Right click on the .bat file and select "Edit" from the dropdown list.

Feathercoin mines quickly so it was easy to confirm that give-me-coins is paying the expected amount, and since difficulty for FTC has risen dramatically since this morning and my missing VTC balance ended up reappearing, I decided to switch back to VTC on GMC. Besides, I need to get the balance there up to 0.5 VTC before I can cash it out.

Oh, and the time to find a VTC block on GMC has dropped down to about 24 hours, so not nearly as bad as the 105 hours when I last checked it.

Ask if it comes with a lance or a pistol... for dueling! 

J/k... Ask the builder for the brand/model of the video card and look it up. If searching on the interwebz reveals that it doesn't come with a dual BIOS you can still mod the timings on the stock BIOS, it's just that you'll void the warranty for the card.

Personally, I didn't feel that getting an extra 3.5 MH/s of hashrate on Ethash (worth 0.17USD per day mining UBQ right at this moment) was worth voiding the warranty on my RX 570.

The DAG size for Ethereum seems to be a red herring to me - 4GB will suffice until some time in 2021 and I suspect that no consumer grade graphics card will survive 3+ years of mining, but even if they did would you still want to use them 3 years from now? Also, most (all?) mining algorithms don't benefit from more memory over and above what is needed to do the funky calculations. In other words, more memory does not automatically result in faster algorithm execution.

BUT... while I am a power electronics engineer by profession, so presumably semi-literate when it comes to tech, I've only gotten interested in mining very recently so take whatever I write here with the proverbial grain of salt...

The 580 is supposed to be about 10% better at Ethash, from what I understand. That depends greatly on the brand of memory and how you do in the "silicon lottery" (ie - some cards - even with the same memory - overclock better than others). My specific RX 570 (from Best Buy) is the XXX edition by XFX.


Absolutely, it's just that specifically for Ethash coins the most recent models of the GTX 1060 - pretty much regardless of manufacturer, it seems - now come with crappy memory that dropped the hashrate from ~24 MH/s down to around 19 MH/s. Equihash mining - which is much less memory intensive - seems to be unaffected, so the superior performance of the Nvidia cards at this algorithm persists.


Then a stock RX 570 (as long as it has the dual BIOS feature /or/ you are willing to void your warranty modding the BIOS) should get you done. Like you, I'm starting off modestly with just 2 card rigs and I concluded that the RX 570 offered the best bang for the buck when it comes to Ethash coins; it was a much tougher decision for the NVIDIA rig, as I was really tempted to go with a single 1070 Ti to start, but some Asus dual fan ("white edition") 1060 3GB popped up on Newegg for $189.99 (after rebate, limit 2) so I pulled the trigger on 2 of them. That gets me around 20% more hashrate on Equihash for $70 less (yes, I am well aware of the density vs. $/hashrate tradeoffs, which is why choosing an NVIDIA card was so difficult).

I am just a little bit farther along than you in getting into mining and I found out the hard way that new GTX 1060 cards are much worse at mining Ethereum (or any other Ethash coin) than an RX 570 I bought right off the shelf from Best Buy. The RX 570 has two separate BIOS installed that you can select with a switch - gaming and mining - and when I moved it from gaming to mining hashrate went from 21.6 to around 24 MH/s. Then when I selected "Compute" workload in the AMD Adrenalin driver and pushed the memclock ever so slightly (to 1880; any higher than that was unstable) I got to 25.5 MH/s. People here say that if I load custom memory timings into the BIOS I should be able to get to 29 MH/s, and maybe I'll try that later on, but for now I am pretty happy with the performance. I'm mining Ubiq, though, and not Ethereum, mainly because it was too depressing watching my earnings increase at the rate of about 0.003 ETH per day (compared to around 1 UBQ per day).


EDIT - I should mention I have 2 desktops and one I am going to put (2) RX 570 in for mining Ethash coins (UBQ, ETH, etc.) and the other is going to get (2) GTX 1060 and will be used for Lyra2v2 (VTC), Neoscrypt (FTC) and Equihash (ZEC/ZEN) coins.

In a bizarre twist, Give Me Coins now shows a balance of 0.17 VTC (vs. 0.073 expected) while SOAT seems to have lost a send transaction of around 0.11 VTC somewhere as my electrum wallet says I've received about 0.36 VTC in 3 separate transactions while SOAT says it has paid me 0.47 (with an unpaid balance of 0.099 - because min. payout of 0.1, lol...).

