My Bitcoin mining experience

In this post I am going to cover my experience with Bitcoin mining over the past 20 months or so. During this time I have purchased specific hardware for the task of mining Bitcoins in order to come out with a profit at the end. My journey started in June 2011 when I purchased 4 ATI 6990s and has more or less come to an end now in March 2013 when I sold my mined Bitcoins for a profit.

The aim of this project was to be able to purchase some cool hardware that could perform a high level of computation, that would eventually pay for itself. Hash cracking is a hobby of mine and I saw Bitcoin as a good opportunity to generate profit while I was not cracking hashes.

There is a lot of other Bitcoin specific terminology throughout this post so I will try to provide various links to describe these aspects as necessary.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer (P2P) digital currency that allows for instant payments between anyone, anywhere, in an anonymous manner. As Bitcoin is P2P there is no central authority giving it many advantages over many traditional currencies. For further information on what exactly Bitcoin is and how it works I suggest taking a look at the about page found here.

Bitcoins can be “mined” with computing power, for example you can use CPU/GPU power to collect Bitcoin. It is recommended to go with GPU power over CPU for Bitcoin mining as CPU is extremely slow in comparison to GPU. This is because the computation involves generating a SHA-256 hash and this operation can be much faster performed on a graphics card.

Generally AMD (Formally ATI) graphics cards are used for this task as they are much more efficient at this than Nvidia based graphics cards, you can find a comparison between the different graphics cards and what they can provide for your Bitcoin mining here.

Bitcoin miner hardware and software

As above graphics cards are much more efficient at the Bitcoin mining process than CPU, so I based my hardware selection on a set up using the best AMD card available at the time which was the ATI 6990 – a dual GPU card. When I was planning this in 2011 GPU was the way to go, however nowadays there are more FPGA and ASIC options available so these should also be considered when purchasing Bitcoin mining hardware. The efficiency per $ of these pieces of hardware is outlined in the link in the previous section.

Below is a list of the hardware I purchased in June 2011, one of the main goals was to keep the start up costs low so I basically purchased some of the cheapest hardware available to me at the time – noting that in Australia hardware prices are typically higher than other countries as well.

  • 1           Corsair VS2GB1333D3 2GB (1x2GB) DDR3     $22.00
  • 3           OCZ Fatal1ty Series 750W Modular     $387.00
  • 1           Intel Core i3 2100     $122.00
  • 1           Gigabyte GA-H61M-D2-B3 Motherboard     $79.00
  • 4           Powercolor Radeon HD6990 4GB     $2836.00

The total hardware cost was $3446 AUD for the required hardware. Power costs are calculated further down.

Bitcoin miner partsHere is an image of the purchased hardware.

No hard drive was purchased as a USB flash drive I already had was used for this which you will see in the images, these are very cheap and minimal space is required for Bitcoin mining, you can get away with a few GB for the operating system and that’s it. Spare items I had available included an ethernet cable used for network connectivity, a monitor and VGA cable for initial set up, as well as a keyboard and mouse. These are not included in my costs as I already has them ready to use.

I required some PCIe 1x cables to connect 3/4 of the graphics cards to the motherboard. Bitcoin mining, like hash cracking, does not require the full bandwidth of the PCIe x16 bus so this allowed me to buy a cheaper motherboard and make use of the PCIe 1x slots instead of purchasing a much more expensive motherboard with 4 16x slots. These 3 cables were purchased from Cablesaurus as they accept Bitcoin payments and I already had some Bitcoin to spend that I had mined previously. You can make these cables yourself easily enough however while Bitcoin was still quite young I was keen to support it’s growth by purchasing what I could with it.

Below is an image I took while assembling the miner, you can see the PCIe 1x cable attached to the larger PCIe 16x card.

Bitcoin miner graphics card PCIe 1x

As you can see everything was pretty minimal to keep costs low, even the GPUs were cheaped out on in terms of brand, although I do not believe this made much difference as the underlying hardware is quite the same.

The operating system used for the miner was LinuxCoin which is a Debian based OS image that has everything required for mining ready to go. Some other Linux OS’s were trialled prior to this however I found LinuxCoin great after having countless driver issues.

