Long story short, I ran a small scale mining operation in the beginning of 2017 for about a year. It was more of a hobby but did yield some good profit and I learned a ton in the process. Fast forward to 2019, I'm getting bored with my current job and looking to venture out on my own and try something new. I'm willing to relocate to potentially anywhere in the US, leaning towards WA due to electricity prices but am open to other options. I have the capital required to get things going (wouldn't need a loan from the bank). I've looked at current hardware options and it seems like Whatsminer M20 and Antminer S17 will give the best bang for my buck, but before I even go there I need to consider some of the logistics.

For people who've started up their own mining operation, where do you recommend I start? I'm mostly curious about creating the business entity, leasing (or potentially buying) the industrial space needed, working with the state and utility company to get lowest possible commercial rates, figuring out total load and power requirements, etc...

Any help/feedback would be much appreciated, thank you!

Any idea on how long it takes to retrieve funds after "force closing" a channel? One of the nodes I had a channel open with was offline so I had to force close, it's been about 1 week and the balance is still in limbo. When I enter "lncli pendingchannels" I get the following output. Any ideas?

Code:

    "total_limbo_balance": "16774760",
    "pending_open_channels": [
    ],
    "pending_closing_channels": [
    ],
    "pending_force_closing_channels": [
        {
            "channel": {
                "remote_node_pub": "03a503d8e30f2ff407096d235b5db63b4fcf3f89a653acb6f43d3fc492a7674019",
                "channel_point": "e176a4c2bbfa1009f28e53a284b49c34f937a86d8725e44ac4cb919943a6fb12:1",
                "capacity": "16777215",
                "local_balance": "16774760",
                "remote_balance": "0"
            },
            "closing_txid": "6a4d6b6a6765a412d706597a6f08c7191bc272b3f212c18dd0ffc99314143074",
            "limbo_balance": "16774760",
            "maturity_height": 549921,
            "blocks_til_maturity": 849,
            "recovered_balance": "0",
            "pending_htlcs": [
            ]
        }
    ],
    "waiting_close_channels": [

Closing TXID below, TX has over 300+ confirmations

https://blockexplorer.com/tx/6a4d6b6a6765a412d706597a6f08c7191bc272b3f212c18dd0ffc99314143074

I recently configured my first Lightning node (Bitcoin Full Node + Lightning Node) on a Raspiberry Pi using LND. I learned a lot in the process and feel I have a pretty good understanding of how Lightning works. With that being said, there are still a few things I'd like to get clarification on.

________________________________________________

1) When using LND and funding a new channel, is there a way to see what fees you're paying to have that channel opened? Conversely, is there a way to check what fees are paid to close the channel?

2) When your channel is being used to route payments, how do the fees get paid out to the channel owners? Do the fees go to your LND wallet or get added to your channel balance?

3) I noticed you can customize your alias and color (ex. #68f442). What purpose does the color serve?

4) How are funds allocated with Autopilot when you add new funds into your LND wallet? Are the channels created/funding amounts totally random?

5) How do I send funds from my LND wallet to my main BTC address? What command do I need to use? Do I have any control over choosing the fee?

6) What's the purpose of connecting to peers with "lncli connect NODEADDRESS" if you don't have a channel open with them?

7) Any good visualizers you'd recommend where I can see my node? The one on 1ML is a bit confusing to navigate.

8 ) How often does 1ML update node info? Is there a way to force an update? My node was last updated 11 hours ago but I noticed other nodes have been updated more recently

9) How long does it take to retrieve funds after "force closing" a channel? Two of the nodes I had channels open with were offline so I had to force close, it's been about 24 hours and the balance is still in limbo



________________________________________________

That's all I have for now, I'll be sure to update this thread if anything else comes to mind. Thanks in advance!

[Update:]

I'm in the process of setting up a Bitcoin/Lightning node on a Raspberry Pi following Stadicus' walkthough and have some pretty rudimentary questions (since I've never used Linux or a Raspberry Pi before). Link to the guide is below...

https://github.com/Stadicus/guides/blob/master/raspibolt/README.md

First question is really simple, I'm almost embarrassed to ask but I had no luck finding an answer on google. Under the "Raspberry Pi" > "Mounting external hard disk" section of the guide, it instructs us to "Edit the fstab file and the following as a new line (replace UUID=123456) at the end." He does this by putting in the following command line (this is all being done in a CMD window through a SSH client, in this case PuTTY)...

sudo nano /etc/fstab
UUID=123456 /mnt/hdd ext4 noexec,defaults 0 0

As you can see there are two separate lines, how do I add the second line in PuTTY so both commands execute at the same time? I tried using the "^" symbol after the first line but that didn't seem to work.

