to currently mine in terms of LTC and DOGE coins doing merged mining. We did a quick test using the F2Pool as one of the large Litecoin mining pools that does support merged mining with DogeCoin and you can see the actual results for the last 7 full days. Do note that there is a slight increase and then a slight drop in the number of mined coins as there has been a difficulty adjustment on two occasions during the test period. The first one on 21st of November with 1.4% drop and the second one on 24th of November with 5.3% increase.

So, the amount mined Litecoin coins is around 0.0023-0.0024 LTC per day with is roughly around $0.17 USD at the current exchange rate. This is not much really considering that the miner uses around 5.6 kW of power per day and depending on your electricity cost this may be enough to just cover roughly maybe 1/5 of the electricity bill. But wait, there is also the DogeCoin that you mine with it at the same time and you get around 3-4 DOGE per day with it. That is another 30-40 US cents per day with the current exchange rate of the coin. Essentially at the moment you will be kind of covering the electricity used by the miner, depending on where you live, with what you are able to mine with the Mini-DOGE miner.

While the Goldshell Mini-DOGE Scrypt ASIC miners may not be very profitable at the moment, don’t forget that we are in a bear market at the moment and pretty much everything is down in terms of price in the crypto world and there is not much profitability regardless of what you mine. So, mining and keeping the mined coins is the wiser idea the moment, waiting for the bull run cycle to start and the prices to go up and, in the meantime, you can just pick a couple of Mini-DOGE miners if you manage to score a good deal on the price and use them as space heaters during the cold winter days. They are quite compact and operate pretty silent and thanks to the WiFi module you can place them easily in different places around your home. A single device with its 233 Watts of power usage won’t be able to heat up much space that well, but a few of these devices might do the job better. We are soon going to be sharing a more detailed review of the Mini-DOGE ASIC miner here on the blog, so stay tuned if you are interested in learning more about the device.


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