I’m aware USB Miners are not profitable
That being said, interested in one as a toy - does anyone know what the most popular / most easy to buy options are?
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I’ll throw my two cents in and as far as I know the only ones still being produced are the GekkoScience NewPac and CompacF. They are fun to tune and play with and super simple once you get the hang of it. Personally I put mine on ZergPool which switches coins but pays me in BCH or BTC or whatever you choose. They are literally set it and forget it or you could tinker all day to get great better has rates with more cooling. They are easy to overheat though if you don’t have active cooling. A plug in USB fan for the powered USB hub will be enough. Not going to lie though if you can’t get them on sale they are quite expensive for what they are. NewPac is around $100+ and the CompacF around $200+. Personally I bought my four NewPacs for around $50-75 each and the ComPacF for $140 or so each. Still quite expensive for what I got but it was my start into ASIC mining. Add up what I spent on them and I could’ve bought a better single ASIC but live and learn. That’s just my $0.02.
Thanks
Doug
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Not great miners by any means, but I still have a small group of Gridseed Orbs running at 7W each on their own little dinky set up.
Each one only does a mere 350ish kh/s in Scrypt mode, and I use them just for pure addiction. I really love watching the text on the screen I feel like im watching the matrix.
They take a crap ton of work to set up and need to be run off of a custom miner version. Replacing the USB drivers with Zadig and such. They ended up being so cool I can run them fanless. They also use really stupid mini-B data cables and barrel pin power jacks. In the end fun but not worth it at all, thankfully I got them for 34$ a piece.
If you were to ask which one was best I would say to check out the Moonlanders and block erupters on ebay, lots of people getting rid of that kind of novelty.
Probably a lot less hassle than these gridseeds and you’ll get your fix knowing every one of your USB ports is populated, making you an extra cent per day 
Thank you for the detailed response - how are you cooling your USBs?
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I will check our your recommendations, looking forward to this extra cent!
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The orbs are powered by 6 pin pci server psu breakout board on a mining rig to barrel pin jacks, this way they arent powered by usb. They are still sent data through mini-b. I stacked the gridseeds and cleaned them as best I could and put a dab of thermal paste on each layer creating a sort of “Gridseed Log”
lol.
No cooling anywhere except top and bottom units fans i left installed; keep in mind the 6 pins can handle the Scrypt only mode, but only one 6 pin can handle one gridseed on BTC mode because of the wattage max. (75W on one 6-pin pci connector).
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