Bitcoin Forum

Is there a future in Harddrive Mining. If people don't know what I mean I'm referring to the altcoin BURST which is mined through Proof of Capacity i.e. Harddrive space...

My question is whether there is a sustainable future in this and whether this will be the latest development in the crypto mining world?

What the hell is hard drive mining?

storj.io is trying to sell disk for coin and your disk could join the network, the more disk space, the more coin you can earn (not bitcoin btw). I tried signing up a couple of weeks ago and nothing. They are really, really disorganized.  It could be interesting but nothing...

Hi,
 
Matt from Storj here. Can you expand on your issues? I would be glad to help you out!
Or feel free to contact our support desk at hello@storj.io where one of our team members will respond to you promptly. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve, please let us know! We are always open to improving ourselves in anyway we can.
 
Cheers!

My issues were that I signed up on 6/24, signed up for the crowdsale, bought some SJX, but then got left out of any more info. Then I see the banner here on bitcointalk, but when you click it just sends you back to the invite page. Grrrr.  I asked what was going on over at storjtalk and was told to put more into the crowdsale. I just sent a message to the support desk email.

Here's a tip: Lower your barrier to participate. You're making it too damn difficult, just put up a setup page to the drive miner and stop it with all the shenanigans. If it's not ready or hasn't been released yet, *don't advertise it!*

Sorry, I'm just pissed at you guys...

Do you mean that have not been receiving emails? If that is the case, please check your spam inbox because we have been sending out a good number of emails lately that might have led to answers to your questions.
 
You also mentioned that you were told to put more into the crowdsale. Please do not ever feel pressured to contribute to the crowdsale. Any contributions of any kind are appreciated and we do not want to pressure you into sending more than you are comfortable with.
 
Right now, Metadisk is currently in its beta phase. You can try it out at node1.metadisk.org (http://node1.metadisk.org) and a tutorial video on how to use it can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmMIMtbBnA8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmMIMtbBnA8) . DriveShare is currently being worked on diligently and you should see a protoype in the coming weeks. You can follow further development on Metadisk, DriveShare, and Storj in general on our GitHub: https://github.com/storj (https://github.com/storj).
 
You can also find Storj on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and many other social media websites for daily updates on our progress. We sincerely apologize for the way you have been treated with Storj. We always try to make it as easy as possible for those interested in our project to not only find out more information, but also participate as well. If there is anything at all that we can do to improve your experience or our organization, please let us know.

Got two emails today and a response back from tech support, so thanks.

However, you're advertising here on bitcointalk, the following ad: "RENT OUT YOUR FREE HARD DRIVE SPACE FOR COINS!" Until your miner program is released, my suggestion would be for you guys to remove your ad until you've released the program, you've been running that ad for at least a couple of weeks now. This community here has been hit hard by those asking for BTC and not delivering services.

PoC mining can be, if the data is used for something positive and useful. In Burst, it's just creating data to make currency only.

Here's the link for other to see the thread on it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=731923.0

Here's a thread I did for PoC mining: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740158.0

Most of the info about mining is on the Burst thread, but I took some of the info and put it in a dedicated thread.

I agree with cloverme.
I can't find the download page of driveshare,  if there isn't any yet, don't advertise it.
If there is, it is well hidden.

I dont think it is a good idea, POC can be easily abuse right? Dropbox capacity, google drive maybe cd also?

will i lose my coins if hd fails?

Time for an observation on this coin and mining method, I'd like your input.

After a few days of reading on it, it seems that the only real mining equipment needed is some multi-TB hard drives, otherwise any old computer can eventually make the plot files and be good enough to mine on.

But therein lies a problem.  Cost of entry is low.  It won't be long before someone with huge storage capacity jacks the difficulty into the stratosphere.

You've seen what happened when ASICs came out for Bitcoin, and then for Scrypt coins.  Difficulty went sky high, everyone got less, and it takes a ton of money to even be a low level player.

So how long will it be before 100 TB worth of hard drives gets you one block per week?  Of an unknown, untested, unproven alt coin that could price crash at any time?

At least with BTC ASICs, their high price slowed the addition of them a bit.  Any jackhole here can call up Tiger Direct and order 100 4 TB drives at any time, and then we could see a run on large hard drives like what happened with GPUs last winter.

So part of me wants to get in on it, and part of me wants to say the hell with it, it's not worth the effort to be playing catch up and adding TBs of storage every few weeks.

