One of these little guys runs you about $67 at current market value and nets you 330M/hash. This would cut down power costs immensely.įor Example your average Dell PC has a 300W PSU amd a power draw of 50Watts, if you setup a miner using a raspberry Pi and 4 Block Eruptors you would be drawing 10 Watts MAX, while having a hashrate around 1400M/hash. They are simply just very versatile and easy to use if you are just getting started in bitcoin and makes it easy to get started mining, you can even hook these things up to a Raspberry Pi or Beagle Bone Balck development board instead of a normal PC. The advantage with this miner is clear in that it is far easier to use in comparison to other miners and it is very easy to expand your mining power should you choose to do so, grab a USB hub and plug more of these in till your hearts content. ![]() Its a new form of ASIC that is powered through a simple USB port. If you want to get into bitcoin now im going to reccomend ASICMiner Block eruptors. There are alot of different ASIC miners out there if you want to mine, however many are expensive ranging into $1000's of dollars and many more have long wait lists. ![]() These ASICs are far more efficient then a GPU or CPU ever could be as they are designed to do one task whereas a CPU or GPU is a generalized form of processor. In the case of bitcoins you want an ASIC that can do SHA 256 hashes as this is the hashing algorithm that is used by the bitcoin network. It is a specialized piece of electronic equipment that is designed to do one task and do that task to the greatest possible efficiency. Now what is a an ASIC? Well to put it simply lets define it, an ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Thats why if you are new to mining or just want to get started im going to be up and front with you, your going to have to get a form of ASIC miner. Power efficiency is everything if you hope to get the most for your inital investment in mining hardware. The name of the game in bitcoin mining is power efficiency, if you are consuming electricity at a rate far faster then your generating coins then you are doing it wrong. At this point and time mining on a GPU WILL cause you to lose money rather than gain it for the simple fact that you are consuming a large amount of power to generate coins. I notice alot of people want to get into coin mining and the first they they hear is they have to go out and buy tons of high end GPUs and tons of powersupplys to run them. This is going to sound like an AD, however i think the message is important enough to warrent it. We'll get that up even higher by getting a second USB hub to use our remaining sticks, and if we do it non-stop, the Eruptors will be profitable in seven months or so.This post is going to be a Review/Public Message of Bitcoin mining and ASICMiner Block Eruptors, as well as guide and links to help those interested: By using only some of the ports, we were able to mine at just about 4Gh/s consistently. Plus while some of them were extremely hot, some were cool to the touch.Ī million combinations of ports, spacing, and timing later, we discovered that our powered USB hub wasn't quite so powered after all.If we tried to use every port, some of them wouldn't receive enough power. Once we were successfully mining ( the Eligius mining pool has great stats) it was a long afternoon of getting as many of those Eruptors successfully working as we could.Īt first it seemed like they were all chugging along, but we noticed our hashrate was way lower than expected, and lots of rejections and hardware errors were piling up on some of the Eruptors. It takes a while for cgminer to detect and utilize all the Eruptors, so be patient if it takes a while for them all to show up. Use zadig to install drivers for your USB sticksĬgminer.exe -o "" -u YOUR_BITCOIN_ADDRESS -p anything.Download the "zadig" USB Driver installer.Download the latest release of CGMiner (we used 3.8.2).We weren't surprised to find that a lot of the information about how to set up the mining software to talk to the USB sticks was out of date, so here's how things stand in November 2013 if you're mining with ASICMiner Block Eruptor Sapphire USB sticks on Windows. With 16 of the cute little guys, a powered USB hub, and a slow afternoon, we got to fiddlin'. We love Bitcoin, and while we haven't done much mining since GPUs got involved, last week Josh saw some little ASICMiner Block Eruptor USB sticks available for $30 each and figured they would be fun to mess around with. Guess who doesn't pay for electricty in their office?
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