Below is an image of the Bitcoin miner set up and running. The “case” was basically some spare scrap metal attached together with rivets, there is some electrical tape covering the corners to cover the sharp metal.

Bitcoin miner running

Here are a couple of images from the side.

Bitcoin miner side

Bitcoin miner side

Running the Bitcoin miner – Challenges and costs

Keeping the Bitcoin miner running was much harder work than anticipated, I was hopeful that it would be a “set and forget” project in that once it had been purchased, assembled and was running that would be it. This was however not the case and there were a few challenges and annoyances along the way.

Firstly there were heat and sound issues. Running 8 GPU cores with an overclock (overclock switch on each card was on, increasing each core from 830MHz to 880MHz) flat out 24/7 generates a lot of heat, each card was typically running continually at 100c. The cards were cooled by their default stock air coolers which meant that the fans were also going very fast the entire time causing an extremely loud noise. The solution here was to run the Bitcoin miner in another room with nearby air ventilation. The best option here would have been to purchase some water cooling blocks for the cards and run a water cooled system, this would reduce sound and heat by a lot as well as extend the life of the cards and protect the investment.

I did not do this as I was trying to keep costs low and wanted to see a fast return, at the time the cost of 4 water blocks alone would have paid for another 6990 card so I did not justify the cost as worth while. Looking back I probably should have paid the extra money and set this up to keep everything running optimal, however with that said I did not have any problems with the hardware running it in this manner for so long.

Another issue that occurred was that occasionally the graphics card drivers would crash causing everything to stop. I did not always keep on top of things and check constantly that everything was running all the time, which involved confirming all 8 instances were mining away no problems – one instance per GPU core. I also admit that there were times where I would be so annoyed with software issues that I would just leave it off for days at a time. A few times at the start only two 750w power supplies were used which were not enough to power everything with the overclocks, a couple of crashes were caused by this which was fixed by adding in a third power supply.

A few months after starting the project throughout the summer of 2011 (December – February in Australia) a lot of the time the miner was left off as it was just too hot, heating up a lot of the house. There were not really any overheating problems of the hardware, if this came up I would have been more inclined to swap to water cooling.

Additionally during the summer period Bitcoin was only a few dollars each ($2-$5/BTC) so the miner was left off for some time during these less motivational phases. Looking back now since Bitcoin has risen up again so much it would have been a lot more profitable to stick to it and keep mining.

The following graph from bitcoincharts.com shows the long term price of Bitcoin since it begun. Note the drop in price since I started mining in June 2011 and the low point in my 2011 summer (December 2011 – February 2012).

Long term bitcoin price
Click image for larger version.

Power is a very important aspect that must be factored in. Here in Australia this is unfortunately quite expensive compared to many other parts around the world. Comparing my results to other Bitcoin miners around the world I found that they were typically making much more profit than I was due to power costs. Overall I calculated about 1/4 of my total mined Bitcoin was spent on power costs – more on the break down of costs later.

All of these issues were increased by the fact that the default overclock on all 4 cards was enabled to provide a better overall result. Obviously an overclock will require more power, produce more heat, and ensure a higher chance that the drivers may crash in comparison to normal operation. To me however it was worthwhile to do, as all 8 GPUs overclocked basically gave another 1 GPU worth of power which made quite a big difference to the final result, again I really wanted to get the most out of the hardware that I had. The default overclock switch took each of the 8 cores from 830MHz to 880MHz.

Over time lower profits have been observed, this is mainly because when I purchased the hardware not a lot of people were using such a large amount of GPU power to mine Bitcoin. Nowadays however with graphics cards becoming cheaper and with more people getting involved in Bitcoin mining, the overall profit has slowed down while the difficulty has increased. This was also related to the amount of coins from November 2012 being halved from 50, to 25 per block. The recent price rise in Bitcoin (see above pricing graph) has helped counter this, although with new technologies becoming available such as ASICs it is hard for my older model GPU based miner to keep up.

Results

I sold most of my mined Bitcoin in February 2013 while writing this article, as in the previous price graph you can see recently Bitcoin has spiked up and I thought this was a good time to sell. Little did I know that it would keep going and almost hit $50/BTC, however I was working with the assumption that this sudden peak may drop off fast like it did in 2011. Only time will tell, in any case I am happy to have paid for my hardware and made a small profit.

