You're planning to drop 12 to 18TH/s on the network, yet you have no idea on where you might want to point it?  Seriously?  The only 6TH/s miners I know of are the upcoming SP30s from Spondoolies-Tech.  If you happened to get on RoadStress' group buy in April, you could have had them for about $4500 each.  However, from your statement of "I plan on running 2 or 3...", I can infer that you have not yet purchased the equipment.  That being the case, you're thinking of dropping anywhere between $10,000 and $15,000 on equipment, without having even done the most preliminary of research.

Take a look around.  Read up on the different offerings.  Look at payout mechanisms, fee structures, hash rates, etc.  Sheesh... tell you what, I'll charge you 0.5BTC an hour and do all of the research for you.  T&M contract, with at least 40 hours of work payable up front, non-refundable.

Depending on how much hashing power you're planning to point to your local node, you might be better served throwing up a stratum proxy in front of it.

For example, if you have a couple USB sticks, you can point your mining software directly to your node and be done with it.  If you've got a few TH/s across multiple miners, you should consider using the proxy.

Anyway, as a general guide to making sure your node can accommodate mining, make sure you add server=1 in your bitcoin.conf file, and allow the IP address range of your miners.  Example (taken from my own, with passwords and wallet addresses changed):


Now when you start your mining software, you point it to the node like this:

If all has gone according to plan, when you start your miner, you'll see something like this:

When you run cgminer manually, do you mean you've gotten rid of the init.d script that automatically starts it, and do something like:


To the OP, I'm a bit confused by what you're asking.  You stated you don't want to have multiple browser tabs running... how is that any different than having multiple putty windows running?

By the way, if you're looking for a good tool, check out mdude77's Antminer monitor: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=596178.0

Sorry about that stryker.  Just to give an example, the next time we're going to see a month with 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays is May, 2015.  After that it's January, 2016.

Yes I know that is not true... Lol.  I purposefully wrote a common misconception that is accepted as truth.  It is relevant here because people are constantly posting block withholding attacks as the definitive answer for what is far more likely normal swings in luck.

Is the version of cgminer on the S1 even compiled with ncurses support?  Wouldn't that be required to get the TUI to display properly when attaching it to the screen command?

Both of your blades show that?  Do you have enough power running to it?  What that status means is that every other ASIC is dead.  This is why you're seeing about half the rate you should be getting.  Definitely power it down and unplug the PCI-e cables.  Check the unit for any obvious signs of damage like scorch marks or bent/broken pins.  In addition to that, check your PSU and its cables.  Make sure your PSU is actually able to provide the 360W the S1 needs, and that each of the 2 PCI-e plugs is actually providing it.

That's an interesting thought... adding your machine running the bitcoind.  I'm a bit confused, though.  Are you running the bitcoin daemon on both your games machine and your p2pool one, or are you using
when you start up your p2pool node?

@kgb2mining, another option to consider is ensuring you have connections to nodes that are close to you.  There is a command that you can pass when you start your node:
This forces your node to connect to this particular in addition to the ones it will randomly connect to on startup.  Remember, the orphan race completely depends on which share chain is longer and gets broadcast across the network first.  If you're broadcasting your own version of the chain to a node that's 500ms away, and I'm broadcasting my chain to that same node, but it's only 50ms from me, I win the race.

Lol... That's what happens when I do math before morning coffee... I looked at the percentage .0006 and in my head that meant 6 in 10000... Or about 1 in 1667.  Using my earlier hash rate of 147PH/a you've got a 1:147000 chance.

Sorry about that

He kind of did explain it, but the supporting math is a bit fuzzy.

Let's assume that you have 1TH/s.  Should you point that to a pool, or solo mine? (In solo mining, I'm also going to include the solo mining pools - which I agree is an oxymoron).  For this example, there is no merged mining, no transaction fees, nothing but a straight up 25BTC block reward and we're living in a perfect world where you get exactly your expected earnings every day, blocks take exactly 10 minutes to solve, your rig is 1W/1GH/s and electricity costs $0.10 per kWh, and finally, BTC is $650.

