Ethereum GPU mining?

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Feld

Senior member
Aug 6, 2015
287
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101
i wonder if folks with power hungry r9 3x0s (such as myself) will shut down out as profitability drops to negative income. if they dont replace them with 4x0s or 10x0s the difficulty may not rise as fast as it is now,

im hoping to hold out till pos hits before i have to drop out.
If the price of ether continues to go up then the 200 and 300 series cards will remain profitable up until the switch. 2/3 of my mining cards are still Hawaii cards and it's still very profitable for me. Only those with very expensive electricity may find themselves having to make a choice, as long as ether price continues to rise.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
i wonder if folks with power hungry r9 3x0s (such as myself) will shut down out as profitability drops to negative income. if they dont replace them with 4x0s or 10x0s the difficulty may not rise as fast as it is now,

im hoping to hold out till pos hits before i have to drop out.

The first major shutdown comes in or around December when the DAG grows too large to fit into 2 Gb of VRAM. Unless the mining clients get some kind of an update to permit their continued operation, those cards will have to go offline.

Right now I run some of my 290/390 cards at around 900 MHz to save on power, and if difficulty keeps getting worse, I may take the rest of mine in the same direction. Efficiency is generally higher around those points.
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
Thanks for the replies on the pools. The difficulty is climbing faster than I expected. 390's can be undervolted quite a bit where you can generate approximately 110 - 115mh @ 900W or less with 4 cards. This is still profitable but probably not for much longer. Writing is on the wall for them. For compariaon a 6 card reference 480 setup with the 29Mh low power BIOS's will generate 170Mh using the same amount of power. Big difference.

I've sold off half my 390's and outsourced the remaining rigs. Once profitability completely dries up I'll sell the remaining cards. At least the 390's all ROI'd for me so any profit now is just bonus money. Hopefully all my 480's also ROI but hard to tell right now. No way my 1070 will ROI but I expected as much, mining Ether will probably pay for half if lucky which is still awesome.

For anyone new to the game, don't expect to fully ROI at the current or projected difficulty rates. If Ether price shoot's up there's still a good chance but that may take a while.
 

VeryCharBroiled

Senior member
Oct 6, 2008
387
25
101
Right now I run some of my 290/390 cards at around 900 MHz to save on power, and if difficulty keeps getting worse, I may take the rest of mine in the same direction. Efficiency is generally higher around those points.

going to have to lower my 390s and 380 speeds and under volt soon as well. the windows 390 will be easy, the ubuntu 390/380 can reduce speed via software easy but under volt need a bios flash :(

the cards have almost made roi and i plan to keep the for 390s for xfire and the 380 itx for my htpc, so im pretty happy even if they dont make a profit.
 
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tracerit

Senior member
Nov 20, 2007
457
1
81
hey guys, having some issues sending my ETH to another user. I created my account through geth first. placed geth.exe in C:/

I then used Claymore's miner but this is located on the desktop. I plugged the address I obtained through geth into the start.bat file in Claymore's directory.

When I came here to try to send the ETH, the address that geth.exe pulls up is different than the address from Claymore miner. Any ideas?
 

wege12

Senior member
May 11, 2015
291
33
91
I just updated to the latest AMD drivers and my Fury X's hasrate fell by almost 50%. Is there any way to restore my normal hashrate of about 32-34 MH/s while also staying on the latest drivers?

Thanks
 

Pete_69

Junior Member
May 28, 2016
14
0
6
Hi all, is it safe to flash bios every day. Reason I`m asking is last night flashed my RX480 reference to high power bios mod, totally awesome btw, 31Mhs, but it is very loud for a home pc and is unstable for playing games on. So want to know if i could flash to the original 1 for the day and then the high power 1 at night.
 

Raduque

Lifer
Aug 22, 2004
13,141
138
106
I'm seeing some odd issues on my miner. Mining is fine (other than the difficulty jump brought me down by almost 2 Mh/s), but when I'm running the Ether wallet, system responsiveness is pretty much zero. geth is maxing out my hard drive read/write and using 4 of 6gb of ram. It's so bad that the mouse cursor doesn't even move smoothly. The wallet app itself meanwhile is completely stalled out. No syncing, and it seems to crash/reload (the window goes black and comes back).

Is it just me, or is this program kind of junk?
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
I'm seeing some odd issues on my miner. Mining is fine (other than the difficulty jump brought me down by almost 2 Mh/s), but when I'm running the Ether wallet, system responsiveness is pretty much zero. geth is maxing out my hard drive read/write and using 4 of 6gb of ram. It's so bad that the mouse cursor doesn't even move smoothly. The wallet app itself meanwhile is completely stalled out. No syncing, and it seems to crash/reload (the window goes black and comes back).

Is it just me, or is this program kind of junk?

Geth is running poorly due to the ongoing attacks causing the problems you're describing. Switch to Parity.

