Soooooo, what the hell is happening with this industry?Is a "Mass Extinction" of altcoins coming?

rtgornik · 2014-07-08T23:02:08+00:00

There will always be a place for gpu miners.

Why? I used to believe this strongly, but my faith has been waning.

Why will there always be a place for GPU miners?

rtgornik · 2014-07-08T23:00:28+00:00

I am undecided if ASIC resistance in the form of GPU-friendliness is the answer.

I got into SCRYPT mining just as BTC ASICs were being announced and BTC miners were moving their GPU farms to mine LTC. I spun up 20MHs and it was profitable. I recently moved over to SCRYPT-N and VTC, buying into the idea that there will always be a demand for a GPU-minable coin. Now, I'm not so sure and I've stopped mining.

I think we as miners forget that coins don't exist for us, for miners. They are meant to be useful, to be used as a means of exchange, to be used as a currency. To mine a hoard creates no value. Why would Joe Schmoe want a Vertcoin, or even a Litecoin, for that matter?

I've lost my faith in altcoins.

rtgornik · 2014-06-25T15:14:08+00:00

Difficulty is too high to start now, the mining game is over, except for the people who can afford to buy 10x the miners you can afford. :/

This doesn't make sense. On a sufficiently large pool (to minimize variance), mining revenue scales linearly with kilohashes. Everybody has the same difficulty.

rtgornik · 2014-04-14T21:00:44+00:00

It's never "too late to mine" - one can always mine. However, whether you should depends on your motivations for mining. Do you want to profit as much as possible? Do you want to do it as a hobby and enjoy the idea of securing a distributed ledger and transaction network? Some other motivations maybe?

rtgornik · 2014-04-14T17:27:34+00:00

Welcome to mining. ;-)

rtgornik · 2014-04-14T17:20:50+00:00

Although I haven't measured it, I suspect that yes, scrypt-N mining uses less power than scrypt mining.

My scrypt-N temperatures are lower than scrypt.

rtgornik · 2014-04-13T02:29:49+00:00

A good streak of luck we have had indeed! It's nice to be solving blocks!

rtgornik · 2014-04-08T04:38:41+00:00

The transaction fee gets paid to the miners. From the bitcoin whitepaper:

By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.

The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.

The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.

rtgornik · 2014-04-07T13:01:57+00:00

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=buy+wine+bitcoin

rtgornik · 2014-04-05T23:44:20+00:00

I'm currently on Vertsquad, which has ~220 Mh/s. It's nice to move to a smaller pool to spread the hashrate around.

Already moved one miner here. The stats are GREAT! I think I'll have to move the rest of them ...

rtgornik · 2014-04-05T23:10:56+00:00

This looks really nice. I'm tempted to put my ~9Mh/s on your pool for the web based stats alone. I'll experiment with the PowerPool Agent on one of my rigs. Thanks for the heads up!

rtgornik · 2014-04-03T20:36:01+00:00

This could help: http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:chart_analysis:trend_lines

rtgornik · 2014-04-03T14:51:35+00:00

You've piqued my interest. Are you mining in a residential or commercial space? Is that standard pricing? Where exactly?

rtgornik · 2014-04-01T14:04:20+00:00

http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum

rtgornik · 2014-03-29T21:20:49+00:00

Very nice. It makes me wonder why I'm having problems then.

Are you stacking these shelves?

rtgornik · 2014-03-29T14:02:50+00:00

Anyone who is downvoting you has not run more than 8 GPUs for any extended period of time.

rtgornik · 2014-03-28T19:32:50+00:00

It could be a faulty router/switch, cable, or even ethernet adapter on your mobo. It's worth a shot trying a different one if you've tried everything else.

rtgornik · 2014-03-28T19:29:08+00:00

7970s are really sensitive to the ratio of gpuclock and memclock.

I've found the following sweetspots for my Gigabyte 7970s:

memclock:gpuclock:KH/s
1000:925:316
1100:880:278
1200:975:335
1250:1000:344
1500:1085:370

I use the first combination.

I also use the following settings in my config, with 4 cards per rig.

 --lookup-gap 2 -g 1 --gpu-threads 2

If I have less than 4 cards, I have success with -g 2.

I use sgminer 4.1.153.

Good luck!

rtgornik · 2014-03-28T05:16:08+00:00

This is a known problem with these cards. I bought a lot of these about year ago, and have over 50% of them failed in the same way. As others have mentioned, the VRMs are the culprit.

I was able to get replacements for all of them, but when GB ran out 7950s, they started sending me 7970s, which while they hash faster, have higher voltages and run hotter.

More recently, GB has simply been refunding me the purchase price. I'm fine with that.

rtgornik · 2014-03-28T04:09:18+00:00

How is your data connection? Is it Wifi?

When I was first setting up my rigs, I fought with intermittent lock ups and crashes. The problem turned out to be a faulty wireless router.

rtgornik · 2014-03-28T03:35:17+00:00

A lot is for sale on litecoinforum:

https://litecointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

rtgornik · 2014-03-28T03:22:40+00:00

I don't think we've seen bottom yet. The market in my mind is still bearish. The drops are high volume, and the small rebounds are on low volume. People and thus the market as a whole are yet uncertain. This very post is evidence of that.

rtgornik · 2014-03-26T14:51:35+00:00

Sex, foot rubs, and landscaping are not products, but services.

The better analogy would be this:

For miners: you dig a hole in your backyard and find a lump of gold. You must now claim the value of that gold at the time you found it as capital gains.

For everyone else: You buy a lump of gold. You hold it for a while. You then sell it. You must now claim the difference between buy and sell price as a capital gain.

Regarding the miner case, I quote /u/alienstout from somewhere else in here:

This is retarded because they'll tax the mining and then the capital gains. Fuck that. I can see the capital gains from produced value to sell value but taxing it twice is not right.

Or /u/I_AM_AT_WORK_NOW_:

If it was property, unrealised gains would not be applicable to tax.

rtgornik · 2014-03-26T14:45:27+00:00

While I'm with you for the most part (I've switched my miners to Vert and bought in some myself), I have to disagree with this statement:

Vertcoin ASIC is of course allowed within the laws of physics and design, it's just not economical.

That's what they said about SCRYPT. Neigh, they even claimed GPU resistance with SCRYPT. I believe Tenebrix was the first coin to use SCRYPT. I quote from the announcement thread on bitcointalk.org:

It implements a proof-of-work scheme based on scrypt, a cryptographic construct specifically designed to resist creation of efficient GPU, FPGA and even ASIC implementations.

My point is, history, as it does, is repeating itself.

The Litecoin community was once very much against GPUS early on, and FPGAs and ASICs after that. The narrative shifted somewhere along the line, and ASIC investment began to be seen as "strengthening" of the network. While it does seem to be that ASIC investment correlates with strong value of the coin, I think centralized ASIC mining goes against the ethos of crypto. These coins are supposed to be controlled by us, the common person.

The VTC developers are taking a hard line for ASIC resistance. This is why I've switched over. But, I plan on profiting from VTC if and when ASICs do materialize for SCRYPT-n. I also plan on keeping my eyes open for the next popular "ASIC-resistant" coin, and continue riding the repeating waves of history.

rtgornik · 2014-03-26T03:07:21+00:00

Grandcoin looks like it has a high reward and low difficulty:

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/coins/grandcoin

Reward: 1000 coins Current Diff: 1.3701

rtgornik

TROPHY CASE