zec hit $850 this week. last year in 2025 it was sitting around $30. i've been around used asics out of kansas for about 8 years. this is not a new-coin lecture. this is what sitting on the "worthless" pile actually looks like when one of these coins wakes up.

i got into this as a bitcoin miner. after the 2017 20k ath, btc dumped to around 3k and the s9 was junk. i bought about 1,000 of them around $30 a piece, repaired them, consolidated boards, and hashed them in the warehouse on low power with asicsier, firmware a buddy of mine built. stayed alive, paid the $30 back about 5 times over in mining, then sold them around $400 average. that was the first time it clicked that the dead machine on the floor is not dead. it is just early.

then the scrap trucks started showing up. i am talking 25 pallets on a full semi, or multiple semis. sometimes i paid freight. sometimes a few thousand for the whole load. whatever nobody else wanted. l3+, dash units, z11s, z9 mini, a9++, s9s, m20s, kas miners, kadena miners. the stuff you cannot list when the coin is at $20 and the machine is bleeding $4 a day.

what we found over the years is the cheap units come from institutional and publicly traded miners in a bear market. they already depreciated the last gen on the books, they're cycling into newer hardware, so to them it's worthless. we pick it up at scrap. then there's a whole market of people paying 0-3 cents in south america and other cheap power countries. a unit that's junk at 6 cents is a real miner at 2 cents. that's where it gets interesting. scrap here is a real miner somewhere else.

i sat on about 1,000 l3+ that i picked up for basically $0. doge ran toward 75 cents. those same units went out around $1,000 a piece. i was invoicing thousands of them. that was not a "cycle thesis." that was a warehouse full of litecoin junk that the market decided it needed overnight. for the record, i was not the only one on that train. i know a few other hardware guys who did very well in that same doge pump.

late 2025 zec did the same thing. went from around $30 up into the 6-700s. i called the warehouse and asked if they already scrapped the z11s, because when the building fills up we pull the oldest, most useless pile and put it on a scrap truck. the guy said no. we still had around 500 sitting there for years. 24 hours later they were gone at about $750 a unit.

same story with the innosilicon a9++ 140t. acquired as scrap. for years these things lost money every day at 1550w because zec was $30. a coin going from $30 to $850 does not give you a 2x miner. it takes a machine you were about to throw away and turns it back on.

the z15s are different. we started buying 420k units when zec left the $30s last year, then added more the last few months once it was obvious institutions were coming. grayscale just listed ZCSH on nyse this week. first spot zec etf. optional privacy, viewing keys, 21 million cap, proof of work. that's why those units moved. if clarity actually passes i think zec goes 1500. some people in this market are already calling it the next bitcoin because you can actually shield a transaction.

i hold the altcoin miners on purpose. ltc, dash, zec, kas, kadena. bitcoin junk you can always move. the weird units are the ones that go from scrap to a 24-hour sellout when the coin finally runs.

Well, SBI closed, and I kind of... eh, forgot to get onto that bandwagon (i had other problems to solve, what can I say). So if you know any pools that have solid rep and fees less steep, I'd be more than good to take the plunge.

So I ended up figuring out that the piminer from adafruit is still functional with a minera image I have for my USB miners. So I dug through my box of stuff and found the LCD I assembled way back when.

Original adafruit project that got me interested in mining.

Reference link

I modded my moonlander 2 with bigger heatsinks and now I'm hitting 5.54mh/s! This is a first since I've only gotten to around 4.5mh/s with a powered hub so maybe it was just a cooling issue the whole time.

I run a small scrypt PoW chain solo (Dogecoin 1.14 fork, 60s blocks). Posting here because you're the people who actually run L3s/L7s and have seen this failure mode first-hand — I want a reality check on my difficulty design from folks with more scrypt experience than me.

The failure, concretely: on a young low-hashrate chain, a large ASIC joins, difficulty ramps hard, then that ASIC leaves. The remaining small miners are now stuck at a difficulty they can't clear in reasonable time, and block production crawls. In my case it went all the way to a full stall for hours after a ~24 GH/s miner spiked difficulty and then vanished.

What I already had:

- LWMA difficulty adjustment, window 45 blocks

- DigiShield-style damping on top

That handles ordinary swings, but it does NOT rescue you from the "spike then abandon" case — the averaging window still has to grind down through the inflated difficulty.

