@Phill, I agree, in general, you need BTC price to go up to be in profit, even if you were only looking at it from BTC perspective, you still got bills to pay, so the higher the price of BTC goes -- the less BTC you spend on power and other expenses.

On the other hand, if the price does indeed go up, you might as well just buy the coin instead, the problem with mining is that you kind of follow a lump sum approach, so once you are in you are stuck, whereby with buying the coin directly you can always do cost averaging, buy more coins for the same price when price goes down (with mining you spend more BTC when price goes down).

Mining does work for some very specific cases, you need the right conditions to beat the buy and hodl strategy.

The total hashrate for Fractal as of right now is about 220EH, that's like 30% of the entire SHA256 hash power that we know exists, that much can't be coming from home miners, and quite honestly anyone who mines Fractal Bitcoin on permissionless mode is just a gambler, they are hopping for the price to spike, otherwise, just Megrge mine it and still make the same BTC + whatever you get from Fractal, it's 2:1 ratio so it isn't all that bad.

As for home miners, they are done for the most part regardless of which coin they mine, the game has changed, and the ship has sailed but some people don't want to see the truth.

Actually here is an interesting page to watch hashrate estimates for Fractal https://explorer.unisat.io/fractal-mainnet/mining

We should ignore the "Merged Mining" numbers since those mine BTC as well, but look at "Permissionless Mining", we now have 20EH mining Fractal only, and were as high as 34EH, so that's 3% to 4% of the total available hashrate, with the current pace being -6% it could be 3-4% "Fractal" and the rest is just "luck", so it's possible that there is no actually hashrate drop, or maybe it's just a tiny 1% or so.

We shall find out when FB hype is done with.

It's probably people mining Fractal Bitcoin, but again, this shouldn't affect your payout, it should be the buyer's responsibility to ensure they use the hashrate correctly otherwise, as long as MRR sees your hashrate coming in, they should figure out a way to account the buyer for that, I don't know how MRR do all their calculations but if because the end-user is doing something wrong -- your payouts drop, you should stop using MRR.

Economics are rather complicated, it is not what you think, supply and demand are the the root of it, and then how they go together would determine the end result.

Say you have a vilage of 10 people, you buy 10 bottels of milk from the next vilage and sell it there, it costs you $1, you sell it for $2, what happens when 90 more people move to the same village, milk prices go up you would say -- but not always.

with 100 customers, you may now start thiking about buying a cow (not possible with only 10 customers), you now save on transportation and storage, your cost may drop to 90 cents and you can still sell it for $1.95, so overall 5 cents more profit for you and 5 cents less cost for the buyers.

The same logic applies with electricity, there do exist cases whereby the demand is low enough causing the production and transmission to be power more expensive.

As for putting the dry cooler inside, if it is heat related, it won't differ from just putting the miner with fans since it is the same heat, As for noise, I am sure the dry cooler would be a lot quieter than the small fans on the miner provided it has an EC fan (variable fan speed).

You are right in regards to the complexity level, it won't be as simple.

one thing you can try would be using inline fan, something like this https://youtu.be/8JJHSj-F0yI?si=SLk-Uj7HRZzcG0PO

The bottom line is this, to mine at home, you need a larger fan that spins at lower RPM.

I am not against what Philipma suggested, but there is one piece of information that might be missing when you buy a miner and then underclock it or run it with two hash boards you are basically paying a lot more for the same hashrate, if they gear costs you $1000 and you run two boards only, it would about $300 waste, that 30% or so loss might not be too noticeable if you already have a used gear sitting around or you found someone selling it locally for cheap, but if the gear is new and expensive than that difference might be enough to buy you the immersion cooling kit.

One thing to keep in mind as well is that the extra money you pay for silence is going to go to waste the moment you move to the next gear, whereby if you buy immersion cooling kits you would always be able to use it in the future, I think you should explore the smaller single-miner options like C1 from Foghashing, or Bitpod by DCX, those have very small dry coolers which you may be able to place inside the house to keep it warm, or connect it to your water supply to heat the water.

Aside from the obvious "luck" there exist things that would increase your chances of actually wining a block.


