Estimating Ethereum (ETH) mining profitability [ETH mining profit formula, average profit ratio.] blacksheep19 (25) in ethereum • 5 months ago. Mining Ethereum is new hype! Well, that was true 2 months ago.currently, miners are suffering from low profitability due to a significant price drop. Even after the recent bull run,.

To mine solo, which I do, you run a full node (process the blockchain directly from the network) with 'geth' on one system. Then you run your 'ethminers', connecting to 'geth' to get the work directly, rather than going through a pool. You don't get paid as often, but you receive the full block reward when you find one.

The 'geth' command looks like this: geth --rpc --rpcaddr '10.10.10.9' --rpccorsdomain 'localhost' Where you use the IP address of your system that's running 'geth' (use that IP address in the 'ethminer' command below). The 'ethminer' command looks like this: ethminer -G -t 6 -F The '-t' option takes the number of GPUs you have on each system. -Best Care David. My total hash rate at this moment is 1.8 GH/s. I'll be adding another rig soon, so it'll be close to 2G/s.

Even when the network hash rate is more or less stable, the difficulty rises and falls in response to the block times (I'm sure you already know that). I've noticed block product fall as these minor difficulty adjustments go up, and accelerate as they come down. The difficulty algorithm doesn't seem capable of going in one direction for a long time, even if the block time is relatively far from norm (17s); it still oscillates up and down in the shorter-term, even though the longer-term trend one way or the other.

-Best Care David. The Crimson drivers are AMD's marketing name for their latest GPU device drivers, which came out late last year. They have bugs, especially on linux, as most major driver updates do.

But understand that you are not using the GPU to run some killer video game, your using it to mine. As such, the GPU driver isn't doing that much beyond simply implementing a communications path between the OpenCL runtime libraries and the card. What you really need it stability, not bleeding edge video performance. Whenever you change the fglrx (AMD GPU) drivers, you need to completely remove the existing drivers *before* you install fresh drivers. If you run: sudo dpkg -l fglrx* you see a list of what's currently installed. It's somewhat cryptic output, but if you post it, I can tell you what you have currently. (The entries that start with 'ii' are the components that are installed).

Sometimes you can end up with components that are only partially installed, so just run the command and post the output. -Best Care David. I have 1.5 GHS and I pool mine, with the high difficulty its better to lock in the set amount of Eth you can get.

Also solo mining is a lot more maintince, you constantly have to monitor you geth nodes, if it goes down of the geth server crashes you have all your miners with no work spinning their wheels. Solo mining I think is for professional miners with close to 3GHs of hash basically they treat it as a full time gig.

I soloed mined all through October to January before I finally gave up on that. Back then 800mh/s could sometimes pull in 18 blocks a day with good luck. Sadly those days are gone. One cool thing about pool mining is I don't do anything, recently with stratum pool mining the workers are far more stable, I can go to my 9-5 7 days a week and not even think about it my 10 miners have stayed up for 2 weeks straight don't have to reboot do anything using a combo of windows 10 and Ubuntu boxes. When I solo mined using the inefficient get-work process I would have miners go down constantly at least one or two a day, have to reboot, restart so I ended up loosing more hash than pooling.

If I could find an efficient stratum based solo mining proxy/software I would probably try solo mining again but right now the only open source one uses get-work still. Not really, unless you know what altcoin will be popping. ASIC's have ruined most of the good mining.

Bitmain has ruined BTC mining over the past 2 months with their crappy S7's bringing SHA256 profitability down to 1/3 it was 4 months ago. I think X13 has a 'special' tweaked miner out that costs a ton of $$ but mines at about 1/3 the speed of ETH on GPU's so that can be profitable if you're a big player.

For the little guys, ETH is it. Besides with MS and larger financial institutions looking seriously into ETH, it mght just be the next big thing after BTC starts to fade out. In my mind, ETH and BTC are apples and oranges. BTC is a store of value, due to the ultimate, fixed number of BTC that will ever exist. If that changes, of course, it will be like a corp floating a new share issue, i.e. It will dilute the value of existing BTC, but I doubt that will happen. BTC, over the long haul, will probably continue to rise in value.

ETH, on the other hand, is a blockchain platform intended for the *much* broader use case of smart contracts, even to the extent of replacing what we now call the Web, potentially. Of course, that will only happen over a period of years. Then there's always the big question of what governments may eventually do in the way of regulation and control. It's a brave new world, and as an older fellow, I find it exciting to be a part of it and watch it unfold. -Best Care David.

Notice Becoming a miner is not recommended. Ethereum is going to transition to proof-of-stake, making mining obsolescent.

Becoming a miner would involve investing in a mining rig (several GPUs, plus maybe other hardware if needed, like a compatible computer), which is unlikely to get a return on investment before PoS is implemented. Best Gpu For Gulden NLG Mining here. Introduction The word mining originates in the context of the gold analogy for crypto currencies. Gold or precious metals are scarce, so are digital tokens, and the only way to increase the total volume is through mining it. This is appropriate to the extent that in Ethereum too, the only mode of issuance post launch is via the mining.

Unlike these examples however, mining is also the way to secure the network by creating, verifying, publishing and propagating blocks in the blockchain. • Mining Ether = Securing the network = verify computation So what is mining anyway?

