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I live in a federal school environment, and as a result, we have free-constant electrical supply, which I was expecting to put to good use by mining bitcoin with.

Here's the question(s): Is there a website where I can buy used mining equipment at a low cost? And, if I intend to purchase all of the essential equipment using this technique, what is the estimated cost?


It would also be helpful if you could provide me with a list of the items I will require for mining. Thank you.

Ebay or the forum marketplace is the best place to find best deals for asic miner. @Philipma1957 is oldest member here that I know which mining Bitcoin for a long time. You can get tips or perhaps ask him if he have a spare asic mining rig to sell for you as stater.


The estimated cost will varies based on your target mining power for your setup.


You can use this guide for setting up your Asic miner https://cryptominertips.com/bitcoin-asic-mining-guide/

This is the most essential list the you will need for your Bitcoin mining.

• Asic Miner
• Power Supply
• Internet Connection

The Russian Criminal Code has Article 165. "Causing property damage by deceit or breach of trust."
Miners in Russia are judged by this article, and they do not steal electricity, but only mine in their homes and pay for electricity at a cheaper price.
And in your country there are no similar articles in the criminal code?
Electricity for schools in Russia is free, it is paid by the state, but if it is used for mining, then this is a crime. Think about the risks first, you can't hide the Asics, its works loudly.

I'm aware of that, but in this case the electricity is connected directly to my dad's house. I'm not trying to tap into the school's electricity illegally all I'm trying to do is to try to use the electricity for something meaningful, the only thing that the electricity power in my dad's house is our Air conditioner, pumping machine, Tv sets and some other electrical outlet.

I'm not sure if using an electricity that has been connected this way would still be considered as a crime?

Lets start off easy.

This is the bitcoin section so it should only be a bitcoin machine to follow rules exactly.

So i recommend a used antminer s15 if you can provide 205-240 volts.

It will do 22th and pull 1100 watts. on low. Since power is free it will earn about 1.32 usd in btc.

Now if you get an antminer L3+ point it to nicehash it will convert the ltc+doge it mines directly into btc.

it pulls 750 watts. It will make about 1.0 usd worth of btc.

I can give you info on either one. I am USA based So if you are in USA 🇺🇸 I could sell you either one.

But if you are in Russia I think I can’t safely ship to you. Customs would likely take it away.

You do know that your breakers are probably most likely not gonna handkle more then 1 or 2 and the room your in bro i'm sure if you can handle 130degrees F then maybe but anyways with what I just said if ur still wanting a single machine I can ship you one out on a whim that you'll be putting it in my solo pool.

I can't know what is forbidden for you.
A breach of trust will allow the energy company or school administration to sue you for damages from your mining idea.
If you have electricity meters in your home and the controllers check the readings of the meters, then they will see an increase in electricity consumption.

I know you are not going to like what I am about ti say, but it's the truth, you live in a federal school environment, and you believe that no one is paying for the electricity that you believe to be free?

If you go out and buy an Asic miner because of this, remember that this move can lead to you evacuating from the premises, because you are doing nothing but stealing the electricity, there is no such thing as free electricity, someone, somewhere is paying the bills.

Once you begin this plan, there will come a time where they will notice, because the electricity bill will be higher, you don't know how much they are paying I believe, since you think the electricity is free, that's what will make you lose guard.

Even if there is no explicit regulation that bans you from doing that, I would not be surprised if they decide to cut you in one way or another. I mean, it is just common sense. If they know you consume a lot of electricity, they would get suspicious and would think what you've done is unethical at the very least. If your definition of meaningful is not limited to generating passive income, I can see other usages such as running a node, a NAS, and so on.

What is a "federal school environment" you also mentioned your dad's house, so I don't understand that.  Putting that aside I'd say:

- It's probably illegal to use free electricity (paid for the by the government / tax payers) to mine bitcoin

- Even if it's not specifically illegally, once they discover that you're mining bitcoin (especially if you get more than just one mining machine) they're likely going to make you stop and possibly charge you with theft (doesn't have to be a law specifically about bitcoin, you can't open up a business with free electricity)

- It's going to be loud, very loud.  Especially if you have more than one mining machine.   The noise is going to bother you and anyone else around the machines, you don't even have to be in the same room.  The noise comes from the fans on the front and back of the ASIC mining machines.

