[ANN][YAC] yacoin: yet another altcoin. START is now.

[super3]

I'm actually working with a hosting provider right now, that might let me do custom instances with large amounts of CPUs. Let me redo my math here, and you guys can check it.
The pool I am using says I'm getting 53.596 yac/day and I am mining 328 k/s. So that means 0.1634 yac per day/per hash.  
A core earns about ~25 khash/s. So a core would be worth 4.085 yac per day, and 122.551 yac per month.

Current average exchange rate at 30 LTC per 1K yac is 0.03 yac/ltc. So thats about 0.12 ltc per core/per day. It costs at least 2ltc/month to rent a single core.
So you would break even at day 16(about halfway through the month).

So basically you would earn just a little less than 2x what you put in at current prices and difficult as long as you don't use aws.
Basically use my 0.12 ltc per core/per day vs whatever your own ltc per core/per day cost is to get your profit.

Anyone want to work with me on this? Its currently setup and mining. Just want to buy way more cores.

Remember the difficulty is going up very quickly, so gotta take that into account!!

No problem it is a cloud server. I can just reduce the number of cores to 1 when its no longer profitable.

[xibeijan]

My thoughts on all this:

We've reached the point where AWS EC2 spot instances for mining YAC are no longer profitable (I know, since I just shut down 40 extra large clusters). That means from here on out mining is going to start being done by people who own their hardware (read: everybody with a CPU).

That's a good thing, because it's properly decentralized. It's much harder to run a CPU farm as cost-efficiently as a GPU farm (you certainly can't have 6 consumer-grade CPUs per motherboard, and server hardware is expensive).

Meanwhile, the people with the largest YAC stacks are people who fired up server clusters to mine the crap out of it early on. The people with the insight and skill to do that will largely have been developers.

If most of the YAC is owned by developers, there's a huge motive to develop applications for YAC to see it succeed.

So we've got a properly decentralized currency with built-in developer support.

See you guys on the other side of 50 LTC/kYAC.

+1

[WindMaster]

Well, even if it's 100% profit, I'm kinda burned out so I'm done.

LOL, I had indeed suspected there were quite a lot of us using Amazon EC2 for Yacoin mining.  I just shut down most of my instances as well, including c1.xlarge's in the Virginia data center.

I'm going to post a quick guide for anyone still thinking about doing some AWS mining. Note that this is a fairly primitive method, and I'm only putting it here because it's so easy anyone can do it.

First, you need to start a single instance of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, either for server or cluster - doesn't matter. Then SSH into it (don't forget to set your security settings to allow your SSH!). I'll add the detailed instructions for this later - but honestly, AWS is pretty simple, I think anyone can figure it out.

Once your SSH connects, enter the following 3 commands in sequence:

Alternative approach, or at least this is what I did, get one instance all nice and set up, with /etc/rc.local firing up yacoind.  Pre-seed yacoin.conf with the desired options and addnode= options to form your own highly interconnected low-latency mesh within the Yacoin network, run yacoind to create the wallet.dat file and download the blockchain.  Then stop the instance, create an AMI out of it, and then proceed to spawn massive numbers of spot instances off that AMI.  All of the instances then mine to the same wallet mining address, automatically when they boot up, with no need to individually SSH into them.  Pretty nice now that Amazon lets you copy AMI's between their data centers.

[WindMaster]

You can then use the following two commands to get your yacoins as they are mined:

./yacoind getbalance - gets the balance of your miner account

./yacoind sendtoaddress <address> <amount>

A clarification on my last post there, if you use the same wallet.dat file on all the mining instances as well as your actual GUI wallet client, there's actually no need to bother transferring the YAC from the individual miners.  Anytime any of your mining servers or instances anywhere in the world that is using the same wallet.dat file finds a block, the client on your desktop pops up the usual notification message.

And then you can also impress people by posting screen-shots of your wallet client to brag about how successful you were at mining, since it'll show the combined mining transactions of all your mining servers or instances just as if you had mined them all on one single computer.  :-)

[bitdwarf]

I'm impressed that YaCoin has managed not only to avoid GPU farming at launch, but to keep CPU farming under control (and more democratic, since Amazon's services are available for anyone).

