Why don't you hold on to your rigs for a few more months powered off?

Even as difficulty rises, mining altcoins can be profitable despite high power costs if the coins are rising even more in value. Many observers believe that we are presently in the collapse of the November 2013 bitcoin price bubble and that the next bubble is due approximately mid summer. If this year's bubble is similar to the November 2013 bubble, then Litecoin and the other altcoin prices will follow bitcoin prices upwards - and probably make GPU mining again profitable for a while.

The best site is http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/. Their core indicators are running about 10x annual growth, which relates to the 10x average annual bitcoin price growth,.

One of my rigs has 6 x 5770 of various makes - none yours - running cgminer 3.7.2 with this configuration file. Average KHs is 173 per card, with 3-12% rejects.

Wisdom. And ironic that a problem with Mt.Gox was again significant in the collapse.

The Logistic Model is now revised to use mainly Bitstamp prices

With the shutdown of Mt.Gox, I revised the Logistic Model to use Bitstamp prices starting January 1, 2012. I also manually re-fit the logistic model parameters to the new price series. To the extent that this model is a valid representation of the adoption of bitcoin by the population of possible speculators, the predictions remain the same. Prices will fluctuate around a logarithmic growth curve averaging about 10x increase per year until growth inevitably begins to slow down. I performed sensitivity analysis of the model using a variety of hypothetical maximum bitcoin prices and observed that the 10x growth rate is common regardless of the maximum price.

Considering the November 2013 bitcoin price bubble, it is remarkable that Mt.Gox again plays a major role in the recent collapse as it also did in the collapse of the greatest bitcoin bubble back in June 2011. 

Inspecting the model log chart, I suppose that prices will remain below the log trend line for a few more months and then rally above it in a manner similar to the price rallies of April 2013 and November 2013.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArD8rjI3DD1WdFIzNDFMeEhVSzhwcEVXZDVzdVpGU2c

When cgminer starts, it takes a few seconds to open the API port provided that you have enabled it as the cgmon instructions specify. You will see a detail line in the cgminer terminal window that says that the API port is open. Until that happens cgmon is not able to see cgminer and says so in its own log.

You can trace cgminer using the -T command line option, which logs all messages to the terminal window without overwriting any previous information.

I executed ...

and got this error message, using my actual generated ID on LeaseRig ...

I would like to thank the folks who leased and mostly re-leased my rigs on the first day of availability.

Here is a photo of the rig you leased - SS1. Observe an open rig based upon standard wire shelving in which the 6 x 5770 graphic cards are suspended for maximum airflow via cable ties. I used powered PCIe risers in order to spread out the cards. A single power supply handles the 600W requirement.

FYI. Leave the default log interval of 5 seconds alone when configuring cgminer. LeaseRigs cannot parse other than 1 or 5 second values according to a prompt PM conversation with djeZo. The administration POOLS panel reported accepted share values OK but each rig was getting set disabled. We fixed everything by resetting the cgminer log interval.

Hi everyone. This is my reputation thread where you can review and post feedback about my mining rigs available at LeaseRig.net. These dedicated rigs are automatically monitored to ensure hashing rate, and are cared for by me full-time. What you do with a leased rig is private - I do not compete with you.

Rig descriptions
============

SS1 - 6 x 5770 graphic cards yielding 0.98 MHs with less than 1% reject rate. This rig automatically reboots to your chosen pool should any graphic card fail to generate an accepted share in 30 minutes.

SS2 - 3 x R9 280x graphic cards yielding 2.10 MHs with less than 1% reject rate. 10 minute accepted share timeout for auto reboot.

SS5 - 1 x R9 280x graphic card yielding 0.70 MHs with less than 1% reject rate. 10 minute accepted share timeout for auto reboot.

Try changing line 27 in your tcl script.


The scrypt assumes the stratum pool protocol.

I am a computer hobbyist, so it is better to have an engaging hobby that pays even a little as compared to a hobby that simply costs.

