With the recent price drops on the USB Bock Erupters and Blades, I decided to finally start playing with Bitcoin mining. I tried mining with my home computer long ago, but my wife complained about the performance of the machine, so I gave up. At that time, bitcoins were cheap and buying a dedicated computer and graphics cards didn't seem worth it. So, I recently purchased a small number of USB Erupters (5) and a Blade. I started with BitMinter, because it was easy to download and install. I loaded my Raspberry Pi up with MinePeon (an Arch Linux distro with cfminer and a nice web interface) and attached my 5 USB sticks to it. I found MinePeon to be a little buggy, but it worked ok. The blade was a disappointment, though.
Here is a list of problems I encountered:
Bitcoin-qt and Namecoin-qt I'm convinced starting this app up earlier this year, downloading the entire blockchain, and creating a wallet caused me to exceed my AT&T DSL useage limit. As much as I love the idea of crypto currencies, this seems like the major roadblock for Bitcoins and alternates to become widely accepted forms of currency in the future.
MultiBit This is much better because it doesn't download the entire blockchain. After my first mining transaction, I couldn't figure out where the transaction went, though. I didn't see it in MultiBit, even though I could see it on blockchain.info. I eventually figured out that I needed to choose "Reset Blockchain and Transactions" from the Tools menu. Then I was able to see my transactions. There needs to be a MultiBit client for Namecoin.
MinePeon The first problem I found with MinePeon was changing the password. It defaults to username: minepeon and password: peon. After I reset the password from the web frontend, I was locked out. I did this three times and re-imaging my SD card before giving up and leaving the default password. I haven't tried resetting it from the shell yet, I'm afraid to interrupt my mining operation.
ASICMiner USB These things are rock solid. I get very few rejections or hardware errors. I'm using a Etekcity 10 port hub with a 3A power supply. I have 2 more USB hubs on the way and I'm planning on hooking all of the hubs up to a computer power supply that puts out 28A on the +5V. The only problem I encountered was when I first tried them out on my Win7 PC, I needed to download the drivers. I googled for them, downloaded, and installed the drivers without any problems.
ASICMiner Blade This was the biggest disappointment and the hardest part of my mining operation. This thing is buggy and fairly unreliable. I put it in a mini-ATX computer case with a 240W power supply. I ended up getting one of the new green PCB boards with about 3mm of PCB missing from the side, no fuse, and a fixed clock. Here is a list of things I hate about it:
- It uses the Getwork protocol instead of the more efficient Stratum protocol. I suspect this is where I'm seeing less than 10.7 Ghps from BitMinter. I'm also seeing a LOT of traffic on my network.
- It shows up as a 10Mbs ethernet adapter on my switch. Who uses 10Mb ethernet anymore?
- There are a ton of errors being reported at BitMinter (2.5%). I tried to get it to work with BTC-Guild, but they don't have a getwork protocol anymore and I couldn't get it to work. I tried to use bfgminer 3.3.2, but I got an error about --http-port was an unrecognized command line option. I even tried compiling it myself on my raspberry pi and got the same error. I want the blade to run without going through another computer. I'm only seeing just under 10Ghps from this, probably because of these errors.
- If you don't put 2 ports, 2 Server addresses, and 2 user:pass separated with commas and something in the pass area, the thing will save the configuration all messed up with lots of mixed up text in the fields.
- The statistics are all messed up. Even though I'm seeing about 10Ghps, this is what the blade is reporting:
Total MHS: 01456
Received: 0000048225
Accepted: 0000006190
Per Minute: 018.92
Efficiency: 012.83%
Up Time: 0d,05h,27m,10s
Current Server: mint.bitminter.com:8332
Chip: OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