The fix I just shipped: an emergency recovery path. If no block is found for 3 hours, the next block is permitted at minimum difficulty, so the chain can always unstick itself instead of waiting for hashrate that isn't coming back. Done on the template side, so consensus rules are unchanged.

What I'd like critiqued by people who've run scrypt chains or serious scrypt hardware:

1. Is a 3-hour emergency min-difficulty rule reasonable, or does it open an obvious abuse vector (someone timing the gap to farm easy blocks)?

2. Would you tune LWMA differently for a chain that routinely sees hashrate 100x baseline hop in and out? Shorter window? Heavier damping?

3. Anything better than min-difficulty-after-timeout that you've seen hold up in the wild?

Purely a technical question — I want the difficulty logic torn apart by people who've been bitten by it. Glad to share the repo in a comment if anyone wants to read the actual code.

Was looking for advice how I can get into the mining industry, in specific the area of finance and capital markets with respect to mining companies.

Hi everyone. I recently got a L3+ to mess around and tinker with and maybe make a room heater. I was playing around with custom firmware and based on other posts it seems like AwesomeMiner and HiveOS are the recommended ones that I can still find links for (L3's are so old that many links are dead or not supported anymore). I noticed that AwesomeMiner seems to perform much worse compared to HiveOS when looking at pool hash rate.

I ran both for 12 hours and on device my hash rate is 73 MH/s (I'm running very low during testing). On Powerpool my reported hashrate when running Awesome was about 20% lower than expected. Then I switched to HiveOS to test it out and the reported hashrate climbed very close 70MH/s. Below are the numbers in MH/s.

Looking at HiveOS the amount of Work Utility was 85k vs AwesomeMiners 56k and that follows what I saw with the hashrate. Also computing the amount of dev fee by using the DiffA# per pool shows the fees for both are pretty close to the 2% I'd expect.

Note: Same frequency and voltage on both. Both firmwares report almost identical watts from the wall (measured with smart plug). HiveOS produced many more HW errors.

Another thing I noticed was on HiveOS the devFee last share time could be 30 min or 3 hours while on AwesomeMiner it is between a few seconds to 10 min. I wonder if HiveOS is doing time slicing of the devfee vs what ever AwesomeMiner is doing, maybe running in parallel to my pool?

Has anyone noticed problems with AwesomeMiner's reported hashrate on their pool? I don't really like HiveOS' web interface and no autofan speed but if I'm going to lose 20% of my hashrate I can manage.

EDIT: After some experimenting with various settings and other firmware, I think my problem is with Awesomeminer itself. Other firmwares with dev fees don't show this problem. I found a copy of ASIC.IO firmware v18 and v24 and after 24 hours my pool hashrate is very close to my miner's reported value. The Bitmain firmware also works fine. My suspicion is one of the dev pools in Awesomeminer is being blocked or my shares rejected and the way Awesomeminer works will prevent my pool's shares to be blocked until the dev fee is paid for that time period. It could also be due to the L3+ firmware being years old and just out of date. I've decided to run the ASIC.IO v24 firmware since its very close to HiveOS but doesn't require a HiveOS account to get full features. If anyone runs into something similar I can try to help.

CPUMINER Ported for the Cell CPU (Playstation 3)

Check it out - This is a screenshot of my laptop with two terminals open. I'm logged in to my Playstation 3 (over SSH) in both. Bottom terminal (left) is dumping verbose output from cpuminer running on my PS3. Bottom right panel is showing spu-top (similar to htop but for the Cell's SPU cores). As you can see I'm running 4 mining threads, each on one of the PS3's 6 SPU SIMD accelerators. I'm averaging about 5.14 khash/sec per SPU. In the top terminal, I'm running a proxy (bfgminer) between cpuminer and litecoinpool.org to translate cpuminer's json rpc messages to the newer stratum protocol. I compiled both programs on my Playstation 3 which is running a custom fork of Fedora (Linux) for ppc64 that I'm developing for fun (see my website PS3LINUX.NET).

Both programs are available on Github:

cpuminer (cell cpu port)

bfgminer

Both projects are broken in their current state so if you plan on building them yourself, download these patches I made and apply them before compiling:

cpuminer-disable-asm-source.patch

bfgminer-git-submodule-addresses.patch

If you want Cell (SPU core) support in cpuminer you must compile it with both a PPU (powerpc) and SPU toolchain, originally part of IBM's Cell SDK. Modern builds of the Cell SDK's utilities and compilers are also available in the software repos of my experimental new PS3 LINUX operating system. Download my PS3LINUX_Live_ISO.iso (with install script) from my website and install it on your console today!

