Ethereum GPU mining?

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metalliax

Member
Jan 20, 2014
119
2
81
Ok I read some more, just to be sore of one thing. I'm using Etherum wallet with graphical interface which is connected with geth. I had wallet there I was using even before now trying to mine some. When I run the geth account list its showing the same wallets as my wallet soft. If I will solo mine will the coins be getting to one of those wallets? Also if yes is it a first one or how will it determine?

Thank you

If you solo-mine, you may need to run geth separately with the command, "geth --rpc". I don't know if the mist wallet runs geth this way. Then when you run ethminer, it will auto pull/sync with your running geth instance, mining to the default address, or coinbase, of your geth account.
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
So, how much money you guys making?

I'm up to 20 ETH now after about a week, that's including some downtime due to blown breakers (just like the old days lol). Will be adding a 970 to the mix sometime this week and if I can figure out how to get my old 2GB 5870 that will help a lot considering the amount of shaders on that thing.

I'm averaging around 90MH with 2 Fury X's and one MSI 390 so far.

Stock Fury X's much are more power efficient than my older stock 290's and definatley the MSI 390. KillWatt on my X99/5930K system which is a bit of a power hog is measuring just under 500W from the wall which I'm sure I could optimise to pull under 400W with undervolting. My old Bitcoin rig with dual 290's would pull 650+ unless undervolted so for now I'm not too concerned about consumption.

If things keep going the way they are I should have my MSI 390 paid off in another 3-4 weeks.
 

SimianR

Senior member
Mar 10, 2011
609
16
81
The Eth pool approximated earnings estimates that I pull in about $100 USD a month on an R9 290, which definitely isn't all that much, nowhere near what you could make at the end of 2013 and early 2014 with all the alt coins based off of Litecoin back then, but with power costs for me at being about $15-20 a month to run the GPU at 100%, it still makes me a decent enough profit. I guess you could mine and hold, I'm not sure what the long term outlook on Ethereum is though.
 

Crono

Lifer
Aug 8, 2001
23,720
1,501
136
Switched my GTX 970 from Windows 10 (anemic hashrate of ~8 MH/s on 10) to Xubuntu and on nanopool (ethereumpool.co/eth.pp.ua was down for a few hours - wonder if they are being DDoSed or something... may have to switch pools). Now getting ~17 MH/s without any tweaking of the clock speeds. Should have switched to Linux or Win 7 earlier, really, but I hadn't realized the gap was that large until I started looking at mining hardware comparisons.

11b42lw.png



Still working on building my dual R9 Nano system, but not going to be completed until next month since I'm building the case from scratch. I intend on using it for gaming and not just mining, though, so I'm not in an enormous rush.
 
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Crono

Lifer
Aug 8, 2001
23,720
1,501
136
The Eth pool approximated earnings estimates that I pull in about $100 USD a month on an R9 290, which definitely isn't all that much, nowhere near what you could make at the end of 2013 and early 2014 with all the alt coins based off of Litecoin back then, but with power costs for me at being about $15-20 a month to run the GPU at 100%, it still makes me a decent enough profit. I guess you could mine and hold, I'm not sure what the long term outlook on Ethereum is though.

I'd suggest everyone consider holding, at least half of what you earn. For up to 2 years or so, when many of the applications that are currently being developed should be ready for the public. Especially since the mining difficulty is going to spike to insanity mid summer (1 year after the launch) before the algorithm switches from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. I hope everyone does realize this is going to happen, because no one else mentioned it yet.

It's not entirely a waste to cash out some ether now in case it becomes valueless at some point in the future, but if there's even half or a quarter the kind of price jump Bitcoin saw a few years ago it might seem unwise after the fact, especially if 1 ether goes to the double or (dare I hope) even triple digits USD. And aside from just holding to gain interest after Casper/Serenity or holding speculatively, it would be cool (for me at least, can't speak for other miners) to try putting Ether into applications/platforms like Augur or others that have yet to come out. Probably don't need much to test or play around with, though, but I'm not sure if other IoT, FinTech, or smart contract applications we haven't heard or thought about yet will fuel demand.

EDIT: Current difficulty now above 13 TH

x1j4a9.jpg
 
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beginner99

Diamond Member
Jun 2, 2009
5,208
1,580
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So, how much money you guys making?

Sadly I just started mining, earlier would have been better. Also missed buying directly as a huge jump happened mid-january.

For me nothing really. This is a low-risk, high reward scenario. I should be able to get about 100 ether till mid-summer when mining gets unsustainable. If you get the same ridiculous price increase as with bitcoin in couple of years (eg 500 per ether), say 5-10 years that's then 50k USD for investing like $100 in power usage. And if that does not happen 100 ether would be about $400 now so it would pay for power and the GPU.

Above logic also makes me consider to buy directly. It's about $5 per ether now. If it spikes to $500 per ether you just made 100x. So invest $1000 to get 100k in 5 years. Not bad and if you lose all, you are not broke. For me sounds like a better deal than putting that $1000 into stocks.
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
FYI I wasn't able to figure out how to to run two independent mining instances on my Fury X's but I did overclock both of them to 1100Mhz / 545 Mem and they seem perfectly stable so far. The two cards together are now averaging around 65MH so around 32/33 each. Power usage went up around 100W but I'm using a 1KW Platitum EVGA power supply so plenty of room left. This reminds me of the old days of GPU mining when I started Bitcoins were worth $3.50 each lol.