-  You've also got to get rid of the heat produced by the mining machine(s) so you can't just put them in your closet (unless you rig up some airduct somehow and have somewhere to get rid of that air) and even at that it's still going to be hot, especially if you have more than one mining machine.

-  The electrically wiring in your house / school (or wherever) is going to have to be large enough (the gauge of the wire, or wire size) otherwise the amps the machines draw are going to burn up the wiring (more so if you have more than one mining machine).   The breakers are also going to turn off if you pull too many amps (or more than the breaker is built for, example 20 AMPS).

- You're going to have to mine on a bitcoin mining pool so here are two mining calculators (a simple one and a more advanced one):

Simple: https://btc.com/tools/mini-mining-calculator?lang=en

example: hashrate of 14 TH/s (terahash) which is about what an Antminer s9 does (since electricity is free for your you don't need a new machine, and these are only about $100 on eBay nowadays) and you make about 0.000035 BTC every 24 hours (or about $0.09 dollars (or 90 cents)).

Advanced (although you don't really need this because it's for calculating electricity and the price of the mining machine (new machine usually): https://btc.com/tools/mining-calculator

All legal stuff aside and assuming you got that handled, the real question is (how much power can you use?) This is will be the most important factor to decide what gears you should buy, buying just whatever is cheapest is a terrible idea, when you answer this question I can suggest a few models that would fit you best.

The heat that is generated from ASICs and noise can be hidden if water cooling is used. To connect video cards in a private house no more than 10 kilowatts per hour, I replaced all the wires with new ones from the power company poles to the meter and from the meter to mining farms. I found damaged sections of wires that could lead to a fire under load.

I always like it when I see people go into mining, and I hope you get all the guides and assistance you need here. But the fact that you live in a federal school environment, you have uninterrupted power supply and you want to capitalize on that and start mining? Don't be deceived into thinking the light is actually free, you better make provisions for electricity in your budget because the moment you start mining, words will start spreading and electricity officials will certainly come for you. So don't take the light issue likely, get everything sorted out before you venture into it.

Having good electricity is just one of the hurdles to mining. With Free electricity you will be able to achieve a lot, you have already skipped one hurdle, but there are other factors you need to consider and prepare for because there are always obstacles. School environments can have bad boys, your equipment can be stolen if you do not try to make sure that they are safe after purchasing them. Do not tell people that you are mining Bitcoins, do everything in secret.

The problem is even more than OP pictured, if you are getting money through mining and you are in the midst of boys, they will want to know, if they find out what you are running 24/7 they will hate and this will even make the dream of you leaving the premises happens faster.

You will be busted in no time, I was not even talking about this before, I was focusing on the electricity bill, and Bananington, there is nothing like free electricity, he is prepared to steal the electricity that someone is paying for, I am curious if OP knows the type of grid meter that's been used in the school.

If it's the old school meter it's better, because there is no measurement on the electricity consumption, only bills monthly, but if it's the new digital like the meter that people use today in different countries there will be problems fast, because they are loading money on the meter using the meter recharge card, once the loaded amount that was supposed to be managed within a month or two finished in 2 weeks, there must be some explanation.

The problem and unrest will start from there.

Modern electronic meters with SIM cards are not so common in many countries.
These electronic meters are put on new houses and commercial real estate and the owner pays for it.
If the old electricity meter has an expiration date, then it will not be changed at the expense of the owner. And the energy company doesn't want to pay for it.

You're lucky if the electricity is free there, what country are you in? You are envious, I wish all countries were like the country you are in. But of course you should know the basics needed in Bitcoin mining.

First of all you must have an Internet connection, a power supply, a Bitcoin mining rig which is usually an Asic miner, and above all a Bitcoin wallet address of course. In addition, there must be capital.

And the site platforms that you can trust that are good for buying bitcoin mining are Canaan, Nicehash, Bitmain and Hut 8 Mining.

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Reference:

* https://www.nicehash.com/nicehash-miner
* https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/hardware/
* https://www.canaan.io/
* https://hut8.io/

Nicehash has mining software, but it doesn't have mining gear, and neither does hut8 they don't sell Asics anymore.


