Hobby Bitcoin mining can still be fun and even profitable if you have cheap electricity, an efficient bitcoin mining machine, and get the best Bitcoin mining hardware.It’s important to remember, however, that Bitcoin mining is competitive and today it is not a good idea for the average person to mine.If you want bitcoins then you are better off buying bitcoins.Since it’s now impossible to profitably mine Bitcoin with your computer, you’ll need specialized hardware called ASICs.Table of ContentsBitcoin Mining Hardware ComparisonWhat is an ASIC Bitcoin Miner?Don’t Get ConfusedHow to Find the Best Bitcoin MinerBitcoin Miners for Sale on eBay or AmazonUsed Bitcoin Mining Hardware for SaleJust Want Bitcoins?Hardware ProfitabilityMost Efficient Bitcoin MinersBitcoin Mining Hardware CompaniesBitcoin Mining EquipmentBitcoin Mining Without Hardware?USB Bitcoin MinersOriginally, Satoshi intended for Bitcoin to be mined on computer CPUs.However, Bitcoin miners discovered they could get more hashing power from graphic cards.

Graphic cards were then surpassed by ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits).Nowadays all serious Bitcoin mining is performed on dedicated Bitcoin mining hardware ASICs, usually in thermally-regulated data-centers with access to low-cost electricity.bitcoin chain browserThink of a Bitcoin ASIC as specialized Bitcoin mining computers, Bitcoin mining machines, or “bitcoin generators”.There is Bitcoin mining hardware, which mines bitcoins.There are also Bitcoin hardware wallets, which store bitcoins.There are some important factors to look at when determining which Bitcoin mining ASIC to buy:Hash rate – How many hashes per second can the Bitcoin miner make?bitcoin baby jetMore hashes cost more, which is why efficiency is crucial…Efficiency – You’ll want to buy the most efficient bitcoin mining hardware possible.bitcoin quote api

Since miners use a large amount of electricity, you want to buy one that converts the most amount of electricity into bitcoins.Price – How much does the bitcoin miner cost?ethereum exodusCheap mining hardware will mine less bitcoins, which is why efficiency and electricity usage are important.bitcoin graph iphoneThe fastest and more efficient mining hardware is going to cost more.Don’t try to buy a miner based on only price or only hash rate.bitcoin dealer londonThe best ASIC miner is the most efficient bitcoin miner.bitcoin stolen on airAim for value.If you’re a hobby miner who wants to buy a couple rigs for your house, eBay and Amazon both have some decent deals on mining hardware.Both new and used bitcoin mining rigs and ASICs are available on eBay.ethereum anonymity

One may want to buy used ASIC mining hardware on eBay because you can get better prices.eBay’s customer protection ensures you’ll get a working product.bitcoin mi az aOther bundled equipment may be included with your purchase depending on the seller.We recommend purchasing the Antminer S7 or the Antminer S9.If you just want bitcoins, mining is NOT the best way to obtain coins.Buying bitcoins is the EASIEST and FASTEST way to purchase bitcoins.Get $10 worth of free bitcoins when you buy $100 or more at Coinbase.You can use a bitcoin mining profitability calculator to determine your estimated cost of return on your mining hardware.Be sure to take electricity costs into account.Most mining hardware appears profitable until electricity costs are accounted for.Good Bitcoin mining hardware needs to have a high hash rate.But, efficiency is just as important.An efficient Bitcoin miner means that you pay less in electricity costs per hash.The miners in the table below are currently the most efficient Bitcoin miners on the market.The Avalon6 gets 0.29 Watts/GH, but costs more than $200 more than the Antminer S7.The Antminer S7 is more efficient, with 0.25 Watts/GH.

The Antminer S7 also costs much less, and comes with 4.5 TH/s of hash power compared to the Avalon6’s 3.50 TH/s.The AntMiner S7 is clearly the better option between these two miners, which are currently the most efficient miners available for purchase.To improve your efficiency, there are also companies that will let you order hardware to their warehouse and run the miners for you.You could also cloud mine bitcoins.But both options are a lot less fun than running your hardware!Bitmain – Bitmain makes the Antminer line of Bitcoin miners.Bitmain is based in China and also operates a mining pool.BitFury – BitFury is one of the largest producers of Bitcoin mining hardware and chips.Its hardware is not available for purchase.Spondoolies Tech – Spondoolies Tech is an Israeli based mining hardware manufacturer.In addition to a Bitcoin mining ASIC, you’ll need some other Bitcoin mining equipment:Power Supply – Bitcoin rigs need special power supplies to funnel and use electricity efficiently.Cooling Fans – Bitcoin hardware can easily overheat and stop working.

Buy a sufficient amount of cooling fans to keep your hardware working.You can find Bitcoin mining equipment for sale on eBay.It’s still technically possible to mine bitcoins without dedicated mining hardware.However, you’ll earn less than one penny per month.Mining bitcoins on your computer will do more damage to your computer and won’t earn a profit.So, it’s not worth it unless you’re just interested to see how the mining process works.You’re best bet is to buy dedicated hardware like the Antminer S7 or Antminer S9.Using a Bitcoin USB miner with your computer was once a profitable way to mine bitcoins.Today, however, USB miners don’t generate enough hashing power to mine profitably.If you just want to get a Bitcoin miner USB to learn, eBay is a good place to buy a cheap Bitcoin miner.I’m building a prototype blockchain project called AlertChain for the Blockchain Virtual GovHack sponsored by the United Arab Emirates, under Challenge №3: Fighting Fraud and Proceeds of Crime.The general idea is to provide a decentralized blockchain to record security incidents, alerts, and fraud notices.

