How I Became a Crypto Miner

For my first post on Steemit, I wanted to share how I became a Bitcoin miner….

My interest in Crypto began in 2014 when I bought my first Bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin had recently dropped from a high of around $1200, and was trading between $400 and $600. I didn’t buy very much, I thought it was far too expensive and risky as hell. LOL! Then in May May 2017, Crypto just exploded and I was suddenly very interested again. Since that time, I have been following crypto religiously. Having come from an IT Infrastructure background, I started to seriously consider mining, I wanted to get hands on. Then, when a batch of Bitmain’s AntMiner L3+ became available in late July, I knew I had to jump in headfirst. And that dive started when I submitted my order for two L3+ miners on August 1st… and proceeded to wait for them to arrive.

In the meantime while patiently waiting for my miner to arrive in late September, I kept thinking about where I would put the miner. I knew they ran really hot, and I was aware they are super noisy, upwards of 80db!. I hear (pun intended) hearing damage can occur with prolonged exposure at this level. After some contemplating and marking off the days on my calendar, I finally decided to run two two 220V outlets in my laundry room. My laundry room is just off my garage and gets really cold in the winter, to the point need to run baseboard heat constantly to keep the pipes from freezing. The waste heat from my miners would at least keep the laundry room warm, the garage too if I opened the door, and keep the pipes from freezing. However, I couldn’t shake the concern about the noise. Not to worry however, I still had just under two months to solve that problem.

At this point my buddy also bought an L3+ and we started seriously discussing the possibility of scaling up to a small mining farm between the two of us. We thought we could start small as a proof of concept, and if mining was both interesting and profitable, perhaps we would scale up and out of the hobby stage.

In fact, I had run some preliminary numbers using https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc to determine Litecoin profitability and estimated, based on previous trends and Litecoin prices at the time, what the hash rate and profitability would be when our miners arrived. For my two miners, I had estimated a 15% to 20% monthly increase in hashrate difficulty and a potential ROI at about 3 months. In hindsight, this turned out to NOT be true at all, and the hash rate difficulty is now significantly higher and ever increasing.

Anyway, several weeks after submitting our orders for the L3+, my buddy and I also bought Bitmain's Antminer D3 Dash Miners. At that point we started talking about what a larger operation may look like given we were already outgrowing our as yet unused spaces, mine in my laundry room and his in his basement. Around, this time, somewhere near the end of August, I was looking into small industrial space in my area. While I found a few available, this was too much for our small miners. Especially given that purchasing through the Bitmain site was damn near impossible sometimes, and we still had no guarantee our original orders would arrive. Was Bitmain just a scam? I was pretty sure they would arrive, but I was also pretty sure Bitmain would “test” them on their own network, for their own profits, while we waited for them to ship.

While continuing to wait, as Bitmain “tested” our miners, I started looking into how our soon to be mining operation could scale up. As an IT guy, my first thought was to look into hosted rackspace, especially if I wanted to buy more miners. Heck, I really just needed a shelf, some power and Internet access. However, I soon realized that hosting facilities seem much more expensive when you are personally paying the monthly rates. The first quote I received for a rack was $2,000/month with a 36 month contract.

However, there are some miner focused hosting facilities, generally where there are inexpensive electric rates. For example, I was looking into a facility in Washington State with cheap electricity, remote hands, and they said we could ship our miners directly from Bitmain. However, I really wanted to get hands-on with my new miners and did not want to send them out of state. Basically, I wanted to have more control over my miners, and besides, there was little cost advantage in the published rates rates compared to my own home electric.

Despite the total lack of trust that Bitmain would deliver on time, we took another risk and became owners, or future owners of the Antminer S9. At this point I was keenly aware I had outgrown my laundry space, and my friend’s basement, and I had yet to see a miner! Rackspace was out, leased space was out, the only options remaining to us were to convert a space in one of our houses… or build a mining shed!

With our first batch of miners arriving in 3 weeks, we quickly scoured the Internet looking for a shed that would suit our needs. My first requirement was that if our mining endeavor did not pan out (which was looking more likely with every hash rate increase), I would at least have a usable shed to hold two large 100 Gallon trash and recycling containers and while keeping the critters out. That way I could eventually get my trash barrels out of my garage. In fact, I was looking for a shed that that looked like this:

The second requirement was that it be located behind my house next to the circuit breaker, as well as fit within an unused dirt area to the side of my patio... and of course able to hold up to eight or nine Antminers!

We started looking at prefab sheds, quickly ruling out that idea in favor of a self-built, more robust structure. This lead us to these plans for a Cedar Fence Picket Storage Shed which can be found at http://www.ana-white.com/2012/04/plans/small-cedar-fence-picket-storage-shed

In my next post, I will detail our mining shed build out...