I'm sure I'll have more questions as I get deeper into the guide but this is currently what I'm stuck on. Any help would be much appreciated!

Appreciate the help. I finally got past that step and am now stuck again with a new problem. Under "Raspberry Pi" > "Login with SSH keys" it instructs us to use private key encryption to login to our Pi and provides the following guide:

https://www.tecmint.com/ssh-passwordless-login-with-putty/

I followed everything without any issues until getting to Step 8, which shows how to login to our Pi with the private key. It gives the following instructions:

"Open Putty and add your server login user followed by your server IP Address or FQDN on Host Name field in the form of user@domain.tld, enter your server SSH Port number if it was changed."

Assuming my servin login user is "admin" and the server IP address is 192.168.1.2, would I be putting admin;192.168.1.2 into the "Host Name" field? I tried just using the IP address and loading the private key but the SSH window opens blank and doesn't allow me to type anything. Once again, any help would be much appreciated! Would really like to get this thing up and running

I've been cruising through the rest of the guide but just hit another road block (under Lightning > Assign LND permissions to "admin"). It asks us to check to see if files admin.macaroon and readonly.macaroon have been created by using the following command

ls -la /home/bitcoin/.lnd/

When I execute this command I get everything in the screenshot except those two files. Do I have to wait for them to be created or am I doing something wrong?

I was able to get testnet fully operation and have started the migration process to mainnet. For some reason I'm having a hard time unlocking my LND wallet. Under "Mainnet > Restart bitcoind & lnd for mainnet" it has us create a new LND wallet using same password as testnet. Followed these steps without any issues but for some reason when I restart and unlock my wallet, I get the following error message

[lncli] rpc error: code = Unknown desc = wallet not found

Any ideas?

Update: Node is fully operational and live on mainnet. Thank you for all the help!

So to my surprise, I recently found 1.01 BTC in an old mobile wallet (Breadwallet). I tried sending a small amount (around .025) out last night and the transaction got stuck in "sending" for a while and then eventually canceled itself out, leaving me with my original balance. This morning I decided to send the full amount out and the transaction again is stuck in "sending" but hasn't canceled out yet. The transaction ID it provides also can't be found on the block explorer. Any advise on what to do?

I've heard of sites that use this maliciously, basically users will unknowingly be using their computer power to mine while browsing the site. I'd like to make a website that does this in a transparent way, basically giving people the option to mine cryptocurrency if they choose to. Anyone know anything about this? Any help on getting started would be much appreciated. Thanks.

I received my A3 this afternoon and having been having some problems. When I first set it up, everything was working flawlessly. Hashing at 833GHs on Siamining, no HW errors, everything smooth. About 2 hours later I checked again and saw my hashrate dropped in half with a bunch of X's on one of the hashboards. Since then I've only been able to reach 500-600 GHs, and am getting HW errors on different boards whenever I refresh. Anyone else having issues? I would normally try reflashing the firmware but it's not available on Bitmain's support page.

Hi,

My brother currently runs a home furnishing e-commerce site (www.decormarket.com) and is interested in adding a crypto/bitcoin payment option. Does anyone know where I would start? I tried registering on CoinGate but apparently their services are not available to US customers. I also know about BitPay but they only accept Bitcoin. Any other good options?

Anyone else with the Jan batch of S9's notice a distinct whistling sound when the miners are running? I've only noticed this with the latest batch. This is not to be confused with the normal sound of fans spinning.

I'm going to be sending back a total of 3 defective hashboards from 2 different miners. My question is, how do I know which boards to remove? For the first miner chain 1 and 2 are defective, so how do I know which hashboards correspond to the first 2 chains?

I started having problems with my D3's after updating to the latest November firmware (drop in hashrate, missing chains, etc). Anyone know where I can find earlier versions to see if it fixes the problem?

I've been able to post in a few threads without any issues but just recently went to the main Zpool thread and don't see the "reply" option. Why am I locked out of this one topic and not others?