The story

What a fucking summer!

Weather is crazy here and this week end it was raining again, so my plans have fallen through.

This is why I decided to clean up a little bit and found this beauty.

This is my first bitcoin miner, an ASIC at the crazy rate of 340 MH/s.

In fact, I've found a bunch of them along with an old raspberry pi (the first one, yes folks! with just 512MB of RAM).

It brings up some memories when in 2013, one of my collegue, Alex, was talking about bitcoin.

The man was crazy about it, he just bought one bitcoin (for about 100€ at the time) and thought it will be something huge. Day after days, Alex kept talking about bitcoin so I decided to get information on it.

I was convinced, but not enough to buy bitcoin myself, and as a geek, I decided to mine bitcoins, at least if it was a fail, I could resell the hardware.

Long story short, I mined bitcoin with this ASIC, made a decent amount of money, use this money to buy more hardware, etc etc, and I stopped mining 2 years after that (my last machine was a crazy at the time 30GH/s butterfly labs ASIC miner that I’ve sold in the end).
Since that day, I still own some bitcoins (0.04 btc, more or less 50€ when I stopped mining) and till now, I hodl :)

Nonetheless, it looked like the perfect opportunity to procrastinate, I stopped cleaning, and decided to restart this old mining setup.

Lets get (re)started

The SD card was still ok, so I installed a fresh Raspberry Pi OS on it.

I know there is some specific OS for mining, but I don't care about having a nice UI, and I wanted to do it old fashion style.

At the time I was using bfgminer and slushpool so I used the same stuffs.

I installed bfgminer which was easy because there is an apt package now, but it failed. For some reason, I don’t know why, it was not able to connect to the stratum server.

After some unsuccessful searches on the internet, I abandonned bfgminer and tried cgminer, and it worked !

Like you can see, I’m now mining at the “amazing” rate of 4.7 GH/s.

I had to recreate a brand new slushpool account, my old one was not working anymore and I was astonished. The UI is not the old HTML only UI anymore and it’s really a modern one now, great work guys I love it !

In the end, everything was working and I get back to my cleaning.

Will it make any money?

Sunday morning, after my coffee, I looked at slush pool.

Not that bad! There is some up and downs but in the end I’m mining at a 4.6GH/s hashrate which is nice considering I'm using some 7 years old devices.

But did it made any money? Did I mined at least one satoshi?

Yes I did, but only one satoshi, I was expecting a little bit more to be honest.

Is it profitable? I don’t think so, and it going to take years before reaching the minimum payout threshold.

Conclusion

I’m going to let this setup run for a week.

Will it make any money? Nope. Is it a good idea to run it? Definitely not.

But at least, i's a fun project and I can now call myself a miner again :)

Maybe I’ll try to test mining with other crypto using the same sha256 algorithm to see if I can actually make a profit.

Let me know if you wants some news about my mining rig, or if you know why bfgminer is failing (pool 0 JSON stratum auth failed).