Bitcoin Forum

The consensus around here about trying to get into mining now using USB miners is now pointless. With the difficulty rate and the ROI it doesn't make sense to buy USB miners - unless you want make this a hobby and tell your friends and family that you are 'mining' for Bitcoins.

So what else can you do with USB miners? Is there another virtual currency that you can use USB miners for or will these be paper weights?

I may have answered my own question:

Bitcoin is based on SHA256 algorithm. Block Erupters use ASICMiner chips designed to do one thing – calculate double SHA256 hash. This specialization allows them to be highly efficient at Bitcoin mining and consume minimal amount of electricity. They can also be used to mine alternative coins based on SHA256 algorithm, such as Terracoin or PPCoin.

Anything else?

Firmly grip the top of a beer bottle with one hand, and wedge the Block Erupter under the bottle cap with your other hand.  Use the fingers wrapped around the bottle's neck as a pry-wedge and quickly pull the end of the erupter downwards.  Bottle top should pop right off.

Should look similar to this:
http://content5.videojug.com/f3/f3adec2c-6195-0e80-b42e-ff0008ca1141/how-to-open-a-beer-with-a-lighter.WidePlayer.jpg

Haha I heard of some people using them for vanity mining, and I remember reading some where about possibly turning these into usb coffee warmers.

Couldn't they be used for folding@home?

I don't think calculating SHA256 hashes is terribly useful for biochem.

Mind you, even if it were, the hardware probably doesn't waste effort relaying the result, rather just whether it finds one below a specific value or not.

You can use it as a bookmark.  ;D

You can carry your USB Erupters in your pocket, and if someone ever tries to attack you, you can pull them out and start whipping them at the persons' face, ninja throwing star style, while you make your escape.

Can't think of much other use for erupters.

At 112 million difficulty, my 4 Ghash worth of GPUs would take 70 days to earn me 1 BTC, if I were dumb enough to still be mining BTC.

LiteCoin FTW! :D

Coffee warmer!  :D

would need to diy a plate and integrate the miner into it, and then sit your coffee or alternate hot beverage and never hav a cold surprise interrupt your forum browsing ever again!

No.

 :-X

Protect the bitcoin network and heat your home.

I currently have 5 USB block erupters. Should I buy another 5 and USB hub so I can put one under each foot to keep them warm? Is a 25W heater not designed specifically for heating really enough to keep my feet warm? Should I maybe double up and put 10 under each foot?

Christmas Lighting.

If I had 25BTC for every time my USB miner blinked...

You could send them to me!

I'll give you 0.1 BTC each.

Actually a good price...

I dont think you can do anything except mining coins

You people need to think outside the box, forget the mining paradigm. Think about what the erupter does, what the algorithm used was designed for, and then think about what else you could apply it to.

No.  It's not.  Private/public address generation does not look like double-SHA256.


Bitcoin was designed to use SHA256 for a very specific operation that shares little with anything other than bitcoin - by design.

They're not usable for anything other than bitcoin-like double-SHA256 operations where you are searching for a target hash value by incrementing a nonce.

I strongly disagree. I can think of one application where they would work quite well, but just prefer not to mention it.

Sell them all to this guy!  He needs them for his secret application.

Trongersoll:  how much you paying for used Bitcion hashing equipment?

I think one would make a pretty cool necklace.

plug them into your butt?

Whoever said they are mining vanity with usb asics is a lying sack of shit. any sha256 asic cannot vanity mine, fold@home, or whatever. It can only do sha256 hash, nothing else, only good for bitcoin mining.

Buttcoin

Not true, You aren't thinking hard enough.

Are you taking this (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/7264/3249) into account?

If they are right in all their examples, my applications will still work and be viable in most instances. coins have two side, most people seem to look at the wrong side in this case.

Risky! There is no wide lip so it might go in too far and embarrassingly have to be surgically removed.

hang it from the ceiling whilst erupting for handy insect killer

the blinking light attracts em, whilst the ridiculous heat output kills em on contact

for sale: 3x insect killers 

Pong?

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-11-92/7674.Pong.jpg

USB port advertising. Go plug them into your local computer shop's display computers. See how many people ask about them

There will always be a certain price for these that makes mining worth it with them.

I'm going to just keep them plugged in, hidden away in a cupboard and solo mining. Check it every now and then and not care if it gets a block or not.

Of course you care if they get a block.  Who are you fooling?

