The wallets are all fixed and working.
2 seperate groups, Burst Consortium, and Burstnation.
The pools seem to be working too, after weeks of DDS attacks.
Before you get too excited thou, the diff is very high now, and the block reward not great.
You can still make money, but you need many TB. (I gave up cos i only had 20TB).
I would say realistically you want at least 10TB, but should aim for more like 50-100TB.
AWS does not work well...you need locally attached USB drives are best. Spin speed is not too important. 5400rpm archive drives work great. (usually cheapest too - take much longer to plot thou, but u only need to plot once).
As for the price, well it's 100 sat am the mo, which peeps will moan at, but it was 6 sats when i started, so i can't complain.
Will it rise, probably, mainly due to die hard miners, stabilty seems very good now, no other POC coins (yet). 4 min block times, and very low fees. (u can transfer for 1 burst)
So if u can find cheap hdds, and have very cheap electricity (still on 24/7) then what do you have to lose?.
Also, if you use an online wallet, and are not bothered about a bit of corruption, you can use old knackered drives. If you split the plots in to chunks, rather than 1 big plot per drive, then u can use duff drives, if a few sectors get knackered, so u lose a few plot files, just chkdsk the drive, and replot...
I was using thrown away 2TB drives, which after a full wipe and format probably gave me about 85-95% good working capacity. (just remember to let them sleep, or they will spin 24/7 and last about 2 months)
Anyways, thats my experience. Like all crypto, you makes a choice and takes a chance.
Try googling IMINEBLOCKS (youtube), he has made several vids showing his setup and his earnings at various times this year.
J
OK... so some valid points here but I need to correct a few mis-statements.
Yes, the wallet issues has mostly been fixed and DDOS attacks died down for the moment. But, you also need to be aware that there are some bad players how heavily influence this coin. That is mainly why i dumped about half of my earnings a few months back. Right now at 5 cents this is insanely profitable to mine but this coin is probably a bit more risky than others due to said influence of criminal element.
Not sure about the realistic minimum to get in now... like i said, my 50TB have been earning about $80-$90/week at 5 cents per coin, but this is not necessarily proportionate downward (or upward for that matter). Meaning, if you only throw 10TB onto the network, not sure you can realistically expect even $18/week because of the way this kind of mining works. Therefore, I would recommend at least 20-30TB to start but more if possible. a few days ago you could get 8TB for $150, and that's about the best deal I've seen on HDDs.
The thing you need to understand about burst is this... you will make most of your money off hitting blocks, and to hit blocks semi-consistently, you probably will need at least 30TB but better to have 40-50TB+. Case in point... in Dec, I hit 7 blocks... 4 outright winners (about 1000 burst each) and 3 that were what I consider "shared" winners (about 500 burst each). So, a total of about 5,500 burst ($280) from winning blocks. The rest of my rewards for the entire month was only 1750 burst ($88). These come from the shared portion of blocks that another person in your pool won. So, 75% of my earnings came from hitting blocks. My assumption is that if you go in with say 10TB, you may not hit any blocks at all because that it comparatively a very small % of what many other miners are doing. Just something to think about when getting into this.
To the next point of correction... spin speed is actually important although granted, yes, the 5400RPM seagate externals do work just fine as that is mostly what I have currently. However, if you can get 7200RPM drives for similar costs (or a little more), it would absolutely be well worth it.
This is because there are 2 major aspects to successful burst mining. Total capacity, and speed of that capacity. The speed part it controlled by 3 contributing factors:
1- Plot type (highest influence): there are 2 types of plots in burst... regular and optimized. Regular are easier and much quicker to plot, but they are also considerably slower to "mine". What this means is that if you have 50TB of regular plots, they will probably mine at about 50MB/sec. By contrast, Optimized plots, with all else being equal, would probably mine closer to 80MB/sec. So, if you and another person in your pool found the same block... you with regular and them with optimized, they would almost always win that block. I made the mistake early on of mining with mostly regular blocks and probably lost over $1,000 because of it. Writing optimized blocks is more difficult and time consuming but well worth it in the end.
2- Data connection type (2nd highest influence): This is one that I learned from Lee on his IMineBlocks youtube channel. Clearly, the external drives need to be plugged into a USB3 port. However, if you're going to go to 50TB, you will obviously need to expand your ports. My first attempt at this was to just buy a typical 1:5 or 1:7 USB3 expander (meaning USB3 to USB3). I thought this worked ok but then I learned that a PCIe slot to USB3 expansion card works much better. Indeed, in my current setup, i have 9 drives on these PCIe expanders and they are about 30% faster than the USB to USB expanders. They only cost about $25 so this is another no-brainer. Because again, if you are competing with another miner for a block that extra 30% speed will make a huge difference.
3- Drive speed (moderate influence): This one is a bit harder to define, but as I said above, it does matter. The trick is the cost factor. If you can get a 7200RPM drive for the same or maybe up to 10% more, it is well worth it. I have 1 internal 7200RPM drive and that things mines at about 95MB/sec, while most of my 5400RPM externals are around 80-85MB/sec. a decent advantage but again, speed is only 1 of the factors, so if that 7200 costs you too much more to the effect that you are sacrificing capacity... due to the this, it's a bit difficult to say where the cutover point is.
But bottom line, if you take care of #1 & #2, you should do quite fine and not have to worry about #3.
Oh and about electricity... contrary to the post above, you do NOT need cheep electricity to be profitable in this. These drives only consume a small % of watts compared to GPUs and they are not even spinning most of the time. The elec cost is so minimal that I don't really even factor it into my ROI calcs.