OK.  At current difficulty, that 1TH/s expects to earn 0.029BTC a day, which is $18.85.  Power is going to cost you $2.40.  Therefore, your daily earnings are $16.45.  The same math that tells us our expected daily earnings, also gives us how long that 1TH/s will take to solo mine a block: about 2 years, 131 days.

This is where most people stop and say, "Way better to mine in a pool!  I'm not waiting over 2 years!".  Here's the fuzzy bit: just because you can "expect" to find a block in that time, does not mean that it "will" take that time.  See, each and every single little hash your miners produce has EXACTLY the same chance of solving that block as the hash before it, and the hash after it.  In other words, you can just as easily solve 10 blocks in a row as never solving a single block.

I'll give you a concrete example.  On April 26th, I found a block with one of my S1s that had only been mining for about 3 weeks.  Was I mining solo?  No, I was on p2pool.  Sure would have been nice, though

Anyway, back to our story.  Remember that I stated each and every hash produced by your miner has the potential to solve that block.  In a day, there are 144 blocks found.  This means I've got 144 chances.  Are you a gambler?  Are you going to risk $16.45 at the chance for $16250?  That $16.45 buys you 144 chances at hitting the jackpot.  You have the possibility of hitting all 144 times, too.  Just because you solved the last block doesn't disqualify you.  So... are you willing to risk that $16.45 at the chance for $2,340,000?

Now, before you all go tearing off and pointing your miners at some solo pool with delusions of becoming millionaires in a day, realize that you have competition.  Everyone other miner on the planet is trying to solve those same blocks.  Your 1TH/s represents a pretty tiny portion of the total network (currently at 147,000TH/s).  Since we have established that every single hash has the same chance to solve the block, this means that 0.000680272109% of the chances belong to you.  Or, to put it another way, you've got about a 1 in 1667 shot of solving a block.

Back to the question: are you a gambler?

So far, yes, I've seen the best results on stock clocks.  One thing I have noticed is that one of my S3's performance slowly degrades.  It hashes at 440GH/s for a while... then slows down to 430 and 420.  Rebooting it sometimes helped, but a lot of times on reboot, I'd notice one of the ASIC would show a status of "-" instead of "o".

So, this morning I completely stripped the thing.  When I pulled off the heatsinks, I saw thermal paste everywhere.  It was on the chips, on the PCB, on everything.  So, I cleaned it all up and re-applied to the chips.  Everything is put back together and it's up and hashing again.  Hopefully, it will stay consistent now.  We'll see .

I'm probably going to do the same to my other one as well.  Then, I'll retry over clocking them both.  Some people have reported amazing success.  For example, Goxed has his happily hashing away at 504GH/s (250 clock).  Now that would be nice!

There are a number of threads discussing this very topic.  I know you don't want to hear it, but variance does indeed play a very significant factor in the statistics, especially as BTCGuild's total hash rate becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total network.  As of me writing this post, BTCGuild is reporting a speed of 9.4PH/s.  GHash.io, on the other hand, is reporting 42.47PH/s.  The total network is showing 143.2PH/s.

Here... let me throw some random piece of information at you and you can use that as justification for the bad luck:

This August there will be 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays.  This only happens once every 800+ years.

Are you inquiring about a Bitcoin mining ASIC rig that you would bring to college with you, or are you looking for recommendations on a PC setup for the same?  If it is the former, understand that any rig you purchase will generate both heat and noise.  You can purchase stand-alone rigs like the Antminer S1/2/3, Dragons, etc that don't require a separate controller (although the S1 and S3 require you to supply the PSU).  Of the rigs I've owned, thus far the S3 is the least intrusive of them.  The S1s are a bit noisy and put out enough heat to keep a small room warm.  The S2 is louder and will keep a large room quite warm.

You can also go for rigs that require a separate controller like the Rockminers.  Some come with, others don't.  You could even go for stick miners, but those also require something to plug into.

There is no PC rig that will be effective for mining BTC.  You might do alright on alt coins like X11 and X13-based ones using a powerful CPU/GPU machine, but you'd have to do some research in the alt coin forums for recommendations.

