latest bitcoin core version still support mining ?

[maplelake]

I download the latest bitcoin core(0.19) and run it for several days. It sync all blocks.
If i run rpc command "generatetoaddress", can it be used for mining ?

Is there some option , which enable bitcoin core always in mining mode ?
such as fGenerateBlocks = 1 in bitcoin.conf ?

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[achow101]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet.

Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time because it is not worth CPU mining (as mining with Bitcoin Core was). Even if you do use a version of Bitcoin Core that has mining capabilities, you will never find a block.

If you just want to learn how mining works, do it on regtest or testnet. You will need external mining software. Running a CPU miner on mainnet won't get you anything. You probably won't find any shares that can be submitted to a pool either.

[gmaxwell]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet. Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time

What? Since when? Works fine for me:


$ ./bitcoin-cli generatetoaddress 1 bc1qw64su7f6sdf9qqawa40v2uq7crzrrmzs2qx2hl
[
]


(and setting a high max tries makes it take a long time to return while it busily tries many times).

It has an utterly negligible chance of finding a block because the little cpu miner does so little work compared to the current difficulty, of course, but it works.

Please don't conflate "this would be a waste of your time and energy" with "this will not work".

Yelling at people that they shouldn't or can't mine has done a lot of harm to Bitcoin. And a bitcoin node that couldn't mine at all-- even if the mining is only useful in a testing capacity without the help of an asic-- wouldn't deserve being called a node.

[maplelake]

WOW, my pleasure to get response from Bitcoin core developer ! It is amazing  Smiley

[philipma1957]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet. Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time

What? Since when? Works fine for me:


$ ./bitcoin-cli generatetoaddress 1 bc1qw64su7f6sdf9qqawa40v2uq7crzrrmzs2qx2hl
[
]


(and setting a high max tries makes it take a long time to return while it busily tries many times).

It has an utterly negligible chance of finding a block because the little cpu miner does so little work compared to the current difficulty, of course, but it works.

Please don't conflate "this would be a waste of your time and energy" with "this will not work".

Yelling at people that they shouldn't or can't mine has done a lot of harm to Bitcoin. And a bitcoin node that couldn't mine at all-- even if the mining is only useful in a testing capacity without the help of an asic-- wouldn't deserve being called a node.

So I can load one of my many pc's  and set it to mine giving me a true 1 in a trillion shot.

Today on ck's solo pool we had a guy hit  a block with an s-3 and 400gh of hash.

an s-3  is about 800 times better then a ryzen 9 3900x cpu.   but the point is  he hit one with 400gh.

I like that I could mine with a cpu  and have the smallest of chances to hit a block.

Thanks for info  on how to solo mine it.

and yes I will not be mining btc with my ryzen 9 3900x cpus but I still have the option to do it.

[maplelake]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet. Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time

What? Since when? Works fine for me:


$ ./bitcoin-cli generatetoaddress 1 bc1qw64su7f6sdf9qqawa40v2uq7crzrrmzs2qx2hl
[
]


(and setting a high max tries makes it take a long time to return while it busily tries many times).

It has an utterly negligible chance of finding a block because the little cpu miner does so little work compared to the current difficulty, of course, but it works.

Please don't conflate "this would be a waste of your time and energy" with "this will not work".

Yelling at people that they shouldn't or can't mine has done a lot of harm to Bitcoin. And a bitcoin node that couldn't mine at all-- even if the mining is only useful in a testing capacity without the help of an asic-- wouldn't deserve being called a node.

Can I use generatetoaddress to set bitcoin core always in "mining mode"? just like "fGenerateBitcoins = 1" option

[maplelake]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet. Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time

What? Since when? Works fine for me:


$ ./bitcoin-cli generatetoaddress 1 bc1qw64su7f6sdf9qqawa40v2uq7crzrrmzs2qx2hl
[
]


(and setting a high max tries makes it take a long time to return while it busily tries many times).

