[ANN] FutureBit Moonlander 2: The Most Powerful and Efficient USB Stick Miner!

[DonBit]

You will never make your money back running one of these. As it sits the ROI is nearly 2 years at current prices, meaning you will be priced out by the difficulty adjustments and never break even. Then you add in the costs of a powered hub and you are just throwing money away. I just dont get it....

Generally mining is betting the price will go up and then it pays out. The outlook for LTC is that will go up, thus miners tend to cost more. Take for instance Bitmain, they had L3+ selling for $1250 in June. Now it's $2280, the same machine.  Expectancy is the future price of total coins generated would at least pay off this total, before the cost of power makes profit negative.

By the time you find out it's profitable (because the price went up) it will be too late.

[1714961286]

1714961286

[Lee-2017]

You will never make your money back running one of these. As it sits the ROI is nearly 2 years at current prices, meaning you will be priced out by the difficulty adjustments and never break even. Then you add in the costs of a powered hub and you are just throwing money away. I just dont get it....

Generally mining is betting the price will go up and then it pays out. The outlook for LTC is that will go up, thus miners tend to cost more. Take for instance Bitmain, they had L3+ selling for $1250 in June. Now it's $2280, the same machine.  Expectancy is the future price of total coins generated would at least pay off this total, before the cost of power makes profit negative.

By the time you find out it's profitable (because the price went up) it will be too late.

I just bought 1 LTC from kraken for $54. So let's say that's the equivalent of 1.85 LTC had i paid $100 which is the cose of the miner. If I placed these $54 (or $100 for argument's sake) on the miner, would I have been better off? I'm finding it hard to work out the true ROI, assuming the price of LTC/USD does not change over time.

[mdude77]

You will never make your money back running one of these. As it sits the ROI is nearly 2 years at current prices, meaning you will be priced out by the difficulty adjustments and never break even. Then you add in the costs of a powered hub and you are just throwing money away. I just dont get it....

Generally mining is betting the price will go up and then it pays out. The outlook for LTC is that will go up, thus miners tend to cost more. Take for instance Bitmain, they had L3+ selling for $1250 in June. Now it's $2280, the same machine.  Expectancy is the future price of total coins generated would at least pay off this total, before the cost of power makes profit negative.

By the time you find out it's profitable (because the price went up) it will be too late.

I just bought 1 LTC from kraken for $54. So let's say that's the equivalent of 1.85 LTC had i paid $100 which is the cose of the miner. If I placed these $54 (or $100 for argument's sake) on the miner, would I have been better off? I'm finding it hard to work out the true ROI, assuming the price of LTC/USD does not change over time.

That's the case with all coins.  The only thing you can do is project at current difficulty and price.  From there it's just guessing.

M

[org0x004]

You will never make your money back running one of these. As it sits the ROI is nearly 2 years at current prices, meaning you will be priced out by the difficulty adjustments and never break even. Then you add in the costs of a powered hub and you are just throwing money away. I just dont get it....

Generally mining is betting the price will go up and then it pays out. The outlook for LTC is that will go up, thus miners tend to cost more. Take for instance Bitmain, they had L3+ selling for $1250 in June. Now it's $2280, the same machine.  Expectancy is the future price of total coins generated would at least pay off this total, before the cost of power makes profit negative.

By the time you find out it's profitable (because the price went up) it will be too late.

I just bought 1 LTC from kraken for $54. So let's say that's the equivalent of 1.85 LTC had i paid $100 which is the cose of the miner. If I placed these $54 (or $100 for argument's sake) on the miner, would I have been better off? I'm finding it hard to work out the true ROI, assuming the price of LTC/USD does not change over time.

You can mine alternative scrypt coins with less difficulty and bet to a price increase bigger than ltc.

[2xjO9M3P]

You will never make your money back running one of these. As it sits the ROI is nearly 2 years at current prices, meaning you will be priced out by the difficulty adjustments and never break even. Then you add in the costs of a powered hub and you are just throwing money away. I just dont get it....

