Last week I found what I felt was a reasonable
deal on a Bitcoin ASIC, so I decided to give it a try and bought a
couple Bitmain
AntMiner S1 ASICs. Each is good for 180GH/s SHA256, or when
overclocked around 400GH/s combined. At a price of about 1BTC each, I thought
it was worth a shot. Now I'm thinking I may be lucky to break even.
Let me run some numbers for you.
Lately, like since about March of 2013, Bitcoin has been pretty
consistent about increasing in difficulty by 20% or so every 12
days. In fact, I can do one better and say that the average increase
every 2016 blocks since last March is... wait for it... 23.73%.
That's pretty massive when you think about it, and it's the reason
why difficulty has gone from 6,695,826 on March 24, 2014 to a
staggering 5,006,860,589 today. Put another way, the difficulty --
and thus the returns for mining -- have changed by a factor of nearly
750. And what's worse: there's no sign of slowing down just yet.
So let's take a closer look at the AntMiner S1. At a price of $600
(around 1 BTC), assuming you have spare power supplies and
everything else you need, we can get a pretty good idea of your
profit estimates using any number of online calculators. Personally,
I think the calculator
over at BitcoinWisdom is one of the best, and it's what I
used. Since I now have my AntMiner S1 ASICs up and running, I know
power, performance, etc. With the current difficulty and running at
400GH (overclocked) with a power draw of 850W, my two AntMiners are
looking at the following scenarios:
1) 15% difficulty increase every 2016 blocks = 233 days before the
power costs outweigh the income. I can make around $454 in that time
off my ~$1200 investment. This is basically the "best case"
scenario.
2) 20% difficulty increase every 2016 blocks = 177 days before it's
no longer worth mining. I'll only earn about $70 off my investment.
3) 23% difficulty increase every 2016 blocks = 163 days before I
should stop mining; I'll lose $82 based on current prices.
Now, obviously the price of BTC is the big wild card. If we see
$1000+ again, and I think we will some time in the next 9 months, I
easily earn back far more than the initial investment. If we take a
nose dive on the other hand and don't recover, I stand to lose even
more of my investment. So it's a risk, but a calculated one. And in
another 10 days or so when the difficulty jumps up 20%, things start
looking even worse. At $600 for an S1, you'd stand to lose $70 in
the "reasonable" 20% increase scenario -- a swing of $140 in just 10 days (and the reason ASIC prices are tumbling).
If you're thinking, "Okay, but the AntMiner is a 55nm ASIC -- what
you need to look at is a good 28nm ASIC," well, you're only partially correct.
If you took a chance and pre-ordered a Terraminer IV a while
back, you're rolling in the BTC right now. If you order one right now from
the June batch however, let's be optimistic and say you get it in 60
days (before the end of May). With difficulty jumps of 20%, you'd
end up losing half your investment! Even smaller 15% increases would still result in a loss of over $1000. That's a pretty
sobering thought -- one of the fastest, most efficient BTC ASICs right
now is looking like a terrible risk for future buyers; either price needs to come down or difficulty needs to stabilize. BTC prices basically need to double for
you just to break even, and the rate of difficulty increases
will likely slow down before then, but be careful.
What about the scrypt ASICs? Well, Alpha Technologies is now
promising 90MH instead of 25MH, which is pretty great to hear.
Depending on when the hardware arrives and the difficulty at that
time, however, it's not looking so hot. Let's say it ships in just
60 days (which is very aggressive). At a moderate 5% increase in
difficulty every LTC cycle that would mean mining LTC would never recover
the initial investment cost. Even if we assume you can beat LTC
returns by 50%, you'd still only make about $1850 on the $10,000
investment. I suspect those who pre-ordered the first batch will do
pretty well, but the future (most likely) second and third batch orders are far more suspect.
The big problem with ASICs of course is that once it becomes
unprofitable to mine with them, they're essentially useless. With a
PC, you can at least use it to run Windows (or Linux or whatever if
that's your thing), play games, do real work, etc. You might not
need dozens of GPUs, but you can at least recover some of
the initial investment. Perhaps you'll find some people willing to
buy your outdated BTC ASICs as well, but I'd expect very low prices
at best.
In short, ASICs are mostly going to make a lot of money for the
people selling the ASICs, not for those buying the ASICs. It's the
Gold Rush all over again, where the real winners are the people
supplying the miners. It will certainly be interesting to see where
pricing and difficulty stabilize over the coming months, but don't
be surprised if a lot of the Scrypt ASICs turn out to be losing
propositions. Unless of course we see a repeat of last November
where prices shot up 20X on Litecoin in only a week or so, which is
what we're all probably hoping to see. :-)
There's more available in the newsletter, as usual. Just let me know you'd like to start your subscription with the 3/26 email and I'll make sure you get it!
In-depth testing and reviews of graphics cards and related technologies, focusing on performance across numerous generations of hardware. Gaming benchmarks galore, plus AI and professional testing on occasion, to show the best value GPUs right now.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Monday, March 24, 2014
Mining with GPUs for GPUs?
Have you heard about GPUcoin (GPUC)? It's an interesting idea that could have been a killer and made GPUC mining something worth
doing... except the whole alt-coin market is going soft, and with less
profitability comes lower demand for GPUs, which leads to lower
prices. In short, after peaking at prices of $420 for R9 280X, $550+
for R9 290, and $700+ for R9 290X, we're starting to see a return to
sanity on GPU pricing. So let me start off with some quick GPU pricing links that
might be of interest:
Radeon R7 240: Newegg starts at $65
Radeon R9 270: Amazon starts at $209; Newegg starts at $179
Radeon R9 270X: Amazon starts at $229; Newegg starts at $199
Radeon R9 280: (Can't find on Amazon); Newegg starts at $289
Radeon R9 280X: Amazon starts at $329; Newegg starts at $349
Radeon R9 290: Amazon starts at $439; Newegg starts at $459
Radeon R9 290X: Amazon starts at $569; Newegg starts at $579
The reason those prices are important is that we can now buy some of those GPUs using GPUC -- but how much does it end up saving...or costing!? Here are the current GPUC prices for the R7 240 (don't bother...), R9 270, and R9 280X. Yes, the R9 280X they have on offer is a nice Sapphire TOXIC, but performance won't be all that different from other R9 280X GPUs if you know what you're doing. Right now, you'll have to pay about 32 satoshis per GPUC in order to buy enough coins for a GPU (though that could obviously change). The good news is that you could now build a capable miner for about $1500 instead of $1900, though at the current rates you'd still be looking at four months or more to break even on the investment. But what about buying graphics cards with GPUC?
[Note: Prices and difficulty for GPUC are jumping around like jackrabbits, so take the following as a snapshot in time rather than a "this is the way it will always be" statement.]
The only way this gets worked out and GPUC thrives is if they can go and purchase a bunch more GPUs at well below the MSRP (which would mean below $299 for the 280X). Then they can take a bit of a loss on the ones they already purchased and end up delivering GPUs at a reasonable price. It would actually be super cool to go buy new hardware with GPUC (or BTC), especially if the price was below normal online pricing, but that would take a lot of work and a big warehouse to store inventory I suspect.
I should note that the GPUcoin store also has an open market where users can sell items. This is getting closer to the ideas above, but it's more like eBay with additional risk -- you send your GPUC, then have to wait/hope you didn't get scammed. And if you don't receive the product you orders, TOO BAD! Mwahahaha.... Yeah, I'd be a little leery at the least. If you're curious about pricing, though, someone is offering a 2MH scrypt rig for 10M GPUC -- that works out to about $1850. Buying the same hardware online (5x R9 270, ASRock H81 mobo, 4GB RAM, Intel Celeron CPU, 1000W PSU, 5 x16 risers, and a power button) will set you back about $1500. So sadly, no, there are not good deals to be had there right now it seems. And if you actually want to buy 10 million or more GPUC fast, you'd probably pay at least 25% more than the price I've just quoted.
As an alternative, you can already go through Gyft.com and buy a $10-$2000 Amazon.com gift card with Bitcoins, and then you could buy GPUs that way -- or anything else you might want to buy at Amazon. (And you get 3 Gyft points back for paying with BTC, compared to 2 points with Paypal or 1 point with credit cards -- basically a 3% "cash" back reward.) See the problem with all these new coins claiming to improve on the existing options? Some will likely succeed, but there's a lot of "reinventing the wheel" going on.
If you're struggling to find good coins to mine, my newsletter is always available -- and a quick side note to subscribers is that if you haven't received today's full newsletter, send me a note and I'll make sure you get it (or potentially let you know your subscription is expired). Another alternative is putting your rigs up for rental on LeaseRig where often there are people willing to pay a bit more than what you might mine normally to borrow your rig and chase some new coin (or boost hashing power for their new pool, etc.)
There was plenty more information that only went out to subscribers, along with the above commentary; want to see what you're missing? Start with a 2-day $5 trial, and if you upgrade to a week ($10) or month ($30) I'll count your initial payment towards the total! Let me sweeten the pot for all subscribers as well with this offer: when I hit 100 active subscriptions (I have fewer than 50 right now), I'll start sending out a daily newsletter with current charts to all active subscribers. I'm also looking into other ways to provide data in a real-time fashion (i.e. sharing a Google Spreadsheet). In short, the more people subscribe, the more it becomes worthwhile for me to spend time on the newsletters.
Radeon R7 240: Newegg starts at $65
Radeon R9 270: Amazon starts at $209; Newegg starts at $179
Radeon R9 270X: Amazon starts at $229; Newegg starts at $199
Radeon R9 280: (Can't find on Amazon); Newegg starts at $289
Radeon R9 280X: Amazon starts at $329; Newegg starts at $349
Radeon R9 290: Amazon starts at $439; Newegg starts at $459
Radeon R9 290X: Amazon starts at $569; Newegg starts at $579
The reason those prices are important is that we can now buy some of those GPUs using GPUC -- but how much does it end up saving...or costing!? Here are the current GPUC prices for the R7 240 (don't bother...), R9 270, and R9 280X. Yes, the R9 280X they have on offer is a nice Sapphire TOXIC, but performance won't be all that different from other R9 280X GPUs if you know what you're doing. Right now, you'll have to pay about 32 satoshis per GPUC in order to buy enough coins for a GPU (though that could obviously change). The good news is that you could now build a capable miner for about $1500 instead of $1900, though at the current rates you'd still be looking at four months or more to break even on the investment. But what about buying graphics cards with GPUC?
[Note: Prices and difficulty for GPUC are jumping around like jackrabbits, so take the following as a snapshot in time rather than a "this is the way it will always be" statement.]
- R9 280X: 2,520,301 GPUC = $470. OOPS! The exact same GPU is in stock at Newegg for $399.
- R9 270: 1,227,839 GPUC = $229. Oops again. Yeah, we're still talking pricing higher than Amazon/Newegg right now, by $20 to $50.
- R7 240: 174,482 GPUC = $32.50, so that's a pretty good price.
The only way this gets worked out and GPUC thrives is if they can go and purchase a bunch more GPUs at well below the MSRP (which would mean below $299 for the 280X). Then they can take a bit of a loss on the ones they already purchased and end up delivering GPUs at a reasonable price. It would actually be super cool to go buy new hardware with GPUC (or BTC), especially if the price was below normal online pricing, but that would take a lot of work and a big warehouse to store inventory I suspect.
I should note that the GPUcoin store also has an open market where users can sell items. This is getting closer to the ideas above, but it's more like eBay with additional risk -- you send your GPUC, then have to wait/hope you didn't get scammed. And if you don't receive the product you orders, TOO BAD! Mwahahaha.... Yeah, I'd be a little leery at the least. If you're curious about pricing, though, someone is offering a 2MH scrypt rig for 10M GPUC -- that works out to about $1850. Buying the same hardware online (5x R9 270, ASRock H81 mobo, 4GB RAM, Intel Celeron CPU, 1000W PSU, 5 x16 risers, and a power button) will set you back about $1500. So sadly, no, there are not good deals to be had there right now it seems. And if you actually want to buy 10 million or more GPUC fast, you'd probably pay at least 25% more than the price I've just quoted.
As an alternative, you can already go through Gyft.com and buy a $10-$2000 Amazon.com gift card with Bitcoins, and then you could buy GPUs that way -- or anything else you might want to buy at Amazon. (And you get 3 Gyft points back for paying with BTC, compared to 2 points with Paypal or 1 point with credit cards -- basically a 3% "cash" back reward.) See the problem with all these new coins claiming to improve on the existing options? Some will likely succeed, but there's a lot of "reinventing the wheel" going on.
If you're struggling to find good coins to mine, my newsletter is always available -- and a quick side note to subscribers is that if you haven't received today's full newsletter, send me a note and I'll make sure you get it (or potentially let you know your subscription is expired). Another alternative is putting your rigs up for rental on LeaseRig where often there are people willing to pay a bit more than what you might mine normally to borrow your rig and chase some new coin (or boost hashing power for their new pool, etc.)
There was plenty more information that only went out to subscribers, along with the above commentary; want to see what you're missing? Start with a 2-day $5 trial, and if you upgrade to a week ($10) or month ($30) I'll count your initial payment towards the total! Let me sweeten the pot for all subscribers as well with this offer: when I hit 100 active subscriptions (I have fewer than 50 right now), I'll start sending out a daily newsletter with current charts to all active subscribers. I'm also looking into other ways to provide data in a real-time fashion (i.e. sharing a Google Spreadsheet). In short, the more people subscribe, the more it becomes worthwhile for me to spend time on the newsletters.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
What Not to Mine? (aka How to Spot a Shady Cryptocurrency)
For those that are curious, here's the sort of thing I write about in my newsletter. There are charts showing current profitability and other recommendations as well, but I also provide some thoughts on the market as a whole. Rather than only emailing this to my subscribers, however, I'm going to post this on the blog. If you like this sort of thinking and analysis, please subscribe -- I'm still only asking the equivalent of $5 for two days, $10 for a week, and $30 for a month. Details are in this post. And with that said, let's talk about what not to mine right now...yes, it could be a big list, but I'll just pick on a couple options.
It shouldn't be too surprising that there are a lot of "scam" coins going around. The latest two I want to discuss are PANDA and 10-5 (with 10-5 having some of the same core developers as PANDA). With PANDA, "wolong" has apparently disappeared after trading in his 2.5% premine of PANDA at higher prices -- after promising to stop that sort of manipulation -- and the devs "learned their lesson" and are making the coin they really wanted to make this round. PANDA smelled fishy from the start, but I still mined some (and they're now basically worthless). Fine.
Here's the problem with TenFive/10-5: like PANDA, this is a premined coin. It's only 1% premine this time, but there's more to it than that. The block rewards of 10-5 are small, so the 105,000 premined coins would actually take a bit of time to mine, according to the original specifications -- around five days before the end of the initial month after launch. But now, the specifications changed after the coin launched! The original specs called for the following reward structure:
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that premines are a clear sign that a coin is going to go nowhere but down over time. I don't care whether the coins are for the "hard working developers" (that had to take someone else's code, change a few variables, and recompile -- oh my! Five hours for a good developer could accomplish that!), "marketing efforts" (e.g. get it listed on an exchange, get other suckers to jump on, etc.), or bounties for people to make pools and such; the end result is the same: a big dump of coins early in the life of the cryptocurrency that will plunge the price down to places where it may not recover.
Someone asked me recently if I had ever tried any of the cryptocurrency IPOs. The answer is "no", and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced I never will. There's just too much chance for abuse, and I don't want a part of it. And just to be clear, there are developers who really put in some time and effort. I think the Darkcoin guys have done a lot of good work, for example, and even things like Heavycoin and Fuguecoin at least require them to do something other than clone a github repository. But if you're not adding something truly new and complex, it's really not that much work to get a cryptocurrency started.
Now if you'll pardon me, I'm off to create my own cryptocurrency. I'll only do a 0.5% premine for my efforts -- 1 billion coin total supply, so I'll just take 500K. The first month of blocks will be to help set the difficulty, with low block rewards. Then the rewards will start to ramp up -- just in time for my huge dump! I'll borrow ideas from several other popular coins, we can all mine it for a month, and then when things are starting to look up I'll cash in and retire...or go create my next cryptocurrency. Sound familiar?
But everyone is doing these premines, and the developers really do need to be paid, right? Well, no, not really they don't -- not like this. It's no wonder the alt-coin market is tanking, as hundreds of new clones have come out and very few of them have any real worth -- other than for early pump and dumps. We even have websites that will adjust scrypt for you and help you create your own coin -- for a fee, of course. Which coins will actually survive the test of time? Besides BTC and LTC, well, it's a bit difficult to say for certain! I have my bets, and some will certainly be wrong. So bet it. If you want to know more, just send me a subscription request.
Good luck to you all as we mine our hearts out.
It shouldn't be too surprising that there are a lot of "scam" coins going around. The latest two I want to discuss are PANDA and 10-5 (with 10-5 having some of the same core developers as PANDA). With PANDA, "wolong" has apparently disappeared after trading in his 2.5% premine of PANDA at higher prices -- after promising to stop that sort of manipulation -- and the devs "learned their lesson" and are making the coin they really wanted to make this round. PANDA smelled fishy from the start, but I still mined some (and they're now basically worthless). Fine.
Here's the problem with TenFive/10-5: like PANDA, this is a premined coin. It's only 1% premine this time, but there's more to it than that. The block rewards of 10-5 are small, so the 105,000 premined coins would actually take a bit of time to mine, according to the original specifications -- around five days before the end of the initial month after launch. But now, the specifications changed after the coin launched! The original specs called for the following reward structure:
The "Flat" Reward Scheme designed to reward pi (really!?) for the majority duration:Now, there are reasons to change from that reward structure -- for instance, at that rate of mining, pi isn't really the reward much at all, and the coin would be mined out in about three years (give or take). But there's a less benevolent reason to change the rewards to the following:
- First 1050 blocks: Payout of 1.57079632679 per block
- Next 3150 blocks: Payout of 3.14159265359 per block
- Next 6300 blocks: Payout of 9.8596 per block
- Next 9450 blocks: Payout of 19.7192 per block
- Next 18900 blocks: Payout of 25 per block
- Next 37800 blocks: Payout of 50 per block
- Next 75600 blocks: Payout of 25 per block
- Next 151200 blocks: Payout of 19.7192 per block
- Remaining blocks: Payout of 9.8596
The "Flat" Reward Scheme designed to reward pi for the majority duration:First, they estimate 2150 as the year when the coins would all be mined right now. Well, I can do math better than that! A block of Pi coins every 1.5 minutes means people will mine ~3015 coins per day, 84446 coins every four weeks, and 1101568 coins per year. At that rate, it would take 9.53 years to mine out TenFive. So if they want to mine until 2150, they need to up the supply to around 150,000,000 coins (oh, but that's not "10-5" so that would be bad... maybe 105,000,000 then?) The bigger issue however is this clause regarding the premine:
- First 1050 blocks: Payout of 1.57079632679 per block
- Next 3150 blocks: Payout of 3.14159265359 per block
- Next 4000 blocks: Payout of 9.42477796077 per block
- Next 5150 blocks: Payout of 3.14159265359 per block
- Final value of 3.14159265359 per block for the remaining blocks
Stipulation: 4-week mandatory share lockdown. After lockdown period only a % based on quarterly performance reports will be paid out.Have you figured things out yet? By changing the rewards structure to pay out fewer coins, in the first month before they dump their 105K coins on any willing suckers, they have reduced the supply from roughly 400K coins plus the premine to just 84K mined coins plus the premine. Fewer coins in circulation for the first 28 days may promote higher exchange prices, and then BOOM! "Hey, who just dumped 105,000 coins on the exchanges!?" Also worth noting is that we're now on blocks in the 6000+ range, and the reward is still at pi, so we didn't even get the 4000 blocks worth ~3X pi.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that premines are a clear sign that a coin is going to go nowhere but down over time. I don't care whether the coins are for the "hard working developers" (that had to take someone else's code, change a few variables, and recompile -- oh my! Five hours for a good developer could accomplish that!), "marketing efforts" (e.g. get it listed on an exchange, get other suckers to jump on, etc.), or bounties for people to make pools and such; the end result is the same: a big dump of coins early in the life of the cryptocurrency that will plunge the price down to places where it may not recover.
Someone asked me recently if I had ever tried any of the cryptocurrency IPOs. The answer is "no", and the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced I never will. There's just too much chance for abuse, and I don't want a part of it. And just to be clear, there are developers who really put in some time and effort. I think the Darkcoin guys have done a lot of good work, for example, and even things like Heavycoin and Fuguecoin at least require them to do something other than clone a github repository. But if you're not adding something truly new and complex, it's really not that much work to get a cryptocurrency started.
Now if you'll pardon me, I'm off to create my own cryptocurrency. I'll only do a 0.5% premine for my efforts -- 1 billion coin total supply, so I'll just take 500K. The first month of blocks will be to help set the difficulty, with low block rewards. Then the rewards will start to ramp up -- just in time for my huge dump! I'll borrow ideas from several other popular coins, we can all mine it for a month, and then when things are starting to look up I'll cash in and retire...or go create my next cryptocurrency. Sound familiar?
But everyone is doing these premines, and the developers really do need to be paid, right? Well, no, not really they don't -- not like this. It's no wonder the alt-coin market is tanking, as hundreds of new clones have come out and very few of them have any real worth -- other than for early pump and dumps. We even have websites that will adjust scrypt for you and help you create your own coin -- for a fee, of course. Which coins will actually survive the test of time? Besides BTC and LTC, well, it's a bit difficult to say for certain! I have my bets, and some will certainly be wrong. So bet it. If you want to know more, just send me a subscription request.
Good luck to you all as we mine our hearts out.
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
More Thoughts on Scrypt-Jane
I talked about scrypt-jane a few weeks back, discussing the basic idea and providing some charts talking about the N-Factor adjustments. (Those charts have now been ganked by all the scrypt-jane coin threads, apparently -- thanks for at least giving me credit guys...um...guys? Really, just a link to my blog post would have been nice. FYI, those tables listing the N-Factor change times didn't exist in the original threads until my post went up, and the Ultracoin thread at least took the time values verbatim from my blog. Sheesh....) One of the things I didn't really get into which I wanted to at least quickly discuss was the problem with the early stages of scrypt-jane, as well as the expected hash rates.
I'm going to use the Radeon HD 7970/R9 280X as my primary example here, as I have access to those GPUs and they actually work so far on all of the N-Factors...provided you have the right settings. Let's go over those here, just for fun.
Starting at the initial N-Factor of 4, you can expect pretty amazing hash rates -- about 6.1MHash/s from the 280X, with TC at 8192 and intensity 18-20. Six days later you switch to NF 5 and your hash rate will drop to around 4.1MH, still with more or less the same settings. At NF 6 you'll drop to maybe 3.3MH, then NF 7 is going to be around 1.8MH, NF 8 drops yet again to 1.0MH, and so on. Along the way, however, you'll start to find that the settings that worked well for lower N-Factors no longer run without hardware errors at higher N-Factors -- and never mind what happens after about NF 12, where hash rates seem to drop far more than the 30-50% of earlier changes.
You'll need to tune the above settings a bit in most cases to get accepted shares and no HW errors -- in particular, I had a lot of problems not getting HW errors on the R9 290X at lower N-Factors. I also know that HD 5800 and HD 6900 hardware basically suck at scypt-jane (scrypt-chacha) for reasons I don't quite understand. Probably it's just the OpenCL code isn't really tuned for those older cards, or maybe the older hardware just lacks certain features, and that's fine. Still, it's interesting to look at how performance at the different N-Factors compares. As far as I know, scrypt-jane with NF-9 is basically regular scrypt, but hash rates are lower by around 20% compared to vanilla scrypt. At NF-10, again hash rates are lower than Scrypt-N by 15% or so.
One of the things I wanted to mention in all of this is that the initial stages of scrypt-jane are basically a headache for larger mining operations. Depending on how similar your hardware is, you could be looking at a few hours to perhaps a day or two of tuning and tweaking settings to get things running "properly" at each N-Factor adjustment. And if you're not paying close attention to all your rigs, you might come back from a weekend to find that all your PCs basically accomplished nothing after the latest N-Factor adjustment -- been there, done that, and didn't particularly care for the hassle, thanks! At least the rate of NF change slows down a lot at NF-14, but then at that point you're looking at rather low hash rates and there may be better coins to mine.
It's not too surprising then that most new "clone" coins that are moving away from vanilla scrypt are going with Scrypt-N (Adaptive-N-Factor Scrypt, as defined initially by Vertcoin). Sadly, VTC doesn't seem to be getting as much credit as it deserves, at least in terms of trade value, but then part of that might be due to the somewhat lackluster name and logo. There are at present at least seven cryptocurrencies I can name off the top of my head that use Scrypt-N, compared to six scrypt-jane options (though I'm probably missing some from both sides). The first scrypt-jane coins are already at NF-14, and frankly they've struggled since NF-13 with GPU mining; in a few months we'll see NF-15 and then three months later we'll hit NF-16. They might become predominantly CPU-mined coins at that point, which may or may not be a bad thing.
In short, Scrypt-N makes more sense to me from many perspectives. It skips the early (and somewhat chaotic) low N-Factor stages, it defines a more systematic progression from one N-Factor to the next, and in my experience at least it runs better on several generations of hardware. That doesn't mean it will necessarily succeed (see Betamax vs. VHS), but as more and more scrypt ASICs arrive and GPU miners look for greener pastures, I suspect the majority will end up with Scrypt-N (or something new). What will that be? I'm not quite sure, but as always I'm keeping an eye on things. If you'd like to subscribe to my email newsletter for more information on what I'm mining, you can find the instructions on this page.
I'm going to use the Radeon HD 7970/R9 280X as my primary example here, as I have access to those GPUs and they actually work so far on all of the N-Factors...provided you have the right settings. Let's go over those here, just for fun.
Approximate Settings for Scrypt-Jane Mining
|
|||
| N-Factor | Settings | R9 280X | R9 280 |
| 4 | -I 18 -thread-concurrency 20480 -g 1 | 6.1MH | 4.8MH |
| 5 | -I 18 -thread-concurrency 20480 -g 1 | 4.5MH | 3.7MH |
| 6 | -I 18 -thread-concurrency 16384 -g 1 | 3.3MH | 2.5MH |
| 7 | -I 18 -thread-concurrency 16384 -g 1 | 1.8MH | 1.5MH |
| 8 | -I 18 -thread-concurrency 8192 -g 1 | 1.0MH | 850KH |
| 9 | -I 18 -thread-concurrency 8192 -g 1 | 550KH | 470KH |
| 10 | -I 18 -thread-concurrency 8192 -g 1 | 330KH | 270KH |
| 11 | -I 12 -thread-concurrency 8192 -g 2 | 133KH | 100KH |
| 12 | ? (I missed this stage of YAC/YBC) | ~70KH | 55KH |
Starting at the initial N-Factor of 4, you can expect pretty amazing hash rates -- about 6.1MHash/s from the 280X, with TC at 8192 and intensity 18-20. Six days later you switch to NF 5 and your hash rate will drop to around 4.1MH, still with more or less the same settings. At NF 6 you'll drop to maybe 3.3MH, then NF 7 is going to be around 1.8MH, NF 8 drops yet again to 1.0MH, and so on. Along the way, however, you'll start to find that the settings that worked well for lower N-Factors no longer run without hardware errors at higher N-Factors -- and never mind what happens after about NF 12, where hash rates seem to drop far more than the 30-50% of earlier changes.
You'll need to tune the above settings a bit in most cases to get accepted shares and no HW errors -- in particular, I had a lot of problems not getting HW errors on the R9 290X at lower N-Factors. I also know that HD 5800 and HD 6900 hardware basically suck at scypt-jane (scrypt-chacha) for reasons I don't quite understand. Probably it's just the OpenCL code isn't really tuned for those older cards, or maybe the older hardware just lacks certain features, and that's fine. Still, it's interesting to look at how performance at the different N-Factors compares. As far as I know, scrypt-jane with NF-9 is basically regular scrypt, but hash rates are lower by around 20% compared to vanilla scrypt. At NF-10, again hash rates are lower than Scrypt-N by 15% or so.
One of the things I wanted to mention in all of this is that the initial stages of scrypt-jane are basically a headache for larger mining operations. Depending on how similar your hardware is, you could be looking at a few hours to perhaps a day or two of tuning and tweaking settings to get things running "properly" at each N-Factor adjustment. And if you're not paying close attention to all your rigs, you might come back from a weekend to find that all your PCs basically accomplished nothing after the latest N-Factor adjustment -- been there, done that, and didn't particularly care for the hassle, thanks! At least the rate of NF change slows down a lot at NF-14, but then at that point you're looking at rather low hash rates and there may be better coins to mine.
It's not too surprising then that most new "clone" coins that are moving away from vanilla scrypt are going with Scrypt-N (Adaptive-N-Factor Scrypt, as defined initially by Vertcoin). Sadly, VTC doesn't seem to be getting as much credit as it deserves, at least in terms of trade value, but then part of that might be due to the somewhat lackluster name and logo. There are at present at least seven cryptocurrencies I can name off the top of my head that use Scrypt-N, compared to six scrypt-jane options (though I'm probably missing some from both sides). The first scrypt-jane coins are already at NF-14, and frankly they've struggled since NF-13 with GPU mining; in a few months we'll see NF-15 and then three months later we'll hit NF-16. They might become predominantly CPU-mined coins at that point, which may or may not be a bad thing.
In short, Scrypt-N makes more sense to me from many perspectives. It skips the early (and somewhat chaotic) low N-Factor stages, it defines a more systematic progression from one N-Factor to the next, and in my experience at least it runs better on several generations of hardware. That doesn't mean it will necessarily succeed (see Betamax vs. VHS), but as more and more scrypt ASICs arrive and GPU miners look for greener pastures, I suspect the majority will end up with Scrypt-N (or something new). What will that be? I'm not quite sure, but as always I'm keeping an eye on things. If you'd like to subscribe to my email newsletter for more information on what I'm mining, you can find the instructions on this page.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Standard Miner Profitability, One Crazy Weekend, Subscriptions
I've just sent out the latest copy of my newsletter, which covers the aftermath of this rather crazy weekend for cryptocurrencies. What happened and who were the winners and losers? Subscribe and find out! $5 for one issue, $10 for a week (typically three issues, but really however many I write in seven days), and $30 for the month of posts. Email me if you have questions. I'll even make you a deal: start at either the one day or one week subscription, and if you decide you want the full month I'll count your initial donation towards the $30 -- so $25 to go from one letter to the full month, or $20 to go from one week to the full month.
I've been working on a more formalized posting of how to subscribe, and at some point I need to get a link to it put in a prominent position on the blog, but for now donations of one of these coins should suffice. You can do the math to determine roughly how much $5/$10/$30 is, or go with the rates I list below (which might end up being too cheap/expensive if the prices change much):
BTC: 153qS9Ze32hnV3fwirZLWNka4wBAowc21E (0.01/0.02/0.05 BTC)
DOGE: DD9iTWf8diPkvKdB8roPJepTyp6BGVQtct (6500/12900/38500 DOGE)
DRK: Xd3EaCJg6G8ZnGuKkpvwyRMwyHzbaRDnob (7/13/39 DRK)
LTC: LfCLyykrNFftzpdWejR73hf478ZtBzQ9jE (0.32/0.64/1.9 LTC)
MAX: mf5DXTLiZFCnJC2x13MXSyigyUjmBnrwjG (27/53/158 MAX)
MRC: 1Ctnz6cHcMYiF9fz2pyd6orFuo1mDhKdWj (810000/1620000/4840000 MRC)
VTC: VaNuRCj73JVAwR1YMnt8CXaqoiPgykiMTk (4/8/22 VTC)
Moving on, I've listed roughly the same PC quite a few times on my blog, but I'm going to go ahead and call this my "baseline mining PC" for now. It consists of the following parts:
My recommendations for mining are based off of that particular build, and the goal has mostly been to try and choose coins that can pay that off in four months or less. Note that it's possible to add a fourth GPU quite easily, and the two 750W PSUs have enough power to do that, so technically you could spend about $2320 for a system that's 33% faster than the above and it would end up being ab it more efficient. Anyway, right now, the market is in a bit of a slump, so the best I can do as around $13-$15 per day. That means it will take more like 4-5 months to break even, provided prices don't drop -- but prices could also jump up again.
Consider LTC; Litecoin launched and went up to around $4.50 per LTC last April, then it quickly fell to the $2-$3 range and stayed there for much of the year, with a drop down to as low as $1.11 at one point. Many were proclaiming the end of LTC...and then November happened and LTC shot up to $48. Those who had strong hands and held until the bubble came out with some amazing profits; even if you sold at $20-$25 (which is what I did with the LTC I still had), it's hard to complain. Well, we're now repeating that with most cryptocurrencies. Sure, prices are higher on LTC and other coins, but so is the difficulty, meaning for every dollar spent on a GPU you're looking at three months to earn it back. Save the coins, though, and I suspect in another year many people will be looking back thinking, "I wish I had kept all my VTC until it hit $50!"
Anyway, if you want to join in the fun, at least some of the prices for hardware have come down. The same system as above last month cost around $2020, so $100 less now. GPU prices are still way over MSRP (by 30% or more), which oddly enough appears to be more of a US phenomenon. I have friends in Europe that are able to get GPUs for less than what I have to pay, where normally it's the exact opposite. Their power costs are still a lot higher, so I suppose that's a small consolation.
I've been working on a more formalized posting of how to subscribe, and at some point I need to get a link to it put in a prominent position on the blog, but for now donations of one of these coins should suffice. You can do the math to determine roughly how much $5/$10/$30 is, or go with the rates I list below (which might end up being too cheap/expensive if the prices change much):
BTC: 153qS9Ze32hnV3fwirZLWNka4wBAowc21E (0.01/0.02/0.05 BTC)
DOGE: DD9iTWf8diPkvKdB8roPJepTyp6BGVQtct (6500/12900/38500 DOGE)
DRK: Xd3EaCJg6G8ZnGuKkpvwyRMwyHzbaRDnob (7/13/39 DRK)
LTC: LfCLyykrNFftzpdWejR73hf478ZtBzQ9jE (0.32/0.64/1.9 LTC)
MAX: mf5DXTLiZFCnJC2x13MXSyigyUjmBnrwjG (27/53/158 MAX)
MRC: 1Ctnz6cHcMYiF9fz2pyd6orFuo1mDhKdWj (810000/1620000/4840000 MRC)
VTC: VaNuRCj73JVAwR1YMnt8CXaqoiPgykiMTk (4/8/22 VTC)
Moving on, I've listed roughly the same PC quite a few times on my blog, but I'm going to go ahead and call this my "baseline mining PC" for now. It consists of the following parts:
| GPUs | 3 x Radeon R9 280X 3GB | $1,200 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3/UD5 AM3+ | $137-$166 |
| Processor | AMD FX-8320 Vishera | $154 |
| Memory | 2x4GB DDR3-1600 (desktop) | $77 |
| Power Supply | 2 x Rosewill Capstone 750W 80 Plus Gold | (Two) $200 |
| Storage | 2.5" 60GB Kingston V3 SSD | $59 |
| Risers | 3 x x16 to x16 and/or x1 to x16 powered | (Three) $13/$9 each |
| Case | Build it out of wood or PVC pipes | ~$40 |
| Total (price range) | $1906-$1935 | |
My recommendations for mining are based off of that particular build, and the goal has mostly been to try and choose coins that can pay that off in four months or less. Note that it's possible to add a fourth GPU quite easily, and the two 750W PSUs have enough power to do that, so technically you could spend about $2320 for a system that's 33% faster than the above and it would end up being ab it more efficient. Anyway, right now, the market is in a bit of a slump, so the best I can do as around $13-$15 per day. That means it will take more like 4-5 months to break even, provided prices don't drop -- but prices could also jump up again.
