Crypto currency mining

[moltuae]

My NiceHash payouts have been quite low throughout the latest China FUD related crash. It's recovered nicely in the last few days though now that confidence in the markets seems to have returned.

It is astonishing when you consider the amount of energy worldwide that is being used for cryptocurrency mining ... and it'll probably increase greatly as time goes on. Although hopefully developments in technology will continue to bring more efficient GPUs and ASICs.

That's a very good point about the traditional banking sector too. Hadn't thought of that. I bet that's an astronomical figure, if you add up the energy consumption of every bank and financial institution.

Algorithms such as Poof of Stake (PoS) have of course been developed as a replacement for Proof of Work (PoW), aka mining. In many ways though I think PoW is still a better solution, despite the increasing amounts of energy it requires. It means that every mined coin costs hundreds or thousands of pounds to make, giving it real value, which is more than can be said for most fiat currencies.

[ainarssems]

I think it's time for a update.

First about GPU's, -it's gone downhill a lot since July, mostly Ethereum mining but others a bit as well. Amd cards were making about £1.50 per day in July/August, now only about £0.80 but still consuming the same £0.40 in power consumption. The price of cards have also dropped on e-bay as well, looks like many are jumping off bandwagon and selling cards but not me, at least not for now. I guess it's hobbyists with 1 or 2 cards deciding it's not worth it and getting rid of them. I hope payouts will return when hashrate drops.

My Antminer L3+ has arrived. I tried calling UPS and paying import duties while the Antminer was still in transit in India on Tuesday and they would not accept payment until it landed in UK. 2 hrs later UPS man shows up at my door with invoice to pay, I explain him I already tried to pay without success. He says just keep once checking tracking status and landed in UK I can pay. So I paid over phone Wednesday morning about 9:30 and goods arrived around 10am. Checked it out, all looked good plugged in and started mining, all good so far. Wish I have bought more of them.

Also have been looking at getting S9, decided to go for it but Bitmain only accepts Bitcoin Cash payments for it at this time so I bailed out. I guess they have personal interest in Bitcoin Cash and are trying to promote it.

[ainarssems]

Since I got L3+ I have had itch to overclock it even if it voids warranty. So I have done a bit of online research and after a couple of days of stable running I decided to go for it. I have overclocked pretty much any CPU/GPU I have owned on desktops in the past(not servers or laptops) and so far only fried 1, it was back in 2004-2005 with Athlon XP 3200 when I tried to push too much voltage and it did not have any protection. Since then I have not killed anything keeping voltage sensible. As the L3+ only offers frequency change and nothing to do with voltage I thought it is fairly safe to do it as long as I keep temperatures low which should be achievable considering that S9 uses the same design consuming 1200W and L3+ is only 800W. Theoretically it voids the warranty but would Bitmain even know I overclocked( unless they read this post) and I expect it would be single chips or hashing boards failing first and not the whole thing so repair cost should be acceptable. Another factor is that there are other batches coming soon which will increase network hashrate and decrease payout so it makes sense to get as much as possible while I can.

To cut a long story short I have gone from 384MHz to 462MHz which increased hashrate from 500 to 600 and increased payout from £500/month to £600 while electricity costs went from £65/month to £80 so net increase in payout of £85. And temperature increase from 59C to 62C.

[moltuae]

Originally Posted by ainarssems

To cut a long story short I have gone from 384MHz to 462MHz which increased hashrate from 500 to 600 and increased payout from £500/month to £600 while electricity costs went from £65/month to £80 so net increase in payout of £85. And temperature increase from 59C to 62C.

Interesting. I think I might give overclocking a try too. Presumably all you did was make the frequency change in the L3's advanced settings?

I've noticed there seems to be a firmware bug in the units we have. The ASIC status will show failed ASIC chips (banks of 00000000 randomly change to xxxxxxxx after a day or two) yet the hash-rate is correct and the L3 seems to be functioning normally. Rebooting clears the fault flags. I haven't checked to see if there's a firmware update for them yet ...

I've had a new L3 mining via Prohashing for a few days now, though I'm probably going to point it to NiceHash's servers instead soon. Prohashing is a good alternative, and it has some great feature but, as expected, the earnings aren't as good as NiceHash's. It seems to be settling at around $15-$17 per day ...

[ainarssems]

Yes, just changed frequency in advanced settings. Hashrate stayed 0 for a couple of minutes so I restarted it and could not connect to it anymore, got a bit scared. Turned out DHCP has assigned different IP, changed it to static to avoid future issues and has been fine since. Never seen any Xs but I only had it for less than week and played around with it a bit so it has not been running for long periods at the time. It does get HW errors on 2 hashing boards but it did it before overclocking as well and it's not too much of them to affect actual hashrate much

Also funny thing it found 3 blocks on the first day and none since that. If I was solo mining that day it would have been 75 LTC- £3000+

[moltuae]

I get a lot of found blocks on the S9 some days, while using NiceHash, most likely when it's mining an SHA256 altcoin. I suspect it's the same with the L3. The blocks yours found may not be Litecoin blocks.

A small percentage of HW errors are considered normal. I'm not sure of the exact normal range but it's typically a fraction of one percent.

I think I'll try overclocking one of the L3s later. Why did you choose 462MHz?


Also, out of curiosity, what firmware version are you on?

Ours L3s state:

Hardware Version 1.0.1.1
Kernel Version Linux 3.8.13 #22 SMP Tue Dec 2 15:26:11 CST 2014

[ainarssems]

Did not think about altcoins, you are probably right about found blocks being for altcoins.

My firmware is :

Hardware Version 1.0.1.3
Kernel Version Linux 3.8.13 #22 SMP Tue Dec 2 15:26:11 CST 2014
File System Version Fri Aug 25 17:28:57 CST 2017

There is only 1 available to download from Bitmain and that is from the same day 25/08/2017 but 17:37 instead of 17:28 if I remember correctly.

I chose 462MHz because I found a post on internet somebody else successfully using that speed. When the weather gets colder I might try a bit higher.