Ethereum Frontier, like all blockchain technologies uses an incentive-driven model of security. Consensus is based on choosing the block with the highest total difficulty.

Miners produce blocks which the others check for validity. Among other well-formedness criteria, a block is only valid if it contains proof of work (PoW) of a given difficulty. Note that in Ethereum 1.1, this is likely going to be replaced by a proof of stake model.

The proof of work algorithm used is called (a modified version of ) involves finding a nonce input to the algorithm so that the result is below a certain threshold depending on the difficulty. The point in PoW algorithms is that there is no better strategy to find such a nonce than enumerating the possibilities while verification of a solution is trivial and cheap. If outputs have a uniform distribution, then we can guarantee that on average the time needed to find a nonce depends on the difficulty threshold, making it possible to control the time of finding a new block just by manipulating difficulty. The difficulty dynamically adjusts so that on average one block is produced by the entire network every 12 seconds (ie., 12 s block time). This heartbeat basically punctuates the synchronisation of system state and guarantees that maintaining a fork (to allow double spend) or rewriting history is impossible unless the attacker possesses more than half of the network mining power (so called 51% attack).

Any node participating in the network can be a miner and their expected revenue from mining will be directly proportional to their (relative) mining power or hashrate, ie., number of nonces tried per second normalised by the total hashrate of the network. Ethash PoW is memory hard, making it basically ASIC resistant. This means that calculating the PoW requires choosing subsets of a fixed resource dependent on the nonce and block header. This resource (a few gigabyte size data) is called a DAG. The is totally different every 30000 blocks (a 100 hour window, called an epoch) and takes a while to generate.

Since the DAG only depends on block height, it can be pregenerated but if its not, the client need to wait the end of this process to produce a block. Until clients actually precache dags ahead of time the network may experience a massive block delay on each epoch transition. What Is A Usb Zcash ZEC Miner. Note that the DAG does not need to be generated for verifying the PoW essentially allowing for verification with both low CPU and small memory.

As a special case, when you start up your node from scratch, mining will only start once the DAG is built for the current epoch. Mining Rewards Note that mining 'real' Ether will start with the Frontier release. On the Olympics testnet, the, the ether mined have no value (but see ). The successful PoW miner of the winning block receives: • A static block reward for the 'winning' block, consisting of exactly 3.0 Ether • All of the gas expended within the block, that is, all the gas consumed by the execution of all the transactions in the block submitted by the winning miner is compensated for by the senders. The gascost incurred is credited to the miner's account as part of the consensus protocol. Over time, it's expected these will dwarf the static block reward.

• An extra reward for including Uncles as part of the block, in the form of an extra 1/32 per Uncle included Uncles are stale blocks, ie with parent that are ancestors (max 6 blocks back) of the including block. Valid uncles are rewarded in order to neutralise the effect of network lag on the dispersion of mining rewards, thereby increasing security. Uncles included in a block formed by the successful PoW miner receive 7/8 of the static block reward = 2.625 ether A maximum of 2 uncles allowed per block. Ethash DAG Ethash uses a DAG (directed acyclic graph) for the proof of work algorithm, this is generated for each epoch, i.e every 30000 blocks (100 hours). The DAG takes a long time to generate. If clients only generate it on demand, you may see a long wait at each epoch transition before the first block of the new epoch is found.

However, the DAG only depends on block number, so it CAN and SHOULD be calculated in advance to avoid long wait at each epoch transition. Geth implements automatic DAG generation and maintains two DAGS at a time for smooth epoch transitions. Automatic DAG generation is turned on and off when mining is controlled from the console.

It is also turned on by default if geth is launched with the --mine option. Note that clients share a DAG resource, so if you are running multiple instances of any client, make sure automatic dag generation is switched on in at most one client. To generate the DAG for an arbitrary epoch: geth makedag For instance geth makedag 360000 ~/.ethash. Note that ethash uses ~/.ethash (Mac/Linux) or ~/AppData/Ethash (Windows) for the DAG so that it can shared between clients. The Algorithm Our algorithm, (previously known as Dagger-Hashimoto), is based around the provision of a large, transient, randomly generated dataset which forms a DAG (the Dagger-part), and attempting to solve a particular constraint on it, partly determined through a block's header-hash. It is designed to hash a fast verifiability time within a slow CPU-only environment, yet provide vast speed-ups for mining when provided with a large amount of memory with high-bandwidth.

The large memory requirements mean that large-scale miners get comparatively little super-linear benefit. The high bandwidth requirement means that a speed-up from piling on many super-fast processing units sharing the same memory gives little benefit over a single unit. Formal Requirements TODO: Content from formal requirements doc. Design Decisions Taken TODO: Content from design decisions doc. Infrastructure Overview Mining will be accomplished in one of two ways: either on CPU (and possibly the GPU, to be confirmed) with the Mist client or on the GPU though a combination of the Ethereum daemon and.

An sgminer module for Ethash is expected to be released at some point during, but not necessarily before the Frontier Genesis. JSON-RPC Communication between the external mining application and the Ethereum daemon for work provision and submission happens through the JSON-RPC API. Two RPC functions are provided; eth_getWork and eth_submitWork. These are formally documented on the wiki article.