While mining I made use of Slush’s pool. Mining with a pool allows you to steadily earn Bitcoin as you get a share for the work you contribute to the pool. I saw this as a much better way than mining and waiting, hoping to get my own block of 50 BTC.

The Bitcoin miner has not really been operational for the last few months and as such I have sold 2/4 of the 6990s for $400 each. This was done as the new 7990s were just coming out and I wanted to get something back from the cards while they still had value, perhaps for a future upgrade. The other two are currently still remaining to allow for hash cracking as this is something else I have been using the miner for from time to time and this was one of the main reasons for going ahead with this project, with the idea that I could have quite a powerful GPU hash cracking machine that would pay for itself by mining Bitcoin – which it did.

In total about 334 BTC was mined. For the price of $24 USD per 1 BTC I sold at I made about $8016. Power costs were calculated as costing approximately $1780, I can’t recall the exact wattage in use while the miner was maxing out, and my measuring tool was quite cheap so it is not perfectly accurate however generally 1600w-1800w was continually in use.

So with the $8016 from selling the Bitcoin, $1780 was used to cover power bills, the initial hardware purchase was $3446 as outlined previously. This means that overall profit was approximately $2790, based on the fact that the Bitcoin was sold at $24 each. It could have been much more, almost double if I had waited to sell now. Either way it was an awesome project that paid for itself, left me with decent hash cracking hardware and a nice small profit, therefore this project was a success.

Leave a comment ?

74 Comments.

  1. Hi, what was the hashrate of this setup? If only you waited a bit longer… :)

  2. you must be sick now LOL with a btc hitting over 100$ :P

    • Hi Ronan,

      It’s a bit annoying, but I did keep a bit aside as an “investment” that I will probably look to sell soon.

      While I didn’t make as much profit as I could have, I am still more than happy that the hardware paid for itself with a profit while mining at a steady rate without having to count on a big rise coming one day, if at all.

      Basically I work with the information available rather than letting things come down to chance. :)

      • Hey dude,

        You still mining? :P How much coins ya got so far, I got a shitty card and I am only getting 28mh/s xD. I want to upgrade it but, I am only 16, so I don’t have like 1000 bucks to buy the 7990 or the 6990.
        But I really don’t mind it, my pc is on 24/7, and the power is free over here. :p

        Anyway, good job dude. Great investment.

        • Hi Alex,

          Thanks, mining a bit of Litecoin at the moment as I found it faster profit than Bitcoin for a while.

          Not many coins any more, sold most but kept a nice little investment.

          Free power definitely always helps with mining!

  3. Thanks for sharing your experience!!
    I want to use very little hardware.. (lets say, my laptop with 1gb gpu) will i be able to mine some btc?
    Where should I start from?
    I am a newbie.. :)

    • Hi Max,

      It depends on the GPU, it’s more about the power of the GPU cores rather than the memory the card has available. With that in mind laptop GPUs are typically less powerful than other cards.

      However if you already have the laptop available with a decent GPU it could be worth trying out. As long as the GPU is not too old and supported you should be able to mine and see how you go.

      Even with the laptop card, mining as part of a pool you may be able to turn in a profit as 1 Bitcoin is currently worth over $100 USD.

      You can find links above in the post to the about Bitcoin page, as well as the pool I used for mining which have further information.

    • Hi Max ive got a samsung x22 intel centrino duo 2.0GHz with an ati mobility radeon HD2400 display adapter…it gets 1 to 1.5 MH/s :)

  4. Superb overview, thanks for taking the time to explain your experience with the process.

    Given the current situation would you be interested in a partnership with a Sydney based guy if we can acquire some ASIC hardware within a short enough time frame? I am thinking cost splitting etc

    • Hi Todd,

      Thanks, sorry I don’t think I’m looking for that sort of thing at the moment. ASICs are pretty interesting though, considering doing some research and maybe getting into them, demand seems pretty high for them at the moment though.

  5. Yeah I think I saw somewhere there is around an 8 mth waiting list, which kind of defeats the purpose right?

    Ok well thanks again for your insights

    • Yeah that’s one down side, the demand is so large because the potential to turn a good profit is so high. It would be nice to get one of the first ASIC’s though that’s for sure.

