8th Alt coin thread. Or what to do now that asics are all over the place.

[dragonmike]

XMR has made my Vegas profitable to run again!

...at least for the next few days.

...not yet at the ugly $0.16/KWh I'm dishing out for power, but if it keeps going in the right direction, it might just fairly soon!
There's no secret though. Prices need to go up for profits to rise as well. Wonder how long it'll take for Asics (and FPGAs) to kick into gear and up the diff on CN/r.

Oh btw have any other coins forked to CN/r yet, or only XMR thus far?

Is it still true to say that Cryptonight algo (including the forks) is still lowest in power consumption compared to all the other algos?

Yes it's the lowest power usage mining algo out there. I am actually trying to build a enclosed rig which is more living room friendly when the guests or family arrive. Seems with adequate cooling you can easily do 5-6 GPUs in a server chassis without the temps going up or without the fans going max speed.

XMR however is not as easy as ETH to set up properly. The bios needs to be difficult and if you take the time to tune each GPU individually you can get decent power efficiency.

So it's a good thing that it's hard to tune because most lazy miners might just stay on ETH using Claymore. Should keep the difficulty low temporarily.... until the FGPA arrive again that is.

I would say XMR mining is consuming less power only by a small margin now...
Here is some numbers from my test rig with 2 x Sapphire Pulse RX 574 cards.
Here goes
system idle  43 Watts
XMR mining: 240 Watts, Hashrate: 1870H/s    1150/1975
ETH mining:  255 Watts, hashrate: 61 MH/s    1100/2000
The XMR power usage is average figure since it fluctuates between 230 and 260 Watts.  I probably need to tune the GPUs more with XMR..
Even rebooting the rig with the same GPU config will yield a different hashrate/power figure.  With ETH mining it is really easy...
My other rigs are all mining just ETH, just for the of configuring..

You know, the "this or that algo is consuming less power than xyz" is a bit of a fallacy.
It all depends how much you want to achieve.
Whilst I agree that ETH doesn't gain much from upping core clocks and voltage, XMR scales better. Nobody says you should run your Vegas at 1408/1100 to mine XMR. You could achieve quite a lot more hashrate for 10-20% more power to the core.

On the other side of the spectrum, ProgPow sucks everything out of your cards, but you don't have to run them at these speeds. You can underclock/-volt them and they'll certainly draw less power.

Lyra2z was a prime example. Remember in early 2018... The GPU miners we had available achieved crap hashrates... but everyone was claiming "oh but it's so power efficient". A year and a few "optimisations" later and that efficiency is completely gone. You've got a lot more hash out of your GPUs, but they now draw at least as much as any other algo.

[1715308072]

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[ATCkit2]

XMR has made my Vegas profitable to run again!

...at least for the next few days.

...not yet at the ugly $0.16/KWh I'm dishing out for power, but if it keeps going in the right direction, it might just fairly soon!
There's no secret though. Prices need to go up for profits to rise as well. Wonder how long it'll take for Asics (and FPGAs) to kick into gear and up the diff on CN/r.

Oh btw have any other coins forked to CN/r yet, or only XMR thus far?

Is it still true to say that Cryptonight algo (including the forks) is still lowest in power consumption compared to all the other algos?

Yes it's the lowest power usage mining algo out there. I am actually trying to build a enclosed rig which is more living room friendly when the guests or family arrive. Seems with adequate cooling you can easily do 5-6 GPUs in a server chassis without the temps going up or without the fans going max speed.

XMR however is not as easy as ETH to set up properly. The bios needs to be difficult and if you take the time to tune each GPU individually you can get decent power efficiency.

So it's a good thing that it's hard to tune because most lazy miners might just stay on ETH using Claymore. Should keep the difficulty low temporarily.... until the FGPA arrive again that is.

I've set up one of these using a Thermaltake Core X5 case. I'm running 7 x 470 MSI Twin Frozen 470 GPUs. It:'s quiet and most of the GPUs stay below 60 C.
I'm Canadian too. If you're near Toronto, you're welcome to drop by and take a look.

[h311m4n]

XMR has made my Vegas profitable to run again!

...at least for the next few days.

...not yet at the ugly $0.16/KWh I'm dishing out for power, but if it keeps going in the right direction, it might just fairly soon!
There's no secret though. Prices need to go up for profits to rise as well. Wonder how long it'll take for Asics (and FPGAs) to kick into gear and up the diff on CN/r.

