Bitcoin Forum

Hi everybody

I have 2 Antminer S3+, I have tried alt coin mining lately and it works great but I am spending more electricity then it generate enough
to pay the electric bill.

I do understand that the chips are made to mine ONLY SHA-256 algo

So is there an other use for those door stopper ?
Did somebody found a coin that is worth mining or a firmware upgrade that would work whit other SHA algo ?

Keep it and use it as a space heater when it gets cold.

Actually I have have heated my basement last winter with them :)

That is why I am looking for something to do whit them next winter mouhahaha

I wish there was something solid to do with them, simply due to there being so many around its a waste. I was looking into actually turning them into space heaters but never went very far with it.

Be creative and maybe you can solve this issue that a lot of people have.

If you buy lotto ticket weekly, may be power the old S3 you have and solo mine!  May get lucky one day...

Why don't you sell both of them instead? Even though mining rigs sell have been in a slower rate due to the halving, you'll still be able to sell them if the price you will be asking is reasonable and as result, considering you already got ROI on them, them simply earn you easy money by selling them. Another option, you could host it with someone trusted that has cheap electricity as well.

Lotto is both fun and it can be lucrative. Occasionally somebody hits a lucky block and they earn a whole 25 btc, so that's what I do with my old miners. Selling is also a great option, but I much prefer lottery mining than just giving up and selling. Selling is for the weak, be a man and pay the electric bills! :p One of my friends lives in Alaska and they need a lot of heating each year, so they just power on a few S3+s and because it's pretty cold there for most of the year, he manages to actually make a fair amount of money. He's planning on buying a few S7s after the halving when people will be dumping those into lower prices.

Lotto mining can be fun I have not went as big as a S3.  But at my biggest time in lotto I had 3 U3's connected to a R1 with crazyguy's custom firmware.  Then had some compacs going with a RPI.   I tried to keep mine low power.

On my list of to-do's is to get my R1 back up and lotto mining for fun.   I had sold my U3's a while back they held their value decent I got a lot of what I put in out of them. 

Here in Montreal Canada you are able to get a S3+ for 20$ an S5 for 80$ without the power supply, to run 24/7 cost 0.60 cents a day.

To run them solo is not worth it, sell it ...... maybe as a door stop since summer is around the corner. They are great space heater in the winter,
I actually saved money this years heating my basement.

Now there is a lot of alt coin out there and I was successful whit Peercoin until it fork lately and not all the nodes updates, I tried Emercoin
and got a lot of orphan blocks, those coin are made for POS not POW.

Here is my ideas, pretty sure there is a genius out there that would take one of the coins that did not start of tank and make that coin
a slow ASIC POW coin, let say that you can't mine that coin whit more then 1.5 T or you get kick out the network or temporarily ban.

The coin reward would increase whit the difficulty not the other way like all the actual coin. By doing this people will bring back they old ASIC
to work and maybe create a new rush like Bitcoin did when it got popular.

The value of that coin should be low but high enough so people would like to mine it and enjoy making a block and the reward.

So I am trowing the ball out there, hope that somebody catch it and swing it back. 

I'm not sure how you are suppose to control the 1.5T cap you gave as an example.
People can just "fake" they are a different person by spreading their hashrate.

It's a good idea if you find a way to avoid that.

That is an easy one.... there is what we call an IP address

 

There are SO many different way's to try to get around if IP address is used to separate different people.  I mean VPN's, Proxy's, heck whole there is a whole industry working to do this.   A good example is some places like China block this very site.... does it stop us from seeing people from China.... anwser is no they got around the blocks.

As long as there is profit to "game" the system, people will try to do it.  IP is in no way the final anwser to protect something.