General Questions
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Mining in pools
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Questions about ASIC miners (SHA256 and Scrypt)
GPU Mining and Archive
Common questions
What is mining?
Mining (from. mining) in the mining industry means the development of deposits, in our case the extraction of “virtual gold” – Bitcoin. Miners (miner, miners) – people who engage in mining, or specialized devices for mining.
Technically, mining is the calculation of a block header hash, which includes, among other things, the header hash of the previous block, the transaction set hash, and a random number. If the hash value is less than the current target (which is inversely proportional to complexity), a new block is formed and the miner receives 25 bitcoins just created. If the hash is greater than the target, a random number is changed and a new hash is calculated. This is done billions of times per second by every miner.
Mining can be economically profitable depending on various factors: the exchange rate of BTC to other currencies, the current complexity, the cost of electricity, the available hardware, etc.. Mining requires a very large amount of computing power, and the more there is in the network, the more complexity will increase and the less each “miner” will receive, but the more the network itself will be protected, because. It would take so much power to put in false information and have the network accept it that the attack becomes economically unprofitable.
Even at a fairly early stage of its development, the total processing power of the Bitcoin network exceeded the hashing speed of the fastest supercomputer in the world.
This is the result of the super profits made by the “miners”. For example, in June 2011. or in the fall of 2013. The purchase of a top-end video card for mining would pay for itself in just a couple of weeks, if not sooner.
Now the payback of even the most powerful ASIC miners at normal electricity rates is about half a year or even more.
For more information on the basics of mining, please see our article.
What are the Internet access requirements for a miner?
The traffic in mining depends on the number of devices, their performance, and the minimum decision complexity that the pool makes. For one properly configured device traffic is less than 10Kb/s, that is enough and Dial-Up-connection, the main thing – its stability.
Miners who don’t have a stable wired connection often use 3G modems with the cheapest unlimited plan. If you have dozens or even hundreds of devices, you need a “thicker” channel.
How much profit do miners make?
The Bitcoin system is decentralized, it is based on the principles of changing the complexity of coin generation, depending on the total power of the system. The complexity varies every 2016 blocks so that an average of six blocks are solved in an hour. Thus, the change in complexity occurs approximately every 14 days. But if the network power increases, the complexity changes earlier (increases), and if the network power decreases, the complexity changes later (decreases).
To see the entire history of complexity changes, see the charts at. For a forecast of the next change in difficulty, see the home page of our website.
You can calculate your earnings on the Bitcoin Mining Calculator. You just need to enter your speed in Mhash/s and click “Calculate”. If you don’t know your speed, you can calculate it by the name and number of devices in this table.
Bitcoin rate is not dependent on the complexity, it’s the complexity that is indirectly dependent on the rate. BTC buyers don’t care how difficult it was to generate those BTCs.
You can see the current rate at the link where:
Latest Price – the last executed transaction
Bid – demand
Ask – proposal
You can also monitor the rate in real time on other sites. The most complete list can be found in the Statistics and monitoring article.
How do I manage my farm remotely?
On Windows family operating systems, you can’t use remote desktop (RDP) to manage farms because. it works with its virtual video card. If you stop mining, you will not start it again because. video cards will not be detected correctly. Use third-party tools such as TeamViewer, *VNC and others. Under linux (Ubuntu, XUbuntu, Debian) lightGDM does not allow to get graphics card resources in the remote console. Everything works fine with GDM. Checked with cgminer, diablo.
How to start mining in solo mode?
Mining Bitcoin in solo mode is pretty much impossible nowadays unless you have your own datacenter with several thousands of advanced ASIC miners. However, for some forks, solo-mining is still effective.
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Let’s describe the process using Bitcoin as an example:
First, go to “%appdata%\\Bitcoin” (for example, in Windows 7: “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin”). Create a text file. Write three lines into it:
server=1
rpcuser=user
rpcpassword=pass
(without the quotes, user and pass can be your own). Then rename the file to “bitcoin.conf”
Setting up cgminer:
1. Go to the folder with cgminer
2. Create a txt file and put it in:
cgminer -u http://имя:пароль@127.0.0.1:8332/ -k phatk DEVICE=0 VECTORS WORKSIZE=128
(specify your own settings, get name and password from bitcoin.conf)
3. Rename the file to “runsolo.bat” and run it.
For solo mining on ASIC the above mentioned address, name and password must be entered in the miner settings. However, not all ASICs support the getwork protocol used by the wallet. You may need to install additional software.
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How do I set up my Linux mining?
A rather detailed article on setting up mining on Linux, in particular Ubuntu, can be found here – Bitcoin mining for Ubuntu.
Mining in pools
What is a pool?
Currently everyone who finds a block gets 25 BTC. It is very difficult to do it alone, unless you have very high computing power. To solve this problem, there are pools, and there can be many in the network. Pool unites miners for common search and solution of blocks. For more information on co-generation pools, their modes of operation, and examples of how to configure miners, see the article Pools.
