LTC Mining Updates

I'm feeling pretty good about the current LTC price, it's really holding a lot of support down here in the upper-50's to lower-60's where I feel like a lot of people have been disappointed. The key here is that we all know those big over-confident bull runs don't last, but coming down without crumbling is really nice--not that we haven't felt that before.

Now, I'm no expert on analysis, and I don't follow the news feeds like those who swing-trade much higher stakes, or even those who mine much higher stakes, but I know what I'm getting out of my operation, and it's more than satisfying.

I get free heat in the winter and just enough over the costs to have a nice little purse off to the side. In addition, I'm supporting a technology I really do love. My two favorites are LTC and XRP because of their capabilities. Ok, so I'm rambling off-topic here. Back to the mining update... Price is acceptable.

Remember, I restarted all my counters, data logs, and a couple accounts on February 7th of this year. I'm pretty happy about how fat the total value is. I did a little selling high a little over a week ago, and I'm holding that value in the USDC until I need to draw it for the electric on the 34th of this month.

Judging from the current value, I'll be able to choose to pay the whole electric with a little overage or potentially just pay the miners' share and leave more in for the dips to cover costs. It'll be fine either way, but I do like padding. Again, going on a tangent. Let's talk about temperature...

It's obviously been warming up outside and we've managed to just keep some semblance of comfort by opening all the windows in the living room and two of the bedrooms (the others still have the storm windows on for the moment). It'll be time to put the cowl back on the box--which will alleviate a considerable amount of noise--to pull air from outside and exhaust it outside.

This year, I'm finally knocking out a whole glass block window for this purpose (I'll take pictures and whatnot). I need a pretty large intake and exhaust to move 1,250 CFM of air and I have to keep the intake and the exhaust away from each other if possible. I have a solution for this that I will share once it is built. Ok, moving on to a new part of our program...

As you can see, this is my electric bill from last month and some estimates for the current cycle. It just so happens that I had the rig down since late last year and happened to start the machines back up on February 6th. This is perfect for the data logging and analysis for this project as I not only have a perfect start cycle but because of the billing schedule, I also have a two-week head start.

Now, some boring geek stuff...

While the stock clock speed of these particular miners is 384 MHz, they are capable of quite a bit more without too much risk. Now, Miner #3 is a bit of a black sheep and has been since 2017, but I'm working on swapping it out for ol' Miner #6 who tragically lost its power supply a few months ago. I haven't bothered replacing it because five miners seem perfectly adequate for this project--and I'm lazy... very, very lazy.

You'll see that the hardware error counts are frighteningly high, but are they? I have no idea. I thought so, then I didn't, then I did, but the whole while it hasn't really mattered. It really hasn't slowed them down, so until they explode, I'll accept the error counts. Why display them? Well, in case it starts to matter, I can look back and say to myself in an exasperated tone, "Dammit, why didn't I just see the signs?"

Ok, so you can see that other than Miner #3, these things are chugging right along as they have for a little over two years now. I'm feeling confident in the project starting all the counts and data from scratch and really pushing this idea for other strange folks like me. Code examples for monitoring, using Google Apps Script to cheat a free hosting platform, and other tech stuff coming soon!