The ASIC s9 from D-Central Mining comes with a slick 3-d printed case for points with the gf. It costs about 325748 sats (in today's terms ), shipping included. It's not a complex set-up if you go with the ethernet connection. I tried their vonnets wifi connector and ended up banging my head against the wall - not compatible with my ISP's router frequency, so pretty much useless for now.

As it's probably well known here (as @siggy47 has been writing about), its not a get-rich-quick scheme - far from it! If you look at it as a hobby, and you intend on using spare change to buy sats anyway, then you probably be quite satisfied with the result. May as well contribute some hash and get them kyc-free.

Noise wise, it is not too bad with the modified fans. My living space is not huge, so if the door to the room it is in isn't closed, then I can hear a quiet, high-frequency sort of hum (comparable to the dial-up internet sound, but not nearly as loud.) Also, I would have liked if somehow it came with a bult-in dust filter, as I find I have to vacuum more often with it running (probably not a bad thing). I am sure there are more sophisticated home-miners at this point.

The s9 kicks off a good deal of heat (enough for a home-office during a Canadian winter), and actually gets around 8 - 8.5 Th/s!

For fun, I ran some numbers to determine at what price point given my hashing power it would turn a profit. This is based on a tiered-electricity pricing plan, which means I have a few different scenarios to play around with. This also assumes a certain amount of hashing power per day, as estimated by OCEAN Pool.

Below you will see a chart showing the cost-of-use variables for the electricity in my area. As you can see, it gets more expensive during weekday evenings and cheaper by a large margin over-night and during the week-end.

Then, I created a few scenarios of when to run the miner, and tried to determine at what BTCCAD price I am paying for these sats.

The green section shows if I just mined at the ultra-low-overnight-rate -- this would already be profitable, but earns me less sats overall.

The red section shows at what price I am mining btc if I leave the miner to run 24/7 -- a 5x compared to the green! Some days when my balls are feeling big, I let it run. If I keep these sats until the BTCCAD exchange reaches 525000 then I'll have turned a profit!

Then, blue is somewhere in between. This is actually what I aim for most days. It basically means I turn it off for a few hours on weekdays.

I can already hear Darthcoin telling me this is a fiat mentality. I tried to treat it based on material costs - the way a business would have to operate. The fact is, where I am from, home mining is speculative based on fiat prices, and at a small scale, this illustrates a reality that the mining industry has to cope with.

If you are interested, the document is available at Unschoooled Network for a small donation to the cause of educating more folks about bitcoin the freedom technology. You can download the file and insert your own assumptions to better understand mining profitability.

Happy mining!