If you’ve been over to my house anytime in the last six months, you’ve no doubt noticed the constant whirring of fans coming from my home office. Bitcoin mining hardware has taken over that room a bit, and though it’s not as crazy profitable as it was a year ago, it’s still worth the complete lack of effort I put into it.

I started with a couple of big time high powered devices from Butterfly Labs. Not going to lie – I wouldn’t recommend you get involved with them. It took over a year for them to fulfill my first order, and any subsequent hardware of theirs I bought from a reseller. They were beyond shady, though their hardware has held up nicely. All’s well that ends well.. I guess.

Recently, a friend of mine turned me onto Moonlight Miners. They make these little Nano Fury 2 devices that plug right into USB ports. When you buy from them, they include a step by step document to get you up and running, including tips on how to overclock the devices for maximum output. I picked up two of them and increased my overall hashrate by 10 GH/s. Just make sure and pick up a USB fan as well, because those suckers get HOT without one! As long as you’ve got a fan putting direct air on them, though, they’re relatively cool to the touch.

My favorite part of all this is the fact that the effort to get it all going was little more than plug and play, once I got an account set up over at Coinbase so I could convert BTC to USD and over at MineCTRL so I could monitor the hardware. Pretty much effortless.