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August 10, 2013, 06:17:29 PM |
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Hey Furball,
Thought I'd jump on and say hello, and ask a few questions. I'm new to mining (and btc... and this forum!) as of June or so, but have been mining on harvestcoin pretty steadily because of no-signup and that you were running litecoin mining on the same pool.
I started with a free 68XX series radeon card I got at work, a free AMD A10 5800K processor & MoBo combo I got at an AMD fan give-away, and a $100 media case & power supply from goodwill. I pointed it all at your litecoin miner, and got a first taste of money from the terminal line. Mmm.
I bought a lot of 10 USB block erupters & hub to run them, mined with them on harvestcoin while I was trying to turn them around on craigslist, and sold (9) of them in USD to break-even. Now I have the radeon card & amd processor, (1) USB block-erupter, and a 9-port Anker hub & usb fan, for the cost of my case & p/s.
got an offer to buy another (10) usb miners at 0.11 btc per, so ponied up a little bit more cash. After the ~0.6btc the first (10) Erupters had mined while I was waiting to sell them, I needed to buy another 1btc or so to cover shipping, etc. Now I'm in for ~$200US, w/ ~3.75 G/hash in hand before the end of August.
Still debating whether I want to sell the additional miners while they're inflated in value, or just take the ride in mining while the USB sticks are still able to produce. I'm in low enough I could actually see break-even, but the opportunity cost the market is providing me with for these USB miners right now is... quite measurable. I'm thinking the most profitable thing to do would be sell the Erupters and buy coin or direct shares of a larger mining pool. That would be less fun than watching the returns through harvestcoin, though, and I am doing this for fun...
Enough waxing idiotic about my setup, my questions!
is it preferable to use different BTC addresses for different bitcoin miners? for instance, I have two separate terminal windows running cgminer, as I have two separate sets of devices mining that require two separate command strings for optimal performance. Would it be advantageous to generate new receiving btc addresses for each of these command strings? reading around on definitions of a P2Pool [1], it says that each miner is set up as a node of that pool, got me thinking that different devices trying to mine on the same node might be "bumping into each other", effectively. Thoughts?
I have noticed very large discrepancies in the TIMING of payouts (obviously between mining w/ 3 GHash vs. 500MHash, but also in holding to a regular rate). Is this just inherent in the structure of P2Pool mining? Am I effectively 'waiting for a block to be found' when I'm seeing spells of non-payment? Admittedly, I've been bad about turning my miners on & off (moving houses, etc.), so I may also just be observing that 24-48 waiting period compounding with breaks in mining. Thoughts?
On your 'pool stats' page, you show a 'local rate' graph, and value listed. What is this rate? I'm only mining ~500MHash/sec, but it shows 1.03 GHash/sec as local rate. Is this 'local' as in miners on a shared node? Am I being grouped w/ somebody? Just wondering how it all works.
Thanks much for the easy-to-use mining pool. If I end up keeping my miners, I'll shoot you a healthy tip when I hit my total break-even (at $200 USD in, should be quick!), and if I sell them I'll do the same.
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