Here's a video on how to switch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOo3_aSXoZE
 
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Raduque

Lifer
Aug 22, 2004
13,141
138
106
Geth is running poorly due to the ongoing attacks causing the problems you're describing. Switch to Parity.

Here's a video on how to switch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOo3_aSXoZE
Why would an attack on a network destroy local I/O (hdd and RAM usage are both saturated)?

Edit: Followed the instructions in the video. Is geth still supposed to be running alongside parity when you launch the wallet?
 
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VeryCharBroiled

Senior member
Oct 6, 2008
387
25
101
geth is maxing out my hard drive read/write and using 4 of 6gb of ram. It's so bad that the mouse cursor doesn't even move smoothly. The wallet app itself meanwhile is completely stalled out. No syncing, and it seems to crash/reload (the window goes black and comes back).

grabbed 12 gigs out of 16 on my rig. cpu wasnt bad maybe 25% (3570k) and mouse was ok. but the blockchain is on a ssd, so that helps.

took like 2-3 minutes a block, so i just bailed on it. ill wait till the mist/geth combo goes up. im to lazy to go parity or the fixed geth.
 
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dark zero

Platinum Member
Jun 2, 2015
2,655
138
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So... In resumen, how we are giving on the Ethereum mining on AMD cards?

And what happened to their nVIDIA counterpart?
 

Shmee

Memory & Storage, Graphics Cards Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 13, 2008
7,381
2,415
146
A 1070 mines well, the 1060 also quite well I hear. Not sure about the 1080, IDK if it still has issues because of the GDDR5X. Would be nice if someone could try it with latest claymore and drivers.
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
Why would an attack on a network destroy local I/O (hdd and RAM usage are both saturated)?

Edit: Followed the instructions in the video. Is geth still supposed to be running alongside parity when you launch the wallet?

I'm not exactly sure how Parity takes over from Geth. I believe when you launch Parity with the --Geth flag and then run Mist Wallet, Mist drops Geth for Parity to sync to the Blockchain. I don't think both should be running at the same time (Geth and Parity) as that would cause a conflict in the Blockchain download.

The Geth protocol is being exploited for weaknesses. I don't pretend to understand how this is happening or why the attacks cause memory leaks and I/O issues but it has been a cat and mouse game for a few weeks (exploits and then patches).

My advice for now is if you only need wallet access / storage / creation just drop Mist until this mess is figured out. Go with MyEtherWallet, it works great let's you import existing Mist wallets. Yes it's a web client (so is Mist really) but pretty safe to use. Or you can use the Chrome plugin. The important thing to note is your private keys to your wallet are never transferred anywhere.

Everything is computed client side in the browser. You can even disconnect your WiFi/Ethernet after the page loads and operate it until needing to send Ether or run a contract.

https://www.myetherwallet.com

I know this seems bad (and it is) but all of these exploits are tightening up the security of the protocols. In land of fortune 500's this type of security testing can cost companies hundreds of thousands dollars.

Also seriously consider buying a hardware wallet if you're amassing a good amount of Ether/Bitcoin. It's never a good idea to store more then a few hundred worth of crypto on a PC.
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
grabbed 12 gigs out of 16 on my rig. cpu wasnt bad maybe 25% (3570k) and mouse was ok. but the blockchain is on a ssd, so that helps.

took like 2-3 minutes a block, so i just bailed on it. ill wait till the mist/geth combo goes up. im to lazy to go parity or the fixed geth.


If you watch the YouTube link it's really easy to get Parity going. But if you can wait it out, don't worry about it ;)
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
A 1070 mines well, the 1060 also quite well I hear. Not sure about the 1080, IDK if it still has issues because of the GDDR5X. Would be nice if someone could try it with latest claymore and drivers.

Agreed. Rx 470 4GB cards are still the best cards price/performance for mining (and don't suffer as much Ether loss if dual mining) but if you want to earn a few bucks the 1060/70 work well now with Claymore and Windows 10. I just wouldn't build a farm out of them.
 

VeryCharBroiled

Senior member
Oct 6, 2008
387
25
101
If you watch the YouTube link it's really easy to get Parity going. But if you can wait it out, don't worry about it ;)

thanks, saw that today. it is easy to run parity in geth mode. but it needs to download like 3+ gigs of data for the initial run as the blockchains have have formats. that would take forever and a day with my 1.5 Mbit/sec 3g modem (no cable/dsl here).

there also seems to be an option in geth to export the blockchain and then an option in parity to import it. might give it a shot but im in no hurry. ill likely just wait it out.
 

EightySix Four

Diamond Member
Jul 17, 2004
5,121
49
91
I thought I would help clarify some things for a few of you that have had questions regarding the RAM and I/O usage for the latest DoS attacks on the Ethereum network to help you understand why it's doing what it is doing, what's being done about it, and what needs to change to keep it from happening again.

