http://www.cryptocurrencychart.com/
The creator of the chart posted in the forum here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=364352.0
I'm not sure how I'll use it just yet but I keep playing with it and find it interesting.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Cryptocurrency Chart
I ran across this handy little chart in the Bitcoin forum.
http://www.cryptocurrencychart.com/
The creator of the chart posted in the forum here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=364352.0
I'm not sure how I'll use it just yet but I keep playing with it and find it interesting.
http://www.cryptocurrencychart.com/
The creator of the chart posted in the forum here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=364352.0
I'm not sure how I'll use it just yet but I keep playing with it and find it interesting.
Stablecoin
I've been looking for a coin that still feels like you can get in the ground floor. After looking through a few sites I ran across Stablecoin. It seems to have some good development support. As far as I can tell since the relaunch the dev team has been active and posting on various forum.
Right out the gate I had a problem. I installed the client and launched it then nothing happened. I couldn't sync to the network. I had created my c:\users\appdata\roaming\stablecoin\stablecoin.conf file as specified from the dev's post on a couple of forums. No luck I was getting no peer connections.
After a few Google searches I found a couple of peer address that allowed me to connect to the network. I then went through my log file and skimmed off a few more peer address. It's late now so I'm not setting up any mining yet and I'm waiting for the wallet to sync anyway.
I'm not going to throw any hashes at something that as a forum user with the same sync problem I have put it "All the lights are on but no one is home". After the sync I'll let it stand and see if my connection to peers is stable before doing any mining.
For those interested in Stablecoin the stablecoin.conf file I used is:
rpcuser=username <-change this
rpcpassword=password <- change this
server=1
daemon=1
addnode=108.186.237.29
addnode=188.126.8.14
addnode=84.170.27.129
addnode=109.197.195.116
addnode=86.20.220.97
Right out the gate I had a problem. I installed the client and launched it then nothing happened. I couldn't sync to the network. I had created my c:\users\appdata\roaming\stablecoin\stablecoin.conf file as specified from the dev's post on a couple of forums. No luck I was getting no peer connections.
After a few Google searches I found a couple of peer address that allowed me to connect to the network. I then went through my log file and skimmed off a few more peer address. It's late now so I'm not setting up any mining yet and I'm waiting for the wallet to sync anyway.
I'm not going to throw any hashes at something that as a forum user with the same sync problem I have put it "All the lights are on but no one is home". After the sync I'll let it stand and see if my connection to peers is stable before doing any mining.
For those interested in Stablecoin the stablecoin.conf file I used is:
rpcuser=username <-change this
rpcpassword=password <- change this
server=1
daemon=1
addnode=108.186.237.29
addnode=188.126.8.14
addnode=84.170.27.129
addnode=109.197.195.116
addnode=86.20.220.97
Monday, December 9, 2013
Litecoin mining
I've been playing with Litecoin mining the last few days. Basic information about Litecoin can be found at https://litecoin.org/. I tried two different mining pools. Coinotron.com and Coinhuntr.com.
Coinotron I setup as a pay per share. They take a 3.5% cut and pay out minimum is 0.3 LTC. I mined with them and achieved just about 0.1 LTC per day with my HD7790 hashing between 220 and 250 kh/s. I also aimed a couple of slower Nvidia cards at the pool but their contribution was negligible.
I then gave my hand at Coinhuntr for a few days. It was giving me a little over 0.1 LTC but this may be attributed to some tweaks I made to my HD7790. Coinhuntr is a proportional reward system. Coinhuntr takes 1% fee and 1% donation so that would be cheaper in the long run.
Both sites seem to work equally well for my needs and I couldn't really recommend one over the other. One thing to remember about LTC is the required transaction fee built into the coin. As of this posting the fee has been dropped but it is best to cash out from the pool in larger chunks to avoid transfer fees later.
I'll put together a tutorial on LTC mining and post it soon.
Coinotron I setup as a pay per share. They take a 3.5% cut and pay out minimum is 0.3 LTC. I mined with them and achieved just about 0.1 LTC per day with my HD7790 hashing between 220 and 250 kh/s. I also aimed a couple of slower Nvidia cards at the pool but their contribution was negligible.
I then gave my hand at Coinhuntr for a few days. It was giving me a little over 0.1 LTC but this may be attributed to some tweaks I made to my HD7790. Coinhuntr is a proportional reward system. Coinhuntr takes 1% fee and 1% donation so that would be cheaper in the long run.
Both sites seem to work equally well for my needs and I couldn't really recommend one over the other. One thing to remember about LTC is the required transaction fee built into the coin. As of this posting the fee has been dropped but it is best to cash out from the pool in larger chunks to avoid transfer fees later.
I'll put together a tutorial on LTC mining and post it soon.
