[XPM] [ANN] Primecoin Release - First Scientific Computing Cryptocurrency

[ninjarobot]

I'm guessing at this point either botnets or unreleased GPU miners are scooping up all the coins.

Regular CPU miners appear sidelined, even with their optimized builds.

[maka]

My 3000pps cpu mined another block after like 2 days, so it is still possible.

[forsetifox]

I'm doing well still. 

hp4 client at about 4200 PPS.

[ReCat]

I just mined a block with the HP4 client a few minutes ago.

[markm]

I'm guessing at this point either botnets or unreleased GPU miners are scooping up all the coins.

Regular CPU miners appear sidelined, even with their optimized builds.

Maybe there are just too many regular CPUs all fighting for a piece of the same pie?

Pools maybe help miners figure out faster whether they are losing money, whereas with solo mining high variance could easily lead to people hanging on a few more days, lucking into maybe even a few blocks one day so hanging on for even more days before lucking into another block which might make them wait longer hoping that was the first block of a lucky burst of blocks and so on.

Intermittent reinforcement is illegal as a pay method in some jurisdictions, and even illegal in the form of slot machines (aka gambling) in some jurisdictions, because it is pretty much the best reinforcement schedule to use when you want to wean the workers out of being paid without having them quit...

So it could very easily be that too many people are running too many ordinary CPUs on this with too many of them thinking that if they hold out a little longer while others quit they will start getting lucky again. Meanwhile how many more thousands of new people are starting up, taking a few days to see for themselves whether maybe their build and/or their CPU might be a little luckier than average, and so on... all the usual stories gamblers tell themselves to convince themselves to put in another slug and pull the lever once again... maybe just once... well maybe just once more... well heck its got to work this next time... etc

And of course all along more and more people who have some amount of electricity they consider basically "free" (already part of rent, whatever) are probably getting involved, they can keep going "forever"...

(I have servers out on the net I already paid for by the year in advance, got anything better for me to have their CPUs work on 24/7?)

-MarkM-

[thef]

I'm guessing at this point either botnets or unreleased GPU miners are scooping up all the coins.

Regular CPU miners appear sidelined, even with their optimized builds.

Maybe there are just too many regular CPUs all fighting for a piece of the same pie?

Pools maybe help miners figure out faster whether they are losing money, whereas with solo mining high variance could easily lead to people hanging on a few more days, lucking into maybe even a few blocks one day so hanging on for even more days before lucking into another block which might make them wait longer hoping that was the first block of a lucky burst of blocks and so on.

Intermittent reinforcement is illegal as a pay method in some jurisdictions, and even illegal in the form of slot machines (aka gambling) in some jurisdictions, because it is pretty much the best reinforcement schedule to use when you want to wean the workers out of being paid without having them quit...

So it could very easily be that too many people are running too many ordinary CPUs on this with too many of them thinking that if they hold out a little longer while others quit they will start getting lucky again. Meanwhile how many more thousands of new people are starting up, taking a few days to see for themselves whether maybe their build and/or their CPU might be a little luckier than average, and son on... all the usual stories gamblers tell themselves to convinve themselves to put in another slug and pull the lever once again... maybe just once... well maybe just once more... well heck its got to work this next time... etc

And of course all along more and more people who have some amount of electricity they consider basically "free" (already part of rent, whatever) are probably getting involved, they can keep going "forever"...

(I have servers out on the net I already paid for by the year in advance, got anything better for me to have their CPUs work on 24/7?)

-MarkM-

The price would have to go a lot lower for mining on CPUs to not be able to pay for electricity. A CPU might use at most 2.5 KWH per day which would cost around $0.30 per day to run. At a price of .007 BTC/XPM and 12 XPM per block, it would be profitable to mine even if you only received one block every 20 days.

[markm]

The price would have to go a lot lower for mining on CPUs to not be able to pay for electricity. A CPU might use at most 2.5 KWH per day which would cost around $0.30 per day to run. At a price of .007 BTC/XPM and 12 XPM per block, it would be profitable to mine even if you only received one block every 20 days.

