mining altcoins

[Wandererfromthenorth]

Just curious.

[Operatr]

Well, you won't get very far with the USB Erupters in all honesty. They are now an older generation, and are basically just a novelty miner that would be a good place to start learning about mining without much investment. There is a big list around here somewhere that has what is currently out there for USB miners but I don't have time at the moment to find it.

It is likely you will never break even with them even mining altcoins, as they are only able to mine SHA based coins (like Bitcoin). Scrypt coins like Litecoin are much more profitable at the moment, for which you will need either ATI/AMD graphics cards, or get something like a Dualminer USB (dualminer.com). How profitable they are varies by the minute in which mining with a coin switching pool like coinex.sw, middlecoin, clevermining, etc would serve you well to make best use of your hashpower.

Getting started the USB miners are a low cost way to get your feet wet, but don't expect to become a millionaire overnight as that is not at all realistic.

[frankenmint]

clarification: profitable for gpu/scrypt miners who once mined a lot of bitcoin until difficulty hit 65,000,000 last year.