Also FWIW I read up a lot on Etherium and I'm sold on the idea. I think it's much better suited for applications than the Bitcoin Blockchain ever will be. 17 second block times vs 10 minute solves lot of issues and the flexibility in the API and what you can run on the network is insane. Think secure Cloud services with no central infrastructure, this tech is perfectly built for IoT.

Anyways unlike the smart move I made a few years back cashing out 400 BTC when they hit $12 a coin! I'll be hanging onto my Eth ;)
 
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Headfoot

Diamond Member
Feb 28, 2008
4,444
641
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Anyways unlike the smart move I made a few years back cashing out 400 BTC when they hit $12 a coin! I'll be hanging onto my Eth ;)

Oh wow. That's gotta sting. I read a story about a guy who had mined ~7500 way back in the day when there were only CPU miners, well before it was mainstream, and he had done it on some old laptop he just set to mine. Put it into his personal wallet on that PC. Forgot about it and threw the thing away. And this story came out right when bitcoin peaked, so that guy was a sad panda.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site
 
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Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
Yeah it hurts but I did keep a good bunch and was one of the first groups to get the Bufferflylabs 60Ghz machines. Supports this hobby now anyway.
 
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Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
Oh wow. That's gotta sting. I read a story about a guy who had mined ~7500 way back in the day when there were only CPU miners, well before it was mainstream, and he had done it on some old laptop he just set to mine. Put it into his personal wallet on that PC. Forgot about it and threw the thing away. And this story came out right when bitcoin peaked, so that guy was a sad panda.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/27/hard-drive-bitcoin-landfill-site

That's horrible. 7500! Makes my mistake a little easier to live with hehe.
 

reb0rn

Senior member
Dec 31, 2009
221
58
101
I am dumping all ETH, would never hold anything that is 90% premined! 70 millions of eth was premined and own by few!
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
I think he is talking about the presale. It's was how they crowd funded money to develop Ethereum. The problem with his line of thinking is that, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum doesn't have a finite amount of coins that can be mined.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/08/05/bitbeat-ethereum-presale-hits-12-7-million-tally/

Ahh, right the kick-starter. I can see how this would turn some people off from it but like you stated there's no finite amount that can be mined like Bitcoin so over time this should become less of an issue. IIRC a huge number of BTC is also owned by whoever Satoshi is.
 

Crono

Lifer
Aug 8, 2001
23,720
1,501
136
I am dumping all ETH, would never hold anything that is 90% premined! 70 millions of eth was premined and own by few!

I'm pro-mining (obviously) but Ethereum isn't a scam coin*solely designed to make the developers profit. I think it's perfectly acceptable that Ethereum was premined in order to sell in an IPO fashion (60 million, in a public sale) and that another 12 million was kept for the developers. They aren't doing the work for charity, though obviously they do believe in the technology of the blockchain (ALL PRAISE BE UNTO THE BLOCKHAIN :p) and smart contracts. A good portion of the pre-mining goes into funding development; Ethereum isn't a small project, so it's not unreasonable to expect that they need some funds in order to run the foundation and continue working on it. Also, it was pretty clear long before mining started that this was the situation and it's not as if they pulled a bait-and-switch.

Ethereum was created to be used, not just mined, which is why the mining - which does use up a lot of energy at the type of mining scale you see with Bitcoin, especially as difficulty increases - is effectively being phased out in a few months by the switch to a Proof-of-Stake algorithm.

And let's not pretend that mining is any more egalitarian in nature than buying or converting a currency to Ether. It takes money for parts or systems and resources (mainly electricity, but also cooling if scaling up). Yes, it's a hobby and can be fun and interesting, but it's not necessarily less expensive than buying Ether outright. It can be significantly more expensive, actually, if you don't have the ability to deploy or convert cheap mining rigs over to ether mining or don't have access to cheap(er) electricity. And those who are interested in mining are given the opportunity to do so now; nothing is stopping you or anyone else with the necessary hardware and knowledge from getting into a gold rush mentality and mining like crazy right now. Yes, those who literally bought into Ether early are at a greater advantage, but that's no wrong than early miners being rewarded for mining before difficulty spikes.

I don't think pre-mining is significantly worse than being able to mine very early at low difficulty as many developers have been able to do with their respective cryptocurrencies. Especially if it's made clear early on in the development process, before release and the genesis block. You are free to disagree and not participate, though I think you'll be missing out. Ethereum isn't just a cryptocurrency designed for speculation.

But if you want to give away your Ether in an act of protest, I'm more than happy to relieve you of your Ether. ;) Let me know, I'll post my address.


* Not that I can be 100% sure of this, but the amount of development thus far makes it unlikely to be a short term pump-and-dump scheme, at least
 
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Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
Anyone mining at DwarfPool?

I tried switching from nanopool to dwarfpool but getting the following error...

"Found suitable OpenCL device [Fiji] with 4294967296 bytes of GPU memory
miner 14:36:29|main Getting work package...
X 14:36:29|main Failed to submit hashrate.
X 14:36:29|main Dynamic exception type: class jsonrpc::JsonRpcException
std::exception::what: Exception -32003 : Client connector error: libcurl error: 52"

So failed to submit hashrate?

I've kept it simple to just what Dwarfpool recommends..

"ethminer.exe -G -F http://eth-eu.dwarfpool.com:80/YOUR_WALLET"

Do you have to specify your hashrate?
 

Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
5,182
7,633
136
You'll get that error if you can't connect to the farm server. Double check the address.