Our four antminer S1's mining away. Doubles as space heater, and also nightime heat mat for our pair of bearded dragonsOur four antminer S1's mining away. Doubles as space heater, and also nightime heat mat for our pair of bearded dragons

So as part of our quest to try and put together a comprehensive guide to Bitcoins in Ireland, we have invested in four antminer S1’s which are undervolted intentionally to give approximately 600 – 650 gigahashes between them. Before investing in our own hardware, I had leased a 12ghs 6 month mining contract and pointed it to CEX.io and BTCGuild. We’ve decided that it would make much more sense to get our own hardware, hack it to run on multiple pools side by side, and use it to review the publicly available bitcoin mining pools, using our earnings to review bitcoin accepting businesses, turn it into real money through our bitcoin exchange reviews, as well as the other things you can read about on the site.

Our four antminer S1's mining away. Doubles as space heater, and also nightime heat mat for our pair of bearded dragons
Our four antminer S1’s mining away. Doubles as space heater, and also nightime heat mat for our pair of bearded dragons

The BitcoinsInIreland.com Bitcoin Mining Pool Review Process

We are identifying mining pools from this list, signing up, and then pointing either some or all of our approximately 650ghs at them. We stop mining when we reach the payout threshold, and then review the pool as part of our series of bitcoin mining pool reviews. Pretty straighforward!

Two of our antminers are hacked to mine up to nine pools concurrently, which we use to give a similar hashing rate to all pools, which lets us see what earnings are like, and see how varience and luck varies between different pools on the same day.

This allows us us to benchmark various large and small pools at the same time, and ask questions about their website, support documentation, overall hash speed, and general look and feel. We are aware that by a lot of bitcoin miner’s standards, we have a small amount of power, so we don’t really focus on earnings as this will depend on how much power you have mining on a particular pool on a given day. But we try to look at everything else, and let you pick and choose your pool.

By BitcoinsInIreland Editorial Team

A staff writer at BitcoinsInIreland.com who covers a range of topics on the site.