What the hell is a federal school environment? And how would electricity be free just by that?
Some guy might open a workshop and draw 600kw of power every second, would the infrastructure even hold?
I see you have a post in the Bangladesh subforum, just yesterday I was reading of another member bitching about daily power cuts, how do you expect to start mining for free with this happening?
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladeshs-worst-electricity-crisis-decade-2023-06-07/


An s19 burns 72kwh a day, 2100 a month, by European standards that's how much a 5-8 classrooms will consume a month.
Do you think that adding 3-4 times the consumption will not be seen?

at best one L3+ pointed to nice hash will earn close to 1 dollar worth of btc at nicehash.

it will burn 20kwatts a day which is 600 kwatts a month.

the gear is quiet but I can tell you 600 kwatts will likely be caught.

First of all confirm about the organization you want to perform mining using free electricity if you will face any problem when you start mining. Because the electricity may be given free in that institution but the electricity to mine bitcoins is not given free to you. It turns out that you started your excavation with electricity supplied free of charge by the company to save electricity costs, but what will you do if the administration arrests you after carrying out the excavation for a few days. Knowing these things well then you decide on conducting this excavation.

To straighten things up from the start, I'm not advising OP to mine like this, I'm not telling anyone to do so because they might end up in court and with a fine or even with a prison sentence depending on the local laws there. But, to debate the mining aspect there is a dilemma :

You have free electricity but you need to be stealthy, so having low consumption gear might get you the stealthy aspect of going under the normal fluctuation in consumption and avoiding the noise, but at the same time doing so you won't be earning that much. Taking full opportunity of the cheap energy and plugging two generations old cheap hardware you can get for scrap metal price might earn you more with less investment but you're going to be in trouble for the consumption per penny earned. Putting too much money into a brand new efficient miner is also trouble since even with free electricity you might never ROI till you get caught because of the high acquisition prices for efficient gear.

So as Phil said, a below ~1kw miner might be the most advantageous choice, but are you ready to risk facing all those consequences for one dollar a day?

Ahh, I dont know. I think you should recheck everything about the free electricity. There has to be system set up to check how much electricity is being consumed by the federal school. At the end of day it might not be you or you dad but it would be government who will be carrying that burden. Its logical they will have to maintain the technical burden at all times. If they see some irrelevant spikes in the usage then I am sure they will track down the house which is consuming more than enough electricity - unusual.

Coming back to the mining operations well @philipma1957 should be enough to answer everything for you.

There is no such thing as free electricity. Even the electricity you get from the solar panels and wind turbines aren't free unless you steal them from someone else. (You pay up-front) So what you are describing here is theft. You are basically stealing from the government. Just because they let you use that electricity for free don't mean you can profit from it by selling it. You are actually risking your life here. Don't do it. The risk/reward ratio is not worth it. It is because the risk here is a jail sentence. If you are going to take a risk like that at least aim big and make it count.

In my opinion at this time you can't buy cheap mining equipment all expensive when you buy it. Then I also know that you can buy a Bitcoin mining rig is canaan. As for the others I have no idea how much and I haven't tried the nicehash that some people here on the forum say about what you want to know. The only thing I don't quite understand is how you get free electricity in the country you are in? How did that happen?

In my country, the community that hosts power plants are given free electricity. They are compensated for the risk of living in such a risky and polluted environment and they signed some agreement with the company before free lands were issued to build the plants. Also, some communities where oil and gas are drilled enjoy a free power supply. These oil and gas firms use gas turbines and the community is connected to the grid.  But I know that Federal government facilities such as schools and other agencies pay electricity bills. But because it is the government that pays the bills some people illegally use the free electricity to do their personal business which is not proper. This is energy theft and can attract a sentence of five years and not more than seven years imprisonment in my country. Some bitcoin enthusiasts in my region were suggesting that mining activities should be started in these areas but the problem is that the power is not constant and reliable. Relying on the government or free power sources in my country for mining activity will lead to loss.   

I am not sure whether or not what you are planning will be tolerated or is even legal. Did you consult the federal school on this? Or perhaps the people who are the higher ups? I cannot imagine that they are ok with you using the electricity for cryptocurrency mining purposes. I am sure that somebody will notice hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of electricity being used up for no apparent reason. You should probably do a bit more research on this and perhaps ask around, and even get written permission before you continue. Otherwise you might find yourself in hot water, in a legal sense, quite quickly.