And hard drives do not have good resale value.

And we are all solo mining now!  How long before Petabyte pools start on this coin?

What say you?

you should buy 2nd hand hdd's. This will extent your mining lifetime a bit, but I agree that it won't be long before the big players crush the mining.

Nice, is this profitable as compare to gpu mining?

How much of free HD is needed to be worth "mining" it? Because I turned off my rigs, cause it is not profitable to POW with graphics cards.

Isn't it an option to use AWS from amazon with the cheapest option/location? Or is it not worth it?

Difficulty raised too quickly and it is now not profitable to buy new one...

Same question here. Tried to set it up yesterday on an old PC but didn't get it to mine yet, would like to know whether it's worth the effort anyway ;)

Mining BURST isn't worth it.  In short order, someone made a program that allows GPUs to create the plot files.  And it was the equivalent of an ASIC for hard drive mining.  Difficulty skyrocketed while the price crashed and stayed crashed.  C-CEX exchange lists BURST coins and has a long term price graph.

Between August 17 and the end of September, I started learning about BURST, rounded up a bunch of laptop hard drives I had laying around, got going in mining, spent $330 buying 4 3TB drives on ebay, got them all plotted, some with the GPU plotter, sold my coins just as the price started to tumble, weathered a long one week plus period of doing lots of mining and getting nearly no coins, shut down my miners, listed the hard drives on ebay, and got back $320 for them.

The developers created a buggy, unstable miner and a wallet format unlike the -Qt wallet that almost every other coin uses, and it was all nothing but trouble and aggravation to get it working.

So you are better off not mining at all than mining BURST coin.  It is a crap coin who has had its price pump and dump.  Let it die now.

Ok, thank you for explanation. It is just bad that I missed pump time  ;)

too easy abusable apparently, through all cloud stuff

also hdd can fall more easily

future nvidia gpu will consume even less than today, 1/2 of today with their 16nm, if they skip 20nm, so no much of a difference will be there

Does anyone know if they fixed the burst wallets yet. I was mining burst for 5 months and then the wallet just would not work and I could not mine anymore.. Any updates? or did anyone else encounter this iissue mining burst coin?

This kind of mining is not profitable.

The wallets are all fixed and working.
2 seperate groups, Burst Consortium, and Burstnation.

The pools seem to be working too, after weeks of DDS attacks.

Before you get too excited thou, the diff is very high now, and the block reward not great.
You can still make money, but you need many TB. (I gave up cos i only had 20TB).
I would say realistically you want at least 10TB, but should aim for more like 50-100TB.
AWS does not work well...you need locally attached USB drives are best. Spin speed is not too important. 5400rpm archive drives work great. (usually cheapest too - take much longer to plot thou, but u only need to plot once).

As for the price, well it's 100 sat am the mo, which peeps will moan at, but it was 6 sats when i started, so i can't complain.
Will it rise, probably, mainly due to die hard miners, stabilty seems very good now, no other POC coins (yet). 4 min block times, and very low fees. (u can transfer for 1 burst)
So if u can find cheap hdds, and have very cheap electricity (still on 24/7) then what do you have to lose?.
Also, if you use an online wallet, and are not bothered about a bit of corruption, you can use old knackered drives. If you split the plots in to chunks, rather than 1 big plot per drive, then u can use duff drives, if a few sectors  get knackered, so u lose a few plot files, just chkdsk the drive, and replot...
I was using  thrown away 2TB drives, which after a full wipe and format probably gave me about 85-95% good working capacity. (just remember to let them sleep, or they will spin 24/7 and last about 2 months)
Anyways, thats my experience. Like all crypto, you makes a choice and takes a chance.

Try googling IMINEBLOCKS (youtube), he has made several vids showing his setup and his earnings at various times this year.
J

I am thinking about to buy 10 TB and start mining. With real rate, I will start getting profit in 2,5 month. What you think about it?

Absolutely NOT true!  I have been mining burst for a little over a year and have had about 50TB online for at least the last 6 months. I have already cashed out about 3x the cost of the HDDs i bought for this, and still holding about half of what I have mined to date.  So, even before this recent spike in price, it was absolutely profitable... and now it's been hovering around 5 cents, which is insane and actually one of the most profitable coins to mine during the last 2 weeks!