What happens if two miners join a pool as one worker?
It all depends on the pool. Most pools allow multiple connections under one worker. The pool simply accounts for all solutions from multiple devices in the same way that it accounts for one.
Don’t forget that a worker in a pool is tied to a specific account, and all income goes to the owner of that account. It doesn’t matter where the devices themselves are located or who owns them.
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I mine in a pool and find a block. Can I not give it to the pool and take all the BTC for myself?
No, you can’t. Each miner in the pool is looking for a block on the server tasks, from a technical point of view, this is equivalent to the fact that all the devices sending solutions belong to the pool. When any of the miners connected to the pool finds a block, the reward transaction comes to the pool wallet. And only after that the software, which keeps records of the miners’ work, distributes the reward among them. But if the owner of the pool is a scammer, he can appropriate all the bitcoins found, and there is nothing you can do about it.
The owners of most large Bitcoin pools are known, but small fork pools are often anonymous. So, when choosing a pool, exercise caution and as often as possible withdraw the loot to your wallet.
How can a miner check the honesty of a pool, that he gives all the transactions in the task and does not ignore the unwanted ones?
The miner at the time of generation can’t check what’s included in the block and what’s not, because. only the task for generating the header of the block comes to the generation. The miner can learn about the bad behavior of the pool only afterwards, after receiving the finished block.
What is pool hopping?
Pool hopping is intentionally moving from pool to pool to catch a period of good luck (short blocks) and thus earning more coins than you would if you were constantly working in the same pool.
This is essentially cheating, which pools fight by delaying stat output, introducing rating systems, and other methods. As a rule, on pools with PPLNS accrual system such jumps are not justified, because even a short absence of a miner on the pool reduces his income for a long period of time (4-12 hours).
Questions about ASIC miners (SHA256 and Scrypt)
What is an ASIC mine?
ASIC (abbreviation for. Application Specific Integrated Circuit) is a microcircuit that is specialized for a specific task. Unlike general-purpose integrated circuits, specialized chips are used in a specific device and perform strictly limited functions unique to that device. An example of an ASIC would be a chip designed solely to control a cell phone, a hardware encoder/decoder chip for audio and video signals (signal processors).
ASICs are used for mining because the strictly defined structure makes the chip production process much cheaper and the narrow specialization of chips increases the performance and energy efficiency of mining.
What’s the difference between a Scrypt ASIC and a SHA256 ASIC?
The Scrypt hashing algorithm was developed specifically to counteract faster devices-first video cards, then FPGAs and ASICs. Therefore, it is “harder” than SHA256 (more numbers, more rounds of calculation) and requires much more RAM. This makes the production of such ASICs more costly.
What is a Dual miner?
It is a miner that can perform calculations using two hashing algorithms simultaneously – Scrypt and SHA256. The developers placed on the same chip computing cores to calculate both algorithms, but each type of core can only calculate “its” algorithm. This makes such a device versatile, but greatly increases the cost of production and heat dissipation, which is not the best way to payback. Now only one company makes this type of ASIC, formerly Gridseed and now SFARDS.
What kind of ASIC miners are there?
Mining devices come in a variety of form factors, catering to different types of customers – compact, home and professional.
Compact miners are usually plugged into a USB connector and powered through it. Compared to their “big brothers” they are the smallest and weakest. This is what the first generation chips from ASICminer – one of the first ASIC manufacturers for mining – called USB Block Erupter look like.
Features: 300Mh/s, 1.05V, 335MHz, 6x6mm. and 4.2 watts at 1 GHz.
Later, compact miners were produced on chips from Bitfury and Coincraft, and even Antminer U-series*, but were not in demand because they brought purely nominal income and eventually turned into souvenirs.
Home and professional miners essentially differ only in size, housing type, and power consumption; all other characteristics are identical.
Home machines usually have cheaper chassis, weaker fans, are smaller and lighter, and can be powered by the average 600-700W power supply. Typical representatives of this class are Antminer S1/S3/S5.
“Professional” miners are designed to be placed in datacenters and are usually mounted in 19″ server racks. They have a built-in PSU (sometimes several) with a capacity over a kilowatt, a sophisticated cooling system and powerful server fans, very noisy, but effective. Typical representatives are Antminer S2/S4, Terraminer from Cointerra, Coincraft Rig from Bitmine.
ASIC miners are compared based on the following characteristics:
1) The technological process of the chip
2) Throughput in Gx/s (gigas per second) or Tx/s (terahashes per second, where 1 Tx/s = 1000 Gx/s)
3) Energy consumption per Gx/s – for example, 1 W/Gx/s
4) Cost per Gx/s – for example, $0.5 per Gx/s
5) Average chip operating temperature – °C (depends on the process, on average 40-60 °C)
Who makes ASICs for mining?
