Bitcoin Forum

Picture if you will:
I have 2 computers that currently mine for bitcoins, both of them cpu miners only.  (I will not upgrade until I get my current issues worked out.)

One of them is an intel machine that just runs the standard, official bitcoin client in generating mode.  However, my other machine is a PPC mac G5 running Ubuntu server (about 8 years old).  Since most of this machine's existence is purposed towards wasting electricity, I figured I might as well put it to use.  So, I started looking into getting the bitcoin client onto it.  This is apparently impossible, due to little-endian vs big-endian conflicts.  Instead, I started searching for a java-based miner since java runs on anything, and I actually know how to debug it.  No dice.  Finally found a C++ miner, namely cpuminer: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=1925.0 (http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=1925.0)

After a select few compiling issues involving libcurl, it now generates perfectly at a whopping 1.2 Mh/s. Yay.

Since this is obviously not a huge number, I joined a pool to see what would happen, and if it was worth getting some actual GPU equipment in there.  Henceforth, I am now a proud member of Bitcoin Pooled Mining at http://mining.bitcoin.cz/accounts/profile/ (http://mining.bitcoin.cz/accounts/profile/).  The account is set up (no issues there).

When I run cpuminer: I get no errors whatsoever.  It starts up two threads like it should and starts cranking away.

2 hours later, on the BPM site, my worker still has 0 "Current shares".  I would think that this is normal, since the hash rate is so slow.  However, when I did a test connection to btcguild (have an account there as well for testing), it didn't even show my hash rate.  So now I am wondering if something is wrong with my machine (besides the fact it is PPC, or a mac, or not made out of lollipops, thanks) or if something is wrong with the network connection, or something else.

To reiterate: machine is crunching, but the website has no current shares listed.  Indeed, there is no external evidence at all that there is a machine working under my account.

I do occasionally get a "PROOF OF WORK RESULT: false" message, and the timestamps check out, so I am at least RECEIVING traffic correctly.

I am behind a firewall if it is relevant.

Ideas?

Not familiar with that particular miner, but your hash rate is pretty low. Slush's pool is high-powered and new blocks are generated sometimes in a matter of minutes. If your client doesn't return one completed share by the time a block is solved it will of course record 0 shares, the work on the current share dropped and it will start anew with a new share from the new block etc.

My suggestion is to try again on a smaller pool, where your miner will have a chance.

Ah.  ok I will try that immediately.  Thank you for the prompt reply.  I wasn't entirely sure of all of the intricacies of this entire system.

Have you tried the java-based bitminter?  The author is very active on this forum and has a very nice miner.  The pool is small and he is paying 5% bonus until the 60th block has been found.  So far, we've found 3.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22432.0