Topic: 123 - page 3. (Read 4890 times)
Don't worry Mr. Skydiver, help with getting your rig up and running has always been hard to get, People are helpful on specific questions, but there is also some frowning against more competition, Like asking a fellow goldminer if he knows a good spot around here. There 3-4 guides around the net on setting up a miner and pointing it to a local port with bitcoinqt running as server. If you want turnkey, boot with Bamt from an usb stick, it's really well optimised, - for pool mining. solomining is now, with standard sized GPU setup around a 60 day wait average before you find a block of 50BTC. You don't have auto reboot and email notifications with gui-miner running solo, very usefull if want to share your free time with women also.
A number of people here try to discourage others from mining and suggest they invest in coins them selves rather than mine. They do this, i think, to benefit themselves. The more new miners that join the lower the profit for all miners across the network, but buying coins directly can increase their value and thus increase profit for miners... this forum (and community in general) seems to be full of scams and shady areas. Its probably best to make your own decisions and not directly listen to any single person.
Actually I don't think that is true. Telling someone that mining is less profitable than just using the money to buy bitcoin and hold it is most likely fairly good advice:
(a) Depending on your electricity costs mining with GPU is almost everywhere a money losing operation.
(b) Telling someone to buy FPGA for about 0.72 USD / MHash/s (current BFL Single) is no good advice either with the looming release of ASICS that will turn all FPGA into very expensive paperweights. Even a BFL Single (with a very attractive MHash/s per USD ratio) will take about six months to pay for it (when considering electricity at .24€/KWh). And this is all considering the current reward. After the drop to 25 BTC/Block everything looks even worse.
(c) Promoting an investment in ASICs is also not very sound advice. Nobody knows for sure when they will be delivered, what the difficulty will be after they are delivered and whether they will be delivered at all.
Disclaimer: I am currently mining with about 1.4 GHash/s but I'm pretty sure it is going to not have a positive return on investment -- or at least a very risky investment.
Ok, didn't read all of it.. but the short story is that unless you have massive amounts of hashing power, there is absolutely no point in even trying solo mining.
Take for example, say you have a single 5970 GPU, at aprox 700mh/sec. At current difficulty it will take on average the better part of a year to mine a block yourself. If you are particularly unlucky, you could mine for over 2 years and never mine a block yourself. Wasting all that electricity and time over nothing. However, if you direct that 700mh/sec towards a pool which is large enough to mine blocks regularly, you will see a small but steady income from your portion of the pools blocks.
Not many people do solo mining anymore because it is not feasible. Not many encourage or are willing to show you how to solo mine because we know that in almost every case it is pointless. One of the largest mining operations I know of, Gigavps could probably mine solo and still make a reasonable amount of coins. For whatever reason he still mines on pools. I would suspect this is to reduce variance, but that is simply a guess..
Back when I started it made sense to solo mine, as pools were young and small, and the total network hash rate had not grown to the point where I with 8 GPU's running could still mine a block once or twice a week. Those days are long behind us now. Maybe if you are one of the lucky first few to fire up an ASIC device you could do solo before the next difficulty adjustment, but not for long once others are running similar gear.
Finally, if you really really really want to solo mine..
setup bitcoind, follow https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_bitcoind
be sure to setup the RPC username and password.
setup your mining program as you would for a pool, but instead of pointing it to a remote pool, set your url to 127.0.0.1 and username/password the same as your RPC setup for bitcoind.
essentially once bitcoind is up and running consider it your "solo pool"
HTH
Take for example, say you have a single 5970 GPU, at aprox 700mh/sec. At current difficulty it will take on average the better part of a year to mine a block yourself. If you are particularly unlucky, you could mine for over 2 years and never mine a block yourself. Wasting all that electricity and time over nothing. However, if you direct that 700mh/sec towards a pool which is large enough to mine blocks regularly, you will see a small but steady income from your portion of the pools blocks.