RPOOL for Primecoin update
I have stopped mining on RPOOL. After 16 hours of mining I have not had a single share drop on my status page. I'm not sure if it is RPOOLs miner which I was using a modified version of the Beer pool miner or the way they issue rewards. I decided to go back to Beer pool to finish mining. Besides at 1% fee at Beer vs 2% at RPOOL I feel in the long run it is the better choice.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
New Primecoin Pool
I knew about ypool and beer pool but I thought these were the only pools available. I just found out about rpool. It's a Chinese pool but the site has an English section.
What I like about rpool. It only takes 2% and pays out every .01 XPM straight to your wallet. As soon as I finish some pay outs on Beer I'm going to give it a try with the VPS machines. For those interested here is the link.
http://rpool.net/
You can use either ypool's jhPrimeminer or beer pool's primeminer. Here is the ussage:
What I like about rpool. It only takes 2% and pays out every .01 XPM straight to your wallet. As soon as I finish some pay outs on Beer I'm going to give it a try with the VPS machines. For those interested here is the link.
http://rpool.net/
You can use either ypool's jhPrimeminer or beer pool's primeminer. Here is the ussage:
Pool： rpool.net:8336
Miner： primeminer v0.6 RC2, thanks xolokram！
Usage： primeminer -pooluser=[payout-address] -poolpassword=0 -poolip=rpool.net -poolport=8336 -genproclimit=[threads-to-use]
Now you can use yPool's miner，T15 and T11.8 are tested， pool address is：rpool.net:10034
Usage： jhPrimeminer-T15.exe -o http://rpool.net:10034 -u [payout-address] -p x -m 31 -m2 37 -m3 41 -m4 47
Use the param '-t' to limit the threads you want to use.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Primecoin VPS update
It's the 4th day of XPM VPS mining for me using Beer pool. The first day started out promising. I was looking at possibly generating a coin every 2 days. Unfortunately the second day things slowed down and they don't appear to be getting better.
We may be looking at pool mining as the only real source of income for the regular Joe. If you had enough machines to throw at XPM you might do OK with solo mining in a private pool but I don't fall in that category. The thing I found funny is PrimesPerSecond (PPS) don't seem to matter as a stat that means anything.
There is a significant amount of luck involved in finding XPM. In a pool I do OK, I get my nibbles but solo mining on my i3 PC has proven fruitless. I'll let it keep running and hope for a chain but I'm not counting on it.
I'm considering converting it to a private pool and throwing a couple of core2duo at it for a week and see what happens but first I'll finish a full week of solo at minimum.
Not giving up on Prime just yet but it doesn't look as glamorous as I first thought.
We may be looking at pool mining as the only real source of income for the regular Joe. If you had enough machines to throw at XPM you might do OK with solo mining in a private pool but I don't fall in that category. The thing I found funny is PrimesPerSecond (PPS) don't seem to matter as a stat that means anything.
There is a significant amount of luck involved in finding XPM. In a pool I do OK, I get my nibbles but solo mining on my i3 PC has proven fruitless. I'll let it keep running and hope for a chain but I'm not counting on it.
I'm considering converting it to a private pool and throwing a couple of core2duo at it for a week and see what happens but first I'll finish a full week of solo at minimum.
Not giving up on Prime just yet but it doesn't look as glamorous as I first thought.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
ASIC Bitcoin Mining
I decided to give ASIC a try but as I've mentioned before I'm cheap. Not wanting to drop a load of cash on anything that has just one purpose I decided to try a Block Erupter.
You can find these on Ebay for about $50 to $60 USD. Far from a bargain. They perform better than a $90 ATI GPU but not by much and that's all they do. I've bee hashing at the advertised rate of 333 MH/s. They get pretty warm to so I'm thinking if I don't want to burn it out I need better cooling.
The advantage of the Block Erupter is that it pulls less power to operate and hashes faster than a GPU. The bad news is that 333 MH/s is not going to cut in the world of Butterfly Labs ASIC miners. BFL sells their smallest miner for $300 USD and it mines at 5 GH/s. Yes you would need 15 Block Erupters at even $50 each you have far exceeded the $300 mark. At $750 you could be hashing at 10gh/s with two BFL miners. The only thing the Block Erupter has going for it is you can get one now. The BFL and other ASIC miners are generally on back order until next year. Once they flood the market the Block Erupter will be as worthless as mining with your CPU now.
Still for me it was nice to get a little piece of Bitcoin history to add to me collection and I'll run the miner in the back ground since I have nothing better to do with it. Maybe in 10 years I'll have 0.1 Bitcoin.
By the way before you can mine in windows with the BE you need to download and install the drivers from this location:
http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx
Plug the BE into a USB port and it will fail install. Point the driver search to the download location and let it install.
After that I used Bitminter with it's Java GUI. It detected the BE right away as an Icarus on Com 7. I turned it on and 333 MH/s was rolling. The heat is outside of my laptop so I can let it mine and not worry about killing it. More than one laptop has been known to bite the dust on mining detail. They really aren't built for good heat dissipation.
