Block Erupter USB Three Days of Mining lottery - 0.1 BTC prize - closed

[TheRealSteve]

Count me in on this. I just forgot to say something sooner.

No prob - bit over 3 hours left   User (BEUSB@5) and password (see PM) all set up.

[TheRealSteve]

Just a heads-up: only ~55 minutes left to sign up and start hashing.
Edit: 10 minutes left.

[doubledave]

I feel silly, I verified the OP message/BTC address and left that in my clipboard and pasted it into the PM requesting entry into this contest.  Asking payment to go back to TheRealSteve.

TheRealSteve, I got both of your replies, thanks for the speedy reply.

Everyone can laugh at me.

[TheRealSteve]

TheRealSteve, I got both of your replies, thanks for the speedy reply.

No problem   user (BEUSB@6) and password* (PM) all set up.
* looking at it, you might want to copy/paste yours - I should have used Base58 encoding 

[doubledave]

It's time 

copy/paste successful, mining in progress.

Thanks TRS

[TheRealSteve]

It's 2015-05-01 12:00am PST - registration is now closed, and mining should commence.  If you aren't mining yet - not to worry, as long as 90% of the samples over the next 3 days are good, you'll be fine.  That doesn't mean that you should wait 6 hours to start mining, however, as you will have some invalid samples due to variance even at vardiff=2

As there are 6 miners, you basically have a 1 in 6 chance of winning BTC0.1 .  To compare that to regular mining, you would need 28,170 Block Erupter USBs at stock frequency to mine the same amount of BTC at a 0% fee pool at current difficulty.

Good luck, and may the block chain be in your favor

[sidehack]

That doesn't mean that you should wait 6 hours to start mining, however, as you will have some invalid samples due to variance even at vardiff=2

What about waiting 8 hours?

Also, out of interest, who's using what versions of cgminer? I'm on 3.1.1 with the -S flag in play.

[BitBlitz]

Also, out of interest, who's using what versions of cgminer? I'm on 3.1.1 with the -S flag in play.

Fresh install of BFGminer 5.1 for me. 
I haven't been mining anything via USB since I turned off my silence/efficiency modified BFL singles last year (40GH @110W vs 60GH @300W).
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/post-sales-and-customer-service/8261-underclock-single-2.html#post81128

[TheRealSteve]

Also, out of interest, who's using what versions of cgminer? I'm on 3.1.1 with the -S flag in play.

Same here, but only because @ID is running off of a basement machine and I don't want to mess around with drivers on that thing.

What about waiting 8 hours?

Unfortunately for you, math tells me that 8 out of 72 hours is 11.11% - so even if all samples from here on are valid, there's no way to reach 90% anymore.  You're free to continue mining just for the heck of it, of course - or try your luck in one of the other two Block Erupter USB contests, modding a Block Erupter USB or guessing USB mining devices

Fortunately for the rest of you, sidehack's loss is your gain as this increases your odds of winning

[doubledave]

cgminer 4.9.1 on a raspberry pi2

Built from commit # 57de2cc.  The newer commits wouldn't build for me at the time (Mar 7).

BTCdig seems to be claiming my hashrate is a little low; slightly in range for this lottery.  currently 207 hourly.  I started mining about 2 minutes before the official start of the contest, so it doesn't leave much room for mining to be down for any reason (internet going down, cat pulling on a usb cable, etc)

[TheRealSteve]

BTCdig seems to be claiming my hashrate is a little low; slightly in range for this lottery.  currently 207 hourly.  I started mining about 2 minutes before the official start of the contest, so it doesn't leave much room for mining to be down for any reason (internet going down, cat pulling on a usb cable, etc)

The apparent hash rate at the pool stabilizes fairly quickly thanks to the low diff - while your miner does appear a bit slow, it's within the range I had determined out of my batch of 8 + bit of margin.. as long as it stays there, it'll be fine

[sidehack]

I forgot the start time and my block erupter was at the shop. If I'd thought about it I'd have set it going before leaving work last night (8:45 local, 6:45PST) and been okay. Maybe I should mess with y'all and point a few TH of old gear at it for the weekend.

Oh well, no reason to turn it off now. It's on the same machine I've had the GPU running 30Mkey worth of humorous vanitygen addresses (1buttcheek, etc) for about the last five months just because. Woo, add another 2.5W to it.