ASIC chips and ASIC-based devices are (or were) manufactured by a few companies:
- Bitmaintech
- Bitfury
- Avalon
- Innosilicon (Scrypt)
- SFARDS (Dual miner) – no longer produced
- Spondoolies-Tech – no longer produced
- KnCminer – no longer produced
- ASICminer – no longer produced
- Zeus (Scrypt) – no longer produced
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What are the most reliable and popular miners right now?
Bitcoin miners from Bitmaintech are rightfully considered the most deserved for mining Bitcoin, as the company has never seriously let its clients down. Bitfury is also reliable, but does not sell at retail.
Current model:
ANTMINER S9 from Bitmain with BM1387 chips
Specifications:
- Performance: 13 Tx/s ±5%
- Energy consumption: 1300 Watt from the wall
- Energy consumption: 0.1W/Ghp/sec out
- Voltage: 12V
- Operating temperature: 30 °C – 90 °C
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The most popular Scrypt-based miners are the Terminator devices from Innosilicon.
Current model:
TERMINATOR A2 90Mhp from Innosilicon
Specifications:
- Performance: 90 mph/s ±5%
- Energy consumption: 1000W or 1KW
- Energy Efficiency: 1.1W/Mhp/s
- Voltage: 12V
- Temperature: 40°C – 90°C
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How do I set my ASIC Miner to solo mode?
Unfortunately, because of the different firmware types for ASIC miners, each model has to be configured in a different way. Some miners do not work in solo mode at all.
Is it possible to configure an ASIC miner to work in p2pool?
Setting up an ASIC to work with P2Pool is possible just like with any other pool, but you will have to configure the P2Pool node yourself. For example, use these instructions.
Rewards are distributed the same way as in the pool with PPLNS, but with one difference: the reward does not stay on the pool for some time, but goes directly to your wallet. P2pool operates on a “self-master” basis.
By the way, it is p2pool that enables real decentralization, the most important reason for Bitcoin’s success.
What kind of software do ASIC miners use?
As you know each manufacturer’s firmware is different, but almost all of them include CGMiner or BFGminer because of the flexibility of the settings and support all ways to connect to the pool.
The most modern ASIC miners’ firmware is based on Linux and has a friendly web interface which allows to manage network settings, connection to pools, frequency and voltage adjustments, view detailed statistics about miner’s work, monitor failures, update the firmware and much more.
Bitmain Antminer S5 interface:
There are numerous custom versions of the firmware, each with its own unique features, such as support for extranonse.subscribe or more customizations.
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How do I overclock ASIC miners?
Most miners have overclocking capabilities, the potential for which depends on the chip manufacturer and technology. Antminer from the factory frequencies are usually overclocked by 10-30%, while chips from KnC sometimes manage to overclock almost twice. But be extremely careful with overclocking miners, increasing the frequency drastically increases power consumption. Chips or power circuits may not be able to withstand the overclocking, and as a result, you may lose the miner and other equipment as well.
Some ASIC miners intentionally have a lower operating frequency in order to increase stability (e.g., Bitmain Antminer S2 and S4). As a result of overclocking, you can get a much more productive, but less stable miner.
What kind of power supply should I use for my ASIC miner?
6-pin power supplies, similar to the auxiliary power connectors on PCI-E video cards, have become the tacit standard for today’s mining devices. They were chosen for their small size and maximum compatibility with mainstream PSUs.
Miners (people) have different opinions when it comes to choosing the perfect power supply. Some people prefer used server PSUs because of stability, good efficiency and low price, others prefer ATX power supplies for home PCs because depreciation (gradual cheapening and wear and tear) almost does not affect them. When choosing a power supply for the miner, you should not look at the total power of the PSU, but the +12V channel. Here the choice is entirely up to you.
To run an ATX power supply without a motherboard, you must connect the 2 pins as shown in the picture:
GPU mining and archive
What kind of video cards are good for mining?
High end Radeon HD 5xxx, 7xxx and R9xxx series graphics cards are good for mining.
Older NVIDIA graphics cards, due to their architecture, show a low level of performance in this type of computation. But starting with GTX 7xx series on the Maxwell architecture, with the latest drivers Nvidia cards are not inferior to Radeons, and often even superior to them in energy efficiency.
AMD APP SDK / Nvidia CUDA must be installed on the PC for GPU mining either with the driver or separately.
What cryptocurrencies can I mine on video cards?
Because Bitcoin, Litecoin and their direct forks using the same hashing algorithms (SHA256 and Scrypt) are already mined on specialized devices (ASIC), the only cryptocurrencies where ASIC development is still impossible or unprofitable for video cards.