I wouldn't say it's fun to play with a BE since there isn't much to it but it was an interesting 10 minutes to set it up. I don't think those 10 minutes were worth the $56 I paid for the BE though.
Maybe I can find another SHA256 coin to mine that doesn't have as huge a following yet has some potential. The might get a few more minutes of fun out of investment capital.
The advantage of the Block Erupter is that it pulls less power to operate and hashes faster than a GPU. The bad news is that 333 MH/s is not going to cut in the world of Butterfly Labs ASIC miners. BFL sells their smallest miner for $300 USD and it mines at 5 GH/s. Yes you would need 15 Block Erupters at even $50 each you have far exceeded the $300 mark. At $750 you could be hashing at 10gh/s with two BFL miners. The only thing the Block Erupter has going for it is you can get one now. The BFL and other ASIC miners are generally on back order until next year. Once they flood the market the Block Erupter will be as worthless as mining with your CPU now.
Still for me it was nice to get a little piece of Bitcoin history to add to me collection and I'll run the miner in the back ground since I have nothing better to do with it. Maybe in 10 years I'll have 0.1 Bitcoin.
By the way before you can mine in windows with the BE you need to download and install the drivers from this location:
http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/USBtoUARTBridgeVCPDrivers.aspx
Plug the BE into a USB port and it will fail install. Point the driver search to the download location and let it install.
After that I used Bitminter with it's Java GUI. It detected the BE right away as an Icarus on Com 7. I turned it on and 333 MH/s was rolling. The heat is outside of my laptop so I can let it mine and not worry about killing it. More than one laptop has been known to bite the dust on mining detail. They really aren't built for good heat dissipation.
I wouldn't say it's fun to play with a BE since there isn't much to it but it was an interesting 10 minutes to set it up. I don't think those 10 minutes were worth the $56 I paid for the BE though.
Maybe I can find another SHA256 coin to mine that doesn't have as huge a following yet has some potential. The might get a few more minutes of fun out of investment capital.
Primecoin Tutorial
Have you heard of Primecoin? I promised in my initial post that I would get more into Primecoin. This cryptocurrency is based on computing prime numbers. It is not a SHA256 or Scrypt based algorithm. It defies GPUs and there are no ASIC to calculate it. You want to mine prime throw your main CPU at it. This keeps Primecoin in the reach of the average Joe.
My PCs at home are busy mining Litecoin and Feathercoin but I wanted to give Primecoin a try. I decided to get a virtual server. My current setup looks like it will produce about 1 Primecoin every two days at a cost of 36 cents per day. I setup 3 virtual servers and am currently turning out over 1200 PPS for less than $15 in a month.
The big question is will this actually pay off? It doesn't matter my investment for 1 month of VPS service is easily chocked up to having fun in my hobby and I was able to learn some Linux while I was at it.
The smaller question is do you want to be a Primecoin miner? There was a time when solo mining would produce many coins a day. Today we are faced with pool mining for coin portions. I choose to start my XPM mining as an experiment using virtual servers at Atlantic.net.
Their cheapest price plan is $3.95/month virtual server with a 2.4g Xenon and 256Mb of ram. I chose Ubuntu 12.04 64bit as my operating system. Before getting started with the server though you will need to go to primecoin.org and get and install the primecoin client. This will be your wallet. Like other cryptocurrency wallets it will take a little time to sync with the network once installed.
Once installed you will need to go to the receive tab and make note of your walled receive address. You can create as many as you like and label them based on receive purpose. I also always encrypt my wallets to add a layer of protection against spyware/malware on my computer.
Now that you have the client taken care of go to a VPS provider and select a server to rent or you can do this on your home Ubuntu machine.
Login as root and run these commands to install the dependancies:
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install -y git make g++ build-essential libminiupnpc-dev
$ apt-get install -y libdb++-dev libgmp-dev libssl-dev dos2unix
$ apt-get install -y libboost1.48-all libboost-chrono1.48-dev
Now get the source code and build it:
(** Doing the swap commands is very important here. The application will install without them but takes much longer. Even so take a break after the last command in this section it's going to be a while. With the 256Mb VPS it is a long long (hours) while but if you don't see any errors don't stop the application.)
$ git clone https://github.com/thbaumbach/primecoin
$ cd primecoin/src
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=64M count=16
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
$ sudo swapon /swapfile
$ cd ~/primecoin/src
$ make -f makefile.unix
On Atlantic.net if you want to create multiple XXS servers the $3.95 ones you can build one then submit a request to cloudsupport@atlantic.net and ask for your server ID number to be cloned. This would be faster than doing more installs on the XXS size server.
Now primeminer should be executable.