In any case, I agree with joshraban76.  Just because YOU aren't directly paying your electric bill, somebody certainly is.  You can probably justify the smaller rigs only pulling a few watts as "normal usage"; however, if you're considering plugging in something drawing 1kw... that's just plain old stealing.

Bitmain initially quoted shipping times of between the 10th and 20th.  When they announced the change in specs, they adjusted that to say they hoped to start shipping batch 1 between the 14th and 17th.  They're still within the original timeline, even though they had to make some adjustments before sending any out the door at all.

I don't think you're going to get any further compensation, unless they don't ship until after the 20th, and then you can ask them for something.

Disclosure: I created my order 2014-06-30 14:01:44 and received them yesterday.  Bitmain didn't update my order status until 2014-07-16, even though the units had actually shipped on 2014-07-15 (China local, so really 2014-07-14 here).

Goxed,

You got a really nice unit if it's remaining stable at 250 clock and 504GH/s, congrats!  Mine apparently are part of the batch that caused Bitmain to set the clocks back to 218.75.  I tried 225, 237.5 and 250.  I would consistently get "x" and "-" in the ASIC stats and the units never got anywhere near the 504GH/s you're showing.  I left them running like that for 7 hours while I slept last night, hoping things might get better over time.  When I woke up and checked, Ant 1 was averaging 450GH/s and Ant 2 was averaging 387.  At 250 clock.  I set them back to stock and after 13 hours I'm at 441 and 439 with 0.0002% and 0.0004% HW errors.  All ASICs are "o".  It's definitely not a power issue - I've got an EVGA 1300 G2.  I even went so far as to hook only 1 up at a time on the PSU to see if it made a difference.  All 4 PCI-e connected.

Also, that solution for the random beeping did not work for me unfortunately.  They still randomly beep at me.  It's like they're just letting me know they're still going.  If somebody does come up with a valid solution to this, I'd be very much... well, my little lady will be very much appreciative of it

As for temps and fans, mine are in an ambient 22C room.  Ant 1 shows 38/39 and Ant 2 shows 39/40 on stock speeds.  Fans are 1560/1380 and 1620/1380, respectively.  With the same PSU as I have, philipma1957 reported 665W at the wall to run them both at stock.

Depends where you're hashing.  GHash.io and BTCGuild don't show best share values in the status page.  Eligius and p2pool do.  Looks like bitsolo.net does as well.
Put up a screenshot of your status page and your config page.

Ant 1: 0.00028637079% HW errors at stock clocks getting 439GH/s on my local p2pool node
Ant 2: 0.00043407425% HW errors at stock clocks getting 441GH/s on my local p2pool node

Take a look here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=416933.0

It's a pretty good experiment showing the earnings across multiple pools.  It has the benefit of being long-running as well.  There are other options than GHash.io.  They all pay pretty comparably to what you're seeing here.

BTCGuild did it.  Do we really want GHash.io to have even more funds to purchase more hardware, to sell more cloud mining, to make even more?  Vicious circle there.  Of course, of all the proposals, they are most likely to adopt the increased fees since it nets them more BTC

baddw does a great job explaining it with numbers and examples.  I'll try to simplify it for you.  The expected shares is equal to the current difficulty, so changes every 2016 blocks.  Every block that Eligius finds, it can ONLY pay that many shares.  So, if it took fewer shares than expected to find a block, there are shares left over, which payout the "shelved" shares.  If it took more than the expected shares to find a block, Eligius "shelves" the extra shares it took to find the block.

The payout queue pretty much works based on how long it has been since a miner was last in the queue, which is why it is recommended that you set your payout threshold to be at least 3 days worth of mining.  If you set your threshold too low, you get placed lower in the queue because you were just there, and other miners have been waiting longer.  Your position in the queue is dynamic, with miners constantly being added before and after your position.  Eligius uses this to show you how many blocks are ahead of you.

Hope this helps.

Honestly, I don't think it's either.  It's more of a general computing question.  I mean, he could have asked, "Why does a GPU render graphics better than a CPU?"