As bitcoin mining increasingly becomes more of a professional pursuit, hobbyists and newcomers have turned their attention to scrypt mining.

So, at CoinDesk, we wondered, ‘why not try scrypt mining ourselves?’

Watch the video to see how well we fared:

[youtube id=”Y0ueyiEUKZo” width=”620″ height=”360″]

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We got our hands on a Gridseed G-Blade miner, one of the first scrypt miners in the market to use ASIC chips. ASIC chips have been used to mine bitcoin for over a year, now they are making their way into scrypt mining.

That’s making scrypt even more attractive to newbies.

MinerEU is the European distributor for the China-based manufacturer Gridseed. CEO and co-founder Jing Wei explains why it is easier to get into ASIC scrypt mining:

“The clear advantage of scrypt ASIC mining is lower power consumption. It’s scalable: you can even set up a mining farm at home. It’s also very easy to set it up. We have streamlined the process. […] In a few minutes you can connect all the parts together.”

It is easier and faster to make money from altcoins rather than investing in expensive and industrial bitcoin mining equipment. Mining equipment manufacturers have already announced refined scrypt-mining equipment.

While Gridseed G-Blade is one of the first to be launched on the market, KnCMiner has already announced their plans to launch their scrypt miner Titan.

Mining Adventures at CoinDesk

Each Gridseed G-Blade miner has two boards with 40 GC335 ASIC chips on each one. This $1,600 miner promises a total hashrate of 5.2M.

We brought two of the two-blade miners into the office. Including installing the relevant software, it took us about an hour to set them up. But, now that we’ve done it once, next time would definitely be quicker.

Depending on what you decide to mine, the return on investment of these miners is three to six months. We decided to mine dogecoin and managed 100,000 doge with two miners in a week.

That’s not a bad start to our scrypt mining career, but it’s certainly possible to improve on the ROI by using the multipool.

Wei says:

“In theory the smart switching technology should give you a higher return that mining one type of alternative coin, but the problem with that is the switching process. If we switch it over from one coin to another, the calculation power will be lost during the transition.”

While we’ve parted with the miners, we’re still working out what to do with our $58 worth of dogecoin – suggestions welcome in the comments below.