I got into mining back in the Butterfly Labs era, when the first ASICs were landing and nobody really knew what they were doing. Put my money into a Black Arrow Prospero, which, if you were around then, you know how that went. Late, hot, loud, and a long expensive lesson. It left a bad taste, and that wasn't just from the smoke when it tried to burn the house down. I walked away from mining for good. Or so I thought.
The Bitaxe generation pulled me back in. Open hardware that actually works, that you can tinker with and understand. And it got me wondering whether the old first-gen gear could still run. Not just power on, but run properly, clean and hashing at spec. So I started tracking the old machines down and restoring them, and I've put the first one on a 24/7 webcam with live stats:
vintagehash.comIt's a Butterfly Labs Jalapeno, circa 2013, 5 to 8 GH/s, solo mining to my own node. Live hashrate, share log, temps, and the odds of it ever finding a block (spoiler: about 1 in 73 trillion). Figured people here would appreciate it more than most.
The restoration:
It turned up filthy. Years of dust packed into the heatsink, thermal paste gone to chalk, running hot. Stripped it right down, cleaned everything out, fresh paste and pads, new fan. Powered off a dedicated 12V 10A PSU on the barrel connector (USB for data only, these don't run off USB power). Then the usual fight getting an old cgminer build to actually talk to it, plus the Zadig/WinUSB driver dance. Anyone who's done this with BFL gear knows exactly what I mean.
Picking the runner: I've got a few Jalapenos, so I tried them to see which ran cleanest, going by cgminer's Device Hardware% (bad nonces over total, the number that actually matters, not raw HW vs accepted). The one on the stream came out best by a good margin, sitting around 0.1% once it had settled. Honestly surprised me how accurate a cool, properly re-pasted chip stays, even on hardware this old.
Everything on the stream is live and verifiable. Stats come straight off the miner, and the mining address is on screen so you can check it on the chain yourself. If it ever finds a block, it happens on camera.
And yeah, the irony isn't lost on me that the machines that burned me (nearly literally) are the ones I'm restoring for fun now. I've still got the two Black Arrow Prosperos. One of them actually runs again. There might be a reckoning on camera at some point.
Got more queued up as well, more Jalapenos, a BFL Single, a few Monarchs. Happy to go into any part of the process in more detail if anyone's interested.
Anyone else still crazy enough to be running first-gen gear from back then for fun, or am I on my own with this?
Come watch it not find a block, forever and ever and ever:
vintagehash.com
