AtomicInternet Archived News

My Bitcoin madness reached a new level this week with the purchase of a second ASICMiner cube. This time I only paid $315, bringing me up to a total of $700 investment and 80 GHash/s that has thus far only netted $56 since Jan 22nd. Two of these miners quickly heated up my server room, then larger family room before I decided on their final setup in the hallway between my basement and garage. Here they can run overclocked with the fans on low, constantly sucking 700w of power. This translates into 16.8 kWh a day rated @ ~ 7¢/kWh, so $1.18 / day I need to make just to break even. Not satisfied with Bitcoin, I decided to add Litecoin and Dogecoin mining as well. These use the Scrypt hashing algorithm rather than Bitcoins SHA-256 and as of yet there is no specialized hardware for it, meaning my two nVidia GPUs had a shot at making some Litecoin. It also meant I could buy a cheap video card for work and take advantage of free electricity despite the lowly 300w power supply in that computer limiting me to under 90 Kh/s. After accepting that nVidia video cards do in fact suck at mining, I found a gently used Radeon 7970 card with 3 fans for extra kickass and paid a whopping $400 for the privilige to mine with it. Hopefully the two nVidia cards sell for at least half that, which would put my new hobby at $900. This is close enough to the $1,000 barrier that I'm ending purchases and allowing the coins to roll in. The impressive 688 KHash/s I was able to get from the new card caused a GPU tornado in my tiny server room, and after creating a startup script to auto-mine on power up I introduced my Bitcoin miners to the new Litecoin/Dogecoin miner. Now at a combined 900w I'm slowly killing forests of trees all for some numbers that may or may not end up being worth something.