This is the right thinking. Morality should be put first. Using the electricity for mining without any explicit permission from the authorities is wrong and not acceptable. No mining community would encourage you. If you really wanted to go into mining, you look getting other alternative source of energy. Put yourself in the shoes of the facility management and do right thing.

The government of your country has thought of you and has provided free electricity in schools so that the students studying in the school can continue their educational activities well. But how do you want to use that free electricity to run your mining operations? You may be thinking that if you use this free electricity system you will have no problem but without your knowledge you are about to take the biggest risk of your life. Because if somehow the government of your country finds out about your activities, then the government of your country can take action against you under various laws, as a result of which you may suffer a lot of harassment later.

I’m more concerned about the history of this free electricity you’re talking about. I bet it’s something that came out of a government-sanctioned infrastructure like a public school or prison, although the former is more plausible for obvious reasons, and in that regard I think you should ensure first that you won’t get into any trouble using that free electricity for mining.

Asics are loud and you can’t hide them easily cause they are bulky as hell, so when a search warrant’s held against you you can’t do anything about it, plus if you can’t afford paying for your own energy, I think it’s enough a reason not to go through with mining cause I’d assume this will not go on forever and at some point in the future you gotta have to live on your own by yourself, if you can’t sustainably manage your mining rig by then you’re going to have a problem.

Everywhere there are limits, and as long as mining does not consume more than it should, then mining will probably work.
And if other people find out that it is possible to mine in this place without paying for electricity, then they will want to do it too, and this will cause power engineers to look for increased consumption of electricity.

if your doing it to earn some cash , its a tough gig , people out there have petra hashes of
kit running for years without catching a block , thats the first REALITY !

Personally i set up some solar to be in THE BTC lottery , and its been a fantastic learning experience
the stuff i have learned the past 4 months has made it worth it.

by sound of it you aint going to be running multiple petra hashes needed to make income
so its just the lottery factor , and the enjoyment of learning

if you buy a second hand s9 its pretty much plug n play , and if you install a software like
"braiins" you dont need to run it on full power , this is all my suggestion to experiment and learn

and like everyone else has said , if there is any "danger" at all legally from using the free electricity
its likely not worth it , its IMHO certainly not worth it in expectation of financial returns unless
you feel you are a REALLY lucky person :-)

but if you really can use the free lectricity legally , you need to move your headspace to
plugging it in is putting you in the "BTC lottery" , with virtually zero chance of catching a block

Nobody mentioned solo mining, so please stop with the damn lottery thing, you might find an interesting word to throw it around but it's not it's place here.
OP said it was going to mine, and that's it, leaving aside the legal implications with free energy he will get a profit no matter what, he can easily just join a mining pool with 4-5 miners and that's it unless you have a broken usb miner from 6 years ago that will never be making the minimum withdraw nobody is forcing you to solo mine! Plenty of pools that will accept an S9 and I'm more curious about those that don't (well, except for foundry)


Stop with your spam and with all your alts!

Isn't it better to buy some photovoltaic kit from China for a little money than to risk legal consequences, especially in Russia? Although, since you live in Russia, rather with the sun will probably be a problem.

That's a subject of debate, first one need to define what "free" actually means, air is free, and if someone finds a way to extract money from it, it doesn't make it illegal, in some countries electricity is heavily subsidized, cheap to an extent you can call "free" but since energy isn't created out of thin air -- the citizens of those countries pay for it one way or the other either via tax or simply by having the government sell the country resources in exchange for subsidizing electricity.

Imagine you had to pay 10% of your salary and could use all the electricity you want (capped by whatever fuse/breaker the electric company installed), if it's capable of doing 10kw and you are using only 2kw to cool/warm your house, then the remaining 8kw is technically "free" if you use it, if you don't, it just sits there, the term "free" might not fit best in this example, but there is no better and simpler term to use.

Even if the state gives a subsidy for consumption of 10 kilowatts per hour to the owner of the house, and the owner of the house consumes only 20% of the maximum limit, this does not allow the owner of the house to use the remaining limits for his business. If this becomes known, the miner will pay fines.