Maybe, if you only count the extra CPU-usage, that is, if you already have the motherboard and internet connection and whatever else you leave attached (disk? mouse? keyboard? whatever) running 24/7 anyway.

However a lot of "normal people" seem not to normally leave their machines on 24/7, so for them it might be more like "a normal PC uses 200 watts, which is one kilowatt-hour per five hours, which comes close to five kilowatt-hours per day, assuming your machine really does not go over 200 watts at the wall when cranking all its cores full blast".

I used to figure turning on a machine cost about $30/month at $0.14 to $0.15 per kilowatt-hour until I got a kill-a-watt meter and learned my box with a 5870 in it was eating 240 to 250 watts before even firing up a miner to mine with that GPU, and more like 340 to (once warmed up) 370 with it mining. Admittedly that was before taking it in to have massive amounts of dust removed from inside and new thermal paste for its CPU heatsink so its CPU would not keep throttling from overheating and its fan control wouldn't keep blasting the fans as loud as they would go.

So when its a matter of whether to plug in or turn on yet another of the machines the air conditioner is trying to make you willing to put up with the noise and heat of, I think your "at most 2.5 kwh/day" is somewhat optimistic.

I have a 12000 BTU air conditioner outside in the minivan waiting for the guy who is making us new windows to come by and install because the 8700 BTU unit currently in my current window cannot handle the heat if I turn on (in addition to what I have on 24/7 already) the four Dell Optiplex 755 boxes. So depending on the season/weather even just the turning on another computer estimate is a little low...

(Not to mention, oh heck with it lets mention it, that I also had to provide an air conditioner (I got a 6000 BTU) at the other end of the apartment so others here don't get too overheated.)

-MarkM-

[lsd225]

My street smarts tells me you are right. I have not hit a block in 5 days although not running anything too ecxciting (no huge virtual machines or servers) just a few i7's. Thanks  to the members of this forum who took the time to work on and compile the optimized builds.  Once I get things running again here I will send tips.

Love or hate primecoin you have to at least respect the amount of attention it was able to get in a very short time.
First few days were fun and of course the heavy hitters stepped in which is all part of this !

Amazing how 'forced' solo mining has made people step back a little bit and think to earlier times. 

For newer people to the scene a new experience. 

If people collect coins in the future like they do old silver and gold dollars now having coins from an early block may actually mean something.

 

I'm guessing at this point either botnets or unreleased GPU miners are scooping up all the coins.

Regular CPU miners appear sidelined, even with their optimized builds.

[laughingbear]

1 US penny Costs $1.99 to make.  http://coincollectingenterprises.com/information/cost-to-make-a-penny

1 US penny metal melt value is 1982 and later is $0.0048917  http://www.coinflation.com/coins/1982-2007-Lincoln-Cent-Penny-Value.html

1 US penny metal melt value pre 1982 is $0.0206746  http://www.coinflation.com/coins/1909-1982-Lincoln-Cent-Penny-Value.html

SO what is the value of a penny?

Its the free market stupid.  XPM value is what people pay for it.  If nothing changes, and the scientific value of the coin creation process is upheld, I see them going to $2 -$5 in the near future.  

[ReCat]

Whoa Whoa whoa. What if... WHAT IF... Primecoin is the new Litecoin?

Duuude.

[thef]

The price would have to go a lot lower for mining on CPUs to not be able to pay for electricity. A CPU might use at most 2.5 KWH per day which would cost around $0.30 per day to run. At a price of .007 BTC/XPM and 12 XPM per block, it would be profitable to mine even if you only received one block every 20 days.

Maybe, if you only count the extra CPU-usage, that is, if you already have the motherboard and internet connection and whatever else you leave attached (disk? mouse? keyboard? whatever) running 24/7 anyway.

However a lot of "normal people" seem not to normally leave their machines on 24/7, so for them it might be more like "a normal PC uses 200 watts, which is one kilowatt-hour per five hours, which comes close to five kilowatt-hours per day, assuming your machine really does not go over 200 watts at the wall when cranking all its cores full blast".