1- Make sure the gear and software you using are capable of finding blocks:

Many people overlook this simple fact, but not every miner out there is technically capable of solving a block, hashing is one thing, and hitting a block is another, there is a good reason some pools restrict certain mining gears from mining to their pool, we have seen one of the largest pools miss a dozen blocks because of a bug in their system, there probably some miners out there that have not proven themselves capable of solving blocks on the mainnet.


2- Your connectivity needs to be pretty good:

Generating a hash that is a valid block by consensus, doesn't mean you are guaranteed to win a block, if the latency between your gear and the mining pool/node you use to solo mine is bad, you may find a valid a block but fail to submit it in time, and thus, you would lose the block and probably won't even notice.

There is nothing more you can do to increase your chances, except to add more hashrate.

Payment swings are pretty normal on Nicehash since the hash rent is used for all sorts of purposes, I still remember not too long ago when they were paying like 7x IIRC for a few days, someone was performing a 51% attack on some Sha256 coin and wanted all the hashrate they could get, and then you get student spikes value in some altcoins where people want to mine that coin and are willing to pay more.

Also, sometimes you get stupid people outbidding each other for exactly no reason, so overall, it's pretty normal, it's also not uncommon for NH to pay less than directly mining to a pool, so anyone wanting to make profit from NH should always monitor the current status and even better, do it with a script that would automatically switch since these swings happen really fast.

This is a Watchdog software for Antmines, it isn't the software or the operating system you use to actually run your Antminers, you need to post your issue in the Mining Support section.

Make sure you post the important information needed for troubleshooting like

1- Miner Model
2- Kernel Log
3- Image from the status page (optional).

Please avoid trying generic sentences like "Miner isn't working" because nobody will be able to help you then.

But wait a minute, Fractal Bitcoin is supposed to be Merged-Mined & permissionlessly-mined with a ratio of 1:2, that means, there is likely no "hashrate moving", it just pools activating the merged coin or choosing not to, for example, Antpool active that by default but only for PPLNS payment mode, I think that 77% pace was just the result of variance given the small sample of 58 blocks, obviously, if Fractal earns some serious value then mining BTC does too.

I'd also imagine some people might be mining fractal permissionlessly but that won't be anywhere near 200EH that's for sure or else the affect on the current pace would have been great, i'd say it's no more than 50EH maximum, the rest is all just merged-mined with mother BTC.

It is, but escrow for used gears is very rare, in order to escrow used gears the escrow needs to test the miners personally, so instead of this going from the buyer to the seller, the gears will now go from seller to escrow, then escrow to buyer, and then testing mining gears is no easy task, you would need the right place for testing and a lot of time, all these things make escrowing used gears very difficult and people try to avoid it.


I have bought and traded thousands of used gears from China, the right source will always want to keep their name clean and thus they would still offer you DOA, when I first started dealing with my main supplier in China, I had to record video of me unpacking and testing the gears, and they also sent me videos of their own testing in China, overtime some solid trust was built and it became a matter of me telling the seller than x hash boards or PSUs were bad and they would send a replacement without a second question.

For obvious reasons, the main supplier I used to deal with always sold slightly more expensive gears, you find S9s selling for $90, yet they sell them for $100 or even $110, that extra money was reasonable because they did proper testing and cleaning, so the failure rate was pretty low like 1-2 hashboards in 100 batch miners, I did take some risks of buying from less reliable sources and ended up with gears in terrible conditions.

Overall, I'd advise against buying used gear especially from overseas.

OP, still waiting for your proof about them promising to pay you something.

Nobody in their right mind would want to facilitate used mining gears, I declined dozen of requests because I know it will be very difficult to judge who is in the wrong.

As for your second statment, in most cases, you would test the gear for 10-15 mins and assume it's good, when they reach to the client and operate for 10-15 hours, shit starts, so it is very difficult to test a used gear, and then many of them break during shipping.

@OP, got any proof of Alex telling you anything about any payment?

Anyone that does not offer DOA is clearly sending you units that are not functioning.


great that you responded, let's  see if OP is going to counter your stamtnet.

