Another week has gone by and so it’s time to do a progress report on my home mining operation and my miner’s earnings.
Source: my own photo. The coins in the picture are not representative of the real bitcoins I mine at home.
Last week I reported earnings of 0.0115 BTC. Since then my miner has made another 0.0182 BTC, of which 0.0115 BTC (pretty much exact as much as the first week’s earnings) came from Kano’s CKPool and 0.0067 BTC from Bitcoin.com’s mining pool. The total earnings so far correspond roughly to 5% of the price I paid for the miner (0.55 BTC). At this pace (and with the difficulty being constant – which it won’t, of course) I’ll need another 38 weeks, or nine and a half months, to break even.
I am still experimenting with the two pools, switching between them in hopes of better payouts. Here are some things I noticed:
Bitcoin.com gives me higher payouts per mined block, but that pool has found less blocks in the last couple of days than CKPool has. Although in the days leading to this past weekend Bitcoin.com’s pool was performing better and finding more blocks. Only if I could’ve known it in advance! It’s difficult for me to guess which pool is going to be more “productive” at which point in time. So far I’ve been going by the pools’ total hash rate on any given day. However, it can change quickly and oftentimes pool’s productivity is more a matter of luck rather than the function of its combined hash rate.
I hope that in the future I’ll be more skilled at determining better timing to switch the miner from one pool to another and back. Another thing I noticed was that mining on Bitcoin.com’s pool can freeze my miner at random times. The only remedy would be rebooting the miner. Which I haven’t been able to do remotely until now and thus lost about one full day of mining time due to two unexpected power-downs while mining on Bitcoin.com’s pool. The first time it had happened I was still on a boat in the middle of the Baltic Sea and couldn’t do much about it. This morning I installed Chrome Remote Desktop extension on my home laptop, so now I can restart the miner from work, using my workplace laptop, or from pretty much anywhere, via the Remote Desktop app for Android on my smartphone. Chrome Remote Desktop is awesome!
I am still learning, adjusting and adapting in order to optimise my miner’s efficiency. Hopefully the following weeks’ earnings will reflect the results of these efforts. As always, I will keep you posted!
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