Test it:
$ ./primeminer
********************************************
*** Xolominer - Primecoin Pool Miner v0.8 RC1
*** by xolokram/TB - www.beeeeer.org - glhf
***
*** thx to Sunny King & mikaelh
*** press CTRL+C to exit
********************************************
usage: ./primeminer -poolfee=<fee-in-%> -poolip=<ip> -poolport=<port> -pooluser=<user> -poolpassword=<password>
If you want to launch primeminer at this point use this command:
**(I use beer.org pool here. No registration necessary just use your cash out address. Mine is below change it for yours or you will be mining on my test account)
$ /root/primecoin/src/primeminer -pooluser=AerwUBdnrUonnmhfhFsHcJQp9Wj3Rc4Jwh -poolip=54.200.248.75 -poolport=1337 -genproclimit=4
(** -genproclimit=# is how many cores of your processor you will use. I experimented with changing this value from 2 to 6 and saw no difference. I suspect as the Atlantic VPS are qemmu virtual machines there was little difference. Your milage may vary with other VPS providers.)
Install the supervisor to automate the miner launching:
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install supervisor
$ mkdir -p /var/log/supervisor
Now we need to create the primecoin.conf file:
touch /etc/supervisor/conf.d/primecoin.conf
nano /etc/supervisor/conf.d/primecoin.conf
(this will open the text editor)
Paste the following into the editor:
(** Again change the pooluser for your primecoin address)
[program:primecoin]
command=/root/primecoin/src/primeminer -pooluser=AerwUBdnrUonnmhfhFsHcJQp9Wj3Rc4Jwh -poolip=54.200.248.75 -poolport=1337 -genproclimit=6
stdout_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/%(program_name)s.log
stderr_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/%(program_name)s.log
autorestart=true
Now press ctrl-o to save the file then ctrl-x to exit
Stop and restart the supervisor:
$ /etc/init.d/supervisor stop
$ /etc/init.d/supervisor start
Grats, your are mining! You can check your miner via the tail command. Tail shows the last few lines of a text or log file in this case. The -f option keeps appending to the output as it grows. To exit tail use ctrl-c
$ tail -f /var/log/supervisor/primecoin.log
You can later check your earnings with the mining pool visiting
http://xpm.syware.de/?a=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
(make sure to replace XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX with your Primecoin address)
I did this with a VPS on Atlantic.net Cloud services. I purchased a 1 month contract for a Xenon 2.4ghz virtual server running 256Mb of ram and one for a 512Mb of ram. The cost for the month was $3.95 ad $4.95 respectively.
My observations of the PPS output from these servers surprised me. At worse I expected them to be the same but in actuality the 256Mb server produced between 460 and 480 PPS while the 512Mb server only produced about 350 to 380 PPS.
I haven't experimented more with this but It may just be that particular virtual server build. It may be worth killing the server and installing a fresh one to see if the results are the same but since I'm not sure how I will be billed for a server if I kill it, I'll leave that for someone else even though it appears you get prorated on use.
That's it. If you enjoyed the tutorial and want to support the site consider a donation to CryptoDuck at one of these address:
XPM = AVb1msSDBRMGk5fPL5WzT7UAkNJTaFakHD
FTC = 6q9dPosgNF7oos76PvEgviB8YgGFhwpaok
LTC = LhP25xdad4RFsF1XXtxqN1VPdmbZREHbMJ
BTC = 1JmhTodLQiUTAtjP7zLPQKzEtk69wcUYTT
NMC = NEKxiMEqKBkK4fXucXBQugYfqvKqpoB6om
My PCs at home are busy mining Litecoin and Feathercoin but I wanted to give Primecoin a try. I decided to get a virtual server. My current setup looks like it will produce about 1 Primecoin every two days at a cost of 36 cents per day. I setup 3 virtual servers and am currently turning out over 1200 PPS for less than $15 in a month.
The big question is will this actually pay off? It doesn't matter my investment for 1 month of VPS service is easily chocked up to having fun in my hobby and I was able to learn some Linux while I was at it.
The smaller question is do you want to be a Primecoin miner? There was a time when solo mining would produce many coins a day. Today we are faced with pool mining for coin portions. I choose to start my XPM mining as an experiment using virtual servers at Atlantic.net.
Their cheapest price plan is $3.95/month virtual server with a 2.4g Xenon and 256Mb of ram. I chose Ubuntu 12.04 64bit as my operating system. Before getting started with the server though you will need to go to primecoin.org and get and install the primecoin client. This will be your wallet. Like other cryptocurrency wallets it will take a little time to sync with the network once installed.
Once installed you will need to go to the receive tab and make note of your walled receive address. You can create as many as you like and label them based on receive purpose. I also always encrypt my wallets to add a layer of protection against spyware/malware on my computer.
Now that you have the client taken care of go to a VPS provider and select a server to rent or you can do this on your home Ubuntu machine.
