[NiHaoMike]

Cryptocurrency mining, in general, is not meant to be a primary source of income. (If you build up a big setup, keeping it running *is* a full time job in itself!) In my case, I like to think of it as my electronics hobby getting its own job. ("I heard you like to make money so here's a miner to leave running at home when you're at work, so you can make money while you make money.")

What my friend did might not have had anything to do with my ASIC not mining certain altcoins reliably. Strangely for something so low powered (rated 6W TDP!), it has a feature often called "auto tune". More or less it works by lowering the voltage to the crypto engine until it gets errors, then backs off a step or two. In doing so, it invariably misses some nonces and the pool for that altcoin doesn't like it, interpreting it as a broken miner. The fix for that, of course, is to disable auto tune. The extra fraction of a watt it uses is totally lost in the noise and I already replaced the small stock heatsink with a substantially bigger one I salvaged from an old motherboard.

I should have mentioned that I broke a personal record for time to break even on investment. I paid my friend $5 to write the software, which paid for itself in just a day and a half. In return, I managed to boost the effective hashrate by about 50x, half of which is more or less going to my friend so I end up with 25x. (That's how I got her to accept such a low initial payment *and* give her an incentive to make something that actually works well.) How that's going to map to actual profit remains to be seen, especially since the effective hashrate increases with difficulty. The coin in question is rather unstable and might crash soon, but given the difficulty has already increased to the point where it would no longer be worth mining with the tablet alone, there's little to lose. Currently trending at about $65/month, not bad for a setup that uses about as much power as an energy saving light bulb.