Generally mining is betting the price will go up and then it pays out. The outlook for LTC is that will go up, thus miners tend to cost more. Take for instance Bitmain, they had L3+ selling for $1250 in June. Now it's $2280, the same machine.  Expectancy is the future price of total coins generated would at least pay off this total, before the cost of power makes profit negative.

By the time you find out it's profitable (because the price went up) it will be too late.

I just bought 1 LTC from kraken for $54. So let's say that's the equivalent of 1.85 LTC had i paid $100 which is the cose of the miner. If I placed these $54 (or $100 for argument's sake) on the miner, would I have been better off? I'm finding it hard to work out the true ROI, assuming the price of LTC/USD does not change over time.

You can mine alternative scrypt coins with less difficulty and bet to a price increase bigger than ltc.

Arguably, if that is your goal, you would be better off just buying the coin and hold.
That said, I pre-ordered a couple and am going to do exactly this. At these prices and speed it's more about having fun, and perhaps support the network on some of the smaller coins.

[sunk818]

Arguably, if that is your goal, you would be better off just buying the coin and hold.
That said, I pre-ordered a couple and am going to do exactly this. At these prices and speed it's more about having fun, and perhaps support the network on some of the smaller coins.

That's my plan. I'm looking at multipool.us to mine the most "profitable" scrypt altcoin. I guess this will be my form of "buy and hold".

[DeepTerrfici]

i would like to get a couple of these but missed the preorder. is it possible to get them anywhere??

[Lee-2017]

You can mine alternative scrypt coins with less difficulty and bet to a price increase bigger than ltc.

I'm not being negative guys, just asking the questions to understand. Less difficult alt coins are even cheaper, i buy 1 LTC and exchange to those, will get heaps of each.

The problem is: to secure the coins against the exchange's CEO stealing everything, I will need to download the block chain of each alt coin. This has to be on a very fast SSD, minmum 1 TB for all the coins. I could safeguard each wallet.dat and delete the wallet, but that means I can't buy again more of that coin unless i reinstall and download the block chain.

Everything seems easier than mining 24/7.

[sunk818]

Everything seems easier than mining 24/7.

Yeah, been trying to figure out how best to store all these different altcoins. I see the most value rising when you get in early on a new mineable coin, but there may not be an exchange yet. So, it becomes a bigger hassle to manage all of these. I wish there was wallet software that manages all altcoins on coinmarketcap for you.

[jstefanop]

You will never make your money back running one of these. As it sits the ROI is nearly 2 years at current prices, meaning you will be priced out by the difficulty adjustments and never break even. Then you add in the costs of a powered hub and you are just throwing money away. I just dont get it....

I hate to repeat this every couple pages, but the #1 point of these is not all about ROI. They are low cost miners anyone can afford to buy and a great way to learn about crypto and how mining works. I specifically build these in order to get new people into the ecosystem, that would have never bothered because A) they cannot afford 2-5k USD mining ASICs, or B) can't even run one because of crazy power and noise requirements. Alot of people also gift these as a way to get people that have never even heard of crypto into crypto.

I say this all the time, but new people and veteran members alike get stuck into the ROI and higher price mania and forget that the only way your going to even ROI on a 2k machine, or expect your 54 dollar litecoins to turn into 200 dollar litecoins is by getting even more people interested, buying, and using crypto. A new user is not going to buy 100 Litecoins, or buy a L3+.

Whats better? The same old 10,000 people using litecoin and about 1,000 huge mining farms mining it all in an endless cycle, or 100k new people all mining with these USB miners and all getting interested and buy/using Litecoin?

Hope you get it now

[philipma1957]

The final design has been locked in for production next month, and I'm happy to reveal it you all! PCB is a cool matte black design, with the same anodized black aluminum heatsink as the original moonlander. I decided to include both memory voltage adjustment in addition to core voltage, as my tests had an efficiency gain of 10-20% for ASICs that can handle lower memory voltage!

