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Old 11-10-17, 09:22 PM   #1
NiHaoMike
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Default a great use for a 100W solar panel

I recently got a 100W solar panel and among other things, it powers my cryptocurrency mining cluster. It's a rather small cluster consisting of a few cheap smartphones, two old tablets, and a small ASIC board that altogether use about 16W or so, but it still makes a decent profit. There's a 12.8V, 82Ah LiFePO4 battery pack for energy storage/backup power, and the DC/DC converter in my PC makes use of whatever power is left over.

One of my (online) friends has mastered the art of combining art and electronics, as well as hosting an awesome TV show to show it all off. Needless to say, that makes people jealous and a few have resorted to hate to make themselves feel better. I have to admit that I'm one of the jealous, but I reacted by becoming friends.
Meet Naomi Wu, Target of an American Tech Bro Witchhunt
In light of the situation, the mining profit would mean more to my friend than it does to me. The solution is obvious - redirect the miners. Sadly, only some of the coins readily convert into a form that my friend can easily use, but the thought is what counts. It also helps solve two of my problems related to mining - the ever growing pile of electronic parts (ever since I got into mining over 2 years ago) and the perception that I'm driving up mining difficulty purely for my own profit.

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Old 11-11-17, 08:36 PM   #2
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Is she the one who optimized your asic device to speed your return rate? I wouldn't worry so much about what others in the field feel about what you are doing. As long as you and your allies profit, let the others hate on about it.
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Old 11-12-17, 01:59 AM   #3
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I'm not worried about competing coiners hating on me for "having an unfair advantage" with an ASIC. I know that it's a fact of life for those who have an unusually high hashrate. Just don't take it personally and it will have no impact.

The hate towards my friend (not related to cryptocurrency, just mean, jealous people), however, has negatively impacted her business and hence why I feel that sharing mining profits is a good way to show my friendship. And that using solar power to do so also shows my friendship for the Earth.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5046

Here's a system diagram for those trying to understand the setup. The "ideal diode" is a TI SM74611, which is quite a fascinating device.
Click image for larger version

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Old 11-12-17, 10:02 PM   #4
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What does something like this cost to build and what are some expected returns on investment? A friend's boss just spent a bunch of money for dozens of machines for mining and said the electricity to mine was in the $50,000 per month range.
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Old 11-12-17, 10:17 PM   #5
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It depends on the algorithm the coin uses and the scale of the operation. Bitcoin, the most famous cryptocurrency, is pretty high in energy use because there are so many large scale mining operations.

For the setup I mentioned here, the hardest part to get would be the ASIC. I was lucky to win one early in the year, but as nobody back then knew how to make it profitable enough to buy, the crowdfunding failed and the ASICs never made it to large scale production. Which is great news for the few who do have one, since if everyone had them, the difficulty would rise to the point where the profits are low again. Although I would say that if it did manage to make it to large scale production, it would be unlikely that really large miners be built since unlike Bitcoin ASICs, high N Scrypt ASICs need a good amount of RAM which adds significantly to the cost, some for the RAM itself but more significantly for the RAM wiring on the board. On top of that, the pre production Jameson Hasher used surplus DDR3 which is dirt cheap because everything new uses DDR4.

As for mining with smartphones, it was once very profitable but now the difficulty is high enough that even a $10 smartphone would take a long time to break even.

EDIT: Just for fun, I calculated the efficiency and performance of the Jameson Hasher and it is on the order of 60 times as efficient as a GTX 1080Ti and nearly twice as fast. That's pretty much what's expected of a cryptocurrency ASIC - insanely efficient and fast compared to GPUs for mining supported algorithms, but worthless for anything else.
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Old 11-19-17, 01:33 AM   #6
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https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/s...36250454163458
I got way more fame per watt of PV than I expected.
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