Login as root and run these commands to install the dependancies:
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install -y git make g++ build-essential libminiupnpc-dev
$ apt-get install -y libdb++-dev libgmp-dev libssl-dev dos2unix
$ apt-get install -y libboost1.48-all libboost-chrono1.48-dev
Now get the source code and build it:
(** Doing the swap commands is very important here. The application will install without them but takes much longer. Even so take a break after the last command in this section it's going to be a while. With the 256Mb VPS it is a long long (hours) while but if you don't see any errors don't stop the application.)
$ git clone https://github.com/thbaumbach/primecoin
$ cd primecoin/src
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=64M count=16
$ sudo mkswap /swapfile
$ sudo swapon /swapfile
$ cd ~/primecoin/src
$ make -f makefile.unix
On Atlantic.net if you want to create multiple XXS servers the $3.95 ones you can build one then submit a request to cloudsupport@atlantic.net and ask for your server ID number to be cloned. This would be faster than doing more installs on the XXS size server.
Now primeminer should be executable.
Test it:
$ ./primeminer
********************************************
*** Xolominer - Primecoin Pool Miner v0.8 RC1
*** by xolokram/TB - www.beeeeer.org - glhf
***
*** thx to Sunny King & mikaelh
*** press CTRL+C to exit
********************************************
usage: ./primeminer -poolfee=<fee-in-%> -poolip=<ip> -poolport=<port> -pooluser=<user> -poolpassword=<password>
If you want to launch primeminer at this point use this command:
**(I use beer.org pool here. No registration necessary just use your cash out address. Mine is below change it for yours or you will be mining on my test account)
$ /root/primecoin/src/primeminer -pooluser=AerwUBdnrUonnmhfhFsHcJQp9Wj3Rc4Jwh -poolip=54.200.248.75 -poolport=1337 -genproclimit=4
(** -genproclimit=# is how many cores of your processor you will use. I experimented with changing this value from 2 to 6 and saw no difference. I suspect as the Atlantic VPS are qemmu virtual machines there was little difference. Your milage may vary with other VPS providers.)
Install the supervisor to automate the miner launching:
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install supervisor
$ mkdir -p /var/log/supervisor
Now we need to create the primecoin.conf file:
touch /etc/supervisor/conf.d/primecoin.conf
nano /etc/supervisor/conf.d/primecoin.conf
(this will open the text editor)
Paste the following into the editor:
(** Again change the pooluser for your primecoin address)
[program:primecoin]
command=/root/primecoin/src/primeminer -pooluser=AerwUBdnrUonnmhfhFsHcJQp9Wj3Rc4Jwh -poolip=54.200.248.75 -poolport=1337 -genproclimit=6
stdout_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/%(program_name)s.log
stderr_logfile=/var/log/supervisor/%(program_name)s.log
autorestart=true
Now press ctrl-o to save the file then ctrl-x to exit
Stop and restart the supervisor:
$ /etc/init.d/supervisor stop
$ /etc/init.d/supervisor start
Grats, your are mining! You can check your miner via the tail command. Tail shows the last few lines of a text or log file in this case. The -f option keeps appending to the output as it grows. To exit tail use ctrl-c
$ tail -f /var/log/supervisor/primecoin.log
You can later check your earnings with the mining pool visiting
http://xpm.syware.de/?a=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
(make sure to replace XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX with your Primecoin address)
I did this with a VPS on Atlantic.net Cloud services. I purchased a 1 month contract for a Xenon 2.4ghz virtual server running 256Mb of ram and one for a 512Mb of ram. The cost for the month was $3.95 ad $4.95 respectively.
My observations of the PPS output from these servers surprised me. At worse I expected them to be the same but in actuality the 256Mb server produced between 460 and 480 PPS while the 512Mb server only produced about 350 to 380 PPS.
I haven't experimented more with this but It may just be that particular virtual server build. It may be worth killing the server and installing a fresh one to see if the results are the same but since I'm not sure how I will be billed for a server if I kill it, I'll leave that for someone else even though it appears you get prorated on use.
That's it. If you enjoyed the tutorial and want to support the site consider a donation to CryptoDuck at one of these address:
XPM = AVb1msSDBRMGk5fPL5WzT7UAkNJTaFakHD
FTC = 6q9dPosgNF7oos76PvEgviB8YgGFhwpaok
LTC = LhP25xdad4RFsF1XXtxqN1VPdmbZREHbMJ
BTC = 1JmhTodLQiUTAtjP7zLPQKzEtk69wcUYTT
NMC = NEKxiMEqKBkK4fXucXBQugYfqvKqpoB6om
Central Banks aren't happy with Bitcoin
I found this article from the WSJ very interesting. It details some hesitation from the Central Banks toward cryptocurrency. I see this as understandable since it threatens their model. I also see this as a good thing. Over all recent news has been more positive than negative about Bitcoin. I won't lie it feels like a bubble but that's not all bad.The key is to not get caught with your whole hand in the cookie jar at the bust.
