Mining with Slow Miners - Difficulty ?

[Borisz]

Hey!

I have a few slow computers that I would like to use to mine e.g. Dogecoin in their idle time. By slow I mean in the order of 10kH/s. (I am not trying to make a full time income here)

I can set the difficulty of my miner to produce shares more frequently so they get accepted. By using the normal difficulty of e.g. p2pool I don't even submit shares at all.

My question is the following:

What happens if I submit shares at a much lower difficulty than the actual pool difficulty? Will the pool simply reject all of these? Or eventually 100000 of my reported shares will count as 1 share in the pool?

Can I use p2pool and set my miner to a lower difficulty? Or alternatively, could you suggest another pool?

Thanks!

[Ludi]

I'm not sure even Dogecoin is worth mining with such little power. I think you'd be better or trying to earn doges another way. People give them away quite a lot.

[Borisz]

The question is more like a concept than actually earning doges/btc etc.

Can I get to a point with my slow, 10kH/s miners where I get a payout or pools simply reject such slow miners / low difficulty shares?

[rarkenin]

Yes, you will eventually be able to get a payout. For example, while I stay away from buying power or mining sha coins on ghash.io, their LTC pool allows me to run a bunch of small miners with 6kh/sec to 40kh/sec. At default diff, they will eventually get shares, although I decrease the smaller miners' diff to 4 or 8 (the issue being in that they need to find one diff-16 share to show up in the worker list and have their diff. edited, although this isn't a problem for even the smallest miners).

Mining to p2pool directly is definitely going to be harder based on the diff., although I personally do not know if p2pool public nodes accept weaker shares and mine for a sharechain "block".

[Borisz]

Thanks rarkenin!

[...]For example, while I stay away from buying power or mining sha coins on ghash.io, their LTC pool allows me to run a bunch of small miners with 6kh/sec to 40kh/sec. [...]

In this case, do you connect all the small miners using the same worker ID in order them to achieve the "combined speed", or when you say total of e.g. 40kH/s, it is simply the sum of all workers and the chance for submitting a share increases?

[rarkenin]

No, in all cases I use different worker IDs. Some pools might react badly (even the same pool after software changes), and it doesn't provide benefit.

[Daniel007]

Now mining become less profitable than past. If you are using slow miners than i must say that you are wasting your time and electricity bill. You should mine with pools. It is a better option for you.

[Borisz]

The computer is not running for the sake of mining coins, but for other tasks mainly.
And I am considering pooled mining, of course.

[InwardContour]

AFAIK dogecoin does not have any p2pool nodes, although I may be wrong about this.

It would be likely that your computer would simply be eating up your electric bill (increasing it) while not producing any meaningful revenue. You would also have the issue of the wear and tear it would put on your CPU

[ranochigo]

CPU mining have a lower chance of getting a share as your CPU is very slow, the dogecoin difficulty is very high. Even if you set the difficulty to 8, you may have difficulty getting a share. Your cpu will also die very soon as the heat is very high. You would also be wasting your time and electricity trying to mine a few dogecoins.

[peeveepee]

You can still mine some of the new coin designed for cpu mining only.

[Nathan101]

I think Slow miners are not much profitable.

[Minnlo]

AFAIK dogecoin does not have any p2pool nodes, although I may be wrong about this.

I believe you could use p2pool for almost all altcoins. http://p2pool.org/

[geforcelover]

well i have a question too someone says to me if the miners stop mining for a day or so then the difficulty goes down.. so we have to cut out the suplly of the world for one week or so .. to make the difficulty down.. or he is just joking .? or he dont know what is difficulty..?

[ranochigo]

well i have a question too someone says to me if the miners stop mining for a day or so then the difficulty goes down.. so we have to cut out the suplly of the world for one week or so .. to make the difficulty down.. or he is just joking .? or he dont know what is difficulty..?

Not true, if you stop everyone to mine for 1 day, difficulty wouldn't go down since we are looking at 2 weeks and ASICs are constantly being shipped. If you are talking about cutting it for 1 weeks, it wouldn't have too much impact.