Newbie's stupid question

[mrl1994]

Hi guys,


Ive got a (probably very stupid and obvious) question, and Ive been trying to reach the answer for the past few hours but I just couldn't find it, hehe.

Well, Ive already read almost every "beginners guide to [insert your coin here] mining" but couldnt find a post that explains more about mining/pools. I mean what each thing that appears on the .exe file while you are mining (eg. what does thread mean, whats the real importance of percentage rate what happens when/if it does to 100%, stuff). Would be really nice if someone could explain all of us newbies this kind of stuff so we can understand more about what we are doing instead of just repeating the guide's instructions like trained monkies


Well, the other thing is about doge mining. Ive been doing it since yesterday just for fun and trying to learn how this whole thing works. But at my pool's website, it's said that my "DOGE ACCOUNT BALANCE" is zero!! Ive been mining for almost 24h, is it something wrong w/ this or am I just really stupid and Im trying to see the doge balance on the wrong place or smthg? If anyone could explain more about how the pool works/ how they pay you and stuff like that would be very nice as well.


Thank you very much and sorry about all the stupid questions...

[btc-mike]

Answering a specific question is more realist than me just "explain[ing] more about mining/pools."

Your DOGE mining question - something is probably not setup correctly. What hardware are you using to mine? Does your mining software show your mining and is it close to what the pool reports you are mining?

[mrl1994]

mm.. sorry about my english, it's not my first language


Im cpu mining with an old Intel processor (maybe celeron?), which sucks, I know, but as I use a Macbook myself, it is the only option I have at the moment - dont laugh at me 


Yes, the cpuminer reports 1.17 hash/s average and the pool says 1 hash/s.. is that close enough? I also noticed that the "thread" is always 0 , is that correct?


Thanks for your help!

[Vivisector999]

I will take a few quick shots at your questions.

First.  There are literally thousands of people mining a coin like DOGE.  Maybe tens of thousands.  Only 1 person in that entire group will find a block, for every block that is released.  This means some people would never find a block in their life.  Huge miners might find a few blocks a day, but everything is based on luck, and results would be sporadic.

What pools are, are groups of people all mining together on the same team, and sharing the results.  t essentially would be no different then you and a few friends all buying a rig, and solo mining with it, and saying you will split the earnings everytime someone lucks out and finds one.  

Since your dealing with complete strangers, and everyone will be bringing a different amount of computing power to the game, they had to change the rules a bit.  Instead of saying they would split the earnings equally to all members, they look at the amount of work each miner brings to the table.  Kind of like if you bought 5 miners each worth $2000, and your friends each only have 1 - $500 miner.  You might not like the fact you are putting in a lot more money and a lot more money into the power bills, and getting the same as your friends.  

So they break the work into work shares.  Every time someone in the pool finds a block, your pools software will take the block reward and divide it between the number of work shares you worked during finding the block.  Bringing that back to your imaginary friend pool.  If you mined for 6 hours before you found a block, with all your computers running at maximum, you might get 20 times the power X 6 hours or 120 shares of the money made.  Your friends coming in with 1 times the power, and mining all 6 hours would deserve 6 equal shares of the money.  If one of your friends had his 1 share machine on for 3 hours, then decided to play Battlefield 4 for the remaining 3 hours, he doesn't deserve the same share as the guys mining for 6 hours, so he would get 3 shares of the money.

That is the over simplified version of how pools work.  There is a lot more going on to keep people from pool jumping ect. but I am not going to go into all that here, since your new to the game.


As for the problems you are having, what type of card are you mining with?  AMD/NVidia?  Are you attempting to mine with a Block eruptor?  Are you CPU mining?  Also when you signed up for the pool, did you remember to create a worker, and is that information entered in your batch file you made to start your miner?  Or did you just copy and paste a script off the page, that stated :

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
 cgminer.exe --scrypt -o netcodepool.org:3333 -u user.name -p password --thread-concurrency 16320 --gpu-engine 1055 --gpu-memclock 1500 --no-submit-stale --intensity 13 --worksize 256 -g 2

and you left the -u being user.name and the -p being password?   You have to change those to whatever you set in your pool as your user.name and your password, or you will mine forever, and the pool won't know where to send your shares.  

[Colin Miner]

But at my pool's website, it's said that my "DOGE ACCOUNT BALANCE" is zero!! Ive been mining for almost 24h, is it something wrong w/ this

Trying to CPU mine on a celeron is going to generate Zero Dogecoins, you will need at least one high power graphics card to mine Doges as the difficulty is quite high now. So this is correct.

[Vivisector999]

mm.. sorry about my english, it's not my first language


Im cpu mining with an old Intel processor (maybe celeron?), which sucks, I know, but as I use a Macbook myself, it is the only option I have at the moment - dont laugh at me 


Yes, the cpuminer reports 1.17 hash/s average and the pool says 1 hash/s.. is that close enough? I also noticed that the "thread" is always 0 , is that correct?


Thanks for your help!

Umm in that case, it might be possible your share is so small it isn't showing up on the list yet. (Like 0.0000000021 DOGE)  I would advise you to stop mining, as you using more money in power then your are generating mining.  Find a place to buy some BTC and trade it in for some DOGE if you wish.

[mrl1994]

Thank you guys for all the answers! Ill stop mining for now still I get a new computer(because this one is so old that does not pay off buying a new processor, cause I'd have to change the motherboard as well.. ) next week (any advices? ) and try to GPU mining.

And thanks Vivisector999 for the explanation!! Ill keep reading the posts here and searching more mining info too.

[btc-mike]

I will take a few quick shots at your questions. 

I think you covered pool mining quite well.

If you want to mine something with your CPU, check this list https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=379601.0

XPM is hard to get but you should have better results with the others.