Bitcoin Forum

I'd like to passively run a miner that's restricted to just 10-20% of my CPU. I understand it'll take, on average, a million years for me to "win" the block. But that's ok: I'm willing to take my chances.

I'd also like to propose that this mining mode be included in the official Bitcoin client. Although any single user is unlikely to win, that's ok, because in the future there will be millions of users. Users should have a chance to participate in the Bitcoin network, even if only in a small way. With a tiny bit of CPU power multiplied across millions of machines, some of them are, statistically speaking, likely to "win" and mine some bitcoins eventually.

This would also help to reduce the risk of a theoretical future where a single super-miner could own 51%+ of the network's computing power.

What's the point in this? CPU-mining is not worth it because the hashes/power consumption ratio is bad compared to GPU. If you don't mind wasting electricity, run a CPU miner at 100% with lowest priority. It will only utilize idle CPU time and won't interfere with other programs running.

Isnt there a way too do GPU low impact mining?

Yes, lower the number of GPU threads (worksize). The number depends on your graphics card.

Why not do that and use the rest of the capacity of the graphicard to play some not high demanding games?

I am doing this and use two different profiles for pure mining and mining while gaming respectively.

I'm using the phoenix miner with the phatk kernel and setting the AGGRESSION parameter to 3 I can fluently play any of my games on my HD6850 and still get about 100-110 MHashes/s.
For pure mining I set AGGRESSION to 16 which after trying differing settings yields the most (about 262) MHashes/s for me.

As for CPU mining, I let the ufasoft miner run at 100% and low priority and got no problems so far (and an additional 13 MHashes/s while my PC is otherwise idle).

Do you pay for electricity?  If you do, the CPU mining may be costing you money.

Two problems:
- A CPU uses a base energy level for 0% computation usage, and another higher energy level for 100% computation usage. The higher level is sometimes 50% more than the base level, such that efficiency for using a CPU at 100% is way higher than using it at 10%. You are consuming two thirds of the maximum's cpu power needs for just one tenth of the benefits.
- Pool mining suffers from "lion's share" syndrome. Your 10% CPU will submit shares once per 72 minutes per ghz per core, multiplied by 10. So if you have a 2.5Ghz dual core cpu, you will submit one share every two hours and a half. Some pools have rounds as short as 3 minutes. The chances of you posting a share in one of those good fat rewarding rounds is very slim, thus your shares will go into the longer rounds, netting you something like 0.0001 BTC/ day. Or the equivalent of two tenths of a dollar.

Enjoy.

The point is not electrical efficiency, nor reducing impact on other apps. Rather, it is heat. My CPU is far hotter, and thus my fans run much faster, and are much noisier, when the CPU is at 100%. My computer's fan is extremely loud.

At 20%, the fan doesn't kick in, so I'd be fine with having that constantly running.

Also, I don't intend to necessary participate in a pool. I'd like to mine directly and have a (small) shot at earning 50 BTC.

Furthermore, I would be interested in doing something similar with GPU mining, perhaps simultaneously with a little bit of CPU mining. How's the GPU on a MacBook Air?

GPU mining with a MacBookAir will be about 15-20 times faster and much(!) more efficient.
But fan might be pretty loud too.

I'm a bit dumb!!! How can CPU mining cost electricity, if someone HAS TO have the CPU always on for professional purposes???
Loved a clue about it wise guy....................................

Do you drive a car? Does your car use the same quantity of fuel when traveling at 90MPH when sitting idle at a stop light? I thought so...

Absolutely wrong your argument! but somewhat fair to a nintendo player, not to a IT tech.
Some more hard shots ??

Really? Well I am not equipped to offer an explanation to your level of intellect. Sorry. Maybe some day someone will satisfy your request with a better dumbed-down version of my explanation. I can't go lower.

If you don't understand that a CPU uses power to shift it's registers during instruction parsing, and the power to maintain a non-changing charge is lower than the power required to flip it from 1 to 0, or 0 to 1, as well as modern chip enhancements like HALT instructions and C states which turn off whole chip sections if there is little work to do, then you will never understand why a CPU uses it's nominal electricity cost at full power and only a residual cost while not used (such as a dumb user staring at the screen and doing nothing).

Good luck.

Look at the thread subject: Low-Impact Mining? (10-20% CPU)

Don't panic now! You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, lol.
Even though I keep your concerns about CPU power consumption at 10-20%..

There are two ways I deal with this issue. If you have lets say a quad core or six core cpu, you could try to use just one core. Or another method (not so suitable if you are using your computer while mining) would be to downclock your CPU to the lowest clock frequency supported. On AMD Phenom II it's 800 MHz. It can be done in Windows 7 by selecting 'Power Saver' radio button in Control Panel, Hardwdare and Sound, Power.

If your cpu has different cpufreq settings. One option may be to switch to powersave mode and run the cpu miner with low priority.

The problem about this is that when you actually want to use the cpu for something, you will have to switch to ondemand or something like that. Since the miner is low priority you don't have to turn it off when doing other things. But when you are finished you need to swtch back to powersave.

Using the userspace mode it may be possible to automate this with some bash scripts that will check for the miner's id, and if it is not the job that is at the top in "top" increase the frequency, if it is the top job for the last 5 mins decrease it to the minimum value.

Oh, if you have a windows, you'll probably have to install a proper os to do all that though.

Your idea, although interesting, is still bound by the principles of probability. Just because you have 1,000 cpus running at 2MH/s doesn't make it any more likely to produce a block with a set of rigs putting out the same 2,000 MH/s.

Probability is scalable into small increments as well as large portions of anything that's regarding chance.