  6. you’re using 3 power supplies. how did you get the other 2 to power(run) without attached to Motherboard?

    Thanks

  7. Awesome article. It’s motivate. Thank you ! :wink:

  8. Hi Jarrod,

    I’ve two HD6990 laying around the house. Do you think it is still worth to start mining bitcoins at this point? Knowing that power costs are around .15 USD/kWh.

    Also, how did you find slush was the right pool for you? Do you recommend that pool? if yes, why?

    Thanks a lot, nice post!

    • Hi Marco,

      I would recommend using them, it does currently seem worthwhile. I have two 6990s left and even with power costs here at .20 AUD/kWh it is profitable.

      I’ve found recently that mining Litecoin is a bit more profitable compared to mining Bitcoin, then I just trade for Bitcoin.

      I found Slush’s pool by just looking up where all the miners were distributed and that pool was one of the biggest at the time so I just went with it and assumed it was fine based on how many were using it, and I had no problems with it.

      Cheers.

  9. Hi Jarod,

    Firstly – awesome, awesome article, thanks for sharing your experience!

    You briefly mention that you now mine Litecoin instead of Bitcoin.. I’ve heard of litecoin but dont know any details and I bet most people also dont, e.g. – do you use the sane software -e.g. cgminer? how to setup the miners? What pools are there for LTC? Are there exchanges like mtgox or you basically go LTC->BTC->local currency? Coz that looks like a lot of conversions/fees?

    Would you pls write an article on this? Based on how good this post is, if the litecoin one is even half as comprehensive as this one it will still probably be the best Litecoin how-to article on the net!! :)

    • Hi Alan,

      Litecoin is pretty similar to Bitcoin in terms of it being a crypto currency, I’m using my same hardware – the two remaining 6990s.

      There are some exchanges out there, and MtGox have announced that they will also be supporting Litecoin too soon so that should help it take off.

      Thanks, I’ll see what I can do about a new article. :)

  10. Now ..i think bitcoin is too saturated …what is your opiniion about LITECOIN….

    • Well it’s newer and quite similar, it will be interesting to see how it goes as a crypto currency in the future. I think it’s good that alternatives to bitcoin are starting to emerge so that we don’t have to rely on just one currency, however at the same time people need to accept it and use it in order for it to succeed.

  11. I bet it’s a nice big regret selling your bitcoins around $50 USD now that they’re averaging $400-425 USD. You could have made out like a bandit if you would have waited out a few more months.

    • That it probably will not take long for the overall network hash rate to rise so much due to the amount of people buying these sorts of things making them less effective with time, the same thing that happened as more people started to purchase graphics cards, it’s barely worth mining with those at all now.

  12. You wrote “Each 6990 GPU core was doing about 400MH/s with the overclock to 880MHz”, can you do that rate for LTC as well? I’ve read somewhere those cards do around 600KH/s (0.6MH/s). How come?

  13. The look on your face when you realise you sold your bitcoins for 24$ .. *Priceless

    • The look on my face when I earned more since this and sold a chunk of it a couple days ago for over $1000 each. :)

      • I hate resurrecting old threads but I was tempted to ask you if you kept mining and made ridiculous profits lately. Glad you came out on top. I just began LTC mining myself, though I am using my existing gaming rig in its downtime. I will see if it is worth building a dedicated rig.

        • I did for a bit, up until it got to the point where even with graphics cards it’s too slow to mine due to ASICs and the like on the network.

          As there is so much competition it takes a lot longer to make any profit.

          I still have some bitcoin left so not all is lost. :)

      • If you wait untill now you get 350k for your bitcoins !!! :oops: :shock: :mrgreen:

  14. I have Core 2Quad processor + 2GB GPU running only for mining.
    it does 18Mh/s only..? is there anything wrong? or can I make it more sufficient?

    I have seen 2GB GPU does around 200Mh/s

    wht do you think?

    • What sort of GPU is it? For example if it’s one in a laptop it will likely be lower power, and if it’s Nvidia it will not perform as well as AMD cards, there are many factors involved.

  15. $2790 profit for a $3000 hardware investment and 20 months of running?

