Yeah, absolutely right. Most experienced miners would be able to do this by tinkering with the devices themselves. There's no market for it really.

And having a custom built PC for heating/mining could be a great idea as you can also use it when not mining for many other purposes.

For example this enclosure for a PC would be actually perfect, and very similar to the space heater I had in mind:

Strike and the Human Rights Foundation specified three challenges to improve lightning wallets' usability and experience. Any individual or team that solves each one them gets one Bitcoin as a reward.

Here are the challenges:


This seems like a very interesting opportunity for the talented people here in this forum.

I just found something that might be of interest to some people here.

It's a new NFC card with some kind of microchip inside that holds a private key and a public key in the card itself.


It's the Swiss Key Card: https://swisskey.io/products/btc-swiss-key-card



In theory they say that you have to use it with their (unpublished yet) app, but I reckon it could be usable as a generic NFC card for lightning payments with LNURL-withdraw for example.

I would say Switzerland is one of the most privacy friendly countries out there.

You can buy Bitcoin in Switzerland at any train station, and also at many shops around the country.

Usually the maximum you can buy at a time is CHF 500.

Here's more information about it: https://www.sbb.ch/en/station-services/at-the-station/services-from-the-ticket-machine/bitcoin.html

One hundred million sats is quite a lot of money these days.

I think a reasonable goal for a lot of people in 2022 is to get to their first million of sats, and go from there.

The Compac F comes with no fans, and you must provide some kind of cooling to prevent its melting.

So I first just connected this USB powered fan:



I pointed it into the heatsink of the miner. This seems to do the trick, the miner works fine over a long period of time, no melting, and the fan is not crazy loud. Normally that would be the end of the story, and most people are happy with that setup.

But, when things get quiet, the fan is noticeably loud in an annoying way as it's right next to me, and I would like to change that.

So I started to look around to see how I could cool them down with minimum noise.

I first saw these small fans that can be attached directly to the miner:


But the fan is rather loud, so that's a no go for me.

I already have some big fans that move a lot of air very quietly, like the Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM:



You can manually set the speed for these fans with a controller, like this one(Noctua NA-FC1):



That way, I can lower their speed and they are basically silent, yet still move a lot of air. That's ideal for this, so I would want to use them.

What would be the best configuration to mount these fans to cool down the Compac F in the best way?

I usually see setups like this (I could mount the big fan on the USB hub and it would be moving air horizontally):



But looking around I've found this alternative setup:



It might work great with a single 120mm fan:



Would it be better to put the big fan on top like the previous photo(moving air towards the ceiling), or horizontally on the USB hub moving air either away or towards the miner?.

Also, is there any optimal distance between the fan and the miner?

I'm personally not sure Ukraine players will be properly trained for the match. I mean, they haven't played any games at a competitive level for months now, so I'm sure they're not at 100%, plus their minds will probably be somewhere else.

On the other hand, you can see that most people around the world are supporting Ukraine, so it will be a weird atmosphere for Scotland, who is playing local. Usually the crowd would have cheered for Scotland but now I'm sure a lot of the stadium will be supporting Ukraine.

My guess is that it will be a bittersweet victory for Scotland, with the crowd hoping for a Ukrainian win.

If you want to use the bolt card with CoinCorner, yes, of course you need KYC. But the card itself is simply an NFC card. You basically just write a LNURL-withdraw link into it, that's it.

You can setup the bolt card, or any NFC card, to work with your lightning node directly, as I mentioned in my previous post.

So, basically, if you want to use the exchange, you need KYC, but the card doesn't need to be used with the exchange.

There are theoretical scenarios in which a halving would take longer than 4 years though.

For example, the current difficulty is very high, and it gets adjusted every 2016 blocks. So, imagine that something huge happens and somehow all ASICs on earth are no longer working for whatever reason. If you only have more primitive miners, and a small amount of them, you still need to mine those 2016 blocks or whatever was left to actually re-calibrate the difficulty.

If that change in difficulty is massive, then it would take much longer than roughly 2 weeks to get to the difficulty re-calibration, potentially years. An event like that would delay the halving, so it would happen later than the expected 4 years.

Note that this is pretty much never going to happen, but it's technically possible.

It can vary a lot, from losing a lot of money, to earning some. Also it depends on many factors, like, what are you planning to do with the mined bitcoins, how much is your electricity, specific tax rebates you can get in your country, etc.

You need to see the specifications of the device. Check out how much power it uses (Watts) and what's the hashing rate (TH/s). Then check how much your electricity costs to run that device, and you'll see exactly how much it will cost you to power it and you can get an online calculator to estimate how much bitcoin you'll get for that hashing rate.

There are so many factors that it's really impossible to answer your question.

I can guarantee one thing though, it will be hot and loud.

It's well known now that a block was found recently by a member of this forum in solo.ckpool with a Compac F:



Of course the chances of getting a block get better the faster you hash, but it can be anyone really, even a tiny USB miner.