My 50TB have been earning about $90/week. In doing some quick match, I figured the current ROI timing is only about 8-9 weeks for a $150 8TB drive. That is insanely good, so I ordered 50TB more and am currently plotting them to get them up and running ASAP.

OK... so some valid points here but I need to correct a few mis-statements.

Yes, the wallet issues has mostly been fixed and DDOS attacks died down for the moment. But, you also need to be aware that there are some bad players how heavily influence this coin. That is mainly why i dumped about half of my earnings a few months back. Right now at 5 cents this is insanely profitable to mine but this coin is probably a bit more risky than others due to said influence of criminal element.

Not sure about the realistic minimum to get in now... like i said, my 50TB have been earning about $80-$90/week at 5 cents per coin, but this is not necessarily proportionate downward (or upward for that matter). Meaning, if you only throw 10TB onto the network, not sure you can realistically expect even $18/week because of the way this kind of mining works. Therefore, I would recommend at least 20-30TB to start but more if possible. a few days ago you could get 8TB for $150, and that's about the best deal I've seen on HDDs.

The thing you need to understand about burst is this... you will make most of your money off hitting blocks, and to hit blocks semi-consistently, you probably will need at least 30TB but better to have 40-50TB+.  Case in point... in Dec, I hit 7 blocks... 4 outright winners (about 1000 burst each) and 3 that were what I consider "shared" winners (about 500 burst each). So, a total of about 5,500 burst ($280) from winning blocks. The rest of my rewards for the entire month was only 1750 burst ($88). These come from the shared portion of blocks that another person in your pool won.  So, 75% of my earnings came from hitting blocks. My assumption is that if you go in with say 10TB, you may not hit any blocks at all because that it comparatively a very small % of what many other miners are doing. Just something to think about when getting into this.

To the next point of correction... spin speed is actually important although granted, yes, the 5400RPM seagate externals do work just fine as that is mostly what I have currently. However, if you can get 7200RPM drives for similar costs (or a little more), it would absolutely be well worth it. 

This is because there are 2 major aspects to successful burst mining. Total capacity, and speed of that capacity. The speed part it controlled by 3 contributing factors:

1- Plot type (highest influence): there are 2 types of plots in burst... regular and optimized. Regular are easier and much quicker to plot, but they are also considerably slower to "mine". What this means is that if you have 50TB of regular plots, they will probably mine at about 50MB/sec. By contrast, Optimized plots, with all else being equal, would probably mine closer to 80MB/sec.  So, if you and another person in your pool found the same block... you with regular and them with optimized, they would almost always win that block. I made the mistake early on of mining with mostly regular blocks and probably lost over $1,000 because of it.  Writing optimized blocks is more difficult and time consuming but well worth it in the end.

2- Data connection type (2nd highest influence): This is one that I learned from Lee on his IMineBlocks youtube channel.  Clearly, the external drives need to be plugged into a USB3 port. However, if you're going to go to 50TB, you will obviously need to expand your ports.  My first attempt at this was to just buy a typical 1:5 or 1:7 USB3 expander (meaning USB3 to USB3). I thought this worked ok but then I learned that a PCIe slot to USB3 expansion card works much better. Indeed, in my current setup, i have 9 drives on these PCIe expanders and they are about 30% faster than the USB to USB expanders. They only cost about $25 so this is another no-brainer. Because again, if you are competing with another miner for a block that extra 30% speed will make a huge difference.

3- Drive speed (moderate influence): This one is a bit harder to define, but as I said above, it does matter. The trick is the cost factor. If you can get a 7200RPM drive for the same or maybe up to 10% more, it is well worth it. I have 1 internal 7200RPM drive and that things mines at about 95MB/sec, while most of my 5400RPM externals are around 80-85MB/sec.  a decent advantage but again, speed is only 1 of the factors, so if that 7200 costs you too much more to the effect that you are sacrificing capacity... due to the this, it's a bit difficult to say where the cutover point is.

But bottom line, if you take care of #1 & #2, you should do quite fine and not have to worry about #3.

Oh and about electricity... contrary to the post above, you do NOT need cheep electricity to be profitable in this. These drives only consume a small % of watts compared to GPUs and they are not even spinning most of the time. The elec cost is so minimal that I don't really even factor it into my ROI calcs.

If I start mine 2 month ago, when 1000 BURST = 6$, I can have really good profit now, when 1000 BURST = 70$.