Oh btw have any other coins forked to CN/r yet, or only XMR thus far?

Is it still true to say that Cryptonight algo (including the forks) is still lowest in power consumption compared to all the other algos?

Yes it's the lowest power usage mining algo out there. I am actually trying to build a enclosed rig which is more living room friendly when the guests or family arrive. Seems with adequate cooling you can easily do 5-6 GPUs in a server chassis without the temps going up or without the fans going max speed.

XMR however is not as easy as ETH to set up properly. The bios needs to be difficult and if you take the time to tune each GPU individually you can get decent power efficiency.

So it's a good thing that it's hard to tune because most lazy miners might just stay on ETH using Claymore. Should keep the difficulty low temporarily.... until the FGPA arrive again that is.

I would say XMR mining is consuming less power only by a small margin now...
Here is some numbers from my test rig with 2 x Sapphire Pulse RX 574 cards.
Here goes
system idle  43 Watts
XMR mining: 240 Watts, Hashrate: 1870H/s    1150/1975
ETH mining:  255 Watts, hashrate: 61 MH/s    1100/2000
The XMR power usage is average figure since it fluctuates between 230 and 260 Watts.  I probably need to tune the GPUs more with XMR..
Even rebooting the rig with the same GPU config will yield a different hashrate/power figure.  With ETH mining it is really easy...
My other rigs are all mining just ETH, just for the of configuring..

You know, the "this or that algo is consuming less power than xyz" is a bit of a fallacy.
It all depends how much you want to achieve.
Whilst I agree that ETH doesn't gain much from upping core clocks and voltage, XMR scales better. Nobody says you should run your Vegas at 1408/1100 to mine XMR. You could achieve quite a lot more hashrate for 10-20% more power to the core.

On the other side of the spectrum, ProgPow sucks everything out of your cards, but you don't have to run them at these speeds. You can underclock/-volt them and they'll certainly draw less power.

Lyra2z was a prime example. Remember in early 2018... The GPU miners we had available achieved crap hashrates... but everyone was claiming "oh but it's so power efficient". A year and a few "optimisations" later and that efficiency is completely gone. You've got a lot more hash out of your GPUs, but they now draw at least as much as any other algo.

I haven't mined anything Ethash in a long while, stuck to cryptonight based coins for over a year now. Not that they are more profitable, but my GPUs and rigs are generaly more stable. I don't know about you guys, but while tweaking GPUs to get one more megahash out of ETH was fun in the beginning, I would really hate having to go through this again nowadays. Testing, flashing, debugging, I just don't have time for it anymore.

When I was mining ETH I recall I always had a GPU bugging out on me at some point which made it a nightmare to debug sometimes.

I must say that with cryptonight coins, I seldom have a GPU that crashes and it does use a bit less power. I'm not sure I could run an 8 card rig (470/570) on a single 1200W PSU on ETHash today. So yeah, XMR definitely scales better.

[ATCkit2]

Currently, what's the best miner for  XMR:

XMR-Stak?
XMR rig?
Other?

[BogdanCo]

Currently, what's the best miner for  XMR:

XMR-Stak?
XMR rig?
Other?

At least for Vega's the best is teamredminer 0.4.2.

[Spotswood]

...

This Spotswood kit is really helpful for 4U builds, but the screws and parts are tiny (frustrating at first): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1731197.0

Your first "Spotswood" build will leave you cursing, the second will be much easier.  If you are of my age, you will need those reader glasses to handle the tiny screws.  But his designs are elegant in some ways.

...

I had one client that assembled over 100 of those brackets.    Much respect to that man.

[P00P135]

...

This Spotswood kit is really helpful for 4U builds, but the screws and parts are tiny (frustrating at first): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1731197.0

Your first "Spotswood" build will leave you cursing, the second will be much easier.  If you are of my age, you will need those reader glasses to handle the tiny screws.  But his designs are elegant in some ways.

...

I had one client that assembled over 100 of those brackets.    Much respect to that man.

That poor bastard 

[JaredKaragen]

1/4 the hashrate on XMR now;  those ASICS really squeeze out the little guys for sure.


If asics/FPGA weren't manufactured and used in such a scandalous way, or if the hardware was cheap;  then they wouldn't be such a bad thing.   Similar to the initial BTC hardware days......    But over the last 2-3 years;  the hardware has become increasingly more shady in terms of price and time to public market...    which drove XMR to act the way they are by forking every 6, and now (from what I read) 3 months....