As a super thank you to all who pre-ordered I decided to include a 25mm fan into the cooling solution as well, so no need to come up with clumsy external fan solutions to keep these cool. A top side small ASIC heatsink will also be included to further increase thermal efficiency (it will be black not blue). With this setup I've achieved 1.6W/MH all the way up to 800mhz, which is 4.6 MH of hash power for just 7.5 watts! Pretty impressive for a chip thats designed to do 3.8 MH at the same watts.

Check out the pics below!



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you built a fan into it.  damn  looks nice.

got one for me?

[sunk818]

Will it fully power 10 units?  and/or has anyone found a cheaper one?  Thanks!

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-005K-00058&cm_re=powered_usb_3.0_hub-_-0XP-005K-00058-_-Product

Take a look at this one from Plugable 7-Port USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Charging Hub with 60W Power Adapter with BC 1.2 for $40. I'd be comfortable and confident installing 4 Moonlander 2 (ML2) spaced apart. Manufacturer said in a review comment, "When the hub is connected to the computer the hub is capable of a maximum of 1.5A under the USB-IF Battery Charging 1.2 standard." So, 5V * 1.5A = 7.5 watts. If ML2 is 1.4 to 1.5 watts per megahash, then 5 megahash is 7 to 7.5 watts.  This HUB can fit 7 USB devices, but we will have to see if ML2 can fit in the provided space and whether excess heat can be controlled adequately.

I know of another 10 port USB HUB and it is 10W per port, but they want $700 for the unit.

[Astrali]

Will it fully power 10 units?  and/or has anyone found a cheaper one?  Thanks!

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-005K-00058&cm_re=powered_usb_3.0_hub-_-0XP-005K-00058-_-Product

Take a look at this one from Plugable 7-Port USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Charging Hub with 60W Power Adapter with BC 1.2 for $40. I'd be comfortable and confident installing 4 Moonlander 2 (ML2) spaced apart. Manufacturer said in a review comment, "When the hub is connected to the computer the hub is capable of a maximum of 1.5A under the USB-IF Battery Charging 1.2 standard." So, 5V * 1.5A = 7.5 watts. If ML2 is 1.4 to 1.5 watts per megahash, then 5 megahash is 7 to 7.5 watts.  This HUB can fit 7 USB devices, but we will have to see if ML2 can fit in the provided space and whether excess heat can be controlled adequately.

I know of another 10 port USB HUB and it is 10W per port, but they want $700 for the unit.

what about short USB extender cables?
0,5 meter .. and plug it in?
you can place them all in a row and plug the cables into the hub

[philipma1957]

Will it fully power 10 units?  and/or has anyone found a cheaper one?  Thanks!

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-005K-00058&cm_re=powered_usb_3.0_hub-_-0XP-005K-00058-_-Product

Take a look at this one from Plugable 7-Port USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Charging Hub with 60W Power Adapter with BC 1.2 for $40. I'd be comfortable and confident installing 4 Moonlander 2 (ML2) spaced apart. Manufacturer said in a review comment, "When the hub is connected to the computer the hub is capable of a maximum of 1.5A under the USB-IF Battery Charging 1.2 standard." So, 5V * 1.5A = 7.5 watts. If ML2 is 1.4 to 1.5 watts per megahash, then 5 megahash is 7 to 7.5 watts.  This HUB can fit 7 USB devices, but we will have to see if ML2 can fit in the provided space and whether excess heat can be controlled adequately.

I know of another 10 port USB HUB and it is 10W per port, but they want $700 for the unit.

what about short USB extender cables?
0,5 meter .. and plug it in?
you can place them all in a row and plug the cables into the hub

Use dual plug this gives more power for each stick.

I want one or two of these.  Pm sent to op

[QuintLeo]

You can mine alternative scrypt coins with less difficulty and bet to a price increase bigger than ltc.

I'm not being negative guys, just asking the questions to understand. Less difficult alt coins are even cheaper, i buy 1 LTC and exchange to those, will get heaps of each.