A few tools will come with it, like automatically updating firewalls based on IPs performing malicious probing attacks such as automated SQL injection detection.Since my goals included storing user-submitted data and incentivizing usage I decided to spin up my prototype using MultiChain, an open source platform that supports all the Bitcoin features along with improvements for digital assets and permissions.I already have an existing Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, and creating a t2-nano instance for testing is both cheap and easy.We’ll get started by entering the EC2 service from the Services Menu and clicking Instances on the left nav-bar menu, and then clicking the ‘Launch Instance’ button along the top of the window pane showing any other running instances we might have.The first step involves choosing which Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to use; there are a variety of operating system and container choices ranging from Ubuntu Linux to Microsoft Windows.We’ll choose the Amazon Linux AMI for both the default developer friendly tools that come pre-installed as well as its cheap (free-tier eligible) cost compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3.Note: this is a choice made for prototyping, not the final production versionNext, we’ll need to choose the Instance Type, and in our case we’ll choose a t2.nano (again for cost efficiency while testing).

Feel free to choose a t2.micro if you still have Free tier eligibility available on your account.Before you continue, do NOT click the blue “Review and Launch” button; click the grey “Next: Configure Instance Details” button instead so we can fine tune a few things.In Step 3, go ahead and check the box for “Enable termination protection” — it’s just a minor feature that forces you to acknowledge deleting the instance by disabling the protection first.Additionally, you can choose your preferred availability zone as well in case you plan to put other instances in the same area and reduce latency between them in the future.Again, just as before, choose “Next: Add Storage” instead of the blue “Review and Launch” button.At the time of writing the size of a t2.nano storage volume is 8GiB.This is plenty for our testing purposes since we’re not going to have the overhead of a web server.If, however, you plan to store data on the blockchain in large amounts (1MB or more per block) you should consider provisioning a more appropriate amount: the storage prices are reasonable.I highly recommend you uncheck the “Delete on Termination” box, as your instance will delete the storage volume once it’s deleted, and you may want the data more than the instance in the future.

This is a feature that can’t be changed through the web interface after you start the instance — you’d have to use the CLI tools if you change your mind.Now, let’s add a tag to the instance.Now that we’ve named the instance we need to configure the security groups.I’ll always recommend naming the security group something more useful than “launch-wizard-1” or whatever default name Amazon provides.Security groups can be shared between instances, and changes/edits are universal.More importantly: once you launch an instance its security group CANNOT be changed.The best practice here then is to make individual security groups for your instances; I generally don’t share security groups unless the instances are clones of the same image behind a load balancer, for instance.First, change the SSH rule to a point to your own IP address so that no one else can see or attempt to connect to your SSH port.For instance: 111.22.33.44/32 (the 32 is the mask for this and only this IP).Next, add two Custom TCP Rules with ports 6284 and 6285, with a source of Anywhere so that your MultiChain instance can communicate with peers.Finally you can press the “Review and Launch” button which will give you a review page of your various settings.

Once you’ve confirmed that you’ve got everything the way you want, go ahead and click “Launch” which will… take you to the last step.You should create a new keypair and name it in an easy to understand manner.Once you’ve downloaded it the “Launch Instances” button is available.Once you’ve launched your instance Amazon will give you a confirmation page, and when you head back to the EC2 Instances page you’ll see your new instance running its initial checks as it boots up.Once checks 2/2 are completed and the IP address is assigned you’re ready to log in and get going with MultiChain.Note: the IP address here is indeed real, and since it’s going to be the core AlertChain node it’s public.The SSH port is NOT open to the world, however, so its only an example and won’t work if you try it.Feel free to skip this section if you’re already familiar with SSH’ing into an EC2 instance.For Mac users, it’s as easy as going to terminal and typing:For Windows, let’s download the PuTTY installer here: https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty-0.67-installer.msiThis will provide us with both the PuTTY program, as well as PuTTYgen to convert our .pem formatted key to the .ppk format for PuTTYgen.Once you’ve installed the package, run PuTTYgen and click Conversions / Import Key, and select the Amazon key (.pem file) that you just downloaded.When you “Save private key” it will convert your .pem file to a new .ppk file, ready to use in PuTTY or any other PuTTY compatible windows app like MobaXterm.When you run PuTTY, there are only a few things to do:Now on the Session page you can either save the entry or directly ‘Open’ the connection.When you’re asked for the user name you will input ec2-user instead of root, and if your key is recognized then voila: you’re logged in!First things first, update any pre-installed packages:Next, let’s download the MultiChain installer to the /tmp folder.Then unpack the tar file:Now install the MultiChain files to /usr/local/bin:cd multichain-1.0-alpha-26 (this folder will be different depending on the version)And just like that the MultiChain components are ready to use!For AlertChain we want to customize the blockchain deployment according to the various parameters available according to MultiChain’s parameter guide.First, we’ll create the blockchain scaffolding:Next, we’ll edit the default parameters to suit AlertChain’s needs.We want our blockchain to have the follow attributes:Note: With newer versions of MultiChain the defualt ports have changed to 6284 and 6285.