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Old 04-26-17, 02:40 AM   #4
NiHaoMike
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A whole bunch of altcoin mining rigs - a few cheap smartphones and old tablets plus a small ASIC board. Altogether, they use about 15W or so and yield around $80/month worth of altcoins - enough to cover the Internet bill and then some. It also sets a nice budget for "small" hobby parts and other gadgets.

It's down quite a bit from the days when 4 cheap smartphones would get $100/month mining Perk. (Which doubled in difficulty just shortly before crashing, made nearly $1000 and only lost $15 of coins that were waiting to reach the exchange minimum.) My best month of mining was on a (then) experimental coin bringing well over $200 that month, although the difficulty level caught up pretty quickly. I got to understand the life cycle of altcoins - birth, high profitability early stage (some coins fail to get to this point - "infant mortality" or "never got off the ground"), difficulty level hike+maturity, and eventual crash/"death". (Most memorable for me was Realbucks that went through the whole cycle in about 2-3 months, although I made a good amount with just one miner in that time.)

My cousin wanted to get into mining but he didn't want to do the research or IT work needed for the highly efficient coins. Since he is renting a place that has electricity included in rent, a cheap Bitcoin mining appliance was a perfect fit. A friend of mine was selling an Avalon 4.1 (once a favorite among college students in that it's actually quiet enough to run in a dorm or apartment), so I bought it using profit earned from one of my other mining ventures. If all goes well, all three of us get happy.
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