Bitcoin Forum

Just thinking about mining in remote areas...

Why would you do this? Perhaps in that remote area you have access to free energy; wind, water or solar and it therefore could host a small mine 'hut' or similar.. but one then needs an internet connection


Has anyone ever somehow set their miner up to receive and send data via a 3G dongle or roaming USB type internet thing?


Thanks :)

Why not? An internet connection is an internet connection, and mining doesn't require much bandwidth. It's been done before but adding latency to mining is a bad idea since you lose proportionately more shares as stale depending on the latency of the connection. However if electricity costs offset the share loss (which is likely) then it'd be worth it. Additionally 3G connections tend not to be very stable so disconnections are common but mining software reconnects pretty quickly. Certainly being far from a network tower would be a bad idea.

I think its not a problem if you have a slow internet but stable you can mine without any problem..
But if your 3g connection when you are pinging and if there's packet lose its not a good idea to mine with that internet.. better to find other internet provider that even 3g they can give a stable internet..

Here's some relevant news:
https://liliputing.com/2017/03/karma-updates-mobile-hotspot-prices-ones-not-bad.html
The latency of 4G LTE should be minimal provided the signal is at least partly decent. And while the $3/month base charge does preclude small "toy" setups, it is far cheaper than mainstream data plans for low bandwidth applications.

Maybe it could make sense to make an open source 900MHz (850MHz in some regions) wireless link optimized for Bitcoin traffic, text messages, and other long range, low bandwidth applications? No monthly fees except at the node that connects the link to an existing Internet connection.

I used to have Huawei E353 3G USB Dongle plus TP-Link TL-MR3420 Router and I tested the setup with mining.
Connection stability was not good enough for mining.
I live in a near city centre area and there is a 3G base station near me.

I ran my entire farm via a Virgin Mobile 3g connection (as well as the entire rest of my network) for 2-3 years - had to use a Win machine with connection sharing as I could never find a LINUX-based solution that would work, so I fed the shared connection from that machine into my LINUX router/firewall/gateway machine.

 Latency and throughput on that connection were JUNK, but it worked (I saw perhaps 0.5-1% higher orphan/stale share rate vs a good connection).

 I've seen mention of routers/hotspots that would work directly with such a dongle/aircard, but since ALL of them I ever found were WiFI and I don't do WiFi that wasn't an option for me.

Any idea how much data was downloaded/uploaded on that 3G connection? Some providers have data caps, so it's important to have an unlimited plan...

Less than a gig a month - The Virgin plan was "technically" unlimited but that would cap your transfer rate if you exceeded a GB amount per month (but the connection was so SLOW I couldn't tell when the rate cap happened).
 The Exede plan was capped at 5GB a month - then WHAM major speed drop that actually WAS noticeable - but my TOTAL usage almost never was more than that for gaming, net browsing, AND mining - they had a "free zone" 4 or 5 hours in the wee hours of the morning that did not count against the cap that I normally used for BIG patch downloads though.

 Unless I was doing some MAJOR downloading, my total usage a day was consistantly under 100 meg/day - keep in mind that was NOT just mining, and a lot of web pages insist on shoving *high amount of data* video junk at you even when you don't want it (news sites in particular are NOTORIOUS for that).

 I'm pretty sure the mining-only data usage was well under 10 MB/day on a mid-sized home farm with 10-20 mining rigs at any given point most of that time.

All I can say is this, I mining with 4G low coins and it's ok.