I bought a Bitmain Antminer S9i for home mining and I’m diving into the Mastering Bitcoin book.
This past week has busy but also exciting.
I bought a Bitmain Antminer S9i for home mining and for experimentation and I’m really excited to get it setup and start playing around.
I wanted a miner at home to experiment with and really get to know the ins and outs of ASIC devices and mining and document what I’m learning along the way.
I also wanted to use this older S9 device execute some use cases I’m curious about and want to test.
Here is a picture of the S9i I got shipped in from Florida to Manitoba in Canada.
Looking forward to plugging this in once I get some basic electrical done to accommodate the 1300+ watt, 220 volt device in my basement.
My intention with this miner is to test out different firmware software such as the Braiins OS open source mining firmware as well as remote software like Miner Stat and Foreman miner management. Possibly others.
Here are some of the areas I want to do some analysis on.
- AsicBoost feature in Braiins OS for increasing hashrate with per-chip auto-tuning
- Test monitoring and batch managing Braiins OS+ miners using BTC Tools.
- Learn how to unlock SSH on a miner
- Demand management use cases – turning off miner for periods of the day and then back on. under clocking as well.
- Alerting and potential integration use cases
- In addition to this, I want to do some experiments around ASIC heating and connecting this to my home heating and ventilation system.
- Longer term, I may also put this device in an immersion tank too.
Looking forward to all the learning and I will do my best to share back on here what’s happening.
If you have any questions or suggestions I should test or try out, let me know in the comments.
Mastering Bitcoin
O’Reilly books are some of my favorites when it comes to in-depth learning of specific technologies.
Their first book was called “The Whole Internet”, released in 1992, it was one of my first intro’s into the internet back in the early 90s.
I’ve read and used so many other great books along the information super highway.
Fast forward a few years and O’Reilly books have taught me so much from C+ and CSS to HTML, UNIX, SQL, Ruby and more.
The latest addition to my library is Bitcoin Mastery by Andreas M. Antonopoulos.
I just had to have a copy to expand my overall understanding of the inner workings of Bitcoin.
I may even play around with some Bitcoin development at some point but what interests me most is chapter 10 on Mining and Consensus.
I’m already a few chapters into this very well written complete overview of Bitcoin and look forward to sharing some new learnings in some future posts.
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Free access to Mastering Bitcoin
I encourage everyone to buy the book but you can read it all online here on Gitgub. Below are links to each of the chapters of the Bitcoin Mastery Book.
Enjoy and have a great day!
Chapters hosted on Github
- Chapter 1: ‘Introduction‘
- Chapter 2: ‘How Bitcoin Works‘
- Chapter 3: ‘Bitcoin Core: The Reference Implementation‘
- Chapter 4: ‘Keys, Addresses‘
- Chapter 5: ‘Wallets‘
- Chapter 6: ‘Transactions‘
- Chapter 7: ‘Advanced Transactions and Scripting‘
- Chapter 8: ‘The Bitcoin Network‘
- Chapter 9: ‘The Blockchain‘
- Chapter 10: ‘Mining and Consensus‘
- Chapter 11: ‘Bitcoin Security‘
- Chapter 12: ‘Blockchain Applications‘