Bitcoin mining on the pi

With bitcoin becoming more and more popular, so does its worth.  A few years ago these things were only a cent or two and a year ago worth around a few dollars, so why are they now around $1k a bit coin?

Well after silkroad the darkside of the Internet was shutdown and bitcoins that had been traded on these illegal sites been confiscated by the American government, it basically cleaned up the online crypto currency and value soared.

Now by all means a bit coin miner will still not earn you enough these days for the electric used or for equipment needed, but by next year some American financial groups claim its worth would have multiplied by 10-100x meaning each coin could be worth up to $100k

I started mining a few months ago with the raspberry pi and a program called minepeon which can fit onto a 2gb sd card. I used a usb 333m/h usb miner and took me two months using slush's pool to mine $10 

Now luckily my pi and one usb was only using no more than 10 watts of power so about 80p in that time frame but still not enough to pay for itself.

I also use a mining pool as some days you can have a couple of finds to others up to 20 finds and all this is split between the pool by the amount of work you do.  I decided that all through I couldn't afford $10k 1t/hs miner that could recoup my money in less than a month, I could make use of other peoples by buying second hand off eBay.

First warning of doing it this way you could be sold a broken unit, second warning check their feedback and that they have 500 positive feedback.  Many scammers have decided to join eBay and make a dozen low price buys with known Chinese members who automatically give up positive feedback, not paid them but have now got some positive feedback to look good.

Lastly only pay through eBay and PayPal, I had one guy pull a fast one but luckily I was protected through pay pals protection scheme and soon got my money back.

So now I have a 10g/hs set up, a 333m/h usb miner, a tempromental 2.5g/hs usb miner and a butterfly labs jalapeno that works to 7.5g/hs totally around 10.4g/hs on a good day. The jalapeño has had its case removed to allow more air to get to it keeping it around 30c which is around 15c lower than with case on and slightly more quiet.

It's now using in total around 50 watts of power equating to around $15 of electric a month and earning $40-100 dollars a month before knocking off the electric, current bitcoin value and return of investment. I see on a good run it could be as early as six months but in reality it could be longer at least up to two years.

However I'm not in this for a quick buck but a long term investment if i do make enough to buy a state of the art mining machine capable of earning me my weekly wages in a day then it will bea different matter and possibly one to change my life around.

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