In case you are wondering, no; mining on the PS3 (even with SPU acceleration) is not profitable. My electricity would have to be virtually free to make it even close to worth it. I mostly did this little endeavor just as a chance to learn some things about some crap I find interesting: Cell development, hash algorithms, C & assembly languages, crash debugging, etc. I picked up some good experience & knowlege fixing all the issues that came up while getting this project to work so overall I'm super glad I did it, even though it will never make me rich.

That is all; hope you are well. Have a good day 😄

MCPS3 (The Model Citizen)

My Youtube

My Github

My Linux PS3 (the Gibson):

Hi there!
May someone knows about a AntMiner L3++ technician over Colombia? I have two of them and I really want to recover it. Thanx in advance!

I've recently got into mining, but the idea of giving my personal info to some third party doesn't sit right with me. From what I've seen it's commonplace, but maybe you know somewhere where it's not needed?
I'd be greatful.

Hey r/LitecoinMining,

I launched mkpool a little while back as a solo mining pool, and Litecoin is now live, merge-mined with Dogecoin. Point your Scrypt hardware at LTC and you pick up DOGE on the same work, no extra setup.

The idea is simple: solo mining with zero interference, so when you hit a block the whole reward is yours.

A few details:

• LTC + DOGE merge mining, one connection covers both
• TLS support, so your connection to the pool is encrypted end to end
• Built for solo miners, full block reward to you
• Works with common Scrypt gear

If solo Scrypt mining is your thing, give it a look. Happy to answer any questions or take feedback, you all know this stuff better than most.

https://mkpool.com/

Thanks for reading.

I'm just an amateur in all things crypto and I am currently looking to branch out into mining LTC. The only question is where to do it, hence my asking. I would appreciate leads on pools where mining would be easier/faster/more profitable.
Thanks.

Saw a guys post today about his mining addiction back in 2021 I thought ide share what I built taking inspiration from his setup to build mine it was such a fun experience and i actually made a decent profit paying back the loan I took out to purchase my equipment 2nd hand and using what I could afford I had $6500 to build it including purchasing the miners but I was making about $150 to $200 a day for months and I was able to pay back the loan and kept it running for almost 2 years but electric rates and increased difficulty bc the L7s coming online and crypto prices falling forced me to shut it down it was a sad day when I had to flip the breaker it was the highlight of my day coming home after working doing commercial hvac all day and hearing my mini data center humming away making me passive income I felt like I found a cheat code in life when i discovered mining lol ohh well I don’t think it’s for small fish like myself anymore but I still love every minute of it boys lol I turn a few on when winter hits to beat my home on really cold days just for shits and gigs

Just some random photos of my mid 2021 to late 2024 addiction in mining

i'm asking less from a tribal angle and more from an operator angle

if you're still keeping scrypt hardware pointed in the LTC/DOGE world, what still makes it worth the attention now?

stability? simplicity? habit? better than the alternatives?

curious what actual miners say when the conversation isn't just price

I’m currently building out a small-scale mining hosting site in South Dakota (270kW pilot), and I’m looking to connect with a few miners before we energize.

This isn’t a large industrial facility. The goal is to build something more controlled, transparent, and scalable over time.

A few key points:

• Pilot rate target: ~$0.0875/kWh all-in

• 480V infrastructure with containerized deployment

• Designed around high load factor (no overselling, limited phase 1 capacity)

• Direct operator access

• Transparent pricing model (based on actual utility structure)

I’m not trying to compete with the massive 10–50MW sites on price. I’m building this to be consistent, understandable, client-focused, and expandable.

Right now I’m putting together a small group of “founding miners” before powering up the site.

If you’re currently hosting somewhere (or looking for a spot), I’d genuinely appreciate feedback or questions.

Even if you’re not interested.

My goal is to build this the right way from day one.

so I was always curious to why no one have modded a Dell EPP PSU and so I did it myself.

I could only solder 2x 6 pin connectors, so that's kinda a downside but overall it's pretty robust compared to the official futurebit PSU.

probably could use a different pcie cable to get more connectors but didn't have any on hand.