Furthermore, the setup of a typical mining rig is quite scalable insofar as additional rigs are hardware and software copies of the reference working rig. But suppose that I replace the six obsolete 5770 cards with modern R9 280x cards. One could argue that with bitcoin increasing in price 10x per year, the funds spent on a mining farm scale-out could be better invested in simply buying coin. I expect that I will incrementally upgrade my rigs.

Another concern is that ASIC rigs will be available sometime this year for scrypt-altcoin, e.g. Litecoin, mining. I am not too worried about the sudden obsolescence of my graphic card rigs because a new proof-of-work algorithm could be designed to appeal to the large number of graphic-card miners. It is the population of miners that provide the initial enthusiasm for a coin.

Or worse, the DOGE block we solve as a relatively small pool is more likely to be subsequently orphaned by one of the huge pools building a longer blockchain - right?

Interesting points indeed. New altcoin promoters should give some assurances that sufficient long term mining rigs will be dedicated to at least one pool mining that coin,

The Joy of Mining

The emergence of scrypt-based coins, popularized by Litecoin, has made it profitable to again earn bitcoin on my dusted-off graphic card mining rigs. I am running three rigs with a total of six 5770 cards. The operating system is Ubuntu, I run cgminer 3.7.2 and achieve about 144 KHs per card. The conversion to bitcoin is handled automatically by the pool software which heuristically chooses among various exchange-traded crypto currency coins and mines a particular network until it becomes unprofitable to mine when compared to other candidate crypto currency coins. I use TradeMyBit as its operator posts frequently on the pool forum. It is an easy upgrade from the obsolete 5770 cards to expensive but currently in stock R9 280x cards. My first one is on its way - yay!

The coinwarz web site gives a great profit calculation of daily dollar profit on each ranked crypto currency coin given hashing power and price of power. When I input the figures for a single R9 280x card, 700 MHs and 250 watts respectively, the projected Revenue / Profit (per day) for my local power usage is projected to be $15.24 / $14.54 for Tagcoin at rank number one, and  $8.70 / $8.00 for Neocoin ranked five. The actual profit is lower, chiefly due to fees and the effects of periodic coin network switching that result in stale shares and rejects.

When bitcoin prices eventually explosively rally again as suggested by the logistic model trendline, it is very likely that the most-popular-at-the-time scrypt-based coins will exceed the price acceleration of bitcoin, i.e. have a higher beta. I look forward to manually selecting coins to mine from TMB at that time for postponed exchange into bitcoin.

Bitcoin mining and electricity consumption at $1 million per bitcoin


This too is a very interesting point. Supposing that $1.8 billion is received by miners when and if bitcoin reaches $1 million in say 2017, then there will be a tremendous incentive for miners to compete with each other to receive their daily $1.8 billion.

Assuming a reasonable 90 payback for mining equipment, then 90 x $1.8 billion equals an approximate $162 billion market for mining equipment for the 90 day period when bitcoin is priced at $1 million.

Also assuming that competitive miners spend roughly one-third of their income on electric power, then miners will spend $1.8 / 3 equals $900 hundred thousand daily on power. At say $0.13 per KWh then approximately 7 million KWh will be consumed by miners in a 24 hour period at the rate of approximately 300 megawatts.

A very high amount of power usage but doable.

Right!

The logistic model merely tracks bitcoin price not market capitalization. The latter comes into to play when figuring out a plausible probability distribution for the maximum high price when bitcoin speculation is fully adopted.

I believe that mining pools obscure the transaction trail that originates with the new block reward. If payments to participating miners were sent from a well-known pool address, then an analysis of the blockchain should be able to figure out what proportion of the block rewards are rapidly spent.

I suppose that lacking a sound analysis, a poll of miners might suggest the proportion that you requested.

Agreed, and I believe that to forestall action by efficiency-minded governments, the bitcoin proof-of-work mining algorithm could be re-engineered to save electricity. One naive notion I have is that a finite number of digital medallions could be sold by consensus miners which entitle the bearer to mine bitcoins. Or jurisdictions could forbid or otherwise restrict mining, e.g. no mining anywhere electric power is government subsidized, or mine off-peak hours only.