Floodgates open on CryptoDuck
Welcome to CryptoDuck and the wonderful world of cryptocurrency mining. As a noob to this hobby I've made many mistakes over last 3 days and I'm sure will make many more in the weeks to come. Hopefully together we can overcome hurdles and achieve a level of profitability.
My initial expectation was to hopefully do some part time mining which would eventually pay off my investment in some video cards I needed to upgrade some PCs at home. One for gaming and one for a media center.
I had an old Lenovo M57 intel core2duo PC with a Zotac G8400S Nvidia graphics card. I used this PC with Windows Media Center and a TV tuner to capture live broadcast TV. I'm not a fan of paying for cable but I like DVR functionality.
My not so trusty Denon AVR broke after a venerable 7 months of service. I bought a Harman Kardon that was on sale at Frys for $199. What a deal right? Actually I like much of the functionality of the new AVR even if the remote is not exactly user friendly. One major draw back to the HK is that when on HDMI input the only audio source is HDMI. Something in my Lenovo and the Nvidia card never agreed and I couldn't get HDMI audio so I used optical audio via a USB DAC. Now I had a problem. I could see or hear TV but not both at the same time. My solution was a new video card.
I returned to Frys and purchased another Nvidia card this time a GT 610. It was cheap only $30 but it did the job. If you haven't noticed by now I can be cheap when it comes to electronics so I started wondering how can I get my money back. I remember first hearing about Bitcoin last year. It was worth about $14 USD per BTC. The whole thing made no sense to me and I didn't know anything about mining or where the BTC came from. Some friends of mine bought some BTC to use on online purchases. I stayed away from the whole thing as it seemed the only way to get BTC was to send Western Union cash grams and that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Low an behold last week I read an article that said BTC was trading at $1000 USD per BTC. WHAT!! Did I feel like I missed the boat. I decided to look into this whole Bitcoin thing and learned more about mining. I did a quick google search and found a tutorial for pool mining. Bitminter had a GUI so I chose it as my pool. I also like the fact that it was a Java GUI so I could run it on my Ubuntu machines from the web browser also.
With out knowing anything about hash rates or using GPUs or CPUs I launched Bitminter after creating an account. This little needle on the gauge moved and I assumed I'm printing money. Yeah!!! It's addictive. I kept looking back to see what was happening on the PCs and checking the Bitminter site to see how my workers were producing.
Then I realized I had the bug. It was to late to avoid it. This was turning into a hobby. I did some research to find out if I could improve my hash rate. You know what? I was doing everything wrong. For one no one and I mean no one mines Bitcoin using their CPU. To tell the truth no one mines Bitcoin with GPU anymore and expects to make a profit of any kind. You see a new thing has happened very recently. ASIC hashers have been released. ASIC is a type of computer chip which is designed for a very specific purpose. That's what the AS part of ASIC stands for (Application Specific). These ASIC devices which have recently been released are designed to hash Bitcoins. They do it so fast the system has raised the difficulty level of mining BTC and anyone not using one is probably spending more on electricity than their return.
Another thing to note is for the most part these ASIC devices are not cheap. A significant investment is required to be profitable at mining BTC. I felt like I missed the boat again. Then I noticed while logged into Bitminter that there was section under BTC payout called NMC payout and I had accumulated a small amount of this NMC thingy. What could it be? Was it worth anything? I hadn't set Bitminter up to mine anything other than BTC.
It turns out that the algorithm used to mine BTC can be used to mine NMC also. NMC is Namecoin and Bitminter does this automatically. While it can be used as a cyptocurrency it is actually more than that. It is designed as a decentralized DNS service. DNS is the service by which your computer translates internet destinations that you can remember like www.google.com to an IP address the computers and routers on the internet understand.
Well now this makes more sense to me than BTC. NMC has a reason. If you want to register a network name or domain in the NMC network you need to buy it with NMC. This is something that has at least a much more real value. I kept my rigs mining BTC/NMC while I did research into this alternate cryptocurrency. Good news and bad news lay ahead.
The bad news was simply that the same hardware to mine BTC was required for NMC. NMC mines a little faster but ASIC hardware is a must. I felt crushed I still missed the boat. I figured I could keep mining until I reached a cashout level and transfer my coins to Coinbase. I chose Coinbase because you can link it to your bank account.
Coinbase wasn't working linking to my account. It may have had something to do with the Thanksgiving weekend but I started exploring alternate ways to exchange coin. I didn't have enough to exchange but hey I didn't have anything better to do. I found a couple of exchanges and saw a world of cryptocurrency I couldn't believe. There coins upon coins out there.
