About a month and a half ago a friend gave me an Antminer S3 that someone else had given him. I'm not sure if this was a gift so much as a dump. The miner did not have a power supply and after running some numbers at What To Mine the miner would make a whole 28 cents a day! Of course the power consumption would be something close to $2 a day so it would running it would be good for a Sweet -85% profit! So I on my floor it sat while I decided whether to turn it on or turn it into a modern art piece.
But then, a possible savior emerged! I was looking through the crypto chat on the MSP Discord and saw someone talking about Litecoin Cash. LCC is a new fork of the Litecoin blockchain that tries to do what Bitcoin Cash does for Bitcoin, try and create a new currency with an end towards faster and cheaper transactions, more security, and modernized features. It's also been called a scam by the creator of Litecoin due to the naming and at the end of the day it's yet another fork of a popular coin. However the promise of new life to old ASICs seems like it was created just for me!
At first glance it seems like a really solid project, but I'm just not sure how relevant it is. LTC already is decent when it comes to transaction speed and cost, is there really space for a coin that's just slightly better in that regard? Who knows. Early adoption is key to a lot of the standing of these coins, but over time even marginal improvements may push new coins to overtake the old guard. Frankly I don't have enough experience in crypto analytics to say whether this is going to work or crash. I do know however it's a great opportunity for someone in my position to give mining a shot early. The only way this S3 is ever going to be profitable is to jump in at the start of a new coin while the blocks are easy and then hope it moons. Well that and I realized my parents don't pay for utilities and I can go run it at their house. I'd rather take the risk on a new coin with a lot more potential to run than try and plug away in a BTC pool for a quarter a day. My "I missed the BTC boat" story goes I tried to set-up my PC for GC mining back in 2012 when I first heard it was possible and then gave up after an hour of trying to get a wallet set-up and the mining software working. What was the point, this Bitcoin thing is a dumb idea anyway! Guess I got that way wrong. I'm not going to let another opportunity like that pass me by, especially when I can do it with basically no risk.
The Set-up
But remember, I was gifted a miner with no PSU. Fortunately I work in IT and have a ton of dead PCs with PSUs to scavenge! It took a bit but I finally found one with a working PSU that had the necessary 2 PCI-E plugs that was retired. I should have known this wasn't going to be so simple once I got the PSU 95% out of the case save for one cord that was installed behind the board. I didn't need it, so after struggling for a bit I just clipped it off and sealed it with tape. Ok, that was easy I'm good to go! Except not really. Instead of a simple ATX power supply setup, Dell made this PSU modular and it plugs into a breakout board. Great for swapping when they go bad, but an extra step of complications here. Some furious googling later it's suggested that you need to use a paper clip to jump the the green wire with black wires on both sides of it together. I did that and nothing. Then I found that some PSUs need a brown voltage check jumped to an orange wire. But there aren't any orange wires! It seems this 24 PIN connector does not match ANY of the pinout diagrams I found online. So I took a guess and jumped the brown to a purple one, and look the LED on the PSU lit. I'm set right?!? Jumped the black and green again and the PSU comes to life, juuuuuuust long enough to finish booting the miner and then shuts off. After a few tried I thought maybe it was an issue with the jump so in a frustrated bit of rage, I ripped all the wires that we're 12v wires (yellow) out of the connector, stripped the ends, and jumped all the greens and blacks together, a brown to a purple, and the other brown to a blue one. This is the horror I brought upon this poor PSU:
Same result, PSU starts until the miner boots and dies. At this point I trying to search some more but it was to no avail. I guess there must be something on the chip that checks for what's running and if it doesn't meet certain conditions it cuts off. I decide this is not worth any more of my sanity and get a compatible 500w PSU shipped next day on Amazon (yay Prime!). It showed up on time and after a slight moment of panic when it didn't come on right away after turning it on, it worked fine with I jumped the necessary wires with a paper clip on the first go.
Configuring the Miner and Joining a Pool
I followed this guide to configure the thing. Someone at already configured it for DCHP though so the default address didn't work. Good thing I work in IT so logging into my router to get the IP was easy enough. I found a pool in the LCC Discord that seemed like a good balance of hash rate, but not so big that my little S3 would get pennies on every block (as it is I only get about .05LCC per block), and a low fee. The last bit was setting up a Wallet. The Litecoin Cash website gives either a desktop wallet or Coinomi as an option. I'm pulling in so little in LCC right now that I really don't care enough about security enough to worry about it so I used the easier option of Coinomi. I'll move the LCC later if it's every worth something significant. Plugged in all the necessary into into the Antminer config and I'm off and running. Oh boy, I can tell people I'm a cryptominer now!!
Rave Day!
It's a good thing Sunday went much easier than Saturday, cause we had a very late night. Hard dance legend Kutski made his first NYC appearance in 4 years and it was not to be missed! My boy (Schnife the Yak) who was also throwing the party got things going on the main stage after a late start (thanks previous show for delaying things and making sure the floor was already sticky at the start of the party!) He's really been killing it this last year both as a promoter and with is insane multi-genre mixing. Not sure exactly how he managed to make his first three tracks hardstyle, dubstep, and psytrance, in that order, but it was amazing. Next from the man who is keeping the rave alive in NYC to the guy doing it around the world, Kutski dropped a bomb 90 min set. Following some DST confusion (side note: I have been fucked the last two days thanks to the time change, can we stop doing this America?) another local favorite of mine, Integrity was up with some hard psytrance. Thanks to the awesome movement and time jump, this very quickly turned into a 5AM night, but oh so worth it. Onwards to next week and World of Drum and Bass!
To make things even better, our friends came back from the rave and crashed with us. After waking up still sort of groggy at 1:30 the next day, this gave be an excellent excuse to make some chorizo and egg breakfast tacos! One day I will kindly bestow you guys with the recipe, however I was in no state to add taking pictures on top of cooking for four yesterday. Paired with some of the new Angry Orchard Rose Cider it was exactly what I needed to recover from a night of epic rave magic.