I like the concept of solo mining, it's more than just the money.

My every day transactions are done exclusively through credit card tapping. In extremely rare circumstances I would use cash.

I'm now waiting for my Bolt Card which should in theory allow me to do the same, paying with lightning by tapping with the card, and it would connect directly to my lightning node, and pay for the requested amount of Bitcoin.

Note that even though this card is advertized to be used with CoinCorner, you can set it up to work directly with your lightning node.

Of course most shops are still living with legacy merchant checkouts, but covid has accelerated a bit the usage of cashless checkouts, so I hope more stores start using BTCPayServer and similar checkouts, which works with the NFC card

Bitcoin tracks time in a different way than what we're used to. Instead of seconds, or years, etc, Bitcoin uses blocks. Time started in Genesis, when the first block was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. Then, miners all around the world started trying to find the next block. Once one block is found, time increases in one unit. This is block-time.

You can see different events expressed in block-time here: https://timeinblocks.com

Each halving event is expressed in block-time, so every 210,000 blocks the new reward era starts, with half the rewards from the previous era.

Also worth noting, every 2016 blocks the difficulty is re-calibrated so that, on average, new blocks are found roughly every 10 minutes.

If you're interesting in reading more about Bitcoin and time, I recommend you to read this: Bitcoin is time: https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time

Every time I read something about a bitcoin miner being a space heater it ends up being either a joke, or a vaporware.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong for making this?, I would be happy to buy one that looked good and wasn't very noisy.

For example, have a look at this great little space heater:



It looks good, produces nice heat, and it's not crazy loud or annoying at all. It has 2 modes, low(750W) and high(1500W). It's a great little machine.

Now, for home miners, look at something like the Apollo BTC:



It also looks good, produces nice heat, and it's not crazy loud or annoying at all. It has 3 modes, ranging from around 100W to 300W or so generating about 2-3TH/s. It's a great little machine.

Why hasn't anyone made a great looking space heater with something like that?

You could make basically something like the Vornado, but internally instead of just having a simple heating element, you would have something like 10 times what the Apollo has. There's enough room to do that.

It would run nice and quiet, produce enough heat, look great, consume about 1000W-2000W or so(configurable) and generate around 20TH/s. It would be a great little space heating machine that gives you a few sats while running it.

My only guess is that it would be too expensive, but I'm not sure about that really...

I reckon they are pretty much very similar in terms of skills, and the game can really go either way. It will be a very close match in my mind. Scotland does have the local advantage so that's something that might give them the edge. We'll have to see how Ukrainian players perform in the field, because it can go either way, they can be motivated to go and win at all costs, or they might have their minds in other, more important things.

It will nevertheless be an interesting game to watch.

Well, free stuff like faucets has always been things with low value in the real world.

For example, when Bitcoin faucets were a thing, you couldn't really do much with Bitcoin in terms of buying things. Laszlo had to wait a few days to get his pizzas for 10k BTC... so giving away Bitcoin made sense.

It's the same these days. There are a few things that will give you a few sats for free. Which right now is almost nothing, just cents, but it allows you to play around with the lightning network for example.

OK, I just watched the video you posted. You're wasting your time and electricity.

The video explains how to connect to a pool using the GPU from the Mac M1 to mine Bitcoin with a custom build of bfgminer for mac. This is useless in 2022 where pretty much all the mining in Bitcoin is done with ASICs.

Here's a screenshot of the video that shows the hashrate you get, which is about 100MH/s:



To put this into context, look at one of those tiny USB miner, the Compac F:



These tiny miners give you about 300GH/s. That's three thousand times higher hash rate than what you get from the M1.

You won't get any payouts in any pool using a Mac. You simply cannot mine Bitcoin without an ASIC in 2022.

If you're looking for a Bitcoin mining pool with no fees, then the only one that I know of is SBI Crypto Pool, as you can see in this comparison

They seem to be a rather new pool and based on their website they're running a campaign now with no fees to bring more miners to their pool:


Now, if you mean some kind of free website that lets you mine for free with no required miner from you, then that's most probably a scam.

If you download the Carrot App you will be able to get 5 sats for every article of the bitcoin magazine you read from their app: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/sats-earning-platform-carrot-wants-to-reward-the-world-in-bitcoin

That's a great way to keep up with what's going on in the Bitcoin world, and also get a few sats for doing so.

There are also different tasks that you can complete from different companies, and once you complete them they give you a code that you can redeem in the Carrot App.

You can then redeem the sats you have in that wallet to your own wallet with lightning once you reach 500 sats.

Courtois indeed played an amazing game. It was a really fun one to watch, in the beginning I thought maybe Liverpool was going to score, but Courtois kept the net safe for the entire game. And then Real started to attack a bit more, and to be honest I think they deserved the goal that was called out as offside as it was kicked by a Liverpool player...

Congratulations to their 14th Champions League. That's an incredible record, and just like Bitcoin, there is no second best here