Most of them are the equivalent of junk bonds or penny stocks. You will probably loose if you bet on them. On the other hand there was something attractive about some of these alternate currencies. Some of them were ASIC resistant, or at least were designed to use a different algorithm than the SHA256 BTC used. That meant I could mine with my GPU and may actually be profitable.
To be clear there is a very small portion of miners that use CPU for mining. Most of them are in Primecoin because you lose money mining with CPU on other coins. I'll cover more on Primecoin later. I currently have an experimental 3 rig Primecoin setup to test profitability.
Since GPUs could still be profitable in the altcoin market I did a little research and settled on mining two coins. Litecoin and Feathercoin. Litecoin is a well respected altcoin. It is likely destined to be silver to BTC's gold. It was an easy choice. There are many miners leaving BTC for Litecoin because they don't have the ability to upgrade to ASIC or are repurposing their FPGA miners. FPGA is the chip used in good GPUs.
Feathercoin has a good enough following that I think it has a shot at becoming copper but it is still up in the air what coin will take that spot. I like the gamble though because the difficulty level on Feathercoin is still low enough you can mine out a fair share of coins with crappy equipment. If it goes up great. If not no big loss.
Crappy equipment brings me to my next failure. Nvidia cards are horrible miners. While Nvidia rules the world of gameplay with floating point calculations AMD/ATI cards rule the world of mining. The ATI cards have better integer calculation ability and comparably priced cards from Nvidia and ATI will show ATI to be significantly better at mining.
Off I went to Frys again. I hadn't bought my gaming card yet and decided I could swallow some crow and buy an ATI card in a price range that would give me decent enough gaming and ok mining. Lets be clear hear that I was not about to drop crazy cash on a video card when I haven't even received a single cent from my mining yet.
Frys was having a sale and rebate offer. I found an MSI HD7790 OC which was $109 with a $20 rebate. Not bad I just picked up a card for under a hundred dollars and it's hash rate should be over 200 KH/s. My new Nvidia card was only putting out about 18KH/s and was a third the price. This would be good enough for a one month test.
As of this writing I have been mining for 4 days. I have tried FTC and LTC. At current exchange rates and if my the card keeps producing at it's current rate I should pay the card off and make a small profit at the end of the month. Of course difficulty can change and reduce how much I produce or prices on the coins can drop. Let's not kid ourselves it is a volatile market and we may be looking at a bubble.
Will I keep mining FTC and LTC? I'm not sure. I did call this a hobby. I don't envision paying my mortgage with a room full of mining rigs. I'll likely throw my hand at other alt coins and collect a few here and a few there and sit on them and see if they ever amount to anything.
Thanks for reading through my first rant and I'll be posting tutorials on setting up different mining operations soon.
--CryptoDuck
My initial expectation was to hopefully do some part time mining which would eventually pay off my investment in some video cards I needed to upgrade some PCs at home. One for gaming and one for a media center.
I had an old Lenovo M57 intel core2duo PC with a Zotac G8400S Nvidia graphics card. I used this PC with Windows Media Center and a TV tuner to capture live broadcast TV. I'm not a fan of paying for cable but I like DVR functionality.
My not so trusty Denon AVR broke after a venerable 7 months of service. I bought a Harman Kardon that was on sale at Frys for $199. What a deal right? Actually I like much of the functionality of the new AVR even if the remote is not exactly user friendly. One major draw back to the HK is that when on HDMI input the only audio source is HDMI. Something in my Lenovo and the Nvidia card never agreed and I couldn't get HDMI audio so I used optical audio via a USB DAC. Now I had a problem. I could see or hear TV but not both at the same time. My solution was a new video card.
I returned to Frys and purchased another Nvidia card this time a GT 610. It was cheap only $30 but it did the job. If you haven't noticed by now I can be cheap when it comes to electronics so I started wondering how can I get my money back. I remember first hearing about Bitcoin last year. It was worth about $14 USD per BTC. The whole thing made no sense to me and I didn't know anything about mining or where the BTC came from. Some friends of mine bought some BTC to use on online purchases. I stayed away from the whole thing as it seemed the only way to get BTC was to send Western Union cash grams and that left a sour taste in my mouth.
Low an behold last week I read an article that said BTC was trading at $1000 USD per BTC. WHAT!! Did I feel like I missed the boat. I decided to look into this whole Bitcoin thing and learned more about mining. I did a quick google search and found a tutorial for pool mining. Bitminter had a GUI so I chose it as my pool. I also like the fact that it was a Java GUI so I could run it on my Ubuntu machines from the web browser also.
With out knowing anything about hash rates or using GPUs or CPUs I launched Bitminter after creating an account. This little needle on the gauge moved and I assumed I'm printing money. Yeah!!! It's addictive. I kept looking back to see what was happening on the PCs and checking the Bitminter site to see how my workers were producing.
