Bitcoin Mining, is it worth it?

[clicky]

Running a 24 core 300w Intel server 24/7 for months would barely net you a penny if that. You could run the Pi the rest of your natural life and never see a return and you'll spend much much much more in electricity than you'll ever make.

Only purpose for it would be purely educational to learn about distributed computing and block-chains.

Actually - that's an idea: mine it ONLY with renewables - solar and wind (and have Pi4 shutdown on calm nights).

But, even then I bet that price of such setup is going to exceed any life time gains...

[markatlnk]

That sounds like a fun project. As you suspect, not worth it from a financial point of view, but fun. I teach electrical engineering for a living. You learn a lot from the work putting it together. Now the technical questions, super caps or batteries? How big of panels do you have? Will they track the sun or just be fixed?

Let me know how it goes.

m

[clicky]

That sounds like a fun project. As you suspect, not worth it from a financial point of view, but fun. I teach electrical engineering for a living. You learn a lot from the work putting it together. Now the technical questions, super caps or batteries? How big of panels do you have? Will they track the sun or just be fixed?

Let me know how it goes.

m

I wish I have time for it - but as you said - that would be fun project.

Actually, questions you asked could be really good from perspective of teaching:
- caps vs batteries - for some business study (longevity vs price)
- tracked vs fixed panels from perspective of current technology and prices - it would be cool for someone to calculate difference between two (including current needed to tracking to be taken in consideration)

and, at the end - feasibility of complete project, prototype, collected data over 2-3 years, etc...

[Heater]

Could someone explain when the fun is in this idea is?

You have a Pi and some mining software. Or some kind of mining dongle. You power it up and watch it. Watch it doing nothing and producing no result.

I can get into the fun of messing with solar panels, power control circuits etc.

But surely there is a more exciting end goal to be found?

[ShiftPlusOne]

You have a Pi and some mining software. Or some kind of mining dongle. You power it up and watch it. Watch it doing nothing and producing no result.

The fun comes with the next bull run. I'm assured that it's any day now. Then all these miners can buy yachts and retire. /s

Some people say they do it to learn about blockchain, but like you say, you don't really learn anything by running some software that does everything for you.

If somebody really wants to learn how mining works, do it by hand - http://www.righto.com/2014/09/mining-bi ... paper.html

[jhuebner0504]

ASIC miners are at 333mhz, 4-5 years ago, I actually was able to mine with a set of 12. $4.00 in a few months. Then you could use an ASIC. I then built a bank of Gekko 2 miners - 10. Those beasts were ~$50-80 a pop. A substantial investment. Calculating the power requirements and finding a Powered USB Hub, took a while.

Now there is a new generation of Gekko's out. The price is $+80 last time I looked.

you will learn SO MUCH, and running them from Pi's works fine, any of the quad-core machines. I'd say 3b or 3b+, 2b's are a little clunky. They run out of usable memory using CGMINER and just "Lockup". I have my hub full of ten Gekko 2's. I'll have to see if I could squeeze my budget & get some of the G2 Gekko's. Those are my experiences and thoughts.

Others have chimed in with other solutions, here is mine. Unless you have the $$$ in Hundreds of Thousands & can lease a cooled & powered environment. You'll be putzing, like the rest of us. Unless the bottom falls out again. Never know.

[Heater]

You seem to have invested a thousand dollars or so into this mining thing. And only got 4 dollars out of it.

So I'm curious. What did you learn from it all that is worth that much or that much fun that you could not have learned by other means far more cheaply or for free. And that would have had a more constructive outcome?

You seem to be encouraging others to do likewise so this is a very pertinent question.

[markatlnk]

You could ask the same question about buying a fancy sports car or truck. We as humans each learn different ways. When I encourage students to learn about things, you attempt to find out what they are interested and see if you can link it to that. I could point out web sites for people to learn about how block chains work, but somehow when you have a machine in front of you working on the problem, it seems different. Setting everything up, figuring out what other things need to be installed. Problem solving when things go wrong. Those things help with problem solving skills in general. I would never advise someone to spend any significant amount of money on mining these days, but even the word significant is different to different people. For some $20 bucks is too much for others $1000 isn't that bad.

I have been known to purchase lottery tickets also.

My miners are chugging away, it is like a lottery ticket every day.