I notice a nice steady nethash now;  as well as lower nonces in the blocks recently....   This is a true telltale sign that the asics were owning the world for a while.  You could tell when the gigantic FPGA farms were turning on and off for a day or two at a time.   Block times and nethash looking like a roller coaster.   Definitely not normal... all of this is pretty much gone from the network now.


Such a catch 22 of a subject no matter what stance you take.

I am enjoying my profitability jumping way back up on my rig full of outdated hardware that acts as my space heater.

[philipma1957]

1/4 the hashrate on XMR now;  those ASICS really squeeze out the little guys for sure.


If asics/FPGA weren't manufactured and used in such a scandalous way, or if the hardware was cheap;  then they wouldn't be such a bad thing.   Similar to the initial BTC hardware days......    But over the last 2-3 years;  the hardware has become increasingly more shady in terms of price and time to public market...    which drove XMR to act the way they are by forking every 6, and now (from what I read) 3 months....

I notice a nice steady nethash now;  as well as lower nonces in the blocks recently....   This is a true telltale sign that the asics were owning the world for a while.  You could tell when the gigantic FPGA farms were turning on and off for a day or two at a time.   Block times and nethash looking like a roller coaster.   Definitely not normal... all of this is pretty much gone from the network now.


Such a catch 22 of a subject no matter what stance you take.

I am enjoying my profitability jumping way back up on my rig full of outdated hardware that acts as my space heater.

Jared is there any working software for my thread rippers?

[JaredKaragen]

1/4 the hashrate on XMR now;  those ASICS really squeeze out the little guys for sure.


If asics/FPGA weren't manufactured and used in such a scandalous way, or if the hardware was cheap;  then they wouldn't be such a bad thing.   Similar to the initial BTC hardware days......    But over the last 2-3 years;  the hardware has become increasingly more shady in terms of price and time to public market...    which drove XMR to act the way they are by forking every 6, and now (from what I read) 3 months....

I notice a nice steady nethash now;  as well as lower nonces in the blocks recently....   This is a true telltale sign that the asics were owning the world for a while.  You could tell when the gigantic FPGA farms were turning on and off for a day or two at a time.   Block times and nethash looking like a roller coaster.   Definitely not normal... all of this is pretty much gone from the network now.


Such a catch 22 of a subject no matter what stance you take.

I am enjoying my profitability jumping way back up on my rig full of outdated hardware that acts as my space heater.

Jared is there any working software for my thread rippers?

Im not sure how optimized it is;  but my build of xmr-stak (removed devfee) should work as far as I can tell.   Not sure how many threads for the cpu though;  id check xmrstak.com through all the benchmarks if they have them for cpu;  they list the .txt file configs and hashrates there.   https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3264773

*edit* heres a direct link to the benchmarks page: https://www.xmrstak.com/category/xmr-stak-cpu-configurations/amd-cpu-configurations/amd-ryzen/threadripper/

Looks like for threadripper, it wants one process per each even thread:  cpu 2, cpu4, cpu6, etc......  youll see it in the config examples.

XMR-Stak works with CPU, AMD and Nvidia.  All cards supported from GTX6xx-RTX20xx, and AFAIK, all the AMD cards supported in the blockchain drivers are compatible with XMR-stak as well.   Your old Rx560 works fine =)   It's about the only thing it does for now;   I feel its a good idea to keep it in a rig for testing builds and nibbling some coin to save for very long term.    I dont have any plans to spend my xmr anymore for at least 5-10 years.

If you need help with it LMK =)

[adaseb]

1/4 the hashrate on XMR now;  those ASICS really squeeze out the little guys for sure.


If asics/FPGA weren't manufactured and used in such a scandalous way, or if the hardware was cheap;  then they wouldn't be such a bad thing.   Similar to the initial BTC hardware days......    But over the last 2-3 years;  the hardware has become increasingly more shady in terms of price and time to public market...    which drove XMR to act the way they are by forking every 6, and now (from what I read) 3 months....

I notice a nice steady nethash now;  as well as lower nonces in the blocks recently....   This is a true telltale sign that the asics were owning the world for a while.  You could tell when the gigantic FPGA farms were turning on and off for a day or two at a time.   Block times and nethash looking like a roller coaster.   Definitely not normal... all of this is pretty much gone from the network now.