I used to figure turning on a machine cost about $30/month at $0.14 to $0.15 per kilowatt-hour until I got a kill-a-watt meter and learned my box with a 5870 in it was eating 240 to 250 watts before even firing up a miner to mine with that GPU, and more like 340 to (once warmed up) 370 with it mining. Admittedly that was before taking it in to have massive amounts of dust removed from inside and new thermal paste for its CPU heatsink so its CPU would not keep throttling from overheating and its fan control wouldn't keep blasting the fans as loud as they would go.

So when its a matter of whether to plug in or turn on yet another of the machines the air conditioner is trying to make you willing to put up with the noise and heat of, I think your "at most 2.5 kwh/day" is somewhat optimistic.

I have a 12000 BTU air conditioner outside in the minivan waiting for the guy who is making us new windows to come by and install because the 8700 BTU unit currently in my current window cannot handle the heat if I turn on (in addition to what I have on 24/7 already) the four Dell Optiplex 755 boxes. So depending on the season/weather even just the turning on another computer estimate is a little low...

(Not to mention, oh heck with it lets mention it, that I also had to provide an air conditioner (I got a 6000 BTU) at the other end of the apartment so others here don't get too overheated.)

-MarkM-

You're right. I was thinking of just turning on a cpu in a mining rig, but it would cost more for air conditioning and turning on machines that would otherwise be off. However, I believe most people leave their computers on all day, so the extra cost would only come from the CPU. I guess in a worst case scenario where someone turns on a computer that would otherwise be off just to mine would use an extra 200 watts. I actually consider this a high number since I've read video card reviews where the entire system used less than 100 watts at the wall at idle. Assuming air conditioning would use another 200 watts, power consumption would be 10 KWH per day. In the most unfavorable circumstances, people are still going to mine even if they can only get one block every few days.

[markm]

Right, which probably means there could easily be plenty-enough CPU miners already to easily account for current difficulty without even starting to think about botnets and GPU miners.

Not to mention, but I'll mention it anyway, that in some other thread, about using GPUs, it was recently suggested only two times speedup might be obtained using GPUs.

Which contrasts a lot with earlier posts implying this particular application might get 1000 times speedup using GPUs. i wonder what the real speedup will turn out to be...

If its only twice as fast then using two or four CPU motherboards might be better than diverting GPUs from other things that GPUs are much better at than CPUs.

-MarkM-

[AgentME]

And being a miner myself, I can imagine that other miners out there don't really want finding block to be or seem random at this point in time. They more likely want to have a Primecoin mining calculator and then can way up if it is going to be worth their time to even mine it.

Bitcoin was similar before mining pools. Mining calculators will hopefully come around for Primecoin, but currently the ways to benchmark prime-chain finding aren't well understood; the primespersecond value that primecoin shows isn't very useful for predicting progress.

[smoothie]

Would not surprise me if a GPU miner exists. I imagine it would not take very long to create one. Or just hire conman.

Otherwise congrats on this new coin. Looks to have lots of interests. I can just see all the math enthusiasts getting excited over something like this.

My only concern is verifiability of very large prime numbers requires tons of computation and is not a trivial process like SHA256 is.

[markm]

Yeah, I had kind of imagined the way to use primes for work would be your job is to prove that numbers that look darn likely to be primes are NOT primes.

-MarkM-

[wesleyrbk]

A high rise in price like what is happening now won't be good for the coin. Its going to pop very soon.

[ampere]

[03:23] <randy-waterhouse> kind of natural evolution from mining the earth for money
[03:23] <randy-waterhouse> and natural resources ...
[03:24] <randy-waterhouse> now we can mine numbers for math
[03:24] <randy-waterhouse> and money

 

[markm]

A high rise in price like what is happening now won't be good for the coin. Its going to pop very soon.

Go ahead and dump while you can then, afterall you can easily mine some more, right?

-MarkM-

[romerun]

Whoa Whoa whoa. What if... WHAT IF... Primecoin is the new Litecoin?

Duuude.

It looks more like a new Novacoin, amazingly high price and no use

[RustyShackleford1950]

Well, that's it: $1 / XPM.