Bitcoin Forum

Howdy! I am new to the mining world, and crypto in general. I have been trying to educate myself on everything, and have over the past month or so been mining with a couple of old tablets via CryptoTab.
It doesn't produce much, but its fun anyway. I have 3 old tablets mining at 1MH/s (1,000 H/s) each. I estimate I get in the the ball park of 4,000-6,000 sats a month (depends greatly on how often I can "reset" the miner. It only allows 2 hour intervals.)

I am looking to upgrade to something a little more powerful (not quite ready to dive into a $6,000 miner yet). And found a GekkoScience Compac F that says it mines at 200GH, and an old Antminer S1 that says it can mine at 180GH.

My question comes in at the production.

I am using a mining calculator: cryptocompare.com and it is telling me that these two miners, that have significantly higher hash rate than what CryptoTab offers, will mine only about the same amount, or less. How can that be?

I'm not overly concerned about profitability at this point, as I believe any BTC I can mine right now, will be worth significantly more in the future. But, I do want to be able to mine a bit more than 5,000 sats a month...

Any thoughts and direction would be appreciated.

Cryptotab is one of those apps that is going to waste your time and resources and make you think you are making some sats and yet you wasted a lot.

Here is what you need to know

great, thank you. so.... that is why I am wanting to upgrade. Any thoughts on the miners I mentioned?

Without a doubt, USB sticks will beat the antminer S1, those are way too large, and consume a lot more power, there are a few light USB sticks options available, check the hardware section of this board.



Cryptotab and all the other online mining stuff is just B.S, if you don't a own a mining hardware, you will either waste your time for nothing or very, very little.


If are 100% certain BTC will go up in value, then just buy the coin itself, makes more sense no? with that said when making a mining investment, the question you should ask yourself is this


What's your power rate? and how much capacity of power do you have? you might jump straight into the terehash tier, that makes a lot more sats than gigahashes hardware.

The Compac F can go way beyond 200GH/s.

If you have a USB hub that provides 2.4A you can easily get 300GH/s.

There are specialized hubs like the GekkoScience one that will provide more amps per port, I think about 3A, resulting in even more hashing power.

They are great little devices. And a user here hit a block with one of those while solo mining  :o

about how many sats do you think I would be able to mine a month with that usb miner?

I pay about 9 cent KW/hr, not sure about capacity... I have room left in my circuit breaker if thats what you mean. How do I find out about capacity?
I'm not looking for a big miner, as I understand they are usually very loud. My wife, doesn't want to deal with something that sounds like a shop vac constantly going off in the garage, especially as we have an 18 month old that takes naps during the day still.

I have bought some bitcoin already, and plan to buy some more, but the mining thing seems like a fun hobby to play around with a bit. My understanding is the USB miners are quiet but don't produce much sats. Do you have an idea how many I can expect to mine on a monthly basis with one?

Almost nothing, an estimated 3310 sats a month with one Compac F miner at 300GH/s. And that's assuming the pool allows you to join them.

If you want to have a small but reasonable constant payout with a silent miner, then have a look at the Apollo BTC. It can produce around 3TH/s, so 10 times more than one Compac F.

Based on what you've described here I think the Apollo is the perfect miner for you. It's quiet, looks great, and produces a reasonable hashrate.

9 cents/kWh is a bit on the high side for any large asic miner and given your wife, it makes things even worse, but as far as the little baby is concerned I believe they will sleep better with the noise of the asic miner, babies love white noise.  :D


if you get Apollo with 3th you would expect to make about $12 or  0.00038 BTC per month (before the power bill).

You can use this simple calculator (https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/btc?HashingPower=3&HashingUnit=TH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=0&CostPerkWh=0&MiningPoolFee=0) to calculate different hashrate, but keep in mind that these numbers do change depending on the difficulty and price of bitcoin.

Usually the power bill would be much greater than that, or even if in a third world country, then still very close to $12, so if you ask me, mining with any of the devices (a single one) mentioned in the first post is a complete waste of time, except for perhaps the USB miner which I don't expect to use that much energy (I wouldn't mine for that little profit, personally).

I would get some miner with at least a few TH so you don't get completely left behind the block mining race. 200-500GH/s is simply too low to be reasonable even for lottery mining.

Not a good choice because Apollo can pull 200w while Compac F is around 9w. So Apollo consumes more power than the USB stick not a good choice for a 9 cents rate unless he doesn't care about the power consumption.
For clarification, if you have 10 Compac F you can also get 3th/s with around 90w which consumes less power than Apollo.

I just want to add this calculator below with a breakeven analysis to estimate the ROI of your unit.

- https://www.mycryptobuddy.com/bitcoinminingcalculator

If you want to accumulate bitcoin then just buy it on a regular basis. If you want fun with mining as a hobby, look into solo or lotto mining.

Those are operational costs, and in reality they cost about the same to run per TH/s, but buying an Apollo would be much cheaper and simpler to run than 10 Compac Fs.

You can in theory(it's sold out) buy 3 Compac Fs for $699.99
https://i.imgur.com/ChMIuZ0.png

Note that individual Compac Fs are being sold right now at $359.99 and to be able to get 300GH/s you also need to buy special rare USB hubs that provide at least 2.4A per port, a power supply for each hub, and fans.
https://i.imgur.com/21jyBbV.png

But let's assume an individual price of $233.33 based on only buying those packs of 3 miners. That means to get 10 Compac Fs you will need to pay about $2.3k.

In comparison, one Apollo BTC costs $499.90:
https://i.imgur.com/mStPBt4.png

Also, it's hard to make a fair comparison because you can change the power settings on both devices.

These are real numbers that I've measured myself:

For the Compac F, to be able to run at 300GH/s you need to provide 2.4A in the USB port. At 5V that's 12W.

The Apollo can run at different power settings, I'm running mine in a silent setting, so it's producing about 2.1TH/s at 120W.

That's exactly 7 Compac F to match the hash rate of the Apollo.

It's still cheaper and simpler per TH/s to get the Apollo:

1 Apollo BTC: $499.99

7 Compac F: $1,633.31

You can buy 3 Apollos for that price!

well most people wont like this but if you get a laptop mine it to nicehash

it earns more.

you mine eth and nicehash auto converts to btc and pays you in btc.

technically you are mining eth not btc but in practicality you get paid in btc.

it is better than the advice you are getting here.

but the info i am giving would be considered alt coin advice.

if you are usa based best buy has a few good laptops you could get.

Yeah, but you can't solo mine BTC with that though.

You can of course do both strategies.

Sorry boys, were off to the races !
Over 4 terahash already smashing it.



https://imgur.com/a/fm4sysn

That's quite impressive for an older generation USB miner setup!

Ahhh you also got some sweet Compac Fs!

I hope you get a block!

1 dam block, thats all I need. on the Pi screen it currently says "Block = 0".
Eventually thats going to say Block = 1 !!!!!   COME ONNONONNNNNNNNN