[Vycid]

You can then use the following two commands to get your yacoins as they are mined:

./yacoind getbalance - gets the balance of your miner account

./yacoind sendtoaddress <address> <amount>

A clarification on my last post there, if you use the same wallet.dat file on all the mining instances as well as your actual GUI wallet client, there's actually no need to bother transferring the YAC from the individual miners.  Anytime any of your mining servers or instances anywhere in the world that is using the same wallet.dat file finds a block, the client on your desktop pops up the usual notification message.

And then you can also impress people by posting screen-shots of your wallet client to brag about how successful you were at mining, since it'll show the combined mining transactions of all your mining servers or instances just as if you had mined them all on one single computer.  :-)

Durrrrrr! Wow, I can't believe I didn't do that. Heh.

[turtle83]

Well, even if it's 100% profit, I'm kinda burned out so I'm done.

LOL, I had indeed suspected there were quite a lot of us using Amazon EC2 for Yacoin mining.  I just shut down most of my instances as well, including c1.xlarge's in the Virginia data center.

I'm going to post a quick guide for anyone still thinking about doing some AWS mining. Note that this is a fairly primitive method, and I'm only putting it here because it's so easy anyone can do it.

First, you need to start a single instance of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, either for server or cluster - doesn't matter. Then SSH into it (don't forget to set your security settings to allow your SSH!). I'll add the detailed instructions for this later - but honestly, AWS is pretty simple, I think anyone can figure it out.

Once your SSH connects, enter the following 3 commands in sequence:

Alternative approach, or at least this is what I did, get one instance all nice and set up, with /etc/rc.local firing up yacoind.  Pre-seed yacoin.conf with the desired options and addnode= options to form your own highly interconnected low-latency mesh within the Yacoin network, run yacoind to create the wallet.dat file and download the blockchain.  Then stop the instance, create an AMI out of it, and then proceed to spawn massive numbers of spot instances off that AMI.  All of the instances then mine to the same wallet mining address, automatically when they boot up, with no need to individually SSH into them.  Pretty nice now that Amazon lets you copy AMI's between their data centers.

Pick any instance.
Pick ami from http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/quantal/release/
in "user data" paste this. (adapt the urls and credentials to suit your needs)

Code:

#!/bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get -y install build-essential libssl-dev libdb5.3-dev libdb5.3++-dev libboost-all-dev libqrencode-dev libminiupnpc-dev libcurl-ocaml-dev

wget http://link.to/your/compiled/binary/minerd
chmod +x minerd
while [ 1 ]
do
    ./minerd -a scrypt-jane --retries=1 --timeout=15 --url=http://mineyac2.dontmine.me:8080 --user=user.name --pass=password  --syslog
    ./minerd -a scrypt-jane --retries=1 --timeout=15 --url=http://mineyac.dontmine.me:8080 --user=user.name --pass=password  --syslog
    ./minerd -a scrypt-jane --retries=1 --timeout=15 --url=http://mineyac3.dontmine.me:8080 --user=user.name --pass=password  --syslog
    ./minerd -a scrypt-jane --retries=1 --timeout=15 --url=http://yac.dontmine.me:8080 --user=user.name --pass=password  --syslog
    timeout 300 ./minerd -a scrypt-jane --url=http://your.yacond.host.name:8108 --user=rpcusername --pass=rpcpassword --syslog
done

^ Since this uses precompiled binary, i think you can get away with instaling non-dev version of the packages.

If you wanna get real fancy setup central rsyslog server...

[Vycid]

Well, even if it's 100% profit, I'm kinda burned out so I'm done.

I'm going to post a quick guide for anyone still thinking about doing some AWS mining. Note that this is a fairly primitive method, and I'm only putting it here because it's so easy anyone can do it.

First, you need to start a single instance of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, either for server or cluster - doesn't matter. Then SSH into it (don't forget to set your security settings to allow your SSH!). I'll add the detailed instructions for this later - but honestly, AWS is pretty simple, I think anyone can figure it out.

