After 12 hours of running at 14.8MH/s average I've managed to accumulate a whopping 0.0015 VTC on give-me-coins vs. an estimate of 0.0727, or about 48x less than expected... Ping time is 16ms so that clearly isn't the issue, and this dismal track record applies with two different miners.

So far every single Vertcoin pool I've tried is not reflecting my contribution at anywhere close to what my miner should be producing. I will try one last pool - Son of a Tech's - and then I am done with mining VTC.

Well, first I needed to figure out how to correctly configure the switches on a typical command-line miner to work with GMC (aka give-me-coins). Yes, I did /attempt/ to RTFM on GMC's support section, but every time I clicked on "Miner configs" I just got a reload of the top level category descriptions; no actual miner configs, that is.

Through sheer cussed persistence I figured out that you don't specify your wallet address in the command-line switches, rather, you specify your login name (e.g. - MagicSmoker) and your default first worker is named "1". So now my command line for vertminer* looks like:

vertminer -D -r 3 -o stratum+tcp://vtc.give-me-coins.com:3337 -u MagicSmoker.1 -p <password>

Hopefully this will help others that want to use give-me-coins a try because I really like the UI - it's my favorite of all the pools I've tried so far, in fact - and it seems to be accepting most of my shares (rather than discarding >80% of them as stale).


* - I believe vertminer is the actual miner used in One Click Miner,

Yes, I saw that explanation but it is difficult to believe the GPU is polled by bminer so often that it makes a noticeable dent in the CPU workload. But I'm an EE, not a programmer, so I'll take your word for it and try out the -polling=false switch next time I mine an Equihash coin (currently wasting time with Vertcoin).


Oh-ho, very interesting... I was not implying any sort of shady behavior on your part, but you seem to be implying that there could be something shady going on with the pool? I was mining Zcash on nanopool and seemed to reach the minimum payout of 0.01 ZEC after the expected time, more or less. It's difficult to accurately estimate the completion time given the ever changing difficulty, though, so I doubt I would even notice 3 missing shares out of 297... Hmmm.

I hate to ask this sort of thing as I've been using computers since the bad old days of DOS 4.01, but could you provide your command string for excavator to work with give-me-coins? I just d/l'ed Excavator 1.3.7 Alpha and it seems like a hot mess compared to vertminer or ccminer, but I wasn't able to connect to give-me-coins with the latter 2 programs, either, after only changing the url:port in the command string for both programs.

EDIT - here is my ccminer-x64 command string:

ccminer-x64 -D -r 3 -a lyra2v2 -o stratum+tcp://vtc.give-me-coins.com:3337 -O wallet.worker1

I have Debug mode turned on and max retries set to 3 so it doesn't endlessly loop when something fails. Wallet and worker name are fake, of course. Not sure it is a security risk to post actual values here, but, well... I'm paranoid.

Since the last post I have tried Excavator - which was terrible: about 145 Sols/s - and the latest version of bminer that the OP uploaded (2.1.0) and it seems CPU and power consumption is the same, but average hashrate is slightly lower - from 193 down to 190.

The high CPU/power usage has me wondering how the dev fee is paid, as I don't see bminer switching to another pool to mine for 2% of the operational time like other miners do. Perhaps it is running another crypto algorithm on the CPU to pay the dev fee?

EDIT - one other thing I have a question about... bminer has been running overnight and it just stated that share #297 was accepted but also says that I've had 292 shares accepted and 2 rejected; clearly, 292 + 2 does not equal 297, so what gives there?

So, why would dstm 0.5.6 report "inf" (presumably "infinite") for Sol/w with a GTX 1050 Ti? Driver version is 388.59, so I am up to date there.

Sorry if this question was covered in one of the preceding 1637 posts, but thread search on this forum is terminally defective and a google site search just pulled up reported Sol/w results from various cards.

Otherwise, dstm seems to be a winner - the hashrate is slightly lower than bminer, but that is more than made up for by about 30W less average power draw for my rinky-dink single card test setup.

So I decided to switch over to dstm 0.5.6 starting at 6:25pm yesterday to see how it compares to bminer. After 12+ hours of operation here are my observations:

bminer is about 3% faster, based on reported hashrate.

However, dstm results in much less power draw based on the watt display on my UPS: 220W for bminer vs. 190W for dstm. That 30W difference will prove critical.

While dstm does tax the CPU much less - task manager reports 0.8-1.0% - the 15% usage by bminer didn't really affect the computer's operation so not really a penalty.

As far as the UI goes, I like that dstm reports average Sols/s and GPU temperature whereas I like that bminer reports # of rejected vs. accepted shares as well as just being more verbose in general about what it is doing (e.g. - "Share submitted", "Share accepted", etc...). Another possible advantage for dstm is that it reports Sols/W as well, but with my card it only says "infinite" so that function doesn't seem to be working, at least with my card/setup.

Both have been equally stable with no crashes or weird network errors (connected to the us-east server on Nanopool).

