Bitcoin Forum

so i have the litecoingui and minerd and all its accompanying files in the same folder and have been successfully pool mining for about a week now.  i wanna try to solo mine for two weeks or so but i have a couple of concerns. 
1. How do i know if its working? i've run it for about an hour or so and it just says "mining started" i understand there'd be no shares, but is it going to give any indication that its doing what its supposed to?
2. Does it matter that my mining computer is sometimes offline for a few hours sometimes? this is my main concern.  Its not offline often but right now my isp SUCKS and drops connection every few days.  will that restart the process?

anyway thanks for your time!

1. If you are using cpuminer and you are seeing the hashmeter output, everything should be working fine.
2. Blocks are discovered randomly, so you do not lose your progress when you stop your miners.

You can estimate the time necessary to find a block using this calculator:
http://allchains.info/calc.html
At the current difficulty, you can average a block every 24 hours with about 45 khash/s.

thank you very much for the response! i just like the idea of uncovering a block myself even if it takes a little while~!

Welcome to the wonderful world of CPU mining!

yeah cpu mining seems rad! i have 4 cores but i think i'm only using 2... I have 2 threads which i think is the same thing.  hopefully i'll find a block in a few days!

Yes, basically it's the same thing.


I have put together a mining calculator that relates hash rate to the probability of finding a block.
Enter your hash rate here to try it out:
http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc
I hope solo miners like you will find this useful. :)

Neat! Would you care to open-source it?

It's actually a very simple script, the only thing that requires some thought is the formula to compute the probability. Here it is:

prob("a block in [time]") = 1 - (1 - 1 / (2^32 * [difficulty]))^([hashrate] * [time])

The graph is made using Google Chart API (http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/apis/chart/image/docs/gallery/line_charts.html). Just look at the image's URL to see how it's done.

very cool pooler! i found my first block today! i used your calculator afterwards and it was only off by 1 hour! my hashrate is 5.6 and i found a block in 8 days 4 hours.  and i'm sure thats not the calc's fault so much as fluctuations in my hashrate! as a matter of fact i'm surprised it got that close super amazing!  so my question is what could i do to get the coveted 45 k/hs?  i'm thinking of upgrading my cpu anyway.  also i thought maybe i could up my threads to 4 when i'm not using the computer (work etc).  or maybe even set umbuntu back up and run it while i'm away.  i'm sure theres a good btc miner for linux.  anyway i'm ranting.  thanks for all the help guys!

The fact you got one with a low hash rate even at that amount of time is pretty lucky.  As for upgrading your CPU it all depends on what board/socket you are using--however I'm not sure mining Litecoins warrants more or less ripping out your Motherboard and replacing it with a new one including a Processor.

With that being said I do believe the AMD Phenom II series of 4/6core processors so you would be looking at an AM3 socket and they work the best while running Ubuntu or some version of Linux.

Please remember that the "expected time" indicated by the calculator is only a probabilistic estimate, which should match the average time between blocks in the long run.


The Phenom II is the best with the current public version of cpuminer, but I'm currently working on optimizing the miner for Intel CPUs, and I'm pretty sure that i7's, while more expensive, will be able to deliver the best performance in the end.

For the love of god please do I got 2 machines with i7's.  Outside of a virtual machine or live CD I can't run Linux on this machine because of UEFI booting horribly messing up the boot loader.

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The fact you got one with a low hash rate even at that amount of time is pretty lucky. 
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that was kind of lucky, but i started using the optimized minerd for amd 64 bit processers and it upped my khash signifigantly.  block #2 was found 1 hour 58 minutes after i started mining.  THAT is fkn lucky (like less than 1% chance i think)

It was pure luck that it was that close to the estimate.  The calculator gives you the 50% time.  So over the course of months on AVERAGE your will find one block per the unit of time given by the calculator.  However each block is totally random.  You could easily find one in 10% of the time and just as easily not find one in 10x the time. 

The estimator is only useful OVER THE LONG RUN.  So if you mine for 180 days you could take 180 / (time from calculator in days) = good approximation for number of blocks in 180 days.

Not really... it gives the expected value, which turns out to be at probability 1-1/e, or ~63%.
But other than that you are right, that should only match the average time per block over the long run.

Right!

What kind of hashing speeds are people seeing with their Phenom IIs?  I'm debating whether to upgrade to an x4 or x6 Black Edition of some sort.  I'm way CPU bottlenecked in BF3 :(