It has an utterly negligible chance of finding a block because the little cpu miner does so little work compared to the current difficulty, of course, but it works.

Please don't conflate "this would be a waste of your time and energy" with "this will not work".

Yelling at people that they shouldn't or can't mine has done a lot of harm to Bitcoin. And a bitcoin node that couldn't mine at all-- even if the mining is only useful in a testing capacity without the help of an asic-- wouldn't deserve being called a node.

So I can load one of my many pc's  and set it to mine giving me a true 1 in a trillion shot.

Today on ck's solo pool we had a guy hit  a block with an s-3 and 400gh of hash.

an s-3  is about 800 times better then a ryzen 9 3900x cpu.   but the point is  he hit one with 400gh.

I like that I could mine with a cpu  and have the smallest of chances to hit a block.

Thanks for info  on how to solo mine it.

and yes I will not be mining btc with my ryzen 9 3900x cpus but I still have the option to do it.

Does it mean CPU mining still has change to win a block ? although it is less chance
And surprise to see one guy mine a block by CPU ~~~

[gmaxwell]

Can I use generatetoaddress to set bitcoin core always in "mining mode"? just like "fGenerateBitcoins = 1" option

No, the "generate=1" option was removed in 0.19 because of user-inscrutable development reasons around not wanting to have non-wallet code talking to wallet code. You could still trigger it with a script after startup if you wanted to be silly and run it.

Does it mean CPU mining still has change to win a block ? although it is less chance
And surprise to see one guy mine a block by CPU ~~~

A very very small chance, but mostly it will just be a waste of electricity. If you'd like to play the mining lottery, you can get an older asic miner inexpensively and solo mine with that--- your chances will still be low but not as insanely so.

With CPU mining your computer might use on the order of $0.5 in additional power per day, and make about 86 billion tries at mining a block each with a one in 66 sextillion chance of finding a block (actual figure)--- based on a quick measurement here.  So that means each day would have a roughly one in 772 billion chance of finding a block.

With an older asic, like the aforementioned S3, you'd use an additional $.88 in power per day (assuming $0.1/kwh) instead of $0.5, but make 41 quadrillion tries instead of 86 billion.  So your chances of success would be about a half million times better -- though still pretty low at about one in 1.6 million per day. -- but at that point the odds start looking like lotteries that people actually play.

Old miners like the S3 make for perfectly reasonable electric heaters, in places where you might otherwise use a resistive heater.

The figures are, of course, much better with newer more efficient mining hardware, which is why people can mine as a profitable business.

[achow101]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet. Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time

What? Since when? Works fine for me:

Didn't work last time I tried it, but that was also a while ago, so I probably just misremember.

[DaCryptoRaccoon]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet. Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time

What? Since when? Works fine for me:


$ ./bitcoin-cli generatetoaddress 1 bc1qw64su7f6sdf9qqawa40v2uq7crzrrmzs2qx2hl
[
]


(and setting a high max tries makes it take a long time to return while it busily tries many times).

It has an utterly negligible chance of finding a block because the little cpu miner does so little work compared to the current difficulty, of course, but it works.

Please don't conflate "this would be a waste of your time and energy" with "this will not work".

Yelling at people that they shouldn't or can't mine has done a lot of harm to Bitcoin. And a bitcoin node that couldn't mine at all-- even if the mining is only useful in a testing capacity without the help of an asic-- wouldn't deserve being called a node.

I 100% agree today was amazing for the small miner who walked away with 115k with very little power to the pool, I have long suspected it was possible to still mine on main net with the core wallet but so many posts and people saying not to mine make people think oh I might just go mine on antpool or something stupid like that. 

I always wondered what the network would look like now if we never had pool mining and solo was the only option i believe we would be in a much much better place and would have 10000000x more nodes on the network.

I still have my trusty S3's tucked away with 1 always on ck's solo pool for years now without luck I may just setup my own little node and point the miner at that see if I get super lucky like the guy today!

