Home mining is all the rage these days — and Den has plunged into this pool(!) as well (#936913, #1085085;).

The economics are not there, but it's fun, the equipment is beautiful (and useful!), I've gotten better at understanding pool dynamics and — if I ever wanted to — block template creation.

“Difficulty is up, rewards are down, and unless you're sitting on free energy, the ROI math looks grim on a spreadsheet.”
“if you treat mining as a hobby that subsidizes itself rather than a business expecting 10x returns, the mindset shifts.” #1439522

Alright, my residential rates are kind of OK (at least compared to some of the basket cases of Europe) and I heat my home with electricity anyway, so obviously home mining is a NO-BRAINER: Having almost gotten my hands on a precursor of this product a few years back, end of last year was finally the moment for it (#1085085). Meet the 21 Energy team's Ofen 2:

If you haven't heard of them, they're basically a nicer, smoother, fancier, and European-er version of the Heatbit... and obviously, after I got myself one, 21 Energy released a more powerful (60 TH/s) and slightly more efficient (20-ish W/TH) Pro version (and a dope-looking black one!). Jokes on me.... THANKS FOR NOTHING, FRENZ.

OVERVIEWOVERVIEW

The 21Energy team is still fiddling with the software settings, having done two major updates since I started using mine. As is, there are five levels (1-2-3-4-Heat), which the team tells me they're going to condense further (maybe to 1-2-3, only). While advertised as “40TH/s” that is not what I’m mostly running and not the full range available. The maximum I ever managed to push it to was 43TH; do not recommend. The fan was an-gry at me, the noise pretty unbearable. It also pulled closer to 1,000 watts, so markedly less efficient than the 20-21 W/TH that it spits out at reasonable levels.

From multiple observations, the levels roughly correspond to:

• One: 403 watts, 10 TH/s (though after an update last month, this lower-bound seems to be 17 now.)
• Two 522 W, 23.5 TH/s.
• Three: 628 W, for 29.5 TH/s = This is prime efficiency (~21 W/TH)
• Four: 742 W, for 34 TH/s
• Heat: 880 W, for 38 TH/s... and the fan is angry.

It’s somewhat noisier than what I had expected and hoped for — certainly more than I recalled from having seen the products in action before — but then again, I never tested them against the backdrop of extreme quiet and stillness of my village home. (Basically, if there’s a car coming by or snow plows on the next road over, that sound more or less drowns out the smooth airflow from two meters to my left. Moving it to the other side of the living room<->office wall, which I often do when I'm watching TV/working in the other room(s), the muffling of the sound makes it basically go away.)

Also: for air quality reasons, I would like to have a Heatbit in my bedroom but I imagine that even at lowest settings, the tiny noise it'll make will be too much for me... but that is, as the kids say, a me-problem since I crave silence that much. #1383936

Most of the sound isn't actually the fans, but the power supply unit — or so says the 21 Energy engineers. This also has the unfortunate side effect that turning the machine off doesn't remove the sound (since the PSU is still running.) You're left with the option of pulling the chord entirely... which seems freaky. We'll see if I'll do that in the summertime, but even during the summers here I require some heat, esp during the nights.)

The Economics of Home MiningThe Economics of Home Mining

The only other question we care about around econland is whether or not I'm making money. Are you profitable, anon??

I mean, no. But it's not that simple to find out, and using the economist's favorite tool of "compared to what?" I'm still in a decent position here.

Until I took this baby home, I heated my house with electricity. This heater has more or less entirely replaced my 1,500W oil-filled back-up heater... which I didn't run at maximum effect for most of last winter, but it was basically always running a little bit. (This year I've used it once during a particularly crazy storm with heavy winds and temperatures of -10 to -15 outside.)

Electricity pricing is somewhere between confusing and hopelessly intransparent. I pay two invoices each month — electricity and distribution.

For electricity, the invoice I pay contains last month’s use plus an estimate for next month’s use minus the estimate for the previous month… (and there’s a VAT discount for 85% of my usage, meaning my effective VAT is 12.95% instead of 24%). The rate is thus fairly straightforward at $0.0767 per kWh (depending on FX rates).

For my distribution company, then, I’m paying… something: it’s about as intransparent a system of pricing as working out what your tax bill is. Fuck knows is the correct answer to any questions about how much I'm paying and for what. There’s a substantial fixed fee (10-20% of my invoice), a transportation fee and a distribution fee. Oh, and just like the electricity company, they slap me with a one-off (though pretty negligible) "payment/invoice fee." The variable rate, VAT included, is currently $0.0579.

So, at 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour, I'm not exactly competitive. (Google tells me this is roughly the residential rate of North Dakota?)

BIRDS-EYE VIEW:
For these three months, my entire household burned 3,945 kWh... but that includes the three other heaters I also have (different parts of the house) and usage for lamps — darkest months of the year! — and chargers and fridge and laundry etc. For the privilege of doing that, I paid $681.5 in total to the distribution and electricity companies (previous month estimation+ fixed fees wreaking havoc with that 13.5c figure).

All I had to show for that was

a) a beautiful household contraption (and the wonders of the Braiins mini miner display),
b) a heated home, and
c) 115,088 sats in the bank wallet.

At current (depressed? unnatural? undervalued?) bitcoin exchange rates, that’s about $80. Estimating the electricity usage that belongs to the miners only, the sats reward constitute some 31% discounted heating. (So, the way to think about this is that for the electricity portion that this miner displaces, I'm getting 31% cashback in bitcoin.) Even at that, and considering the opportunity-cost view that (unless I wanted to be cold) I had to heat the home anyway, it'll be some 26 months before the expenses of the machinery itself are recouped — and that's assuming it doesn't break, difficulty stays where it is, and bitcoin price doesn't move markedly.

Then again, bitcoin was worth some 50% more when I made the choice to get this one, so realistically speaking, I would have lost a third of that fiat value by hodling anyway.

As an observer of mining economics with skin in the game, I got particularly sensitive to which changes were good for me:

• bitcoin price up
• hashrate down (or, which amounts to the same thing, difficulty down).
• US dollar strengthening

It was pretty astonishing in late-Jan/early Feb when something like half the network went offload during Storm Fern (#1434263)... I was getting hundreds of extra sats for the same electricity and heating!

Conversely, bitcoin price falling, USD falling, and electricity prices increasing are all TEEEERRIBLE.

There’s another, positive-EV rolling effect too: I get the sats from the mining pool daily, but only have to pay my electricity provider and distribution company a month or two later — meaning that when bitcoin behaves and does its thing, I have assets worth (slightly?) more than the electricity I consumed to acquire them. Hashtag aggressive carry trade!
When this pathetic orange coin is misbehaving, on the other hand, I’m doubly burning electricity — both for heat and in vain, worthless, digital hopes of riches.

Oh, and whenever my distribution company gets their shit together to install an hourly meter, I can get "night rates" of 35% less than usual cost for eight hours a day (well, night)... back-of-the-envelope calcs that'll be about 6.5% savings (35% x one-third of the day x 0.57 electricity variable share). It won't turn my sats burned for electricity into a money-making machine (only bitcoin mooning will do that) but it'll markedly improve the efficiency — especially since nighttime is when I make most heavy use of it.

TLDR: Am I happy about my 21E machine?TLDR: Am I happy about my 21E machine?

Yeah, pretty much. It's beautiful, it feels good earning ~1,500 passive sats a day knowing that I had to burn electricity for heat anyway.

Also: I meant to write this up at 100k sats earned so I took a beautiful screenshot for no reason..., but then I was traveling and tardied etc etc, so we made it to 115k instead: