Bitcoin Forum

I am looking at the block chain explorer for Primecoin...

For the time July, 19, 2013 14:10:xx

http://primecoin.21stcenturymoneytalk.org/index.php?block_hash=3e9d0f652b456f42df6d714573ebd4cf237bc6b269cb54e7de2fea49f373851f

Block 65818  14:10:54

Block 65817  14:10:32

Block 65816  14:10:13

Block 65815  14:10:05

Block 65814  14:10:02

It appears like its like 5 blocks a minute.

Now I check YPool.net with 232 workers... http://www.ypool.net/stats.php

which gives an average of like 1:600 chance of finding a block for 232 workers.

So for the average miner CPU, the chance of finding a block is 1 in 139,200.

So the AVERAGE time of finding a block assuming current difficulty is 19 days!

Assumimg 12 coins per block. this boils down to .62 coins per day... at today's price of 1.4 USD = .868 a day... $26.04/month.   Double the average time... you'll get only $13.02 per month per CPU.

... What?

Ouch.. thanks for that analysis. Thats brutal. I tried for a day and gave up :P

will it not vary depending on what type of cpu?

Lol, holy crap.  1:139,200 odds and I found 2 already (in 3 days mining).  I should go buy a lotto ticket  :)

how much primespersec did you get?

and thats why its still cheap...

dont expect 12 coins/block in 19 days from now...

how much primespersec did you have for this analysis?

The 19 july statistic is flowed
ypool fixed it block finding few days ago.. now you can see its finding 5-6 block per hour...

Also mine i5 haswell find a block per few days so not so bad, and i think diff started to drop a bit

what the???  There are now 4,420 miners?  So when did it go from 240 to 4,420????!

Never tell me the odds!

My core2 duo 3ghz machine found 3 blocks last week. And just today my core2 duo 2.2ghz laptop found a block (oh yeah, and it found one last week too).

That is partiially because the pool odds and solo miner odds are very different. The pool's mining client apparently isn't nearly as optimized as the hp8 client, making it give a regular payout but one much lower than what you can get solo mining. I have had a few different computers solo mining for the past week with about 25k pps and I have gotten an average of one block per day with it so far. Either way the odds of finding a block solo mining is definitely not 19 days per cpu, it's closer to a block every 2-3 days for a mid to high end cpu.

If you just run the solo mining client, it will find the blocks when mining and just pay your own wallet? Nothing to set up?

It was broken, now i think it shows numbers of workers... some ppl has ~50-100 CPU`s mining

All you have to do is set up the primecoin wallet software, click the help drop down, click debug window, click the console tab, and enter "setgenerate true -1" to start mining (you can also replace -1 with the number of cores/threads you actually want to be used for mining). You can check your statistics such as pps/cpm etc from there by using the command "getmininginfo".  When it finds blocks they automatically go into your wallet - no real setup work and it pays directly into the wallet, ready to be spent.

Cool. That's simple

Are you using the default client from primecoin.org and finding about a block a day with your computers? There's a faster one called HP8 that I'm guessing you're using for that high of a PPS rate

I am mining primecoin on 4 computers right now get a total of about 21k right now. Your 25k is comparable to mine, so I am curious if I will see similar payouts.

Yeah, I'm using HP8 right now. Over the last few days the rate seems to have dropped off as the difficulty was increasing, but the difficulty has been decreased a bit so I might get more blocks now. We might not have much luck though since there are some gpu miners in the works. Honestly I have been using settings lower than the max speeds that I have available over the last few days since with a sievesize of 100k I haven't managed to get any blocks - I only have gotten blocks with a 1m size so far. Once the gpu miner hits we will be getting that 19 days/block quote there though. The difficulty is probably going to explode...

Also I have noticed it's really random when you get blocks - I have one machine that's getting 1k pps and it managed to get a block and one that gets about 4k or 5k hasn't managed to get one yet.

It's probably just random, despite the faster machines SHOULD get more blocks mined. But the lottery is the lottery.

I am using a sievesize of 100k too because I noticed it gives me a faster PPS rate. Is a lower sievesize actually worse, despite the higher PPS?

I'm not a skilled enough mathmatician to explain this fully, but this should give you a rough idea in terms you can understand.  Let's say you have 100,000 US coins of all denominations, and you are only looking for 1972 pennies.  Now, think of the sieve as a massive coin sorter.  You toss in this 100,000 coin bunch of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, silver dollars, Susan B's, etc.  You're only looking for pennies, so you 'sieve' this mass of coins down to pennies.  These candidates (pennies) are then subjected to the Fermat test (date check) and you only pull out the 1972's.

So, the smaller the sieve size, the faster you can go through it, but you'll find fewer total primes in the long run.

So if I increase the sieve would it have the opposite effect (i.e., find more primes in the long run)?

That actually makes a lot of sense. I have some kind of clue now what that setting does!

Which version of which client were you using? There was a major bug in HP6 and HP7 that made the difficulty effectively 10 rather than 9.2 or 9.3 due to a rounding error that made people much less likely to get any blocks. While it is partially luck better computers tend to get blocks more frequently - The only machines I have gotten multiple blocks on have had 3930ks in them - the older machiens I'm running have at most gotten one block each and a few haven't gotten anything yet. While it is partially luck all of this has a luck factor.

Right now the HP8 is the best one to use for mining - it gives higher pps values for the same settings and has a few major bugs fixed. I never managed to get any blocks on the hp5 or hp6 clients due to crashing buts on there - they have been mostly fixed in the hp7/hp8 releases and hp8 rarely crashes.

At 8K PPS, default sieve settings, I've been hitting a block daily for the past week.