Bitcoin Forum

Picking a couple of random quotes from random people in another thread.




I have a different view in that hobby miners don't really care about the cost of mining (or do not care that much) or what the value of BTC is.

It's not a 'side hustle' it's not a 2nd job.
I am never going to make any money riding motorcycles it's a hobby.

I see hobby miners as the same, they like the mining tech, they like playing around, and as long as they don't loose the house payment buying and tinkering with miners it's not a big deal.

What I would call 'home miners' are people looking to make a profit, be it mining out of their basement / garage / whatever.

Just wondering how other people view things like this. It's more semantics, but when someone says 'hobby' miner to me I see something different then 'home' miner. And if we are having a discussion we can wind up thinking the other person is thinking something else.

Self moderated to prevent spam.

-Dave

Mining is not what that should be regarded as a hobby. Or I can not consider it as a hobby. The reason for this is because I do not think someone will say he is mining bitcoin for pleasure. Hobbies are activities that you do for pleasure. Even if some people just like to be a miner and not benefiting from it, it is still not a hobby for such person because no pleasure derived from not benefiting from being a miner.

The pleasure I mean is the one that makes your hobbies to be recreational activities that can even benefits your health like riding a bicycle with friends, reading story books and novels, watching movies and sport events on TV et cetera.

I enjoy mining Bitcoin. I started doing it in 2011 and it has always been a hobby to me. I’ve had custom electrical work done to enable it, custom ducting, went solar, got a battery backup. I did all these things not to increase profitability or anything like that. I did it because I was having fun supporting a project I care about. I’m still solo mining for fun now and I donate all the coins I get to a community project. No concern about profitability whatsoever.

I think that there are people who consider mining a hobby. In as much as we know that there are a lot of cost involved in setting up a mining rig even if it is a small one, there a people who by virtue of their geographical location and other factors are already at an advantage that enables to afford to mine as a hobby. For example people who live in areas where the cost of electricity or energy is lower than in other places. In addition, people who live in areas where mining equipment like the ASICs are cheaper that in other areas.

hobby mining is emphasising hobby
meaning not the main job of your life, not the profession. not the main income earner. its the thing you jump in and out of when you have spare time or it occasionally peaks your interest to get involved in

the whole point of defining a class of miners as hobby miners is to separate if from the class of the professional asic farms that mine 24/7 no matter the weather or season. vs those that dont do it all the time/all-season

Any hobby is an interest that is done for pleasure (some people include gambling in this category) and most often, money is spent on a hobby, not earned (gambling comes to mind again :)). For example, a hobby with riding a motorcycle requires expenses for purchasing a motorcycle, equipment, fuel, maintenance and repair, etc. Hobby mining, in my understanding, is when a passionate bitcoin enthusiast does it for the pleasure of assembling, setting up and operating miners, as well as for the sake of contributing to the development (support of the BTC-network) of bitcoin. Any profit received is a secondary bonus and is in no way an incentive.

This is how I understand hobby mining.

Indeed. And it widely differs from person to person. For some it may be that they have 0 expectations for earning, they just want to see the software working. They may have very low hash rate and may not do this for too many months.
On the other hand, many lottery miners (solo miners of temporary buyers for mining power) also consider themselves hobby miners (and imho this is debatable).

solo mining is not a thing these days, asic owners still communicate to a pool who manages the block creation, its just the pool manager set terms of payout that the lottery miners dont get a syndicate share of the reward and instead only the winning hash(lotto ticket) holder gets majority of reward minus the management fee

you are right to define what some wrongly call solo... as lottery miners,
lottery miners is more correct term for the pool managers that pretend to do solo

Hobby mining could definitely be a thing. Though here on the forum, I have really come across a couple of persons who as very much supporters of decentralisation and definitely bitcoin too. Most bitcoiners love the bitcoin network so much that they run node just to play around. However as for mining for a hobby it's going to be more like a too way thing. For the very first one which is obvious, one could be a hobby miner by probably not gaining a thing because of costs like maintenance and electricity.

On the other hand, no one said it's wrong to make some profits with mining as your hobby since your hobby is basically what you love doing. Let's not forget that electricity costs is one of the biggest reasons hobby miners aren't as much as those running nodes for fun are. So I think if a miner is basically putting back his earned profits in paying for electricity and maintenance bills with a tiny fraction of the net profit left then he could be called a fun or hobby miner.

no one says that hobby miners shouldnt make profit, its more about any sats acquired that may profit are not part of a long term constant/contracted task.. its more leisurely tried and not a main income job

EG hobby miners would panic and pool jump to an altcoin or stop mining in a bear market of profitability of mining. where as asic farm professional mine 24/7 even during potential loss periods of th market cycles.

hobby miners are more the type that pay residential electric rates and pay it per month when they get a bill.. where as professional asic farms  prepay an x amount of MW/GW of electric to cover a 1-2year length of powering the asics, which they will run constantly because the prepaid electric means there is no gain by switching asics off and instead they waste their allocation by not using it.. also by not mining they lose out on the opportunity to acquire more sats(to hopefully recoup their initial spend) if they switch off, so its in no benefit to switch off

Everyone has their opinion, but it is a fact, I know someone who, just because he knows that his mining equipment is state-of-the-art, makes him happy... it is a hobby, in fact he tells me that he loves the noise that the machine makes. It may be read as a joke, but it seems "strange" to me, but the guy can pay for electricity and buy the latest equipment, without being interested in a return, and that in itself is a breeding ground for turning it into a hobby.

