Try the altcoin section of the forum for mining altcoins

Try a bitcoin mining calculator. Here is a simple one: https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
This one doesn't take electricity into account though. Whether you earn more than the electricity costs of course depends on what you pay for electricity. So you'll need to run some numbers. In some countries electricity is very expensive and mining with a profit is just not possible.

Remember that bitcoin price and difficulty keep changing over time. Also there is the reward halvings to consider.

Happy to hear you like the pool

This model is not supported, so you need to use bfgminer or cgminer.

This is an 8 GH/s USB stick, which currently mines $0.15 worth of bitcoin per month on average? Not considering future difficulty increases or reward halvings.

I guess it's an old an inefficient ASIC chip, and unless you mine with a raspberry pi, beaglebone or similar, the PC would also add a lot of electricity usage.

I wouldn't buy USB-miners in 2017. Maybe you could buy it for 0.50 USD or 1 USD if you just want to see how mining works. I would certainly not pay 40 USD for it.

GeForce 8600GT doing 4 MH/s sounds right. It's an extremely slow GPU that people would not mine on even in 2011. Maybe in 2010?

That's an interesting idea. It would be a very nice feature.

One issue might be that some would use it to scam services that accept zero-confirmation transactions, like some gambling sites do.

Another issue might be some people using this to push through their own low-fee transactions or even accepting payments from a third party to include their low-fee transactions. No harm as long as it would just benefit that miner. But it reduces what we earn from transaction fees from a block, so it hurts all the other miners in the pool.

If this was limited then the second issue probably wouldn't be much of a problem. Double-spending zero-conf txes is harder to do something about.

Have to think more on this.


We use PPLNS with shifts, where the work in the 10 latest shifts gets paid when a block is found. Instead of paying each proof-of-work equally, the work is weighed by difficulty.

Let's say you do some work, then the difficulty goes up 5% and you do some more work. The work you did after the difficulty change will count 5% more towards your share of the coins.

No, that would be the proportional reward system, which would leave us vulnerable to pool hopping.

See http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5072/what-is-pool-hopping

Indeed it is. Unfortunately segwit voting doesn't seem to go much higher than 30% so I guess it may take a while until we see segwit activated.

There's that Christmas block!

Come on, let's have a Christmas block

.. and you had free electricity.

Yes, but you earn nothing using it. To actually earn something you need modern stand-alone ASIC miners that don't use a PC to mine.

In theory you would earn something if you mined for millions of years - but that's a bit long.

The java app is for old hardware. Mining with old USB-based ASIC miners is now pointless, just like mining with a plain PC. Modern miners are stand-alone ASIC miners that don't need to be connected to a PC to mine. For an example have a look at the Antminer S9.

This is bitcoin. The altcoin section is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

It's mining - this is how all bitcoins are created.

Unfortunately there are no tricks to achieve good luck. Worker difficulty won't affect finding blocks. Empty blocks could be used to reduce the orphan rate a tiny bit. But it won't affect finding blocks.

Talking about time and luck gets confusing. Time depends a lot on hashrate. If you look at time you get the wrong impression of luck.

Number of rounds is directly related to luck though. "7 blocks in a row were above 50% CDF." That says something about luck. I'm sure that has happened several times to all long-running pools though.

Ok, ok, I glossed over a few things to make things simpler.

In an ideal world bitcoin mining would be truly random.

In reality there are many complicating details. In addition to things mentioned above there is also for example block withholding, which happened at BTCGuild and Eligius when a miner used buggy software they had made themselves. There is also the chance of vulnerabilities, like the one that was abused at GHash, when they used the proof-of-concept stratum server example code from github which had a nasty bug (you could get paid multiple times for the same work).

Good luck = found a block after a small amount of work.
Bad luck = found a block after a large amount of work.

Working faster does not affect luck. It only makes the rounds go by in less time.

When a repeating event is truly random the outcome depends only on luck. That's exactly how it is when mining for bitcoin blocks. Luck cannot be manipulated. Luck is unpredictable for a small number of events (blocks) and predictable for a large number of events.

Short term: Gamber's fallacy tells us that yesterday's luck will not in any way help you predict your luck today.

Long term: The law of large numbers tells us that if you mine for 10 years you will have close to average luck overall.

Finally another block.

The work amount it took was 7.3x difficulty. Not as bad as our worst round which was 11x difficulty. But it took longer due to the current low hashrate in the pool.

A big thanks to all the miners who worked on this round and especially th1nk3r who found the block! 

Thanks!

Now let's finally find this block.