    If you had bought btc at $12ea in June/July 2011, then sold it at your sell price of $24ea, you would’ve made $3000 profit.

    Now of course, never having sold at all was the best option.

    • Like I said I was keen to cover the cost of the hardware, in any case as also mentioned previously I still have bitcoin left over, I sold some more for $10,000 or so recently so I’m not at all complaining, that is a good return on investment.

      Additionally the miner wasn’t running anywhere near that long due to the issues mentioned.

  16. Hi Jarrod,

    could you describe how you hooked up three power supplies? I read it is dangerous somewhere..

    j.

    • Hi Jacob,

      All 3 power supplies were plugged directly into a wall outlet for power, each graphics card required 2 cables to plug into a PSU so over all 4 cards there were 8 cables split between 3 PSUs, it was a while ago but I think I had two PSUs taking care of 3 each while the last did 2. The PSU that was powering less graphics cards was also the one plugged into the actual motherboard to power the thing.

      Originally I started with 2 PSUs but it would shut down due to not getting enough power which is why I got the third to offload some.

      As only one PSU was plugged into the motherboard, I was able to get the other two to start with no on switch by putting a paperclip between some of the wires like so:

      http://www.overclock.net/t/96712/how-to-jump-start-a-power-supply-psu-test-a-power-supply-and-components

  17. Thanks for this awesome write up. I have a system with a water cooled HD 6990 literally sitting around seeding torrents all day. Been that way for nearly 2 years. I kick myself everyday for not mining sooner. I want to get into it now, and a buddy mentioned that he mines litecoins. I saw in a previous comment you recommended mining those also. It’s now Feb 2014. Do you still think litecoins are the way to go? Any pools you recommend?

    I love that you mentioned the OC switch on these cards, and that the OC benefit was worth the power increase. Since I’m on water I’m probably going to overclock the GPUs further. They never go above 53*C even under full load (furmark).

    • Hi Hugo,

      No problem, I’m not as familiar with litecoin I only did it for a bit so can’t really recommend a reputable pool unfortunately.

      With water cooling I’d definitely go the overclock assuming you can meet the extra power requirements, though it may void your warranty so you may want to check that, that said it sounds like you’ve had them for a while and as I was running them fine with the OC on air you would be more than fine with water.

  18. hey jarrod,

    i’m newbie and i need you to advice me on how to start small and grow bigger in mining either ltc or btc, can i start with my laptop, also i saw some mining stuffs on ebay like usb flash, how good are they ? can they really do anything at all ? kindly write back to me bro thanx alot

    • Hey James, mining on a laptop would be possible however I don’t believe you would make any profit on the cost to run the laptop and it would be very slow to earn anything, this is because the networks have a lot of hardcore hardware on them these days.

      The usb sticks are a cheap option, I don’t know too much about them, you still may need a few to start making any profit though.

  19. Hello Jarrod

    This article has been just great and the fact you are willing to share it with others is very generous of you. Recently me and my brother purchased and are installing solar panels and we are looking to ways to start making them more profitable. Originally we were looking into bitcoin mining since energy or efficiency wont be a factor, but based on your comments we are focused on litecoins now and scrypt-based currencies. Are these still more profitable and also what would be more profitable in your opinion, purchasing a scrypt/asic miner or just putting together a rig, energy not being a factor.

    Thank you for your time and expertise in advance.

    • Hi Rafel,

      Have you worked out what your power requirements for the hardware you’re running will be? I’d be investigating that and then seeing if you’d be better off putting the power back into the grid, as in most countries you typically get money back for doing so though it may depend what’s available in your area.

      People are still mining both bitcoin and litecoin so I’d say they are profitable if you run the right hardware, if power is not a factor due to solar then that could be very beneficial as in my experience the power bill from running the hardware itself was quite a large factor, though if you’re using solar power would you only run the hardware during the day time? I’d definitely say look into an asic based miner at this stage, good luck!

  20. Hi Jarrod

    i’m new to mining and i want your advice on how to start small and later grow bigger in mining either ltc or btc, can i start with my laptop? and If possible what are the software or possible hardware you can recommend for me? I can afford buying them.

    this is my laptop info: Sony, processor: Intel(R) Core (TM)2 Duo Cpu p8700 @ 2.53GHz 2.53 GHz Installed memory (RAM): 4.00
    Graphics by nvidia.

