Bitcoin mining at home with Lili

Sick of being spied on, stolen from, and lied to? Ungovernable Misfits aim to ignite a rebellious spark in every listener. We explore ways to regain privacy and freedom using Bitcoin and open source software. Freedoms are not granted, they are taken and defended. We are rebels with a cause. Join us and become Ungovernable.

26 January 2022

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Description

In todays episode I speak to lili about home mining and how to go from zero to NOKYC Sat stacking hero.

We cover all you need from acquiring your miner to securing your precious sats. All details and links are bellow.

Pitch for bitcoin mining at home (why do it?)
- Cost to mine vs buying spot
- Mining bitcoin depending on your electricity rate costs below 20k, spot bitcoin is trading at 40k. You can calculate your cost to mine bitcoin using the Braiins insights calculator, they even have instructions that walk you through how.
- Non-KYC aspect
- Mining is non-KYC bitcoin at a discount. It is DCA (dollar cost averaging)
Acquiring ASICs and related equipment
- Signs of mining scams/scam sellers:
- Promising free money
- Offering steep discounts
- Crazy specs. Like offering an M30S with 190 th
- Imitating real businesses. Just because a promotion, invoice, and other business material contains the branding of a real mining company does not mean that document is legitimate
- Inability to provide identity verification. Real employees from legitimate mining companies are always available to verify their identities to a customer via video calls, voice chats, or other means of communication
- Immediate payment requests. Any service that wants urgent payment is likely a scam

-WHERE TO BUY:

- Kaboom racks, Compass mining, MinefarmBuy, Hardware market telegram, blockware telegram

Protecting your identity while buying
- Encrypted communication tools
- First thing, do not do business in social media DMs (unencrypted and stored on big tech company servers)
- Email services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Apple Mail and Outlook all collect user data. Encrypted email services like ProtonMail, CTemplar, and Tutanota are more secure
- Messengers: Threema, Briar, Signal, Telegram (secret chats), and Molly, a fork of Signal.
- Paying privately
- - LLCs if fiat payments
  - Transferring funds via a credit charge, ACH payment or wire transfer requires sending a customer’s legal name and bank information to the retailer, which is undesirable for privacy-conscious miners. Miners can operate under a limited liability corporation (LLC) established through a registered agent rather than tied to their real identities may prefer fiat payment methods.
  - Whirlpooled bitcoin and/or non-KYC bitcoin is IDEAL
Setting up your miner at home
- Hooking up your miner and connecting to a mining pool
- Make an account with preferred mining pool. If want to get paid regularly you need to join a mining pool. **I use Slushpool
- Plug in cords. All the chords coming out of the power supply unit just go into the same holes on the top of the miner. Plug in miner ethernet cable and PSU to wall.
- Next you need to connect to the mining pool
- Get the IP address of your miner. You must know this address to access the graphical user interface (GUI) of your miner. Download software to scan your network, angryIP scanner for example. *have to scan with VPN off
- Put IP address of miner in your browser to view the GUI for that specific miner.
- Find the connection link on mining pool website, this is where you will point your hash power to mine with Slush Pool. Paste this link into Braiins OS “Pool Groups” section
- Concealing noise and heat signature
- - Air cooled vs immersion set up
  - For aircooled sets ups, You can build an enclosure for buy an out of box solution like Upstream Data’s Blackbox.
  - Regular dust removal is very important. This will prevent the machines from getting clogged with dust and overheating. Dust removal can be done using a high-pressure blower to blow the dust out of the machines. This should be done monthly. A miner can also replace a machine’s lower speed fans with higher speed versions for better cooling which will contribute to reducing the overall heat signature.
  - Immersion is more involved but once built heat and noise are managed (https://compassmining.io/education/immersion-bitcoin-mining-introduction/ )
  - S19 hydro is cool, water cooled, gives immersion benefits with less complexity, and eliminates the need to deal with dielectric fluid (not released yet)
Troubleshooting miners – what to do if your miner goes down

In the GUI check:

If you can log in and connect to the miner
if pool is up and running
if Config is still the same (sometimes factory defaults or hacks can change this)
that firmware is updated, especially if using a third party one
Verify hash rate and that main stats page isn't showing failed boards
Check log files while the miner boots up

On the actual miner, depending on what you have:

Make sure all power cables are tightly connected if its an external PSU
Reset PSU(s)
Make sure ethernet cable is tightly secured
Make sure nothing is burned

Data protection tips
- Mining pool accounts/avoiding address reuse
- All address balances are visible to anyone with a block explorer. Reused addresses are also more easily linked to real-world identities, which could result in doxxing, address blacklisting, and other risks. Mining pool balances and payout transactions are some of the most closely watched types of on-chain data by everyone from amatuer data analysts to government officials and corporate chainalysis companies.
- Miner can input a new address after every pool payout or just reduce the frequency of payouts
- General web browsing best practices
- Use a good VPN when checking your mining pool apps or visiting mining related websites
- Stratum Protocol Data Transfers
- Privacy and security are a bit more complicated when it comes to the mining data transfers themselves. As miners understand, every second counts in the race to find blocks. While the latency of a high quality VPN isn’t significant for general web browsing, it can impact the profitability of mining by increasing a miner’s stale shares (i.e. shares submitted for a block height which has already been mined) which they don’t receive payouts for.
- Latency: is a measure of delay. Latency measures the time it takes for some data to get to its destination across the network.
- Solutions:
- One common-sense approach presented by @econoalchemist in his guide Home Mining Network Privacy guide is to utilize multiple VPN tunnels in a failover fashion to automatically route mining traffic to the tunnel with the least latency. This affords the user privacy from the ISP, privacy from the mining pool, and no material added latency.
- The downsides of not using a VPN are also significant. With a basic networking setup, a miner’s ISP will see that they have a connection with a pool’s stratum server and the pool will see their IP address. Not only that, but a miner’s hashrate is actually at risk of being stolen if an eavesdropper is sophisticated enough. This is because data transfers via stratum protocol are unencrypted and in human-readable JSON format. This is comparable to visiting HTTP websites without security certificates (i.e. not HTTPS).
- Stratum v2
- The most straightforward and simple solution to protecting stratum data transfers is upgrading to Stratum V2. Unlike Stratum V1, data transfers in V2 are encrypted and in binary format rather than JSON. The encryption means that Stratum V2 is like the HTTPS to Stratum V1’s HTTP, keeping all of a miner’s actual mining activity private and hidden from potentially malicious onlookers and preventing them from being able to steal any of their hashrate.
- Proxies
- A great option that doesn’t significantly increase latency is a DNS proxy such as dnsscrypt-proxy which can be used to encrypt and authenticate requests using the DNSCrypt protocol and pass them to upstream servers (i.e. mining pools). This makes it so that ISPs won’t see details about the communication between a miner and a mining pool, only that there is a connection. In other words, it is also like changing from HTTP to HTTPS, similar to Stratum V2. OS-specific guides for set up  here
Dealing with mining pool payouts
- Coinjoin
- Storing payouts
- You need to coinjoin because you’re not paid directly out of the coinbase. The mining rewards go to the pool operator’s wallet before being transferred to your wallet. Whirlpool can help prevent parties that you send your rewards to from knowing that you mine bitcoin.
- Coinjoin with Samourai wallet or sparrow wallet.
- Send to cold storage. My favorite is passport wallet by Foundation Devices
Choosing a mining pool
Factors to consider: https://compassmining.io/education/how-do-i-choose-a-mining-pool
https://compassmining.io/education/top-bitcoin-mining-pools-grouped-by-payout-structures/