[NiHaoMike]

The difficulty level is continuing to rise, faster than expected in fact. However, I was able to counter that. Or rather, I found an online friend who happens to be a programmer.

Long story short, the coin I was mining with the Kindle Fire turns out to be not so ASIC resistant after all. It defeats the simpler, large scale ASICs (e.g. Antminers) quite well, but smaller, higher complexity ASICs like my RK3288CX can still mine it quite well. (Large scale ASICs exploit parallelism, which ASIC resistant algorithms try to impede by increasing the logic complexity so that it would make building a large ASIC for it uneconomical.)

Basically, I plug my tablet into the USB port on the ASIC board, then my friend wrote a daemon running on the ASIC to accept requests over USB. On the tablet (already rooted and running Cyanogenmod), she replaced a library with a hacked version to forward the requests to the ASIC, then get the "nonces" much faster than calculating them locally. There's a latency penalty going over USB, but that becomes less and less significant as the difficulty keeps going up.

I then discovered another bonus. When I first got the ASIC, I tried merge mining to boost profits. That worked initially, but there was a bug that caused that to stop working after the difficulty increased. It turns out that whatever my friend did on the ASIC fixed the bug so now I'm merge mining *and* dual mining on it. (Merge mining is mining multiple coins with the same algorithm, while dual mining is mining multiple coins with different algorithms, so as to maximize utilization of the miner.)