The problem is: to secure the coins against the exchange's CEO stealing everything, I will need to download the block chain of each alt coin. This has to be on a very fast SSD, minmum 1 TB for all the coins. I could safeguard each wallet.dat and delete the wallet, but that means I can't buy again more of that coin unless i reinstall and download the block chain.

Everything seems easier than mining 24/7.

 Why do you think you need a SSD for that?
 Current hard drives have write speeds that are FASTER than 100MB Ethernet can transfer the data.

[jstefanop]

I hate to repeat this every couple pages, but the #1 point of these is not all about ROI. They are low cost miners anyone can afford to buy and a great way to learn about crypto and how mining works. I specifically build these in order to get new people into the ecosystem, that would have never bothered because A) they cannot afford 2-5k USD mining ASICs, or B) can't even run one because of crazy power and noise requirements. Alot of people also gift these as a way to get people that have never even heard of crypto into crypto.

I say this all the time, but new people and veteran members alike get stuck into the ROI and higher price mania and forget that the only way your going to even ROI on a 2k machine, or expect your 54 dollar litecoins to turn into 200 dollar litecoins is by getting even more people interested, buying, and using crypto. A new user is not going to buy 100 Litecoins, or buy a L3+.

Whats better? The same old 10,000 people using litecoin and about 1,000 huge mining farms mining it all in an endless cycle, or 100k new people all mining with these USB miners and all getting interested and buy/using Litecoin?

Hope you get it now

I empathize with you but its freakin' god___ blank annoying when a new person reads about this and they are all SOLD OUT!! Can't even get our hands on one and our meaning me! (Plus a lot of other new people I'm sure)...just sayin

Im working on scaling up production...im a one guy shop, and I don't have the resources to risk making a massive batch that I can't deliver. Which is why the first batch was relatively small, but as soon as the first batch is shipped out and everything goes smoothly ill be able to ramp up fast.

Have to keep in mind that the main bottleneck are the ASICs...I secured as many ASICs as I could afford, and all of that came out of my pocket with zero pre-order money. For second batch ill have more capital to work with and be able to order a larger number of chips.

If you didn't get one there will be another chance!

[DonBit]

These are great news jstefanop.  Thanks for the update on the 2nd batch.
Hope I can secure my order this time.

[Sev18]

Is it technically possible to build usb ETH miner like this?
Would it be impossible due to ASIC-resistance feature of Ethash?

[jstefanop]

Is it technically possible to build usb ETH miner like this?
Would it be impossible due to ASIC-resistance feature of Ethash?

Yea its already been done..a GPU attached to a USB riser

There are no ASICs for Ethash since the bottleneck is the memory throughput and the 2GB+ dag size, and currently GPUs have the fastest memory of any compute device that can store that much data in memory. You could theoretically make a very efficient eth ASIC, which would essentially be a GPU with the cores optimized for ethash, but since the 2GB+ ram needed would already cost 10-20 watts, at most you could probably reduce power consumption from ~120 watts to maybe 25 watts for the same hash power and probably even more cost than a GPU. The power savings alone would not be worth it, since ~30MH for a single eth ASIC would never ROI the development costs.

Scrypt is actually a "similar" algorithm to Ethash, but how its structured allows you to make tradeoffs in memory size vs compute, and since compute is cheap scrypt ASICs have essentially reduced the memory requirements per scrypt core to 32kb. The ASIC used in Moonlander 2 has 64 scypt cores, which comes out to ~2MB of essentially L2 cache memory on the die. Just this 2MB alone actually makes up >50% of the ASIC die. You can't make this memory tradeoff with Ethash, so you can quickly see why a pure Ethash asic with its 2GB of memory needed is nearly impossible

[Mr_Snipes]

Hey Jstefanop,

you might wanna tell bitmain to stop their false advertising, they still claim that the L3+ is the most efficient litecoin-miner
You have 1.3 W / MH which meant an L3+ with 500 MH built with your ASIC-chip would consume 650 Watts. 700 if your controller-board and the fans were really shitty.