Right now I've switched over to mining Feathercoin on GMC because it takes too long for my puny 1050 Ti to earn the minimum payout in VTC and no pool seems to accurately represent how much I've earned until days - literally days - later. If I had a much more powerful mining setup I'd be pissed at pointing it at a pool that showed 0 earnings for 24+ hours.

Thanks for replying here; the comment section on YouTube should be reserved for posting insults, inflammatory rhetoric and proclaiming one is "1st!"...  

You run a new pool; I'm a new miner - probably a recipe for disaster - but I am an electronics engineer for my day job so I should be less prone to stupid f-ups than the average Nicehash miner... Or, at least, my f-ups will be more spectacular... and with big arcs!

As for the block reward halving on Dec-12, I suspected that the difficulty would halve along with it so I didn't stop mining, and that seems to have been the case, more or less (difficulty ranged from 70-90k prior to the halving and it is now in the range of 40-60k; okay, so a bit more than half the difficulty for half the reward...).


Granted, I've only been mining for about 2 weeks now - and I only just bought my first GPU specifically for mining* (so the mighty 1050 Ti has some competition) - but even in this brief time I've noticed that VTC is one messed up coin to mine. The p2p pools seem to be a total disaster, and your comment that running a VTC pool requires more work than average might explain why.

I have just one request for your pool at this point, and it is something which I feel will make your life easier if it can be implemented: report immature earnings assuming a block has been found. What your pool (and many others) currently do is report 0 earnings until a block is found. You can probably guess what that makes most miners think is happening on your pool - they are doing a whole lot of work for someone else's wallet.



* - an RX 570 that was on sale at Best Buy for $230 (so only ~$40 more than MSRP...   )

I'm curious about this, too.

I don't want to come across as promotional in the slightest, but I seem to have found an honest VTC pool at multipool.sonofatech.com (access from coins.sonofatech.com and choose the VTC multipool).

That said, it did take nearly 48 hours of continuous mining before my reported earnings started coming anywhere close to what I calculated they should be, and this issue seems to plague all of the pools I tried. The difference with the SOAT pool, though, is that 99.8% of my shares are being accepted, while 20-50% were being rejected at every other pool except for give-me-coins (also a high acceptance rate, but their time to find a block is sitting at 105 hours and in the immortal words of Sweet Brown, ain't nobody got time fo dat).

Okay, I've been mining to the VTC pool at multipool.sonofatech.com for 45 hours with very few rejected shares (99.8% acceptance) and my earnings are finally approaching the predicted amount. It's still underestimated, but now the difference is between 0.26 reported vs. 0.34 predicted, rather than 0.003 reported vs. 0.17 predicted... I suspect the long time to find a block at SOAT - around 12 to 16 hours - is partially to blame for the under-reported earnings, and if so, then the estimation should improve the longer I mine there. As a result, I am going to give it another day at least, even though I was planning on switching the mighty GTX 1050 Ti over to mining ZEN this morning.

The situation at give-me-coins.com is even worse: the time between blocks is estimated at 105 hours!?! So while I no longer think there are shenanigans going on at GMC, I also don't want to waste time mining there; 12-16 hours between blocks is already trying my patience as it is.

Similar experience here with several different pools which I am providing a running commentary on over here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2554077.0

Basically, I am getting somewhere around 2% of the expected payout mining VTC on every pool I've tried so far. I suspect there is something malicious going on in the VTC blockchain. Perhaps some way of spoofing shares at pools or the like?

I am having no luck running GPU-Z on my Windows 10 (Home) machine. When I double click on it I see the blue swirly for about 1 second then nothing. Running the program compatibility troubleshooter suggests Win 7 mode, but that doesn't work either and when I tell it that it just says the program is incompatible, so sorry.

I haven't really found any other complaints about this so I'm guessing this is just a quirk of my setup, but damned if I know what. Anyone else having this problem (and even better - anyone else have a solution?  )

Okay, so I'm not imagining it! That's both good and bad to know...

I agree that the rewards for VTC aren't particularly compelling right now, but my current (and evolving) philosophy is to mine coins that are in the middle of the pack on whattomine.com and sell those I've previously mined/accumulated that are closer to the top. Or to put it another way, mine while network difficult is average; sell when network difficulty is high.