Consider LTC; Litecoin launched and went up to around $4.50 per LTC last April, then it quickly fell to the $2-$3 range and stayed there for much of the year, with a drop down to as low as $1.11 at one point. Many were proclaiming the end of LTC...and then November happened and LTC shot up to $48. Those who had strong hands and held until the bubble came out with some amazing profits; even if you sold at $20-$25 (which is what I did with the LTC I still had), it's hard to complain. Well, we're now repeating that with most cryptocurrencies. Sure, prices are higher on LTC and other coins, but so is the difficulty, meaning for every dollar spent on a GPU you're looking at three months to earn it back. Save the coins, though, and I suspect in another year many people will be looking back thinking, "I wish I had kept all my VTC until it hit $50!"
Anyway, if you want to join in the fun, at least some of the prices for hardware have come down. The same system as above last month cost around $2020, so $100 less now. GPU prices are still way over MSRP (by 30% or more), which oddly enough appears to be more of a US phenomenon. I have friends in Europe that are able to get GPUs for less than what I have to pay, where normally it's the exact opposite. Their power costs are still a lot higher, so I suppose that's a small consolation.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Email Subscriptions - Sample and Introduction
I mentioned in the previous post that I was considering trying out an email subscription model for some of my content. I got some takers on the idea -- thanks to all of you! -- and so I composed and sent out my first email today. To give you an idea of what would go into the email subscriptions, I am going to post the majority of that email here -- minus the specific mention of coins as well as my "What to Mine" table showing the calculations and the analysis. If you'd like the full email, just drop me a note and a donation ($5 or equivalent in any of the major cryptocurrencies for now will do -- if needed, I can get you an address for any other coins you might want to donate).
Welcome to my first official subscriber email on what to mine. Disclaimer: this first email might be (okay, *is*) a bit longer, and I'm trying to decide on a good subscription rate. I said "donate $5 or more and I'll tell you what I'm mining", but I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Should I have individual, weekly, and monthly rates? (I don't want to do yearly, as I can't guarantee I'll be doing this consistently for that long!) If so, how often should I update, and what should the rate be? I'm sort of thinking three updates per week might be a good start -- Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I could do $5 for a single update, $10 for the week, or $30 for the month. Does that sound like a reasonable structure, or should I charge more/less? If you would, please email me back with your thoughts. Also, there's a lot of other "stuff" to discuss as I kick things off; I'll add some of this to the blog, minus the "what to mine" table and lists of specific coins. And with that out of the way....
I already emailed a few people earlier this past weekend, but of course prices, difficulty, etc. change regularly. The short summary is that right now, the most profitable coins tend to be those that are not using standard scrypt. This is hardly surprising, considering there are well over 100 "major" (i.e. on an exchange) scrypt coins now. The trick is figuring out which of the alt-coins are going to be worth something in the long run. My thoughts are that for a coin to truly succeed, it needs to be something different/new/useful. LTC is the first scrypt coin, and it's still doing okay (though clearly having trouble of late). VTC, MAX, DRK, XPM, QRK, etc. were all really great to mine early and hold. Sadly, I'm not even sure which coin was the very first scrypt-jane offering (YAC?), but hopefully you get the point. Don't underestimate the power of marketing either -- a "dumb" coin with the right marketing hook can take off in a big way; it might die out just as quickly, but the momentum of belief can be slow to change (DOGE, AUR, and other coins fall into this category).
Now, as I see it there are a couple ways of going about mining. One is to look for the truly special coins and hop on those and hold for a while -- it's what I've done with VTC, DRK, and to a lesser extent MRC. Truth be told, I don't particularly care for the rewards structure of MRC, but so far it's doing okay; the coming month will or so will be telling as the rewards will start to decline in a few days, and price will either stay where it is and/or stagnate, or the "decreasing value" of mining will start to increase the price. It really can't go much lower, as it's currently trading at 3-4 satoshi, but we'll see. If it goes down, I "lose" potentially half to three quarters of my MRC value, but if it goes up to 10-20 satoshi (which is my hope!) I could realize some nice profits. The other option is to simply try to mine any new coin, hold a chunk of them for a while to see if price goes up, and you'll get some winners and a lot of losers -- or you could try to cash out as fast as possible if the coin is listed on an exchange, and potentially make some decent returns. This requires a lot more time and dedication, so most of us don't go that route I think.
I suppose I should quickly put in here that a "satoshi" is termed as 0.00000001 coins. The code for Bitcoin originally defined that as the minimum value you could trade, and if BTC prices go up into the tens of thousands or more perhaps they will one day update the client to allow for smaller transactions, but for now that's where we are. All of the other coins have stayed with the same core code structure in this area, so the smallest amount you can buy/sell of any coin is one satoshi.
Going with the above, that means any currency traded against BTC has a minimum value of 1 satoshi BTC (around $0.0007). That's not much, but with coins like DOGE, MRC, FLAP, etc. issuing billions of coins, and mining bringing in millions of coins per day, that quickly adds up. I have to admit that I'm still shocked that DOGE ever reached 50 satoshi, let alone 280 (or the current 170 or so satoshi). If any of the "billions minted" coins I'm holding hit even 50 satoshi, I'm looking at potential gains of 20X or more. But I think DOGE is a bit of an anomaly, so I wouldn't count on a repeat performance from most clones. If you're interested in trying "day trading" of cryptocurrencies, you could also try to do the old buy low/sell high approach on some of these low-value coins -- if you can buy at one satoshi and sell at two, you double your coins every time the buy/sell cycle repeats. However, the exchanges fill bids/asks in a first come, first filled basis, so as an example if there are already bids for a billion CAGE at 1 satoshi and another billion asks for CAGE at 2 satoshi, you could be waiting a long time for your orders to get filled. (And of course some coins trade against LTC or DOGE as a way to overcome the 1 satoshi minimum issue.) And if a coin ever reaches the point where no one is interested in paying even 1 satoshi per coin, you're left holding the bag.