It is still possible to mine altcoins with the following algorithms on GPUs:
X11, X13, X15, Scrypt-N, Scrypt-jane, SHA-3 (Keccak), Quark and any others for which GPU mining software already exists.
How many graphics cards can I use on one computer?
Driver’s limitation is a maximum of 8 cores, which means 8 graphics cards or 4 dual-processor graphics cards. It is worth noting that the more cores used, the more unstable the system behaves. Run and manage from 6 video cards on one computer can be quite problematic, and will not work on every motherboard, OS and driver version. Also increasing demands on the PSU, most often requiring raisers, preferably with additional power to reduce the consumption from the bus PCI-E motherboard. Also, as the number of GPUs increases, more RAM must be installed.
What should I do if the miner does not show one or more of the installed graphics cards?
There are many options. why this might be the case. You can remove the video card from your devices and let it be found again. If this does not help, check for deleted or transposed card balances that are causing the malfunction.
There are cases when the video card goes to “hidden devices”, then before uninstalling it is necessary to configure their display as follows: right-click “My Computer” icon, choose “Properties” (or Win+Break). In the system properties, go to the “Advanced” tab (for Vista, 7, 2008, etc.. in the computer properties, first click on “Advanced System Settings”) and at the very bottom click on “Environment Variables”.. In the system variables, create a variable DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES and set it to 1. After that, open the Device Manager, under View, turn on the display of hidden devices and remove the hidden graphics cards.
I got slower after a driver update, what should I do?
Starting with driver version 11.12 the issue of 100% CPU core load is fixed, but mining speed is slightly decreased in comparison to 11.11 and previous versions. To get the speed back, unzip the contents of the OCL Libraries archive onto disk in the Windows folder and replace. If the system informs that the file is occupied by a process, then close the mining program. There are two folders in the archive for each bit capacity.
Significantly lower performance on one of the graphics cards
This problem can occur on the “first” graphics card that displays on the active monitor, but does not have a monitor connected to it.
If that happens, you’ll need to connect a monitor or “stub” to that card. First you insert the DVI>VGA adapter, then you insert the 75 ohm resistors as in the diagram:
This problem occurs quite rarely on a wide variety of systems and its origin can be connected, for example, with outdated drivers, BIOS, or just an unfortunate combination of “hardware”. If you are unlucky, use the method described above.
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The Guiminer window does not show, only an icon in the tray. How do I fix it?
This glitch is due to the fact that the miner window is displayed outside the visible boundaries of the screen. There are two ways to overcome it:
1. Highlight the Guiminer tab in the taskbar to make it active. Press Win + left arrow key combination. The Miner window will appear at the left edge of the screen.
2. Close the Guiminer program. Open the configuration file poclbm.ini, located in %appdata%\poclbm (for example for Win7 it is C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\poclbm) and change the values in the “window_position” block to these:
“window_position”: [
546,
353,
579,
318
]
After that start Guiminer again, the problem should disappear.
Radeon HD 7*** not detected by Guiminer on Windows XP, what should I do?
Radeon HD 7*** is not detected in miners because. Windows XP does not support OpenCL for the 7*** series and higher. This limitation in AMD drivers, applies to all versions of Windows XP. We can recommend using a more modern operating system such as Windows 7 or 8.
What should I do if my graphics card isn’t seen by Riser 1x?
Different motherboards and graphics cards will react differently if PCI-E 16x is diverted to PCI-E 1x. For mining the bandwidth of PCI-E 1x is enough, and PCI-E itself supports this trick, but the signal to connect the video card may go through unused pins, and the video card will not work correctly. In that case, the easiest way is to short the hotplug signal on the connector with a wire, for this you need to make a modification by connecting the pins in the connector in this way:
Blue screen of death and error 0x000000ea ati2dvag, what to do?
You need to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. The subtlety is that after uninstallation in the folder Windows/system32 there are 2 ATI libraries, which are not automatically removed even by special utilities such as Driver Cleaner. They must be uninstalled manually, and then the new drivers must be installed.
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There is a problem with decreasing the memory frequency on my graphics card in AfterBurner, what should I do?
If memory downclocking isn’t working, try adding
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 2
If that doesn’t help either, you can try the following method:
In the Profiles folder located where you installed MSI AB.
Go to Profiles folder, it’s located where you installed MSI AB, go to each one of graphics cards profiles, look for Defaults section in each profile and do this
[Defaults]
Format=2
PowerLimit=0
CoreClk=750000
MemClk=600000
FanMode=1
FanSpeed=25
Then we put it in the same place:
[Profile5]
Format=2
PowerLimit=10
CoreClk=820000
MemClk=300000
FanMode=1
FanSpeed=44
Voila, if there are 4 or more identical cards in the system, just run AB, put “synchronize settings of the same GPU” in the settings, the default memory frequency of all will be the maximum (default), not the one prescribed in the profile, but press the hot button profile and all set to 300mhz.