Such a catch 22 of a subject no matter what stance you take.

I am enjoying my profitability jumping way back up on my rig full of outdated hardware that acts as my space heater.

I really hope that ETH devs decide to fork to ProgPOW in the next few months and it will be interesting to see how many ASICs are actually mining ETH.

I am guessing that many of these ETH ASICs are private and were never sold to the general public, only the inefficient ones Bitmain sold which was a similiar efficency like a GPU.

I am guessing that 50% of all ETH hashrate is some form of ASIC or FGPA.

[JaredKaragen]

1/4 the hashrate on XMR now;  those ASICS really squeeze out the little guys for sure.


If asics/FPGA weren't manufactured and used in such a scandalous way, or if the hardware was cheap;  then they wouldn't be such a bad thing.   Similar to the initial BTC hardware days......    But over the last 2-3 years;  the hardware has become increasingly more shady in terms of price and time to public market...    which drove XMR to act the way they are by forking every 6, and now (from what I read) 3 months....

I notice a nice steady nethash now;  as well as lower nonces in the blocks recently....   This is a true telltale sign that the asics were owning the world for a while.  You could tell when the gigantic FPGA farms were turning on and off for a day or two at a time.   Block times and nethash looking like a roller coaster.   Definitely not normal... all of this is pretty much gone from the network now.


Such a catch 22 of a subject no matter what stance you take.

I am enjoying my profitability jumping way back up on my rig full of outdated hardware that acts as my space heater.

I really hope that ETH devs decide to fork to ProgPOW in the next few months and it will be interesting to see how many ASICs are actually mining ETH.

I am guessing that many of these ETH ASICs are private and were never sold to the general public, only the inefficient ones Bitmain sold which was a similiar efficency like a GPU.

I am guessing that 50% of all ETH hashrate is some form of ASIC or FGPA.

In my eyes;  ETH has always been somewhat shady....

Dev control of network...   Programmable nature of ETH....  smart contracts and the fallacies therein that have been exploited countless times now..... etc...   I could just never trust it.



But;  like other coins;  if it gets hyped enough;  it doesn't matter is nobody actually uses it for any of the root purposes;  people buy into the hype.

I too am interested to see how much of a shady foundation ETH has been sitting on nethash-wise.



Now these are just opinions;  and hopefully I made it clear why they are my opinions.  I do not expect anyone to adopt them, but just simply understand the logic behind them as my stance.


I hope XMR holds true.   I actually believe its ability to be an anonymous coin if used in the proper manner.

[soothaa]

I really hope that ETH devs decide to fork to ProgPOW in the next few months and it will be interesting to see how many ASICs are actually mining ETH.

I've been seeing a lot of questionable things and accusations levied against ProgPOW, PIRL (ETH "clone") recently decided to not fork to ProgPOW for a list of reasons relating to how ProgPOW was made. I don't have a lot of specifics, but I know there's lots of questionable things relating to it.

[dragonmike]

I really hope that ETH devs decide to fork to ProgPOW in the next few months and it will be interesting to see how many ASICs are actually mining ETH.

I've been seeing a lot of questionable things and accusations levied against ProgPOW, PIRL (ETH "clone") recently decided to not fork to ProgPOW for a list of reasons relating to how ProgPOW was made. I don't have a lot of specifics, but I know there's lots of questionable things relating to it.

The most questionable to me is the trustworthiness of the ProgPow wannabe figurehead aka OhGodAGirl.
Made a bunch of promises to the mining community with the Mineority project only to deliver nothing and completely sink it a few months later, leaving people with hosted GPUs and FPGAs in total limbo.

Scapegoat or not, somebody with these credentials (and who, to date, refuses to both apologise and acknowledge failure) does not inspire confidence.

[soothaa]

(and who, to date, refuses to both apologise and acknowledge failure)

Based on the interactions I've seen with said person, I can't say I'm surprised.

That said, some people seemed to not like how they worked with both AMD/nVidia to develop ProgPOW to be GPU-centric and platform agnostic.. I'm not sure why, cause it sounds like a good idea to me..

[philipma1957]

I really hope that ETH devs decide to fork to ProgPOW in the next few months and it will be interesting to see how many ASICs are actually mining ETH.