However, I find it amusing that you ignored this part

If you gave him a promise to pay him a certain amount -- it overrides your DOA policy.

@OP, if possible, post an image showing the initial communication, we need to see if you did indeed inform them about the DOA gears and that they did indeed make a promise to pay.

I did not say 5 cents is the minimum in the U.S, but sure thing 2 cents is, so if your country really had 2 cents power rate for anything "good scale" then it would have dominated the mining industry, but it is not, so where is the problem?


I am not talking about a hobby miner who runs an old miner ont their balcony to generate 50 cents worth of profit a day, those things happen everywhere, I am talking about mining Bitcoin for a business, so tell me, that guy with 1 gear in their balcony, can they run 1MW worth of gear? if they can't and they are limited by the 60amp main breaker they have, then that's a different story.

how many miners can you run at that 2 cents price? 3 of them? all these unrealistically low prices are non-expandable and unsustainble, i am talking about a reasonable and legal mining business, not someone outsmarting/ cheating thier landlords.

if any place on planet earth had 2 cents power rate for actuall mining, the U.S farms with 5 cents would have gone under the water.

Furthermore, mining at home is difficult, the noise, the cooling, still, even with close to cheap power, in the long run Hodling beats mining, you still need to consider gear failire, maintance, cooling and infrastructure,  it is not just power rate.

Allow me to make a very bold statement

Bitcoin mining isn't going to work for any small-scale miner anymore, long gone are the days when you could grab a few miners and make a profit at home, mining isn't even profitable at large scale anymore, you need to be mega large to compete, or be in a very special case where you don't have to pay for electricity, aside from that --  everyone will lose money if you got money to invest in mining, it would be best if you buy the coin and HODL instead, in fact, Hodling outperformed mining even when mining at home was a thing, there were only a few cases of which mining outperformed Hodling, and since things have become what they are now, Holding will most certainly beat mining.

Anything buying mining gear after reading this post, please post your status so we can review them in 3 years and see what would have been the result.

Post a picture of the tool so we can tell you where it comes from and you can contact the dealer/manufacturer directly, which most likely isn't Bitmain, most of the Asic fixture tools come from Zuesbtc, so that would be your first shot > https://www.zeusbtc.com/ASIC-Miner-Repair/Repair-tools/Test-fixture/

The other brand is Asic Repair, a Russian-made tool that is more advanced than the Chinese one, so it's more than likely that whatever you have is one of the two I mentioned, so do post an image link using https://www.talkimg.com/ and I will be able to help you better.

Generally, it's a bad thing for BTC, when only a few large entities can afford to mine BTC then

1- Censorship can be more effective:

Since they mine most of the blocks, if they blacklist your address and you want to make a transaction, it could be stuck for days, eventually, even stuck for months depending on the percentage they own

2- Regulation will be easily imposed, large firms can't just ignore the authorities, if the government tells them to do this or that with BTC, they will have to do it.


When people talk about mining pool centralization, I have always said that pool decentralization is far less dangerous than the centralization of hash power ownership, just take a scenario where 80% of the hash rate is owned by 3 U.S firms, they can do anything they want, besides, all it takes to damage the network would be some stupid regulation from the U.S administration.

اخي لا اعتقد ان مصطلح "مركزية" و "لامركزية" يتماشى مع وصف اي محفظة, مثال على عملة مركزية هي "الدولار" يعني ان صك العملة, التعديل عليها, الغائها وحتى تحويلها يتم السيطرة عليه من مكان واحد, ومن هنا تأتي كلمة المركزية, مثال على عملة "لامركزية" هي البتكوين, فلا يوجد شخص او جهة واحدة يمكنها التحكم في انشاء العملة, تحويلها او التعديل عليه, وهدا المعنى الحرفي لكلمة "لامركزية", اما بخصوص المحافظ فالسؤال دائما يكون هل هي "مفتوحة المصدر" ام "غير مفتوحة المصدر", فلا يمكن ان تكون المحفظة مركزية طالما العملة التي تحملها لامركزية والعكس صحيح.