    I will appreciate your reply.Thanks for your time

    • Hi Adex, yes you can start with your laptop however it may be difficult for you to make very much profit. Don’t even consider using the CPU to mine, you would need to see if the graphics card is capable of supporting this as this is much faster than CPU mining.

      You might want to look into purchasing a cheap ASIC based miner as these seem to be offering the best result for amount of money spent at the moment, I’ve seen some tables outlining the cost to performance ratio around so I’d suggest looking into that, good luck!

  21. Muhammad Tanveer

    Hi Jarrod

    I am so glad that I read your post I am new in this field and willing to give some time for mining what will you recommend for me to start from . I am having a PC core 2 due with 4 gb ram and 512 mb graphic card do you think this can do something and i am from pakistan

    I appreciate for your great work and willing to read more posts by you

    Great work dude

    • Hey there, you can try but as mentioned in my comment above GPU and especially CPU based mining is essentially dead, you may need to look into purchasing an ASIC based miner, some of the low end ones are pretty cheap and will significantly outperform graphics card based mining.

  22. Hi Jarrod,

    I just wanted to tell you that this post was so well written and had just the right details for it to be referenced in my thesis about Bitcoin mining. Given that the success of a miner really depends on the computing power he is able to provide to the network in relation to the other miners, I was looking for a practical example of GPU mining just before the advent of FPGA and ASIC mining rigs, and also just before the reward for a solved block was halved down to 25 BTC. Your post hit this period spot on.

    I’m also glad that you managed to make a profit off of it, and it’s a shame you couldn’t have made more by waiting for a year or two. However, in your position, I probably would’ve done the same given the circumstances.

    Cheers.

    • Hey there, no problem glad that I was able to help! I think it’s good to keep this post alive for people to see how Bitcoin was in the earlier days as things sure have changed a lot since then. :)

      Best of luck with the thesis.

      • Thanks, Jarrod!

        The thesis was amazingly well received – so well I’m actually working with my mentor on publishing it in a local business paper and planning interviews with some of the local miners.

        Once again, thank you for this detailed experience on mining – the information provided was absolutely indispensable. I wish you best of luck in your life and career ;)

        Best regards from Croatia,

        Sandro

  23. About to hit 6000 USD now per BTC

  24. Hey, How would I go about setting up a 1gh/s mining rig…or rouhly 300mh/s miing rig? also how would I be able to mine ripple?

  25. Hi Jarrod,
    I see that you were mining back in 2011 or so, great story, thanks for sharing, seems like so much has happened in such a short space of time.
    Hope this isn’t too much to ask but I was wondering if you could get in contact with me, I have something to run by you related to your mining back then which may be of interest to you,
    Im barcelona based, so best thing to do is fire me over an email to [email protected] and we can find a way to chat,
    Would be much appreciated, thanks
    Aodhan

  26. Bitcoin price today $18,150 which touched $20k in past few days.
    take $18,150 price as an average.
    $18150*334BTC = $6,062,100 THATS HELL AMOUNT OF MONEY!!!
    Nobody can feel your pain bro!

  27. I share a similar story with u,and i kept them only cuz in my country nobody would take bitcoin as a currency..so i exchanged 264.2 bitcoin when it hit 16k,I hope i wont regret it

  28. old old post man you must have nearly shit urself when it hit 1700k fuck 5 bucked each jeeze i wish i even knew what bitcoin was when i was 21.

  29. ripple is not mine-able Nagi Mohsen

  30. How did it feel in december 2017?

  31. Diptanshu Malviya

    Hye, I live in India and I want to do mining as did in fantastic way but actually I want some guidance from you that should I dom. If I am new in it… I want your email to contact you…

  32. So what is your opinion on GPU miners going out of style and the new Asic Miners hitting the market, especially with the low we hit today dropping below 5k for BTC

  33. Hey Jarrod. Enjoyed the read.

    I’m sure you’re blown away by the price Bitcoin has reached.

  34. How much btc did you have left when it hit its $60k peak the other month?

    Reading this and getting to the 334 number blew my mind but its easier to say hold for 8 years then done.

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