PKT Pal
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Works well when compared to my homemade rigs
(This is a review I shared on a Discord channel and thought it would be helpful to share here as well) I had made mention on this channel about 8 weeks ago that I was purchasing a PKTPal and would compare it to my home mining experience. I received my PKTPal about a week ago and it is doing well. While the wait was long (about 6.5 weeks from order to receipt of unit), the out of the box experience was excellent. I am fairly competent with technology and expected the process to be easy for me but yet to still need a few tweaks and workarounds in order to get it up and running. I was 100% wrong in that assessment. It was so ridiculously simple to get setup that someone with nearly zero technical acumen could do it. I just took it out of the box, plugged in an ethernet cable, plugged in the power cable, and pressed the on switch. I then scanned the QR code that was on the setup guide and it took me to the setup page. All I had to do there was have my phone on the same network as the PKTPal and tap one button to recognize it and connect it. Poof, done. It was up and running in about 3 minutes from unboxing. Initial results were lower than I expected with it mining about 50PKT/day after 24 hours. I saw that it was only hitting the pkt.world and pktpool pools and not Zetahash or any of the other small pools. I dropped a chat on the dashboard chat to "Routie" and had a support person chatting with me within 10 minutes of outreach. I explained the issue and that I had sufficient bandwidth at 1GB up/down to push harder. They then made a backend switch to their 'experimental pool order' with the caveat that they made no promises of better performance. Given my available bandwidth, I had no issue with the higher demand from mining the additional pools. My PKTPal now mines about 250 PKT/day since the switch. This is compared to about 150 PKT/day that my AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 3.7GHz 12-Core home system achieves with CLI mining. Overall - a million times easier to setup and over 65% more effective than my home mining setup. (I now run them both and am getting ~400 PKT/day combined) From a profitability assessment, the numbers do not make sense at the current PKT price of ~$0.01. I paid around $3k for the PKTPal. At 250 PKT/day and $0.01 current trading price it would take me 1200 days to break even (3+ years). However I am a long term believer in the protocol. If PKT gets back to $0.05 or more (very possible), then my break-even is 8 months or less. I think this is fair and worth it from my perspective. I look for 1 year break even on any miners I deploy (Helium, ASIC, etc). This meets that expectation with a modest price movement back to where it was not that long ago. I also see enhanced utility of the PKTPal once the roadmap is realized and the additional non-mining features are enabled. DYOR and see what makes sense for you. This is just my experience. (I am not on the PKTPal team and am not shilling for referrals or any of that... just an honest assessment of my experience)