[Guide] Solo mine testnet bitcoins with cgminer, Bitcoin Core, and a Compac F

[Nexus9090]

Aside from low hashrate, you probably better use solo mining pool (such as ckpool or kano) which supposed to offer better block propagation speed.

I know, alledgedly pools are supposed to have lower latency.

TBH I'm not so sure given I have a low latency GBit fibre connection to the internet I cant see why it'd be any less effective than a server in a data centre somewhere that only has a 400Mbit capped link tied to it. Unless the other bitcoin nodes are located in the same data centre, the latency between nodes would be similar.

Anyway, this was purely a fun experiment and technical exercise to see if I could get it to work.

I merged the changes from https://github.com/cmmodtools/cgminer into the last maintained version of cgminer 4.12.1 https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer/ and getting it to build, that was technical exercise 1.

Then the challenge was getting bitcoind running and accepting RPC connections for testnet, that worked ok then moving over to mainnet.

Once I'd figured that the named block in the config file was [main] not [MainNet] or [mainnet] it all started to work as it did for testnet, although it did take nearly 3 days to sync the blockchain.

Its been running overnight and statistically its performing similar to that of a pool looking at the volume of data exchanged and the current best share.

There's nothing presently that makes me think solo mining to a pool has any advantage, of course I dont know how things would perform should it hit a block and if the block would successfully propagate. Like I said it could be a very long time before I found out.


Never the less with that said, I guess it's easier to rely on someone else's technical expertise in setting up the bitcoind and maintaining the back-end of things.

[ABCbits]

Aside from low hashrate, you probably better use solo mining pool (such as ckpool or kano) which supposed to offer better block propagation speed.

I know, alledgedly pools are supposed to have lower latency.

TBH I'm not so sure given I have a low latency GBit fibre connection to the internet I cant see why it'd be any less effective than a server in a data centre somewhere that only has a 400Mbit capped link tied to it. Unless the other bitcoin nodes are located in the same data centre, the latency between nodes would be similar.

--snip--

Never the less with that said, I guess it's easier to rely on someone else's technical expertise in setting up the bitcoind and maintaining the back-end of things.

Aside from latency, i also hear claim that node run by mining pool connected to other node which belong to different mining pool and node run by major company. Anyway, i agree the biggest reason to use them is we don't have to setup and maintain stuff.

[Nexus9090]

Aside from latency, i also hear claim that node run by mining pool connected to other node which belong to different mining pool and node run by major company. Anyway, i agree the biggest reason to use them is we don't have to setup and maintain stuff.

I don't think the nodes connected to other nodes is any different to any other machine connecting to a server elsewhere on the net, it still has to traverse the same gateways, routers, switches and other network infrastructure.

Bitcoind looks like it handles all of the node to node connections automatically anyway. In that respect it looks no different from any other DNS lookup or TCP/IP communication.

Presently I just can't see anything to support the claim that mining solo to a pool is any better than mining directly to bitcoind beyond the fact that someone else has taken the time to set-up and maintain the pool and all the backend side of it reducing the initial technical hassles.

Once I have a couple more mining boards built, I'll point them at my bitcoind server and let them run indefinately, if by chance (and it is a remote chance) they hit a block I'll celebrate that here!

Cheers

G.

[BitcoinSoloMiner]

What needs to be changed for this to work on main net? Remove testnet=1 ?

I know I'm late to the party with this one but, for mainnet you have to change the [test] to [main] as well as removing testnet=1

Code:

txindex=1
server=1
[main]
rpcport=5000
rpcallowip=YOUR_MINER_IP
rpcuser=YOUR_RPC_USER
rpcpassword=YOUR_RPC_PASSWORD
rpcbind=0.0.0.0

Anyone's guess as to if it'll actually mine a valid block, but it does seem to be running.

Code:

[2024-05-28 14:41:03.526] Solo mining to valid address: 3MbtxahpbkC1fGhvcWR7Ja38u8cwN9wzY8

With 500GH/s pointed at it, I guess I'll be waiting a while to find out.  

Thanks for the reply, I am going to get a bitaxe supra I think and do this method. What is giving you 500G/H? How much power?

Goodluck!

[Nexus9090]

-SNIP-

Thanks for the reply, I am going to get a bitaxe supra I think and do this method. What is giving you 500G/H? How much power?

Goodluck!

I have something of my own creation a somewhat overclocked (725Mhz) BM1397 that averages 480GH/s, its using about 18Watts at the DC port including the power for the fan and the RaspberryPI Zero 2W thats controlling it.

Presently its pointing at CK pool, but I had it running on my local node for about a week without any issue.

Updating Kano's CGMiner is a bit of a chore but its achievable provided you follow the differences carefully.

Good luck!

[vjudeu]

A bash script to mine coins on derived addresses, to improve privacy:

Code:

$ cat mining4.sh 
nonce=0
while [ 1 ]
do
  numberofblocks=$(./bitcoin-cli -testnet4 getblockcount)
  address=$(./bitcoin-cli -testnet4 deriveaddresses "wpkh([badc0ded/84h/1h/0h]tpub.../0/*)#00000000" "[$numberofblocks,$numberofblocks]" | grep "tb1q")
  echo ./bitcoin-cli -testnet4 generatetoaddress 1 $address 100000000 > address.sh
  ./address.sh
  echo nonce: $nonce
  ((nonce=nonce+1))
done

Of course, instead of bitcoin-cli, the same trick can be used to mine on mining pools. However, note that many pools require producing at least N shares before paying anything, so make sure you produce enough, before you switch to some other address. But: as far as I understand it, that method of switching addresses seems to be good enough, right?

I also thought about mining on silent payment addresses, but I have to think about deriving it properly, because existing clients don't understand "sp1q" addresses.

[nullama]

~snip~
I merged the changes from https://github.com/cmmodtools/cgminer into the last maintained version of cgminer 4.12.1 https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer/ and getting it to build

Nice, I wonder if kano would be OK bringing those changes upstream.

At least for me, @kano branch of cgminer is the one that I use whenever I build cgminer after CKolivas stopped development.

Hopefully there is only one branch with all the required changes.

[Nexus9090]

~snip~
I merged the changes from https://github.com/cmmodtools/cgminer into the last maintained version of cgminer 4.12.1 https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer/ and getting it to build

Nice, I wonder if kano would be OK bringing those changes upstream.

At least for me, @kano branch of cgminer is the one that I use whenever I build cgminer after CKolivas stopped development.

Hopefully there is only one branch with all the required changes.

The changes aren't that difficult to do if you're careful patching them into the correct locations. If I recall most of it is in cgminer.c and there's only a handfull of functions that are affected.

I'm no expert on driving GIT otherwise I'd create my own branch with the adaptations already done.

I don't know if Kano is interested in porting in the GBT mods from cmmodtools, they released these updates quite a long time ago and its never made it back into the master branch.