Then I realized I had the bug. It was to late to avoid it. This was turning into a hobby. I did some research to find out if I could improve my hash rate. You know what? I was doing everything wrong. For one no one and I mean no one mines Bitcoin using their CPU. To tell the truth no one mines Bitcoin with GPU anymore and expects to make a profit of any kind. You see a new thing has happened very recently. ASIC hashers have been released. ASIC is a type of computer chip which is designed for a very specific purpose. That's what the AS part of ASIC stands for (Application Specific). These ASIC devices which have recently been released are designed to hash Bitcoins. They do it so fast the system has raised the difficulty level of mining BTC and anyone not using one is probably spending more on electricity than their return.
Another thing to note is for the most part these ASIC devices are not cheap. A significant investment is required to be profitable at mining BTC. I felt like I missed the boat again. Then I noticed while logged into Bitminter that there was section under BTC payout called NMC payout and I had accumulated a small amount of this NMC thingy. What could it be? Was it worth anything? I hadn't set Bitminter up to mine anything other than BTC.
It turns out that the algorithm used to mine BTC can be used to mine NMC also. NMC is Namecoin and Bitminter does this automatically. While it can be used as a cyptocurrency it is actually more than that. It is designed as a decentralized DNS service. DNS is the service by which your computer translates internet destinations that you can remember like www.google.com to an IP address the computers and routers on the internet understand.
Well now this makes more sense to me than BTC. NMC has a reason. If you want to register a network name or domain in the NMC network you need to buy it with NMC. This is something that has at least a much more real value. I kept my rigs mining BTC/NMC while I did research into this alternate cryptocurrency. Good news and bad news lay ahead.
The bad news was simply that the same hardware to mine BTC was required for NMC. NMC mines a little faster but ASIC hardware is a must. I felt crushed I still missed the boat. I figured I could keep mining until I reached a cashout level and transfer my coins to Coinbase. I chose Coinbase because you can link it to your bank account.
Coinbase wasn't working linking to my account. It may have had something to do with the Thanksgiving weekend but I started exploring alternate ways to exchange coin. I didn't have enough to exchange but hey I didn't have anything better to do. I found a couple of exchanges and saw a world of cryptocurrency I couldn't believe. There coins upon coins out there.
Most of them are the equivalent of junk bonds or penny stocks. You will probably loose if you bet on them. On the other hand there was something attractive about some of these alternate currencies. Some of them were ASIC resistant, or at least were designed to use a different algorithm than the SHA256 BTC used. That meant I could mine with my GPU and may actually be profitable.
To be clear there is a very small portion of miners that use CPU for mining. Most of them are in Primecoin because you lose money mining with CPU on other coins. I'll cover more on Primecoin later. I currently have an experimental 3 rig Primecoin setup to test profitability.
Since GPUs could still be profitable in the altcoin market I did a little research and settled on mining two coins. Litecoin and Feathercoin. Litecoin is a well respected altcoin. It is likely destined to be silver to BTC's gold. It was an easy choice. There are many miners leaving BTC for Litecoin because they don't have the ability to upgrade to ASIC or are repurposing their FPGA miners. FPGA is the chip used in good GPUs.
Feathercoin has a good enough following that I think it has a shot at becoming copper but it is still up in the air what coin will take that spot. I like the gamble though because the difficulty level on Feathercoin is still low enough you can mine out a fair share of coins with crappy equipment. If it goes up great. If not no big loss.
Crappy equipment brings me to my next failure. Nvidia cards are horrible miners. While Nvidia rules the world of gameplay with floating point calculations AMD/ATI cards rule the world of mining. The ATI cards have better integer calculation ability and comparably priced cards from Nvidia and ATI will show ATI to be significantly better at mining.
Off I went to Frys again. I hadn't bought my gaming card yet and decided I could swallow some crow and buy an ATI card in a price range that would give me decent enough gaming and ok mining. Lets be clear hear that I was not about to drop crazy cash on a video card when I haven't even received a single cent from my mining yet.
Frys was having a sale and rebate offer. I found an MSI HD7790 OC which was $109 with a $20 rebate. Not bad I just picked up a card for under a hundred dollars and it's hash rate should be over 200 KH/s. My new Nvidia card was only putting out about 18KH/s and was a third the price. This would be good enough for a one month test.
As of this writing I have been mining for 4 days. I have tried FTC and LTC. At current exchange rates and if my the card keeps producing at it's current rate I should pay the card off and make a small profit at the end of the month. Of course difficulty can change and reduce how much I produce or prices on the coins can drop. Let's not kid ourselves it is a volatile market and we may be looking at a bubble.
Will I keep mining FTC and LTC? I'm not sure. I did call this a hobby. I don't envision paying my mortgage with a room full of mining rigs. I'll likely throw my hand at other alt coins and collect a few here and a few there and sit on them and see if they ever amount to anything.
Thanks for reading through my first rant and I'll be posting tutorials on setting up different mining operations soon.
--CryptoDuck
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)