Bitcoin Forum

Well, it's looking like profitable mining is dead in the water for the ordinary person. The only thing that might pick it up again is the rise in bitcoin value, making Sartoshis worth more, so even little bits are worth collecting.
So I've set up an Antminer U1, 1.5Ghz to solo mine to the solo.ckpool.org site.
I can't win Lotto, so maybe I can win this one.
I'll let it run for the next couple of years and see how it pans out.
If it works... I might just pick up 25 BTC...
Fingers crossed.

Pretty much impossible for this to happen at this point.  Very small amount of hash with hashrate growing every day (in a lot of cases).   I wish you luck with it... but i would not go out and spend that 25 BTC :).

What system are you using to?  I hope you are using something like a RPI they are very good for lotto machines.

with very cheap electricity or free energy via green power i would try it, otherwise it's not so different than paying for regular lotto ticket, and based on the lotto, this may be more difficult, for just $10k in return...

I was thinking the same thing. Plug in my old butterfly lab jalapeño, and see if i can hit it. May take 3 days or 10+ years who knows.  I think maybe just holding atleast 1 BTC for 10-20 years maybe Hundred thousand to a Million times, more profitable. ;)

The thing is, you should only hope for the block reward of 12.5 since the halving is just in the corner and block rewards cuts into half as well. I've seen someone got lucky with an Antminer S3 in 2014 (IIRC), but with as little as 1.5 GH/s is surely mission impossible for you. On a side note, it's nice seeing someone positive ;)

I like to be positive. :-) Everyone, but everyone is saying.. "Don't mine, waste of time, Oh No, you aren't still mining are you..., give it up, you'll go blind..." but I don't care. I still see thousands of people on just this forum - so someone's still doing it other than me. If I wanted to run a business and make a profit, I'd run a street snack stall outside a Shanghai Metro station.
If I want' to enjoy myself fiddling with IT stuff, and seeing how it works, bitcoin mining is a whole field of interest in itself.
For example - I have a spare, very old, Toshiba L630 Laptop running Windows 10. I put the Windows App "Bitcoin Miner" on it the other day, created a Blockchain wallet and let it rip. They pay each time it clocks up 2,790 Satoshis. In two days I made GBP 0.02, about 3 cents US. Somebody else sent me $0.42 (in btc) I've no idea who or why. And someone else sent me a few cents worth of Sartoshis for signing up to their newsletter.

I purchased an Antminer U1 from ebay, new, for about £37 I think it was, just to try it out with MacMiner. Setup is a bit iffy, but it's running. Anyway, I looked at slushpool's payout program, where I had a pool link going, and they apparently don't pay out until you have practically mined a whole bitcoin. Which in my case will take about 7 years... I mean who cares. I can't wait that long for anyone's payout. So I thought I'd just let it run on the ckpool's lotto web site until I think of something better to do with it.

and mean time, I'm learning a lot about bitcoin, and bitcoin technology. I'm having a lot of fun, and it's helping me avoid doing all sorts of other things, like earn a living, have a social life, ... I could care less about profit, power costs, and ROI.

So at the moment, 2750 Sartoshis is worth about £0.02 - if Bitcoins get scarcer and harder to get, the value will only go up, so that 2 bits worth may well become, well, maybe even 4 bits !!!

One has to stay positive in this life :-)

One has to stay positive in this life :-)

Not a truer word has been said. Keep at it, you have what it takes to be/have what the other 90% want.

No harm in lotto mining! You gotta be in it to win it, if  you don't your not out a whole bunch with the U1. Hit, and you can enjoy comfortable returns!

You might as well for all power that little stick would use.

I admire your positive viewpoint on all this.

One small cautionary note about using your laptop to mine. In general, laptops aren't designed to long term compute intensive work. They just don't have a good cooling solution, as the usual laptop usage model is "99% idle with short bursts of computation". It's quite likely that doing long term mining on your laptop will shorten it's life to a few months. The internal fan will wear out sooner, and/or internal parts may "cook". Putting aside the electricity costs and such, will you be unhappy if you find your laptop isn't usable in 6 months?

I tried doing SETI work on a laptop, and it really doesn't work well.

Just something to consider.

Time would be better spent mining some alt coin and throwing those winnings at some lottery site - higher chance of winning 25BTC worth.

I think you will fare better if you joined a mining pool like kano.is instead of solo mining...

That only helps people with bad connections to the network but reducing the likelihood of an orphan or something along those lines.  Your chance of hitting a block is about the same as solo mining.

Ah, I see. Slight misconception here. I'm not actually SOLO mining, but almost - using the lotto pool sites, like ... solo.nicehash.com

and ckpool, which appears to be also kano.it ??

I have a mining pool set up in fallback. In the config, the third one, the Second one is another lotto pool .. Ever hopeful I am :-)
 


And I don't mind letting it run. Its costing me nothing in time and electricity, because it's on the web and mail server, which is on all the time anyway. So it's basically set and forget.

I have a Toshiba Laptop on the network as well, running Bitcoin Miner, and racking up Sartoshis. Making that sucker work... but it's making me about a cent a day. Wealth and riches here I come. I'll swap that out for a basic PC one day soon, before it kills the Laptop. The poor old Laptop is really struggling, but its as old as the hills and still cracking on. Bonus.

I think you're doing it right. You understand that you are mining at a loss, but who knows, you could "win the lottery".

Solo ck pool is the way to go. Kano.is run on the (almost?) same backend as solo ck pool, they mingle together quite a bit. But anyways Kano.is is running ck pool, hence the similarity.

That will be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Good luck, stay positive and thirsty my friend!