With all of the above out of the way, let me note that I'm only one guy, and I already have a full-time job, so I can't hope to track everything. I've wondered if perhaps I could build a large enough readership/subscriber base that I could actually make this a full-time job and perhaps invest more time/effort into some programming and such to automate pulling data for more coins, but that's a big pile of work to tackle right now. In short, I'm going to tell you what coins I *have* tracked in a second, but there's a very real (and even very likely) chance that I've missed something good. If you know of something better and want to give me a heads up, that would be great, and if if I agree I'll even give you a free week of email updates, but if you want to keep your "trade secrets" I won't blame you. :-)
So what am I tracking (and in some cases, mining)? Basically I have a bunch of coins where I've downloaded the wallets, synced up, and can reasonably easily check difficulty and pricing. That in turn let's me determine profitability. It's like Coinwarz, except I track most things manually -- and I can also track the newest coins. It is a bit of a pain, and actually mining on any of the coins requires registering on a new pool (unless solo mining is viable, which is typically only in the first hours of a coin's life), creating workers, editing your miner configuration files, etc. Again, it's a pain, so I usually only switch what I mine daily, and there are quite a few coins where I downloaded the client and perhaps even registered with a pool and did some mining before I decided, "Nope -- this coin is going nowhere." Here's the current list, with exchange prices, difficulty, and reward values current as of (around) 11:00AM PST, March 3...
[SNIP!]
The missing content includes a table of the coins I'm tracking (and felt were worth including) along with several more paragraphs of analysis. And as a final comment, if you're buying any hardware and Amazon has prices that you like (and you're in the US), shop there via my Amazon Affiliate Links and let me know what you ordered (and when) via email. For every $100 ordered via Amazon, I'll credit you with the equivalent of $5 towards these email updates -- so $200 ordered gets you a week at my current pricing, $600 would get you a month, etc. You can also shop via my Newegg Affiliate Link, but the commission there is so low (1%) that I can only give $5 credit per $400 ordered. Then again, that's just one R9 280X so it can't hurt. :-)
Rest assured, the email updates won't replace me writing on this blog. There are still many other topics I want to tackle, when I get the time. Hopefully that will be later this week....
Welcome to my first official subscriber email on what to mine. Disclaimer: this first email might be (okay, *is*) a bit longer, and I'm trying to decide on a good subscription rate. I said "donate $5 or more and I'll tell you what I'm mining", but I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Should I have individual, weekly, and monthly rates? (I don't want to do yearly, as I can't guarantee I'll be doing this consistently for that long!) If so, how often should I update, and what should the rate be? I'm sort of thinking three updates per week might be a good start -- Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I could do $5 for a single update, $10 for the week, or $30 for the month. Does that sound like a reasonable structure, or should I charge more/less? If you would, please email me back with your thoughts. Also, there's a lot of other "stuff" to discuss as I kick things off; I'll add some of this to the blog, minus the "what to mine" table and lists of specific coins. And with that out of the way....
I already emailed a few people earlier this past weekend, but of course prices, difficulty, etc. change regularly. The short summary is that right now, the most profitable coins tend to be those that are not using standard scrypt. This is hardly surprising, considering there are well over 100 "major" (i.e. on an exchange) scrypt coins now. The trick is figuring out which of the alt-coins are going to be worth something in the long run. My thoughts are that for a coin to truly succeed, it needs to be something different/new/useful. LTC is the first scrypt coin, and it's still doing okay (though clearly having trouble of late). VTC, MAX, DRK, XPM, QRK, etc. were all really great to mine early and hold. Sadly, I'm not even sure which coin was the very first scrypt-jane offering (YAC?), but hopefully you get the point. Don't underestimate the power of marketing either -- a "dumb" coin with the right marketing hook can take off in a big way; it might die out just as quickly, but the momentum of belief can be slow to change (DOGE, AUR, and other coins fall into this category).
Now, as I see it there are a couple ways of going about mining. One is to look for the truly special coins and hop on those and hold for a while -- it's what I've done with VTC, DRK, and to a lesser extent MRC. Truth be told, I don't particularly care for the rewards structure of MRC, but so far it's doing okay; the coming month will or so will be telling as the rewards will start to decline in a few days, and price will either stay where it is and/or stagnate, or the "decreasing value" of mining will start to increase the price. It really can't go much lower, as it's currently trading at 3-4 satoshi, but we'll see. If it goes down, I "lose" potentially half to three quarters of my MRC value, but if it goes up to 10-20 satoshi (which is my hope!) I could realize some nice profits. The other option is to simply try to mine any new coin, hold a chunk of them for a while to see if price goes up, and you'll get some winners and a lot of losers -- or you could try to cash out as fast as possible if the coin is listed on an exchange, and potentially make some decent returns. This requires a lot more time and dedication, so most of us don't go that route I think.
I suppose I should quickly put in here that a "satoshi" is termed as 0.00000001 coins. The code for Bitcoin originally defined that as the minimum value you could trade, and if BTC prices go up into the tens of thousands or more perhaps they will one day update the client to allow for smaller transactions, but for now that's where we are. All of the other coins have stayed with the same core code structure in this area, so the smallest amount you can buy/sell of any coin is one satoshi.
Going with the above, that means any currency traded against BTC has a minimum value of 1 satoshi BTC (around $0.0007). That's not much, but with coins like DOGE, MRC, FLAP, etc. issuing billions of coins, and mining bringing in millions of coins per day, that quickly adds up. I have to admit that I'm still shocked that DOGE ever reached 50 satoshi, let alone 280 (or the current 170 or so satoshi). If any of the "billions minted" coins I'm holding hit even 50 satoshi, I'm looking at potential gains of 20X or more. But I think DOGE is a bit of an anomaly, so I wouldn't count on a repeat performance from most clones. If you're interested in trying "day trading" of cryptocurrencies, you could also try to do the old buy low/sell high approach on some of these low-value coins -- if you can buy at one satoshi and sell at two, you double your coins every time the buy/sell cycle repeats. However, the exchanges fill bids/asks in a first come, first filled basis, so as an example if there are already bids for a billion CAGE at 1 satoshi and another billion asks for CAGE at 2 satoshi, you could be waiting a long time for your orders to get filled. (And of course some coins trade against LTC or DOGE as a way to overcome the 1 satoshi minimum issue.) And if a coin ever reaches the point where no one is interested in paying even 1 satoshi per coin, you're left holding the bag.
With all of the above out of the way, let me note that I'm only one guy, and I already have a full-time job, so I can't hope to track everything. I've wondered if perhaps I could build a large enough readership/subscriber base that I could actually make this a full-time job and perhaps invest more time/effort into some programming and such to automate pulling data for more coins, but that's a big pile of work to tackle right now. In short, I'm going to tell you what coins I *have* tracked in a second, but there's a very real (and even very likely) chance that I've missed something good. If you know of something better and want to give me a heads up, that would be great, and if if I agree I'll even give you a free week of email updates, but if you want to keep your "trade secrets" I won't blame you. :-)
So what am I tracking (and in some cases, mining)? Basically I have a bunch of coins where I've downloaded the wallets, synced up, and can reasonably easily check difficulty and pricing. That in turn let's me determine profitability. It's like Coinwarz, except I track most things manually -- and I can also track the newest coins. It is a bit of a pain, and actually mining on any of the coins requires registering on a new pool (unless solo mining is viable, which is typically only in the first hours of a coin's life), creating workers, editing your miner configuration files, etc. Again, it's a pain, so I usually only switch what I mine daily, and there are quite a few coins where I downloaded the client and perhaps even registered with a pool and did some mining before I decided, "Nope -- this coin is going nowhere." Here's the current list, with exchange prices, difficulty, and reward values current as of (around) 11:00AM PST, March 3...