Once your SSH connects, enter the following 3 commands in sequence:

wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/vycid/setupunix.sh?r=&ts=1368081732&use_mirror=masterse

chmod +x setupunix.sh?r

./setupunix.sh?r

Then sit on your hands. KEEP THE SSH SESSION OPEN. Before long a message will appear saying something like

**** MINING HAS BEGUN ****

You can then use the following two commands to get your yacoins as they are mined:

./yacoind getbalance - gets the balance of your miner account

./yacoind sendtoaddress <address> <amount>

Make sure the amount you send is at least 0.01 YAC less than the getbalance amount to allow for the transaction fee.

Keep in mind the blockchain has to be downloaded before any blocks can be found. This won't take long, since it's still quite short. You can check the estimated hashrate with ./yacoind gethashespersec

If this helps you, maybe kick some of the yacoin you mine my way at Y2JcwhZu9m6cqPZ3Jv8iKspcJYNY5wa5zc  

I'll complete this guide and start a thread for it in an hour or two.

NOTE: For the love of god, read the setupunix.sh bash script with a text file editor before you run it. You can't be sure what I put in there otherwise.

I've just updated this guide, added pictures, and posted it over at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=201918.0.

Cheers!

[turtle83]

Helper script for those solo mining.

Code:

import sys, time
import json
data = sys.stdin.readlines()

items = json.loads("\n".join(data))
#print items
hour = 0
for item in items:
    if item.get("generated"):
        if item["category"] != "orphan" and time.time() - int(item["time"]) < 3660:
            hour += float(item["amount"])
        print "%s: %s - %s YAC . %s confirmations" %(time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', time.localtime(int(item["time"]))), item["category"], item["amount"], item["confirmations"])

print hour

(too lazy to read up on rpc spec)
save this as pp.py

then run

Code:

./yacoind listtransactions "" 1000 | python pp.py

Shows you last 1000 (adjust the command) mined blocks including orphans.
The number in the last line is YAC (excluding orphan blocks) mined within the last hour, so you get a sense of averaged gain.

[xibeijan]

Man, YAC is doing really well.  The official website (http://www.yacoin.org) looks amazing.

[WindMaster]

limits are higher for c.xlarge

Were your 200 c1.xlarge instances spread between two data centers, or did you have Amazon raise the 100 spot instance limit for your account for the N. Virginia data center?  I ended up putting 100 in each of the 8 data centers around the world, but obviously, N. Virginia would've been more ideal for all spot instances due to the consistently low $0.07/hr price the last few days.

[super3]

Hmmmm would a raspberry pi work? how well? anyone have any idea?

It would work but you are looking like 10 khash/s. I have a pi right next to me. I could compile it up and actually find out.

[ImI]

Where can one find the actual block reward?

[leadnor]

Hmmmm would a raspberry pi work? how well? anyone have any idea?

It would work but you are looking like 10 khash/s. I have a pi right next to me. I could compile it up and actually find out.

If you would like to I would appreciate it. We will have close to 30 raspberry pi units at our disposal soon. It was just a thought

[turtle83]

Where can one find the actual block reward?

if using the qt. then help > debug > console.

> getblockcount
< 52231
> getblockhash 52231
< 000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075
> getblock 000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075
< {
"hash" : "000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075",
"confirmations" : 4,
"size" : 265,
"height" : 52231,
"version" : 3,
"merkleroot" : "c0232ecd8cf2f04817cfb5bc3fed96f5f33d98b89918878822943dc748eb87e9",
"mint" : 20.15000000,
"time" : 1368271979,
"nonce" : 2684367124,
"bits" : "1c464c97",
"difficulty" : 3.64152323,
"previousblockhash" : "000000000370adf3328118ce7b13d5930ccd3d1ea62e210b16ad01df82585d7b",
"nextblockhash" : "0000000040b219360f2195e22a18d04bb72c814737f564fef1561b84b8eea198",
"flags" : "proof-of-work",
"proofhash" : "000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075",
"entropybit" : 1,
"modifier" : "8fb6c69ff6a11fd1",
"modifierchecksum" : "ca491c68",
"tx" : [
"c0232ecd8cf2f04817cfb5bc3fed96f5f33d98b89918878822943dc748eb87e9"
],
"signature" : "304402203de57c6e6014674fec4d24257427bd54c7015ef529c20a349e1a03762daf0ca40220228 cb2951bf813ac8a08365effaf98fd15b5823fc81c5adfc085fab20020f033"
}