I've been seeing a lot of questionable things and accusations levied against ProgPOW, PIRL (ETH "clone") recently decided to not fork to ProgPOW for a list of reasons relating to how ProgPOW was made. I don't have a lot of specifics, but I know there's lots of questionable things relating to it.

The most questionable to me is the trustworthiness of the ProgPow wannabe figurehead aka OhGodAGirl.
Made a bunch of promises to the mining community with the Mineority project only to deliver nothing and completely sink it a few months later, leaving people with hosted GPUs and FPGAs in total limbo.

Scapegoat or not, somebody with these credentials (and who, to date, refuses to both apologise and acknowledge failure) does not inspire confidence.

well either she is the bad guy or sql acorn is.

I went pretty much in on BCI and mine 200 coins a week.  But the coin has sagged a lot in price.

10 cents for 4900 coins = $490 which is not as good as grin and that also tanked.

I have 12x 1080ti's 4x vega 56  but only pay the power on the 4 vegas

 will stop in a month or two once the heat settles in.

[adaseb]

my electricity cost went up from 0.103 to 0.12

im still mining at a profit, but im not sure how much longer i can mine and pay out of pocket for electricity

im thinking i can turn off my 1060s and just keep the 1080tis going until the bulls come back and the market improves

or just sell the 1060 3gbs

Well Summer is coming soon and many people will have higher electricity rates since rates are almost always higher in the Summer due to high AC use which causes massive demand for electricity at peak times.

Are your electricity rates permanent or do they vary depending on the time of day? Because in some areas the rate is cheaper at night than it is during the day and it works out for some miners since they don't want to heat their home even more in the hot summer weather. Hence mining at night is more ideal.

Either way... we need ProgPOW or ETH at $400 or BTC at $6000 at least to make decent income from mining.

[vapourminer]

The most questionable to me is the trustworthiness of the ProgPow wannabe figurehead aka OhGodAGirl.
Made a bunch of promises to the mining community with the Mineority project only to deliver nothing and completely sink it a few months later, leaving people with hosted GPUs and FPGAs in total limbo.

Scapegoat or not, somebody with these credentials (and who, to date, refuses to both apologise and acknowledge failure) does not inspire confidence.

well either she is the bad guy or sql acorn is.

of course i do not have all the facts but i think kristy/ohgodagirl shafted sqrl and us big time.

and she still just breezes into discord like nothing at all happened every so often.

"we are all mineority" were her parting words when she abandoned mineority.. riight so where is all the money that "we" have.. she has balls ill admit that.

any project she is involved in is poison in my book. unless proven otherwise.

[Elder III]

The most questionable to me is the trustworthiness of the ProgPow wannabe figurehead aka OhGodAGirl.
Made a bunch of promises to the mining community with the Mineority project only to deliver nothing and completely sink it a few months later, leaving people with hosted GPUs and FPGAs in total limbo.

Scapegoat or not, somebody with these credentials (and who, to date, refuses to both apologise and acknowledge failure) does not inspire confidence.

well either she is the bad guy or sql acorn is.

of course i do not have all the facts but i think kristy/ohgodagirl shafted sqrl and us big time.

and she still just breezes into discord like nothing at all happened every so often.

"we are all mineority" were her parting words when she abandoned mineority.. riight so where is all the money that "we" have.. she has balls ill admit that.

any project she is involved in is poison in my book. unless proven otherwise.

I agree with your evaluation completely.  I don't know if the money was outright stolen or if it just vanished since they/she kept it in Eth (which tanked 75% or more of it's value).  Either way I believe she needs to take responsibility for it, not trot off tralallala to the next thing.

[philipma1957]

The most questionable to me is the trustworthiness of the ProgPow wannabe figurehead aka OhGodAGirl.
Made a bunch of promises to the mining community with the Mineority project only to deliver nothing and completely sink it a few months later, leaving people with hosted GPUs and FPGAs in total limbo.

Scapegoat or not, somebody with these credentials (and who, to date, refuses to both apologise and acknowledge failure) does not inspire confidence.

well either she is the bad guy or sql acorn is.

of course i do not have all the facts but i think kristy/ohgodagirl shafted sqrl and us big time.

and she still just breezes into discord like nothing at all happened every so often.

"we are all mineority" were her parting words when she abandoned mineority.. riight so where is all the money that "we" have.. she has balls ill admit that.

any project she is involved in is poison in my book. unless proven otherwise.

You may be proven right. I don't know what will happen with BCI long term.