Will I know if one of my miners ever finds a block?

[danieleither]

I'm sure this question has been asked before, but I'm curious if I would ever know if one of my miners finds a block?

I'm running a mixture of Whatsminer and Antminer on F2POOL as follows:

24 x Whatsminer M31S+ 82T
24 x Antminer S17e 60T
18 x Antminer T17+ 58T
3 x Antminer S17+ 70T

Approx 4.8PH total (as the Whatsminer run well above their rated speed consistently (5T higher than rated) and the Antminers typically 1-2T higher than rated). Not enough to warrant solo-mining, although in theory I might find 2 blocks in a year (ignoring difficulty changes).

I suppose the most likely way of knowing would be if F2POOL send a notification - is that a thing?

[1680359905]

1680359905

[favebook]

You will if you check every miner's miner status page from time to time (or before you restart them or shut down) or your pool might have a feature which notifies you when you found a block (but I doubt F2Pool has this).

But since you are running PPS instead of Solo, does it really matter if you find a block?

[danieleither]

But since you are running PPS instead of Solo, does it really matter if you find a block?

It doesn't matter - but it would be interesting to know...

[mikeywith]

In fact, I doubt that any mining pool would notify you about your miner finding a block, especially if it's a PPS pool.

OP if you use monitoring software like Aweosmeminer you can add a trigger for block found detection like so



Although I wouldn't do that for gears that aren't solo mining, what is the point of blaming yourself wishing the gear that found the block was mining solo?  

[danieleither]

For me, mining is as much a hobby as it is an extra source of income. I have taken much pride and enjoyment in designing, planning and building my first 2 x (very small) farms so it would most certainly interest me to find out if one of my miners found a block, which in the grand scheme of blockchain is a big deal... To think that one of my miners beat millions of other machines around the world to solving the block puzzle etc... Call it novelty factor if you wish

I wouldn't be kicking myself because at <5PH, PPS / FPPS will always be a better option. Finding a block would be extremely lucky and I'm not daft enough to believe otherwise.

[philipma1957]

Reality is you would be fine if it took 2 years. But you would be Pissed if you hit 2 blocks in 10 days or so.

5 ph earns 0.00000792 btc a day x 5000 = 0.0396 a day or a block in about 22-23 weeks

so if you check it for 23 weeks and see 0 or 1 blocks cool.

and if you see  2 or 3 blocks fuck I screwed myself.

I can tell you no way do you know what the numbers would be after 23 weeks until the time passes.

[Biffa]

If you mined at kano.is it would show on the pools web site when you found a block. It shows on the blocks stats page and it show show many blocks you have found over time on the acclaim page.

Ckpool used to announce block finders, but I'm not sure if any record was kept on the web site.

Slush used to show when you did but not anymore since they switched to the new interface.

I guess any pool could log that information, but not many do these days.

[danieleither]

Well... I must have talked this up! I'm sure many will think this is 'sad', but I am immensely excited to see this today!

Ironically I was just flicking through my antminer guis looking at 'Bestshare' numbers, having discovered (from a different topic) that the 'bestshare' number is indirectly an indicator to how close a miner has been to finding a block, then I see this! No idea when this happened other than in the last 16 days (how long this unit has been running).

I can confirm I did not get any kind of notification from the pool, as others suggested would be the case. Still super-stoked about this though!



Is there any way I could find out which block this was? I realise it's meaningless to most, but this stuff really fascinates me. I'd love to know!

[mikeywith]

Yup your S17+ found a block with a share of 29112178806450, nothing to be surprised about because after all, all of these blocks are found by a single miner anyway.

Anyway I have a comment on your backup-pools, I understand why would want to have the 2nd pool the same as the first with the 1st but on a different port, but based on my experience once your miner loses connection to the pool it doesn't really matter what port you connect to, so in almost everything your miner loses pool 1 it will go directly to pool 3, and since these large pools don't always go down you will only collect dust in viabtc, so if you aren't mining at viabtc with other gears it might take you forever to be able to withdrawal the dust, I would suggest your backup pool be Cksolo pool just in case you hit a block while the primary pool is down.

[danieleither]

Yup your S17+ found a block with a share of 29112178806450

Could you help me understand exactly what this means (the "with a share of 29112178806450" part)? From this number, is there a way to determine which specific block my miner found?

I am very new to mining. 3 months ago I didn't even know what an Antminer was...

Anyway I have a comment on your backup-pools, I understand why would want to have the 2nd pool the same as the first with the 1st but on a different port, but based on my experience once your miner loses connection to the pool it doesn't really matter what port you connect to, so in almost everything your miner loses pool 1 it will go directly to pool 3, and since these large pools don't always go down you will only collect dust in viabtc, so if you aren't mining at viabtc with other gears it might take you forever to be able to withdrawal the dust, I would suggest your backup pool be Cksolo pool just in case you hit a block while the primary pool is down.

Once again - I'm still learning, one person advises you to do one thing, the next person will advise you something different... The person I bought my first miner from told me all 3 should be identical pool address but with worker names <name>.1, <name>.2, <name>.3 respectively!

If I remember correctly viaBTC have a very low payout threshold so it's pretty easy to withdraw 'dust' - that being said, in 2.5 months of mining, not once has any of my miners switched to viaBTC

[DaveF]

You miner found this block:

https://explorer.viawallet.com/btc/block/638655?page=1

If you look at the difficulty of the block it matches the number you are showing as the best share.

I'm sure there is an easier way to find it, I went though 2 block explorers. Started with btc.com and filtered by f2pool. The just show the 1st 4 digits of the difficulity xx.yy. Then the via explorer to confirm because on the detail page it gives the exact value.

-Dave

[mikeywith]

Once again - I'm still learning, one person advises you to do one thing, the next person will advise you something different... The person I bought my first miner from told me all 3 should be identical pool address but with worker names <name>.1, <name>.2, <name>.3 respectively!

I won't claim that I know better than whoever told you so, but use your common sense, when F2pool goes down for maintenance or DDOS attack or whatever reason, how will a different worker name make any difference when the whole pool is down? using the same pool on a different port as a back-up pool hardly makes sense, let alone using only a different user name.

If I remember correctly viaBTC have a very low payout threshold so it's pretty easy to withdraw 'dust'...

The minimum payout on Viabtc is 0.001, S17+ makes 0.000554 BTC a day as of today's difficulty, which means you need to mine for a total of 1.8 days or 43 hours on Viabtc in order to get to the minimum payout, based on your connectivity and F2pool stability it's almost impossible to get a total of 43 hours of mining on the back-up pool, it would take you years of mining, things will be better if you have more miners, but with difficulty rising you might not be able to withdrawal from Viabtc ever, so if you don't have another gear that uses viabtc as a primary pool, a solo pool as back up will be your best shot, it also helps with mining decentralization oneway or the other.

[...]

Well done, I doubt there is an easier way to find the block, and for privacy reasons, one shouldn't be sharing the block number/share because that may expose some details about them, I now know the F2pool username for member danieleither  , so if he wants to keep that private, he should change it.