Member-only story
For Christmas this year my wife and I decided to ‘pass’ on buying gifts for each other. With $170,000 in student loans — we both thought it was the financially prudent thing to do.
Instead, I decided to spend my Christmas week setting up a ‘bitcoin mining rig’, for as cheap as possible. I thought, “what the hell, I have an undergrad in computer science, it’s just a bunch of zeros and ones, i’ll figure it out”. What was originally supposed to be an afternoon activity quickly turned into a week long mission on “getting this damn thing working”.
In this story i’ll show you how to go from 0 to 100 and provide detailed step by step instructions on how to set up a bitcoin mining rig for < $99.I will reference only official documentation.
By the end of this story, you will have a fully functioning mining rig connected to a mining pool with a bitcoin wallet. Not surprisingly, alot of the tutorials I found on the net skipped a ton of major steps e.g.
- What to do when your raspberry pi doesn’t have enough power to support the USB mining stick
- How to calculate the mining profitability for your rig using electricity costs in your region.
I’ll also show you how much you can expect to make (lose) with this mining configuration as of January 2019. TLDR: You’re not making money. This isn’t going to make you rich, but it will provide you with a head-first dive into the world of bitcoin mining.
Here’s all the software and hardware you’ll need for this tutorial. Each step will break it down line by line.
If you want to skip to the section that quantifies profits and costs, goto ‘Step 10- Buy a Yacht and a Lamborghini”.
Step 1 — Select your hardware
Although I secretly had grand dreams of massive wealth creation, I knew that it wasn’t going to happen with this rig. You need to know, and accept that as well. This is not going to make you rich, this isn’t even going to make you a profit, even if bitcoins jump back to $20,000. So take this as a learning experience and do it on the cheap.