The difference between most blockchain technologies and Ethereum is that Ethereum allows the execution of contracts on the chain. Contracts are essentially applications, they're written in a programming language called Solidity, and as a miner/node you are executing those contracts. All of the miners together are coming to consensus on the output of the contract, and then the results are being written to the chain.

A contract can be as simple as "send ETH from user a to user b" and as complicated as you can imagine. Not only this, but you can CALL one contract from another contract and use the results from one in the other, essentially like an API. This allows things to be built on Ethereum which are simply not possibly elsewhere. It's a pretty neat technology when you think about it.

To pay miners for this work, executing a contract costs gas. "A" gas is 1/100,000 of an ETH. The amount of gas a contract costs is based on the complexity of the code in the contract. An attacker has realized that some of this code takes more computational resources than the gas cost would imply. So he's spending very little gas but it's causing all of the miners who evaluate it to spend a lot of time computing it, essentially slowing down/DoS attacking the network.

Geth is constantly being updated to help handle these attacks by introducing caching layers to bring the computational value closer to the gas cost. Each time a new update is put out, a different attack vector has been put in place. Long term, ETH will probably have a protocol update fork (multiple are already planned for things like Proof of Stake) which increases the gas prices of certain functions or implements a kind of static computational analysis of contracts to set a gas cost.

Why is the attacker doing it? Well it appears the attacker is mining with a black list in place to ignore their computationally expensive transactions, cheating the system to mine faster than everyone else who is stuck with their junk transactions in the blocks.

And as I wrote this a new version of Geth was released to help mitigate almost all of the potential attacks using state journaling.
 
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VeryCharBroiled

Senior member
Oct 6, 2008
387
25
101
dropped in geth 1.4.16 on windows, so far, so good with mist. memory holding about 6 gigs out of 16 . cpu around 40% with the occasional spikes to 100% on a 3570k. importing blocks about one or two per second.

just run geth.exe 1st, then run mist. mist uses the new geth automagically.
 
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Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
I thought I would help clarify some things for a few of you that have had questions regarding the RAM and I/O usage for the latest DoS attacks on the Ethereum network to help you understand why it's doing what it is doing, what's being done about it, and what needs to change to keep it from happening again.

The difference between most blockchain technologies and Ethereum is that Ethereum allows the execution of contracts on the chain. Contracts are essentially applications, they're written in a programming language called Solidity, and as a miner/node you are executing those contracts. All of the miners together are coming to consensus on the output of the contract, and then the results are being written to the chain.

A contract can be as simple as "send ETH from user a to user b" and as complicated as you can imagine. Not only this, but you can CALL one contract from another contract and use the results from one in the other, essentially like an API. This allows things to be built on Ethereum which are simply not possibly elsewhere. It's a pretty neat technology when you think about it.

To pay miners for this work, executing a contract costs gas. "A" gas is 1/100,000 of an ETH. The amount of gas a contract costs is based on the complexity of the code in the contract. An attacker has realized that some of this code takes more computational resources than the gas cost would imply. So he's spending very little gas but it's causing all of the miners who evaluate it to spend a lot of time computing it, essentially slowing down/DoS attacking the network.

Geth is constantly being updated to help handle these attacks by introducing caching layers to bring the computational value closer to the gas cost. Each time a new update is put out, a different attack vector has been put in place. Long term, ETH will probably have a protocol update fork (multiple are already planned for things like Proof of Stake) which increases the gas prices of certain functions or implements a kind of static computational analysis of contracts to set a gas cost.

Why is the attacker doing it? Well it appears the attacker is mining with a black list in place to ignore their computationally expensive transactions, cheating the system to mine faster than everyone else who is stuck with their junk transactions in the blocks.

And as I wrote this a new version of Geth was released to help mitigate almost all of the potential attacks using state journaling.

Wow thanks for the detailed response.

"Why is the attacker doing it? Well it appears the attacker is mining with a black list in place to ignore their computationally expensive transactions, cheating the system to mine faster than everyone else who is stuck with their junk transactions in the blocks."

I want to learn more about this attack vector, this is the first time I've heard about this. Crazy.

This also kind of explains the wild swings I'm getting on my mining pool. I get the caching techniques but maybe in addition the mining pool servers be upgraded to handle the extra load until we eventually fork?

Early days for Ethereum yet :)
 

Madpacket

Platinum Member
Nov 15, 2005
2,068
326
126
dropped in geth 1.4.16 on windows, so far, so good with mist. memory holding about 6 gigs out of 16. cpu around 40% with the occasional spikes to 100% on a 3570k. importing blocks about one or two per second.

just run geth.exe 1st, then run mist. mist uses the new geth automagically.

Seems like a nice improvement but when you think about it we shouldn't need that many resources to execute contracts on a blockchain. I don't see an easy way to fix this, we're going to need to fork again soon with some better guard rails in place to prevent these attacks.