Your right i made assumption that the OP would be solo mining
Personally i pool mined for a while and came to realization that the equipment i use and the level of free
solar i can achieve i would skip the $500-$1000 a year i could make and go for solo

Im still learning and should likely shutup and leave ALL  the messaging to legeenndddaaarrryyyy folks like yourself

I suppose this is just pure speculation on your side, isn't it? because every country's law is different, and what your country defines as a business isn't universal, where I live as long as I don't go past my main breaker capacity (which was set by the provide as an estimate of max home use) I can use that electricity to do whatever I want as long as it's not an illegal activity like growing weed or making drugs and the likes of it.

Now if my miners make a lot of noise and the neighbors complain, that would be a different subject.

In Russia, it was also not forbidden to mine in houses and use the maximum 15-50 kilowatts per hour that are allowed by the project. This is Irkutsk and the Irkutsk region with very cheap electricity. All increased loads break transformers and cause accidents.
And as soon as you and your neighbors use it, you will understand why other people sometimes hate miners.

So you are talking about a specific case in a specific country, that makes sense, my previous post was pretty general, the law is different from one country to another.



That's correct, in many cities, the electric infrastructure isn't capable of doing 100% load 24/7, a 1MW transformer that feeds 200 houses with the assumption that the average house needs 2-3kw on average and maybe 5kw at peak, will have a hard time functioning when everyone starts pushing their 5kw as the average load, load rotation is no longer there, so now it isn't 100 houses doing 1kw and 100 houses doing 3kw, it's all of them doing 5kw which was not accounted for by the electric company.

I wanted to say that this is a problem for all countries, because household power lines and transformers are not designed for mining. When problems arise, the workers of the power company will quickly find violations, otherwise they will have to modernize the power systems at their own expense.

This isn't a problem everywhere, electrical load is just electrical load, whether it is for mining or powering up a new AC / heater it makes little to no difference, I can personally fire up to 15-20kw of miners where I am staying right now and nothing will happen, many citizens oversize the power infrastructure to account for future expansions, families grow bigger, houses grow bigger, the number of houses increases, the demand for energy is increasing and many things that did not need electricity before -- need it today.

I understand that in many other places, adding 10-20% more load will break things, but that isn't because of mining, it's just because of poor planning by the electric company, long before mining (20 years ago or so) when using split AC become very popular in my city, many transformers started to break, main breakers had issues, wires were heating, and they had to change almost everything to account for those changes.

It makes a huge difference between an average house using 2 ceiling fans, a fridge, a few lights, and a TV (not even 1000w) and a house that uses 2 ACs, 2 water heaters, 2 washing machines, a vacuum cleaner, and what not, just the lifestyle of the people can increase consumption by 500% easily, so ya, old cities that still use the old infrastructure will break if every house added a single S9, whereby a modern city where they calculated the new average based on all the new (everything electric) and added a good 30-40% for future expansion won't have a problem if every house run a miner or two.

In my hometown, some remote houses have their own 100kva transformer just because they are a bit far from the nearest transformer, so instead of running expensive large wires at 240v, they just run the 11kv and drop a transformer a 100kva there, maybe a few years later someone else builds a new house around, so ya, many houses in many cities have access to a few tens of KWs which they could use without breaking a thing.

What you said is correct, that electricity was not made for mining, it was only made because in the era we have now it is possible to mine to earn money through Bitcoin mining or crypto mining.

We know that it is quite expensive because it will consume high electricity consumption which will be due to the increase in bill consumption every month, for example here in our country the per kwh is quite high here around 0.2$0.23$ which is not practical to a resident here with us.

I understand that you want to solve the problem by installing new household transformers, but these transformers do not receive infinite electricity :)  High voltage cables are connected to other high voltage transformers that produce the required power limit, and when this limit is exceeded, new sources of electricity are required.

No, I do not want to solve any problem, :D I am just stating an existing fact, those transformers were not hooked up randomly, when the electric company install those transformers they know for sure that even if they were to go full-load their infrastructure would hold up, the short version of this, is not every city is approaching it's full limit of power, many countries have a ton of "idle-power" sitting there doing nothing, you just need to create demand for it and off it goes.

During the most peak loads on the power grid, the infrastructure is tested every day :) If you overload the transformer, the voltage in the power grid will decrease depending on the load growth.
There are few places in cities with good prices for electricity and you are looking for places for mining outside the city, and there are always problems with limits.