22 May 2014 / ARSTechnica – There are at least a couple of problems for anybody who wants to run a Bitcoin miner in their home, especially if you buy hardware that’s powerful enough to make some money.
“Miners don’t make very good roommates,” said George Schnurle, VP of engineering for miner hosting startup HashPlex. It’s easy for the most powerful miners to “piss off all your roommates because this noisy, hot box is running in your living room.”
Schnurle’s co-founder, CEO and former Microsoft employee Bernie Rihn, was running miners in his apartment, and “he had an extension cord going all the way across the living room because he needed to connect to one of his circuits that didn’t already have a bunch of equipment loaded to it,” Schnurle told Ars. “The one upside of that is he didn’t have to pay a heating bill during the winter here in Seattle because he had these space heaters running in his living room 24/7.”
That’s one of the reasons some people outsource their Bitcoin mining. In some cases, customers can simply lease mining power from a data center that owns a bunch of Bitcoin miners. The data center then takes a cut from each mined coin.
That raises a troubling question: if the miner host can make a profit simply by taking a cut of its customers’ mined coins, how can it possibly be profitable for customers? Schnurle says HashPlex solves that problem. HashPlex doesn’t own your hardware. You buy it yourself and send it to HashPlex, which runs it in a data center that’s near a cheap source of renewable power. You keep all the mining proceeds and pay HashPlex just a little more than the average US resident pays for electricity, and less than you might pay for electricity yourself depending on which state you live in….. Read more