When I plug the relevant numbers into this calculator - https://minethecoin.com/coin/zcash - to compare profitability I find that dstm edges out bminer by 7.5% on a monthly basis ($17.00 profit vs. $15.82 per month). So dstm is the clear winner here, despite that bminer mines 3% faster.

Some crypto algorithms require less video memory to solve than others, but if an algo requires too little memory (e.g. - Bitcoin) then it is open to solving with custom-designed chips (ASICs) and GPUs are left in the dust at that point.

You can see how much video memory is required for some of the more popular Ethash* based coins here:

https://investoon.com/tools/dag_size

Note that running Windows at the same time as mining - especially to play videos (e.g. - YouTube) - will require some video memory as well. During my brief test of Ethereum mining, MSI Afterburner (an overclocking and GPU monitoring utility) reported I was using just under 3GB on my 4GB GTX 1050 Ti, of which ~2.2GB was for Ethereum (the so-called "DAG file"). This means a 3GB GTX 1060 will be unable to mine Ethereum any day now (if not already)

However, when mining Ubiq I was using right around 2GB, so a 3GB card would have plenty of life left in it. Also, there are other coins which don't use a massive DAG file but which are still somewhat to fully resistant to ASIC attack, such as those that use the Equihash algorithm like Zcash, Zencash, Bitcoin Gold, Hush, etc. I am mining Zcash right now and MSI Afterburner is reporting around 993MB of video memory in use (once again, with some of that consumed by Windows).

However, with just 16 CUDA cores and 512MB of memory, I don't a GeForce 210 will be able to mine *anything*, even if booting into Linux or some other O/S that doesn't use a GUI.



* - Ethash is the name of the algorithm for mining (ie - solving) Ethereum and it is used for several other coins such as Ubiq, Expanse, Musicoin, etc.

Quick update - bminer has been running for ~30 hours averaging about 193 Sols/s mining Zcash to Nanopool with my GTX 1050 Ti. I've racked up 6 rejected shares out of 766 and counting; not sure if that has more to do with ping latency or the miner itself, but thought I'd relay the datum anyway.

I plan on running this until I've collected the minimum 0.01 ZEC payout from Nanopool (ie, another day or so... lol) then I'll be switching back to either Vertcoin (trying One Click Miner) or Ubiq (using ethminer 0.12.0, unless I find something interesting to try).

Ahh, ok. Well, I d/l'ed the latest versions of both Vertminer and the tpruvot ccminer directly from their respective Github releases page and had the same connectivity issues with both programs.


I didn't try the "givemecoins" pool but I just checked it out and it certainly looks a lot less clunky than the ones I have tried. I was also considering giving the pool by the guy that publishes the Son of a Tech videos a try.

The pools I have tried so far and which had connectivity and other issues were:

vtc-poolmining - worked the best with nearly 16 hours of continuous uptime, but then I got booted off and couldn't reconnect for >5 minutes. During that time I poked around on their support forum and found out that no one was getting credit for the last 12 hours of shares they submitted so I decided not to waste any more time with them.

vtc.alwayshashing.com - relentless connectivity issues; in fact, can't even bring their static monitoring page up right as I type this.

Webster, US p2p - 67.253.140.201:9181 - the "least worst" p2p pool, but over 50% of the time the miner software was reporting that GPU #0 was waiting for work, and then when it finally did receive work it was marked stale when submitted over 50% of the time... so, my already slow card was running at 25% of its mining speed, effectively.

Montreal, Canada - 66.70.178.185:9171 - the first and worst p2p pool I tried before I better understood that I should be on Network 2 (port 9181 for most sites, I gather?). Relentless and random disconnects; would run for up to an hour before booting me off and miner couldn't connect with the 3 retry limit and 60 seconds between tries (so at least 3 minutes of downtime) and around 20-25% of my shares were being marked stale. This would have been the least-worst p2p pool /if/ it weren't for the disconnects; at least the Webster pool let me stay connected for the entire time I was evaluating it.

FWIW, I just started mining a week ago and am still in the "trying different things out before I commit to buying any specialized hardware" phase, so I am not even remotely an expert. I also just started running bminer earlier today - currently at about 7 hours of mining Zcash on Nanopool...

That said, I haven't had any crashes, CPU usage (AMD FX-8300) is around 15% (according to Windows 10 task manager), and I am getting a software-reported hashrate of 190-193 Sols/s with a rinky-dink Zotac GTX 1050 Ti Mini that has been mildly overclocked (see details if interested below) with MSI Afterburner. I will be trying out a couple of other different miners but I want to let this one run for a full 24 hours first. I did run Excavator for about 15 minutes but it was reporting a terrible hashrate of around 100 Sols/s so I didn't investigate it further. I also have EWBF 0.3.4b and Claymore 10.2 to play with, but I likely won't bother with Claymore since the way it does the dev fee mining actually costs you over 1 minute per hour vs. 36 seconds if you aren't mining Ethereum because of the time it takes to change pools, generate the DAG for Ether, etc. Not to go off on a tangent in my own post, but my personal opinion is that dev fees should be paid  in whatever coin is being mined and by switching the payment address.