So at the time i ran this the last mined block's reward was 20.15000000 YAC. so next one would be very very close to that.

[LiteBit]

So going off this info on the ever changing "N" from the yacoin website:
 May 14, N=64, 8Kb
May 17, N=128, 16Kb
May 20, N=256, 32Kb
May 29, N=512, 64Kb

GPU miners could start hashing in early June sometime? N=1024

[Puycheval]

May 14, N=64, 8Kb
May 17, N=128, 16Kb
May 20, N=256, 32Kb
May 29, N=512, 64Kb

Can someone tell the precise time (with time zone of course) it'll happen ?

[237]

So going off this info on the ever changing "N" from the yacoin website:
 May 14, N=64, 8Kb
May 17, N=128, 16Kb
May 20, N=256, 32Kb
May 29, N=512, 64Kb

GPU miners could start hashing in early June sometime? N=1024

You'd still have to change the minersoftware, since more than only N has been changed

[ImI]

Where can one find the actual block reward?

if using the qt. then help > debug > console.

> getblockcount
< 52231
> getblockhash 52231
< 000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075
> getblock 000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075
< {
"hash" : "000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075",
"confirmations" : 4,
"size" : 265,
"height" : 52231,
"version" : 3,
"merkleroot" : "c0232ecd8cf2f04817cfb5bc3fed96f5f33d98b89918878822943dc748eb87e9",
"mint" : 20.15000000,
"time" : 1368271979,
"nonce" : 2684367124,
"bits" : "1c464c97",
"difficulty" : 3.64152323,
"previousblockhash" : "000000000370adf3328118ce7b13d5930ccd3d1ea62e210b16ad01df82585d7b",
"nextblockhash" : "0000000040b219360f2195e22a18d04bb72c814737f564fef1561b84b8eea198",
"flags" : "proof-of-work",
"proofhash" : "000000000ed0af33f997b81a48b6bea0ea650dbccd7176181d0c621b774c3075",
"entropybit" : 1,
"modifier" : "8fb6c69ff6a11fd1",
"modifierchecksum" : "ca491c68",
"tx" : [
"c0232ecd8cf2f04817cfb5bc3fed96f5f33d98b89918878822943dc748eb87e9"
],
"signature" : "304402203de57c6e6014674fec4d24257427bd54c7015ef529c20a349e1a03762daf0ca40220228 cb2951bf813ac8a08365effaf98fd15b5823fc81c5adfc085fab20020f033"
}

So at the time i ran this the last mined block's reward was 20.15000000 YAC. so next one would be very very close to that.

Thx!

[xibeijan]

OK - After 6 days I can confirm that YAC is amazing!

We are now 6 days after the launch.  The difficulty is reasonably high and I'm currently still able to solo CPU mine.

This makes me think YaCoin _is_ actually keeping its promise about being GPU resistant.

However, it gets even better because... even if someone has ported a GPU miner, the N-factor (separate from difficulty) is about to increase on May 14th, (as I understand) creating a sudden condition where CPU miners have the advantage over GPU miners.

Therefore, there's a second wave of CPU profitability coming up soon on may 14th and I am fully intending to mine at that time.

As explained by the YaCoin author, each time N increases GPU miners should take a hit, slowing them down while CPU miners are unaffected.  CPU miners are further benefited by a slight drop in difficulty, while N hits the GPU dudes hard.

Brilliant!

References:
1. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196196.0
2. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=199888.msg2083600#msg2083600
3. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196196.msg2083635#msg2083635
4. http://www.yacoin.org/about.html