Not many people do solo mining anymore because it is not feasible. Not many encourage or are willing to show you how to solo mine because we know that in almost every case it is pointless. One of the largest mining operations I know of, Gigavps could probably mine solo and still make a reasonable amount of coins. For whatever reason he still mines on pools. I would suspect this is to reduce variance, but that is simply a guess..
Back when I started it made sense to solo mine, as pools were young and small, and the total network hash rate had not grown to the point where I with 8 GPU's running could still mine a block once or twice a week. Those days are long behind us now. Maybe if you are one of the lucky first few to fire up an ASIC device you could do solo before the next difficulty adjustment, but not for long once others are running similar gear.
Finally, if you really really really want to solo mine..
setup bitcoind, follow https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_bitcoind
be sure to setup the RPC username and password.
setup your mining program as you would for a pool, but instead of pointing it to a remote pool, set your url to 127.0.0.1 and username/password the same as your RPC setup for bitcoind.
essentially once bitcoind is up and running consider it your "solo pool"
HTH
A number of people here try to discourage others from mining and suggest they invest in coins them selves rather than mine. They do this, i think, to benefit themselves. The more new miners that join the lower the profit for all miners across the network, but buying coins directly can increase their value and thus increase profit for miners... this forum (and community in general) seems to be full of scams and shady areas. Its probably best to make your own decisions and not directly listen to any single person.
I don't think decentralized means what you think it means. Gold mining is far more decentralized than printing USD for example. Is the gold supply not decentralized because every single person without skill or resources can't just dig a hole in their backyard and find gold?
Also the "everyone should solo mine" & "everyone should only use the largest 3 pools" is a false dichotomy. What about p2pool? using smaller pools? spreading hashing power over multiple pools (it actually reduces variance)? solomine (if you understand the risks and the huge volatility in payment)?
Mining will become more and more specialized over time. Like ANYTHING in the world to be competitive it will require more resources, capital, and skill. Would you say webhosting is decentralized? Is it still decentralized even though starting and operating a datacenter is beyond the capabilities of 99.9% of the planet?
Regarding ASICs, the technology exist, period. The "good miners" not using ASICs doesn't prevent "bad miners" (govt, attackers, banks, etc) from using them. I mean it isn't like as long as all legit miners pretend away ASICs they can't still be used to attack Bitcoin. Using the most efficient equipment available is the only way to prevent "bad guys" from being able to cheat and force them to engage in an expensive battle of brute force. Today lets say it takes $30M in GPUs (total cost not just GPU cost) to 51% the network, thus the network is safe unless an attacker is willing to spend tens of millions right? Of course not. Nobody looking to spend millions would use GPU, they would spend $2M to $3M, build enough ASICs to 99% attack the network and kill Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost. Now when the network is protected by $30M in ASICs an attacker could still 51% the network but they can't do it "on the cheap" by using superior technology.
Also the "everyone should solo mine" & "everyone should only use the largest 3 pools" is a false dichotomy. What about p2pool? using smaller pools? spreading hashing power over multiple pools (it actually reduces variance)? solomine (if you understand the risks and the huge volatility in payment)?
Mining will become more and more specialized over time. Like ANYTHING in the world to be competitive it will require more resources, capital, and skill. Would you say webhosting is decentralized? Is it still decentralized even though starting and operating a datacenter is beyond the capabilities of 99.9% of the planet?
Regarding ASICs, the technology exist, period. The "good miners" not using ASICs doesn't prevent "bad miners" (govt, attackers, banks, etc) from using them. I mean it isn't like as long as all legit miners pretend away ASICs they can't still be used to attack Bitcoin. Using the most efficient equipment available is the only way to prevent "bad guys" from being able to cheat and force them to engage in an expensive battle of brute force. Today lets say it takes $30M in GPUs (total cost not just GPU cost) to 51% the network, thus the network is safe unless an attacker is willing to spend tens of millions right? Of course not. Nobody looking to spend millions would use GPU, they would spend $2M to $3M, build enough ASICs to 99% attack the network and kill Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost. Now when the network is protected by $30M in ASICs an attacker could still 51% the network but they can't do it "on the cheap" by using superior technology.
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