Thanks for the info maxwell!

[pooya87]

but so many posts and people saying not to mine make people think oh I might just go mine on antpool or something stupid like that. 

they say don't mine "with CPU" because it is a waste of electricity not don't mine in general.

and would have 10000000x more nodes on the network.

well we already have more than 100k nodes on the network so things aren't as bad as you may think. keep in mind that numbers that sites like bitnodes report are nodes that they can reach not the entire network.

[Silarous]

generatetoaddress is for regtest only. It is only used for testing purposes. It cannot be used on mainnet. Bitcoin Core no longer has mainnet mining capability. This has been removed for a long time

What? Since when? Works fine for me:


$ ./bitcoin-cli generatetoaddress 1 bc1qw64su7f6sdf9qqawa40v2uq7crzrrmzs2qx2hl
[
]


(and setting a high max tries makes it take a long time to return while it busily tries many times).

It has an utterly negligible chance of finding a block because the little cpu miner does so little work compared to the current difficulty, of course, but it works.

Please don't conflate "this would be a waste of your time and energy" with "this will not work".

Yelling at people that they shouldn't or can't mine has done a lot of harm to Bitcoin. And a bitcoin node that couldn't mine at all-- even if the mining is only useful in a testing capacity without the help of an asic-- wouldn't deserve being called a node.

I have been trying to mine Bitcoin with my CPU merely as an experiment to see what a modern CPU (Ryzen 5950x) hash rate would be.  I have tried to do so with the most recent version of Bitcoin Core as well as old as 0.10.3, but when I enter the command "generatetoaddress" it states "Method not found (code -32601)."  What would be the easiest way to see what the bitcoin hash rate on a modern CPU would be?  I'm fully aware that it is not profitable to do so and this wouldn't be a long term thing.  I just thought it would be a fun experiment to find out how many 16 core CPU's it would take to match a modern day ASIC.

[vjudeu]

What would be the easiest way to see what the bitcoin hash rate on a modern CPU would be?

Just run your own signet, and set signetchallenge into OP_TRUE. Or you can even turn 1-of-2 default multisig into 1-of-3 multisig, by including your own public key, and then you can safely set up a remote server, with your own signet, which would be compatible with the default signet chain.

[BlackHatCoiner]

[...]

Or, if you still want to try out mining in mainnet, you can use cpuminer after you've created a replica of bitcoin (from block 0). You can alter things like minimum difficulty, or set difficulty=1 and see how frequently you mine blocks.

I don't believe there's a well-known program that can compare your CPU hash rate to an ASIC, so I guess you'll have to write it yourself. It is really simple though, just check how many sha256d you can calculate per second.

[Silarous]

Thanks!  I tried out your cpuminer suggestion and just pointed it to a solo Bitcoin pool.  It looks like the 5950x is averaging 6.5 MH/s per thread.  208 MH/s in total and consuming 140w.  I have a S19jPro running at 130 TH/s @ 4000w.  If I wanted to match that with an army of 5950x CPU's, I'd only need 625,000 of them along with 87,500,000 watts of electricity not counting the rest of the computer.  Seems doable!

[vjudeu]

I don't believe there's a well-known program that can compare your CPU hash rate to an ASIC, so I guess you'll have to write it yourself.

It is called Bitcoin Core. Just check your difficulty, after it will be adjusted. You can use mainnet from block zero, you can use testnet3 from block zero, you can use signet, with signetchallenge set to OP_TRUE, or you can even use regtest, and just enable difficulty adjustments, to let it adjust.

and just pointed it to a solo Bitcoin pool

You can also create your own full node, even in pruning mode, it will be possible to get block templates. In this way, you can get your shares accepted, even if they are below difficulty, which is accepted by some pools. And also, it is possible to get rewards in Lightning Network, in the form of having free transactions through your peer, if that peer supports LN-based mining, and if it will give you free LN transactions for producing shares.