A hobby does not have to be something that makes you sweat, laugh, if I explain, there are expensive and unnecessary hobbies, and mining has to be definitely one...

So, in equivalences, of which there are many, e.g. a desktop computer case is necessary with all those lights, etc. With this I mean that depending on the niche to which it belongs it will make sense, but that same niche will have purists who say that why so much paraphernalia of lights on a  tower PC case.. but it has become a hobby...

For some guys having mining equipment makes them part of something... I don't know, you have to be a collector or have some non-traditional hobbies to understand it, a hobby is not just reading a book or going to the movies.

imo!

not strange at all.. i know some people that are into cars.. some love the exhaust streaming roar of the combustion engine noise, some love the low whistling sound of electric cars. i personally prefer the electric car whistle not the misfiring roar of a combustion engines exhaust.. but then again im of the era of watching nightrider at a younger age so thats my car nostalgia

anyway the point about defining classes of miners is more about the different investment planning/arranging/budgeting of mining, much like in the vegetable growing community there are the home backyard growers vs the industrial agricultural farmers

the separations are used in economic classification divisions of mining strategy.. rather than about discussions of community bonding over common interests

But nowadays people are riding bikes and making money by posting social media videos, I know posting social media videos is a different thing, but they are making videos of their driving, some are dancing while driving bikes, some are racing, some are throwing some lines at girl bikers, etc. etc. and making videos of themselves posting on Instagram and getting promotions.
I agree only rich and tech people can mine BTC as a hobby, electricity is the big issue here, so maybe someone getting free electricity from the government in some kind of subsidy or due to work, they might use that electricity to mine as well. If I will have big farms of solar panels or wind power generators and I will have free electricity, then I will definitely buy some rigs and will give BTC mining a try. If it turns out to be okay as my hobby,, like it should be fun, mind refreshing then I will go for it.

But this will be fun for some time only once the rigs are set and the setup is running It won't be a fun or a hobby then we have to find another hobby haha.

You could argue that they're using them as a side job or even their main job at that point, so it's not really a hobby anymore. I believe some people consider a hobby to be an activity that you like to do in your spare time with no expectation of making a profit or anything, so there's a chance your hobby turns into a job when you make money from it. By this definition, traveling/posting on social media/etc to earn money is no longer a hobby, it's a job. It's not like people always hate their job anyway. I don't really mind whether people call their mining activity a hobby or a side gig, as long as they explain it clearly.

The hooby mining should be somewhat a side job or a part time activity, where a bitcoin supporter and fans take it as a responsibility to mind bitcoin at his or her leasure time and at a consistent basis, taking note of all the network rewards and making sure to keep the fun going for as long as possible, although the main motivation is the activities that involve in mining and since it not the main job but as a hobby whatever profit that comes along at whichever time is always welcome.

Having the plans to upgrade my HP laptop to at least the latest version so that I could download bitcoin core and run a node, just for fun, this could be refer to to hobby minner also but when down on a laptop long consistent basis.

I think mining can be hobby but it is not simple. Some people like bitcoin and run nodes for fun. But mining can be expensive because of electricity and maintenance costs. If someone mines as hobby and doesn't make money that is OK. It is still something they enjoy. If they do make money that is good too. Important thing is if they use their profits to keep mining and have little left over. Then they can be considered hobby miner. It is about doing what makes you happy even if you do not get rich.

For example testnet mining. There are many options. You can use ASICs, and contribute to 2^70 chainwork on testnet4, and 2^75 chainwork on testnet3, or you can use just your CPU, and mine all blocks with minimal difficulty.

Sometimes, there is a difference, because for example by mining and selling some ALTs, which were CPU-mineable, I earned 0.01 BTC. And I think it is quite impressive, if you consider, that all of it was done only with CPUs.

But obviously, more often than not, I mined many chains, which were not at all profitable, and I treated them more or less like testnets.

Well, I consider myself both a hobby miner, and a home miner, because if you use just your CPUs, then you don't have to worry that much about your hardware. Then, you just use, what you already have, and for example use 10% of your CPU power, to add some Proof of Work to some things, just to apply some simple hashcash-like antispam on that.