As for modding, I'm not sure I'll have the time to do what I'd really want to for one. Novak's walked on his sweet idea, we got too much other stuff going on at the shop these days. I guess I could hijack one as the USB/UART for my Compac prototype and add that to the competition but I think I'd rather do nothing than do something halfass.

[TheRealSteve]

Maybe I should mess with y'all and point a few TH of old gear at it for the weekend.

Haha - I'm sure the pool operator wouldn't mind

Oh well, no reason to turn it off now. It's on the same machine I've had the GPU running 30Mkey worth of humorous vanitygen addresses (1buttcheek, etc) for about the last five months just because.

Ever thought of pointing that at the vanity 'pool'?  I'm still half tempted to dig into FPGAs and seeing what sort of performance/efficiency I can get out of a reasonably modern Xilinx for vanity generation.

Slightly back on-topic:
Graphs

	BEUSB@1	BEUSB@2	BEUSB@3	BEUSB@4	BEUSB@5	BEUSB@6

BEUSB@6 does seem to dip out of bounds, I'd check on it

[helipotte]

Also, out of interest, who's using what versions of cgminer? I'm on 3.1.1 with the -S flag in play.

Fresh install of BFGminer 5.1 for me. 
I haven't been mining anything via USB since I turned off my silence/efficiency modified BFL singles last year (40GH @110W vs 60GH @300W).
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/post-sales-and-customer-service/8261-underclock-single-2.html#post81128

Same here.  I have 6 BFL singles modded to 0.8VDC.  Think they use about 120W.  Using CGminer 3.12 for my BE.

[Dunkelheit667]

Thanks a bunch! Just plugged one of these little pieces of history in and hashing away. It feels like 2013.

But with greater ROI (though FUN > ROI, of course)

Well, we learned a lot and had a bunch of fun, I consider this as our ROI. Same as joining this lottery, not expecting to win (even if the chances are higher than 2013) but having fun at the moment and crossing my finger the pool will find infinite blocks during the next three days <-= you could have a ROI as well.

Also, out of interest, who's using what versions of cgminer? I'm on 3.1.1 with the -S flag in play.

bfgminer 3.10.0 - don't judge me on this - just had it installed on an rpi located close to the BE.

[TheRealSteve]

crossing my finger the pool will find infinite blocks during the next three days <-= you could have a ROI as well.

Well, 264 blocks to go... I'd take it

[TheRealSteve]

Graphs

	BEUSB@1	BEUSB@2	BEUSB@3	BEUSB@4	BEUSB@5	BEUSB@6

BEUSB@6 has clawed its way back into valid range.

[doubledave]

BEUSB@6 has clawed its way back into valid range.

Phew.

I only changed 1 thing: switched to a different block erupter.  This one has a better heat sink or is just overall faster.

I was going to try to switch to mining on my windows pc but couldn't find a cgminer executable that was compiled with the ability to run block erupters.

Just to satisfy everyone's curiosity, the cgminer running on my RPI, was compiled with the icarus support and without the specific asicminer block erupter support.  (adding the blockerupter support allows it to mine for about a minute then error out and give up on accessing the blockerupter devices again)
Then I launch the newly compiled cgminer with no command line switches and just enter the mining pool server, username, and password and let it go.

[TheRealSteve]

BEUSB@6 has clawed its way back into valid range.

Phew.

I only changed 1 thing: switched to a different block erupter.  This one has a better heat sink or is just overall faster.

Would be interesting to try and figure out what the problem might have been - but unless you're getting HW errors, it's likely something internal - not much that can be done about that

I was going to try to switch to mining on my windows pc but couldn't find a cgminer executable that was compiled with the ability to run block erupters.

kano keeps a bunch binaries in his repo:
https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer-binaries

I'd stick to the rpi though

[TheRealSteve]

Graphs

	BEUSB@1	BEUSB@2	BEUSB@3	BEUSB@4	BEUSB@5	BEUSB@6

BEUSB@6 is indeed performing much better.
BEUSB@4 still has zero rejected shares (doesn't matter for the lottery - just surprising)
If anybody was monitoring the hash rates and was wondering about BEUSB@ID...

...I had to stop it for a little bit to take some pictures and video, plugged it back in proper, and after a little while:
Idle for more than 60 seconds, declaring SICK!
Not responded for more than 10 minutes, declaring DEAD!
And it wasn't wrong - tried restarting it, but I suspect it's done for. Not entirely surprising after the abuse, but unfortunate nevertheless
BEUSB@ID of course doesn't partake in the lottery - but I'll drop in a relatively fresh Block Erupter USB just for kicks.