ASIC Bitcoin Mining

I decided to give ASIC a try but as I've mentioned before I'm cheap. Not wanting to drop a load of cash on anything that has just one purpose I decided to try a Block Erupter.

You can find these on Ebay for about $50 to $60 USD. Far from a bargain. They perform better than a $90 ATI GPU but not by much and that's all they do. I've bee hashing at the advertised rate of 333 MH/s. They get pretty warm to so I'm thinking if I don't want to burn it out I need better cooling.

The advantage of the Block Erupter is that it pulls less power to operate and hashes faster than a GPU. The bad news is that 333 MH/s is not going to cut in the world of Butterfly Labs ASIC miners. BFL sells their smallest miner for $300 USD and it mines at 5 GH/s. Yes you would need 15 Block Erupters at even $50 each you have far exceeded the $300 mark. At $750 you could be hashing at 10gh/s with two BFL miners. The only thing the Block Erupter has going for it is you can get one now. The BFL and other ASIC miners are generally on back order until next year. Once they flood the market the Block Erupter will be as worthless as mining with your CPU now.

Still for me it was nice to get a little piece of Bitcoin history to add to me collection and I'll run the miner in the back ground since I have nothing better to do with it. Maybe in 10 years I'll have 0.1 Bitcoin.

By the way before you can mine in windows with the BE you need to download and install the drivers from this location:

http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx

Plug the BE into a USB port and it will fail install. Point the driver search to the download location and let it install.

After that I used Bitminter with it's Java GUI. It detected the BE right away as an Icarus on Com 7. I turned it on and 333 MH/s was rolling. The heat is outside of my laptop so I can let it mine and not worry about killing it. More than one laptop has been known to bite the dust on mining detail. They really aren't built for good heat dissipation.

I wouldn't say it's fun to play with a BE since there isn't much to it but it was an interesting 10 minutes to set it up. I don't think those 10 minutes were worth the $56 I paid for the BE though.

Maybe I can find another SHA256 coin to mine that doesn't have as huge a following yet has some potential. The might get a few more minutes of fun out of investment capital.