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The Goldshell Mini-DOGE ASIC miners for mining Scrypt-based crypto coins such as Litecoin (LTC) and DogeCoin (DOGE) are quite popular topic among the home miners with the recent spike in the price of both mentioned coins. The miner has the DOGE in its name, but you can mine any Scrypt-based crypto coin and there is actually no point in mining only DogeCoin with it as DOGE is merge-mined with Litecoin, so you are essentially mining Litecoin and DogeCoin together and not only one or the other. Of course, there are quite a few other crypto coins out there that use the Scrypt algorithm, it has been one of the earliest alternatives to Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm, though probably mining for LTC and DOGE is the most popular way these are being used.
It is interesting to note that the Goldshell Mini-DOGE Miner is no longer available for sale by Goldshell as it has been replaced by a slightly faster in terms of hashrate and better in terms of power usage Pro version (205 MH/s at 220 Watts or about 1.1 Watt per Megahash), however you can easily find the non-pro version on the second-hand miner market. And you will be surprised to see that these small home miners do not come very cheap, even though they are not that profitable at the moment. And if you are buying one, just make sure you get the WiFi version as it makes it much easier for home use as there is also a non-WiFi equipped earlier model apparently. If you manage to get a good deal on a Mini-DOGE Pro miner (they come with black cases, so they are easy to differentiate) you better go for that one, though it is not that much of a difference to justify a big price difference.
The official specifications of these small miners are 185 MH/s Scrypt mining hashrate and 233 Watts of power usage, or with other words about 1.26 Watts per Megahash as power efficiency. Just as a reference the quite old already and still quite popular Bitmain L3 Scrypt ASIC miner offers around 1.6W per Megahash and can be optimized to work with around 1.3 Watts per Megahash which is very similar to the Mini-DOGE. So, if you are looking at buying a Goldshell Mini-DOGE you might also check out the options for a Bitmain AntMiner L3 with a custom firmware, it might come cheaper with higher hashrate, but also a bit bulkier and noisier and no WiFi option on that one.
But let us get back to the main question and it is how much do these Goldshell Mini-DOGE Scrypt ASIC miners able to currently mine in terms of LTC and DOGE coins doing merged mining. We did a quick test using the F2Pool as one of the large Litecoin mining pools that does support merged mining with DogeCoin and you can see the actual results for the last 7 full days. Do note that there is a slight increase and then a slight drop in the number of mined coins as there has been a difficulty adjustment on two occasions during the test period. The first one on 21st of November with 1.4% drop and the second one on 24th of November with 5.3% increase.
So, the amount mined Litecoin coins is around 0.0023-0.0024 LTC per day with is roughly around $0.17 USD at the current exchange rate. This is not much really considering that the miner uses around 5.6 kW of power per day and depending on your electricity cost this may be enough to just cover roughly maybe 1/5 of the electricity bill. But wait, there is also the DogeCoin that you mine with it at the same time and you get around 3-4 DOGE per day with it. That is another 30-40 US cents per day with the current exchange rate of the coin. Essentially at the moment you will be kind of covering the electricity used by the miner, depending on where you live, with what you are able to mine with the Mini-DOGE miner.
While the Goldshell Mini-DOGE Scrypt ASIC miners may not be very profitable at the moment, don’t forget that we are in a bear market at the moment and pretty much everything is down in terms of price in the crypto world and there is not much profitability regardless of what you mine. So, mining and keeping the mined coins is the wiser idea the moment, waiting for the bull run cycle to start and the prices to go up and, in the meantime, you can just pick a couple of Mini-DOGE miners if you manage to score a good deal on the price and use them as space heaters during the cold winter days. They are quite compact and operate pretty silent and thanks to the WiFi module you can place them easily in different places around your home. A single device with its 233 Watts of power usage won’t be able to heat up much space that well, but a few of these devices might do the job better. We are soon going to be sharing a more detailed review of the Mini-DOGE ASIC miner here on the blog, so stay tuned if you are interested in learning more about the device.