Maybe you can use the hashing power to accelerate a software.

Basically, these could be used in any application that requires enryption and decryption. A low cost solution with the right software.

You keep going on about this.

Could you explain how to use a bitcoin ASIC for encryption/decryption?  They take a data block, iterate a nonce until a target is found, and return the nonce.  At least as far as my understanding of them goes.  They're not a "general SHA256 engine" on a USB stick - they are a very, very specific bitcoin miner.

Shhh! Haha, I meant it more of a 'I'll just let it sit and do it's thing'. Much like finding a $50 in your winter jacket the first time you use it from last season.

Why not turn it to an alt coin like ppcoin or zetacoin. The likelihood of you finding a block is very low. You may go years without finding one on a block erupter. Mining an alt coin atleast gives you something and you can exchange it for btc whenever you want. But should the price of the alt coin rise you could potentially make a little pocket cash  ;)

Quite the conundrum isn't it?

can anyone confirm that a hot USB Asic Miner can light a cigarette?

Yes it is. I will be facing it very soon with my erupter blades  :(

sew a few into a blanket for the winter!!

I would think they'd have started a few fires by now if that were the case.

You are kind of asking me to teach you about encryption and how to do it. Regardless, of what they were made for, for a specific input string, you get a specific psuedorandom output string. Without knowing the input, you can't predict the output. That is all that is needed for encryption/decryption, the rest is software. Considering how fast these guys are, they would lend themselves to real time applications.

I maintain the Cryptohaze password cracking suite, I'm a panel member on the Password Hashing Competition, and I've spoken at several conferences on password cracking and encryption.  I know my way around encryption.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm

Per the best of my understanding, the bitcoin ASICs take the partial result of the first inner SHA256 operation (the first 64 bytes), and then calculate another SHA256 block starting with the partial state (the 8 32-bit registers) and the 16 remaining bytes, incrementing the nonce each round.  They perform the outer SHA256 on the result, and look for a result matching difficulty 1 or greater.  If this is found, they return the nonce used to find it else say they didn't find it.

You appear to be claiming that the ASICs are a general SHA256 engine that lets you put arbitrary data in and get the SHA256 hash out - or at least this is what it sounds like to me.

I'm asking, "What other application do you have that fits with the manner in which the ASICs actually operate?"  I'm not aware of one.

What would happen if you give it difficulty "0" Even with a Difficulty of "1" i suspect that it would return enough bits to do, say secure voice over IP? Use one for encrypt and one for decrypt in a fulll duplex setup.

Difficulty for block hashing algorithm is totally meaningless and has nothing to do with general purpose sha256 applications. ASICs in their current form, and likely forever more when designed for bitcoin, cannot do general purpose sha256.

perhaps create your own local blockchain with low difficulty, set up a few USBees and have a very elaborate 'hash race' betting track

The difficulty is not adjustable - the miners simply return everything that has a difficulty of 1 or greater (which, conveniently, means everything with one of the end 32-bit output registers all zero) and let the host sort it out.

If you're doing what I think you're suggesting (using the calculated nonces as a pseudorandom stream), you'd be getting something measured in bits per second - a 330HM miner should find a difficulty 1 block roughly every (2^32/330M) = ~13 seconds.  So a 32-bit nonce per 13 seconds.  This isn't particularly useful as a stream cipher - 2 bits per second isn't stellar.

You've been insisting that there is another obvious use for these, "think harder," etc - but from my understanding of how the ASICs work, they are really only good at performing the bitcoin mining calculation or something else deliberately fit into that framework.

I'm not aware of any other type of cryptographic operation that looks anything like what bitcoin does - the people who designed it have done a very nice job of sticking it over in its own little corner of the crypto space and ensuring that it's only useful for bitcoin.

I'd love to be shown wrong, and I'm trying to convince you to do so.  I'm just not entirely convinced you have a solid grasp of the exact nature of the calculations performed and optimizations used by the hardware to do what they need to do, as fast as possible.

You are right, 2 bits per second isn't enough, i thought it would have been faster. in which case you are right, these couldn't be used for that. I thought that at its easiest difficulty it would produce numbers faster.

They're not designed to produce numbers quickly - they're designed to produce answers (valid shares) with a minimum of bandwidth involved.  Remember that people are hanging dozens of these ASICs off heavily chained USB hubs, and there's no noticeable performance loss.  The per-device bandwidth is insanely low, by design.

