Ever wondered what all the fuss is about mining Bitcoins? Well I decided to find out and have a go myself with my trusted Raspberry Pi.
There are several things you need to know if you are thinking about Bitcoin Mining:
- You are not really ever going to make any money and you will never see any ROI.
- It’s easy to get started and if you join a mining pool then you will receive some rewards (not a lot see number 1!) after a few hours.
- These things (USB ASIC Miners) run hot so you will need some type of cooling.
Hardware I used available from Amazon:
- Raspberry Pi
- SanDisk 8GB Memory Card
- 10 Port USB 2.0 HUB
- USB Fan
- 2 x ASICMINER Block Erupter 336MH/s
I used a mining operating system called MinePeon on my RiPi and is simple to set up and get going. The only issue I had was that because the Raspberry Pi has a quick boot up time it wasn’t picking up a DHCP lease from my Cisco switch. The fix was to enable portfast on the switch port and it was off mining bitcoins for me.
This is my current setup which sits at the bottom of my comms rack in my garage.
Future plans are to buy a couple more ASIC USB Erupters, the price has really dropped on these now, and then to buy some new Blue Fury USM miners that operate over 3GH/s for the same power consumption.
Want to know more about Bitcoin mining? Bitcoin Wiki Page.
If you have any questions then leave a comment below. Thanks!