Dogecoin and Litecoin mining on a budget! My take on the Goldshell Minidoge ASIC miner: Part 1

In July of this year, I began eyeing mining equipment and considered what to buy. I'm trying to invest the least amount of money possible (and no, I am not going to mine using my CPU or GPU on my desktop) because I would prefer to spend on crypto that can earn through staking. The price of ASIC miners has exploded recently, and I bit the bullet and hit Ebay to try and find a few deals.

I ended up scoring a pair of Goldshell Minidoge miners for a little over MSRP. They merge-mine Litecoin and Doge using the scrypt algorithm, and with the fluctuating price of Doge they could potentially be good money makers. Even at the current pricing of $.25 USD/1 Doge they will pay for themselves in about a year of mining; but hopefully the price will creep upwards and I will make my initial investment back sooner. I'm still considering it a hobby, so making everything back isn't completely necessary.

Another draw was the fact that they don't really make much noise, only about 35 Db, and won't piss off my wife.

They were originally setup in my living room, plugged directly into the router and were about as loud as a mini-fridge. She's still happy that they are in a closet.

(My miners are in a walk-in closet with an air conditioning vent directly above the setup)

I'm averaging around 15 to 16 doge mined per day, and ~.008 LTC on F2Pool; not a whole lot but it isn't bad for a small starter ASIC. I'll do a comparison of returns with other pools another time. At this rate I might break even on the Goldshells in about a year of mining if doge stays within the .24 to .30 range.

I will post Part 2 of this article once I have a full month of mining under my belt with these new devices running 24/7. 

Thanks for reading!