At any rate, the VTC multipool at Son of a Tech seems to be operating much more fairly than any other I've tried, but the long interval between found blocks is making it difficult to evaluate. At least I seem to be getting credit for the vast majority of shares I've submitted (3400 out of 3402, if I understand the text output from Vertminer correctly); at pretty much every other pool 25-50% of my shares were marked stale and tossed out and/or I had lots of connection issues. The former issue may be a case of pools (possibly intentionally) mining identical blocks while the latter is what you might expect if some kid decides to set up a p2p pool in his dorm room or the like.

Shh! I'm leaving it alone for at least a day!

I'm signed up on Anorak and modding the BIOS is definitely under consideration. If I was only going to get to 27-28 MH/s I probably wouldn't bother, but for 31 MH/s I am definitely game. Still, I'd like to earn a few coins with the card before potentially bricking it.

I experienced the exact same thing with my new XFX RX 570 (XXX edition). After actually looking up the card's SKU number on the web I found out it had a switch near the 8 pin power header to select between gaming (default) and mining BIOS profiles. I shut down the computer, flipped the switch to mining mode, and the result was an increase from 21.8 MH/s to 24.9 MH/s. Power draw also dropped quite a bit, too. Previously I was overclocking using MSI Afterburner to 1950 on memory (which got me to right around 23 MH/s) and even with the power limit reduced by 15% I was pulling around 350W from the wall; now it's down to 295-300W.

If your card doesn't have the dual BIOS feature then my understanding is that you'll have to modify the timings in the BIOS using, e.g., PolarisBIOSEditor. I d/l'ed the program, but I wasn't looking forward to modding the BIOS as there is always the risk you brick the card, and the warranty is null-and-void at that point.

WEll, a bit of a mea culpa for me. I actually looked up the SKU for my card and found out it has switch to select between two BIOS profiles: gaming and mining. So, flipped it over to mining and voila, now it is churning out 24.8 MH/s without any overclocking at all. Power consumption dropped quite a bit, too - now at 300W. I'm happy enough with this that I don't think I'll mess with it for at least a day... 

The network difficulty for UBQ has returned to earth so I resumed mining it on Pool Sexy earlier today. After trying out different pools and coins I have come to appreciate one aspect of Pool Sexy more than anything else: I earn the predicted amount of coins over a 24 hour period. Sadly, this is often not the case on other pools...

I just snagged one of these "on sale"* from Best Buy and popped it into my old desktop with Win 7 installed. Bone stock it was doing about 21.6 MH/s mining Ubiq (using ethminer 0.12.0) which seemed to be way, way less than what I've seen others report for various RX 570 cards.

Then I realized that Compute mode isn't available in Win 7 so I swapped it with the GTX 1050 Ti installed in my newer Win 10 desktop and put the GTX 1050 Ti in the Win 7 machine. After the laborious process of uninstalling and reinstalling the relevant drivers and such on each machine, I was once again getting 21.6 MH/s on the RX 570 before Compute mode was enabled; afterwards, my hashrate increased to 22 MH/s, so not exactly a thundering improvement. I then loaded up MSI Afterburner and increased the memory clock from 1750 to 1900 and that gets me to 23.2 MH/s, but at 375W total at the wall; cutting the power by 15% didn't affect the mining speed at all but dropped the draw to 345W or so (hmmm... just 8%...).

At any rate, I was thinking I'd be cruising at something like 28 MH/s with this card, and while 23 MH/s is a sight better than what the poor GTX 1050 Ti could do (13.4 MH/s), it's still somewhat disappointing. So what are other people getting with this card and what sort of O/C seems stable? Also, is there any advantage doing the BIOS mod now that the official AMD drivers have Compute mode?




* - I say "on sale" because while the "not on sale price" was $250US, MSRP is supposed to be under $200US...

Yep, but difficulty seems to have dropped, too. Not quite in half, so it still takes more time to mine a coin at a given hashrate than prior to yesterday, but in my case I am getting credit for something like 1/50th what I should. I just switched over to multipool.sonofatech.com (after seeing some of his videos on YouTube) so I'll update this thread after I've been mining long enough for a balance to show. Based on whattomine.com I should accumulate VTC at a rate of about 0.00737/hour and I switched over exactly at 8:00AM.