Another example of a hobby mining is transaction mining, for example: https://mempool.space/tx/000000000fdf0c619cd8e0d512c7e2c0da5a5808e60f12f1e0d01522d2986a51

And also, if you tweak (r,s) pairs of DER signatures, then by a little bit of mining, you can save some real satoshis, by making your transaction just a little bit smaller. To do that, you can for example CPU-mine R-value of the public key, and then, tweak s-value, with a fixed R-value. In this way, by doing something like 2^32+2^32=2^33 operations, you can strip 8 bytes.

I think many people see mining more as a work because of its costs. One would think ‘why do this as a hobby when it is so costly and expensive to do? Why not get some profit from it?’. But maybe some people do not necessarily need the profit from mining and they just genuinely enjoy doing it. Just because we don’t and won’t find it pleasurable doesn’t mean it’s not pleasurable for others.
The definition of hobby is any activity that is done outside of work hours and gives enjoyment to the person doing it. It could literally be anything and not just restricted to the examples given.

I would say someone who run full node or mining without looking to earn are trying to catch up with Bitcoin development especially to users who wore paid signature or have a job related to Bitcoin.

Riding motorcycles make you able to build a relationship with people in real life, this depends on the person why they need real life relationship, either just want to share something,  seek a better job, get some validation or looking for opportunities.

While mining, it's not something you can flex to the public, most of the time people don't care with technical thing.

There are two sides to the idea of ​​hobby mining that u bring up. Some may do it for enjoyment and some may do it to benefit from it. I don't think mining can be expected to benefit from this if it is considered a hobby. Hobbies are a different matter. We spend a lot of money to fulfill the pleasures of the mind but we don't get any benefit from it but we get enough pleasure from it. The pleasure of this hobby does not give us money but we spend enough money to get this pleasure.

If u are mining bitcoin for fun I can't agree because bitcoin mining can never be fun. It would be wrong to say that BTC mining is a hobby, because doing Bitcoin mining means expecting benefits from it, which is why it cannot be a hobby mine. When u do bitcoin mining, u monitor the market yourself, if the price goes up, you feel happy and if the price goes down, you feel a little sad, so the idea of ​​hobby mining with bitcoin mining does not seem logical to me.

On the other hand, those who have taken up mining as a hobby say that they are actually doing it with the intention of making a profit rather than enjoying it.

I think entertainment should involve you in something like playing games, various sports, traveling, etc. From which you will personally find joy.

Depends from person to person to be honest, I would not consider it a hobby as it takes a lot of efforts at first to setup and then to maintain the Bitcoin Mining Farm. No way it's a hobby for me atleast. And if someone thinks it's an hobby, they might be having fun doing it. My hobbies are to play games, listen to music, travel etc. That pleasures me, not looking at ASIC miners running hard on heat mining sats haha.

If you are on short margins, then I can see how a spike in the electricity bill will cause a bunch of hobbyists to quit until they get better rates elsewhere.


It only makes sense to spend a lot on miners and electricity in advance when you're mining a coin that will appreciate in value. Which is the case for Bitcoin and to a limited extent some others like LTC.

The pricing of the ASICs themselves mitigates any sort of block reward that you will get otherwise.

I mean what metric would we even use? Equipment level? Quality? I reckon it won't (or shouldn't) be profit since every miner out there is for profit.

I'd honestly just compare it to how people compare pc builders. You know someone does it seriously if they've built/customized something heavily and are always using the latest rigs/maximizing literally every part they have regardless of how good it is. I'd probably use the same here with miners, just a comparison between the quality of equipment, optimizations, etc.

I'd probably consider one a "hobby" miner if they just fired up a random rig they found in their garage and just mined whatever really. Like they probably just got the bare minimum they could needed to start mining.

You made some valid points, but some users actually enjoy tweaking ^{[overclocking and in certain cases, even underclocking a few things]} their rigs just for the sake of getting the most hashrate while keeping it in a stable condition. There are also a few who enjoy modifying the appearance of their mining rigs and they constantly do this for fun, so these things are visually pleasing.

There's no need to go that big when you can have fun with a single mining rig ;)

Not everyone is out there for profit. That's the point.



I personally feel I have drifted into the hobby miner status for what I feel it is. There is no possibility of the hardware I have ever generating a profit. But, I do love tinkering with it. Attempting to fix broken miners that I just about have 0% chance of fixing. See how quiet I can make an old miner so I can use it as a space heater and so on. People have called me a home miner. But, to me a home miner is still someone trying to make a profit mining at home or the office or wherever but it's not their main thing.

Instead of home miner should it be small miner?

All in all it's not THAT important but at times I have seen someone say home miner, when it looked to me to be more of a hobby because they knew that even with $0.04 kwh electric that the miner they bought would never make a profit. But it was fun to play with.

The GPU rig that just I put together for running vanity search was never going to make me a dollar, but it was fun until the smoke came out.

-Dave