EDIT: one feature request so far - display the cumulative run time.

MSI Afterburner overclocking details: +86 on the core clock to 1795 (max possible is 1797); +196 on the mem clock to 3700. Lowering TDP resulted in a lower hashrate so no point in doing that while excessively increasing mem clock did nothing but make the card run hotter so it seems that both core and mem clock need to go up together for the most benefit.

That's unlikely. I have a newish cable modem, a decent router (using hard-wired ethernet, not Wi-Fi), and while mining Zcash on Nanopool for the last 4 hours or so I haven't experienced any connectivity issues and only one rejected share (out of 131 and counting... lol).

I always ping a pool before I connect to it and all the Vertcoin pools came in under 60ms, but I still experienced several dropouts every minute and unrecoverable disconnects (that is, the miner reached the 3 time retry limit I set and I couldn't reconnect to the same pool for several minutes). In contrast, the UBQ pool on Pool Sexy had a ping of about 140ms and while I did receive the occasional stratum warning or temporary disconnect from ethminer 0.12.0, I didn't experience any unrecoverable disconnects; that is, ethminer was able to automatically reconnect and resume operation.

I just find this curious and want to know if others are experiencing the same issues, or if they have found a reliable US pool for small miners (which I am given to understand is "Network 2").

Yeah, I'll definitely be trying different miners out after the network connectivity issue is sorted out.

I probably should have mentioned that I had the occasional "stratum port disconnected" error when mining Ubiq to Pool Sexy, but no full-blown disconnects. I stopped mining Ubiq temporarily because the difficulty spiked to 25 from 15 (!!!) and I wanted to try other coins/algorithms out. Vertcoin was my second choice but since that hasn't worked too well I am now crunching away on Zcash at nanopool (I am also trying different pools as well as coins at this point).

I don't think either ccminer or vertminer are scamming* me, per se; they both accepted my vertcoin address, received work from the pool and submitted solutions that were accepted (though quite a few were marked stale or "boooo"). The main problem I am concerned about here is with poor network connectivity and so far I've experienced such with every single pool.

As I am just starting with mining I am concentrating on reasonably profitable coins with a low payout threshold so I don't have to wait too long to find out the software isn't working right or my coins are going to the wrong address, etc. I am specifically avoiding the most profitable coins, however, so I don't run into massive difficulty spikes from, e.g., Nicehash miners (though I guess that's not so much of an issue now that they got hacked).

* - that said, the first pool that I seemed to have the most network reliability with - though still not 100% - was poolmining.org, however after totaling up some 3000+ shares I noticed no pending balance and checked the support section where, lo-n-behold, a bunch of other people were complaining about the same thing. Finally one of the admins admitted that there was a problem with the payment processor and, so sorry, any work from the last 12 hours is gone. Gone for you, maybe, but not them, I suspect.

I just started mining a week ago so I am probably a bit more sympathetic to the OP here.

The short answer is that a GeForce 210 is way too weak to run anything. My old Win 7 PC has a GTX 460 and none of the mining software I've tried will run on it, either, and it is technically a bit more powerful. EDIT - LOL... my old 460 is about 15x more powerful...

My newer Win 10 PC has a GTX 1050 Ti which seems to be about the lowest graphics card that can run any of the major mining algorithms as it is both modern and has 4GB, though not necessarily at a speed that is worth the bother. However, because it isn't terribly desirable for mining you can still get them for a reasonable price; a new one is about 150-160USD while a used one just popped up (and sold) on OfferUp for 130USD.

Personally, I wouldn't buy any [edit] used card that is or was popular for mining because it will: A) be way overpriced; B) have been ridden hard and hung up wet... ie, abused from being used in a mining rig, even if the seller claims otherwise.

I seem to be getting a lot of "Stratum_recv_line failed" errors and outright disconnects from the pool with both Vertminer and CCMiner-x64, and this is happening on several different pools. Since I am getting a slightly better hashrate with Vertminer I am using it for now, and the only command line switches I am using (besides the necessary ones to specify url:port and address) are "-D" for debug mode and "-r 3" to limit the number of retries in the event of failure.

I am trying to stick to Network 2 where possible since I am using my existing hardware to just try this mining stuff out and it isn't exactly ideal for the task (a GTX 1050 Ti) but at least when mining Ubiq for 1 week I received a little over 2.5 coins; at the rate things are going with VTC I can expect 1 coin in 2 weeks, maybe.

I've been mining Ubiq on Pool Sexy for about a week now with my humble GTX 1050 Ti. Average hashrate reported by the pool seems realistic at 14.2MH/s and I've been receiving regular payouts much more quickly than when I was on Suprnova (difficulty is much higher now, too). One question: is there any kind of bonus when you find a block and if so how long does it take to mature if different from the normal share time confirmation of approx. 88 minutes?