What’s up, everyone? It’s been a week since the arrival of my first miner, SP30 Yukon 4.5 THs. I promised to provide regular updates about its operations and the earnings I am getting from it. I decided to write weekly reports to keep you all posted. Here goes the first such update.
According to the public address I published here, my miner has made 0.01149387 BTC in this first week. Well, actually it’s a bit more than that. I’ve got some “dust” mining rewards on Bitcoin.com’s mining pool, but I haven’t bothered to transfer them yet. So the number above accounts solely for my earnings with Kano’s CKPool.
Neither am I certain whether this amount of weekly earnings is representative of my miner’s full potential. For one, it suffered some downtime periods in the beginning, when I experimented with overclocking. It led to two incidents of blowing out fuses and losing electricity in half of my apartment. In the end I settled on downclocking it to 4.0–4.1 THs from its nominal 4.5 THs. I reckoned that a long-term sustainability is better than short-term greed, right? Also, I turn off the miner for the night, so its productivity is only about two-thirds of a full-time mode of operations.
I have also probably missed some potential earnings by switching back and forth between the two aforementioned pools. I wanted to compare payouts from both of them. In the end I settled on CKPool for the time being. I find its PPLNS payout model with the last 5 shares to be more preferable for my intermittent mode of mining, compared to Bitcoin.com’s 3 last shares. On average the CKPool has been finding between 1 and 3 blocks per day this past week. (Ironically, the day before I set up the miner the pool had mined 6 blocks in one day. Ouch!) The payouts per block have varied between 0.0005 BTC at worst and 0.001 BTC at best – depending on how long the miner has been operational prior to the pool mining a block.
Well, actually, reducing the miner’s power has had some positive side effects too. The greatest benefit is that it’s no longer as loud as it sounded in that first video. Sure, the ear defenders I bought definitely help to deal with the noise. And when I watch videos on my laptop, using earbuds under the ear defenders, I don’t notice the sound the miner makes at all. But even without wearing the ear defenders it is now possible to be in the apartment and not cringe. Maybe I just got used to the noise? Although it does seem to be less annoying after the downclocking.
What I love the most about these ear defenders is their lovely colour! I am striving to establish a dominant turquoise colour-scheme for my entire apartment.
All in all, I am quite content with how things are going for now. The reality is both better than the fears I had in the beginning and worse than the dreams of quick riches I made up in my greedy little mind. The most important thing about this whole project is that I’m learning tons about Bitcoin, its blockchain, mining process, mining hardware, and mining pools. It is all very exciting to me – and that’s exactly how a good hobby should feel!