I'm still open to any ideas, though. :)  It's just that the guys who did the crypto on bitcoin were actually damned good at what they did, and forked off into their own little corner to ensure that it was totally separate from anything else that matters.  It's quite impressive, actually.

I'm thinking about getting one to use with an RPi, think it would be kind of neat, but probably never pay itself off.

Well I have a Raspberry Pi already + $10 Amazon gift card.... Hmmm...

well make sure you get one for $5. They don't ROI at higher prices if you are interested in profiting.

you kidding right? with 200 million diff next and with all major hash machines coming into the market that will take the diff to 500 million by years end, 50 cents is a good price. ASIC Miner sold millions of dollars at 95% profit, they are now flooded with urupters they can't sell nor will ever be able to sell, unless they do it as a vanity. Talking about striking it rich with BTCs lol

I think we're past the point of anyone in their right mind believing these will make a profit at any cost except with extreme luck solo mining. Consider buying one of these as buying a toy only and only pay what you would be happy to pay for such a toy.

Hello peeps ,
I come across threads talking about mining being dead but I do not understand why .

My thoughts :-

1) Mining is the simplest most anonymous way to obtain Bitcoins .

2) Running miners in a home could allow you to lower your central heating thermometer transferring the energy to a heat producing source (miner)that also produces value (bitcoins ).

3) Miners placed into mineral oil with stones or bricks will release heat long after you turn the miners off .

4) Using miners as a replacement heating source negates the electricity cost .

5) with enough miners you could in fact place them in a sealed container filled with mineral oil and use them to heat your hot water system to save on make your energy usage more efficient while still producing a product with value ?

I may misunderstand some of the reasons for saying mining is "dead" but I feel that wasting the heat provided by our miners needs some thinking outside the box .

A usb miner placed into a 2 litre bottle of mineral oil can be used to keep a larger bowl of water warm ,while cooling the miner .

If we look at usb miners as a heating element then mining seems to be a case of adjusting your hash power to suit your income requirements .

Seven Steps how to Profit using Asic USB Miner

1. Create new  SHA256 algorithm based alt coin.
2. Premine the coin
3. Add the coin to exchanges
4. Pump the coin
5. Dump the coin
6. Profit
7. Rinse and repeat




this only a joke.. don't try this at home.

OK, I'll just do it at work then lol

But the Bitcoins obtained by mining hardware are generally more expensive than those bought directly on an exchange because miners are heavily overpriced.
Heating with electricity is not very cost-effective. There are much cheaper forms of energy if all you need is heat.
Yes but only as much as the energy they consumed. And remember, that energy was pretty expensive to start with.
If you would heat with electricity anyway, that's true. Direct heating with electricity is however not cost-effective in most parts of the world (I think the ISS is heated electrically, as burning stuff inside might be a little hazardous :) )

Again, electricity is a pretty expensive source of heat, even if it is being used to mine some mBTC as a byproduct...

Onkel Paul

Nothing much you can do, sell it while it still have some value.

If you have a LOT of them, you can definately use them as Xmas lights while mining on alt-coins. I just joined TomPool for Alts and damn I love seeing the lights blink more often than BTC mining haha

Xmas gifts this year. Give them to people who you think will show an interest in bitcoin and join the community

Modern chainmail (EruptorMail) armor or the newest trend in earring fashions.

Seriously though I will probably tuck mine away in a corner somewhere and rely on pure luck to find a solo mine block.

They make perfect keychains :)

On a serious note though, you got it cheaper than a lot of folks out there. I would run them anyways. There's always the possibility of the exchange rate compensating for the ineffectiveness of the product.

Think of it as gambling. ~30W power consumption hopefully won't make you bankrupt.

Seems to be the way to go - I'm trying some alt mining for now just to give it a shot first.

I bought 10 of them for 1 BTC, I will keep them running and hope that BTC price goes up. They are not power hungry, so they can run forever

sold my last 3 for £55 phew!!

i hit roi on them though, by selling weekly contracts on ebay  8)

people paid well over the odds to test the water

Well, the only thing I can think of is use ASIC USB Miner for heating which most people already knew. Other then that its uselesss....

How about mining?

Yeah mining but soon, the electricity charges will be higher then that....

Make the USB miner into keychain and use it to mine whenever you get free electricity..

Mine as many alt coin using SHA 256 as you can. There are some that are really profitable.

Nah, none are more profitable then BTC.. look http://www.coinchoose.com/index.php