[SNIP!]
The missing content includes a table of the coins I'm tracking (and felt were worth including) along with several more paragraphs of analysis. And as a final comment, if you're buying any hardware and Amazon has prices that you like (and you're in the US), shop there via my Amazon Affiliate Links and let me know what you ordered (and when) via email. For every $100 ordered via Amazon, I'll credit you with the equivalent of $5 towards these email updates -- so $200 ordered gets you a week at my current pricing, $600 would get you a month, etc. You can also shop via my Newegg Affiliate Link, but the commission there is so low (1%) that I can only give $5 credit per $400 ordered. Then again, that's just one R9 280X so it can't hurt. :-)
Rest assured, the email updates won't replace me writing on this blog. There are still many other topics I want to tackle, when I get the time. Hopefully that will be later this week....
Monday, February 17, 2014
Quick GPU Price/Performance Update
If you're still chasing the dream of building rigs with R9 290X or even R9 290, you might want to reconsider as the pricing right now is way out of line with the performance being offered. Here's the short rundown of the currently shipping AMD GPUs, their prices, and their expected performance. All of these are linked via my Amazon Affiliate account, so if you're shopping there I'd appreciate you sticking with my links! I know they're not always the least expensive option, but if you have Amazon Prime you can potentially get free shipping as a bonus (if you can find an appropriate GPU in stock, that is).
Now hopefully it's clear that those performance estimates are a rough ballpark of what you can expect, so don't complain if you only get 850KH out of an R9 290X -- and I've seen a few people pulling close to 1000KH with a 290X, though I'm not quite sure why/how (they were MSI cards, if that helps). In some cases, you can expect to slightly beat a few of the figures. The main point is that in terms of performance per dollar, right now the best options appear to be the old (basically discontinued) HD 7850 and HD 7870 cards, and if you can't find those in stock than the R9 270X and R9 270 are the next best choice, with the R9 280X coming in fifth overall. The R9 290 and 290X are so overpriced right now that they're not even remotely worth considering in my book.
Of course you have to factor in the cost of the rest of the system -- if I just copy an old post from last month, with a bit of tweaking, here's what you'd need -- and keep in mind that with these lower power/performance GPUs, I'm not as hesitant to try going with five or even six GPUs in a rig (though the risers do get expensive). Get two PSUs, six GPUs, and six risers if you want six GPUs, or stick with a single PSU and three risers to keep it simple:
It's still by no means an inexpensive system, but total cost we're looking at roughly $1286 for a system built with HD 7870 GPUs that would do 1275KH -- and that CPU is still available to mine something like Darkcoin. Bumping up to a six-way rig would increase the price to $2144 (plus tax and shipping as appropriate), for around 2550KH. If you were to try for similar performance with R9 290X, three GPUs would cost $2400 just on their own! It might be more efficient in terms of space to go with R9 290/290X, but for price/performance it's better to take a step or two down from the top dogs.
| GPU | Price | Performance | KH/$ |
|---|---|---|---|
| R9 290X | $799 | 900KH/s | 1.126 |
| R9 290 | $640 | 800KH/s | 1.25 |
| R9 280X | $430 | 700KH/s | 1.628 |
| HD 7970 | $450 | 700KH/s | 1.556 |
| HD 7950 | $444 | 600KH/s | 1.351 |
| R9 270X | $250 | 440KH/s | 1.76 |
| HD 7870 | $220 | 425KH/s | 1.932 |
| HD 7850 | $196 | 380KH/s | 1.939 |
| R9 270 | $236 | 400KH/s | 1.695 |
Of course you have to factor in the cost of the rest of the system -- if I just copy an old post from last month, with a bit of tweaking, here's what you'd need -- and keep in mind that with these lower power/performance GPUs, I'm not as hesitant to try going with five or even six GPUs in a rig (though the risers do get expensive). Get two PSUs, six GPUs, and six risers if you want six GPUs, or stick with a single PSU and three risers to keep it simple:
| Component | Description | Price |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3/UD5 AM3+ | $137-$175 |
| Processor | AMD FX-8320 Vishera | $159 |
| Memory | Crucial Ballistix Sport 4GBx2 DDR3-1600 | $80 |
| Power Supply | Rosewill Capstone 750W 80 Plus Gold | $100 each |
| Storage | 2.5" 60GB Kingston V3 SSD | $50 |
| Risers | x16 to x16 and/or x1 to x16 powered | $20 each |
| Case? | Build it out of wood or PVC pipes! | $40 |
| Total Cost | $626-$824 | |
Everything You Wanted to Know about Scrypt-Jane
I've talked a bit about a few scrypt-jane based coins previously -- specifically I've mentioned Microcoin, but there are several others. I've also talked about the alternative Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm used in Vertcoin, "Scrypt Adaptive N-Factor". Put simply, I like the VTC algorithm a lot more, but I've never really discussed why. So, this is as good a time as any to broach that subject.
Fundamentally, the difference between scrypt-jane and VTC's Adaptive-N-Factor PoW algorithms is pretty simple. VTC basically went with hand-picked dates for when to move on to various higher N-Factors, while most coins using scrypt-jane have a formula that decides when it's time to move up the difficulty ladder. In fact, VTC actually adjusted it's rollout schedule in a hard-fork of the blockchain after the first couple of weeks, at the same time they introduced KGW.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I suppose I ought to quickly cover what N-Factor is used for. N-Factor represents the amount of data that a thread works on, with the N in N-Factor being the power of two (minus 1) that's used. Standard scrypt uses and N-Factor of 9 (I think? Correct me if I'm wrong and I'll fix the table!). Here's the quick list of RAM requirements (poached from the VTC announcement thread):
As you can imagine, running the scrypt algorithm with N-Factor of 20 would require a huge chunk of RAM even on a CPU with eight threads -- 1GB just for the basic memory footprint. On a GPU like the R9 290X that has 2816 shader cores and 4GB RAM, any N-Factor above 13 is going to present some real problems. Now, let's get back to VTC's Adaptive-N vs. scrypt-jane.
With Vertcoin, the rollout of the above N-Factors has been set such that we start at N-Factor 11, we'll move to N=12 February 25, 2016; N=13 comes in September 30, 2017, and so on. The reasoning is that right now, scrypt ASICs are just starting to show up, and they're all built for N=10; to make a new ASIC for N=11 will require a solid 6-12 months at least -- assuming you can find a company that thinks it's even worth doing, considering N=12 will supplant N=11 -- and it would require a lot of RAM. And in the meantime, those with GPUs can still do a decent job of mining.
Truth be told, scrypt-jane doesn't actually define any schedule -- it's just a flexible implementation of scrypt that can be tweaked as desired. It supports several mixing and hashing functions, with scrypt being used with a varying N-Factor. In general, scrypt-jane implementations have set a minimum N-Factor of 4 and a maximum N-Factor of 30. That's fine, but the problem is how coins are scaling the N-Factor. Here's what happens with YACoin, YBCoin, Ultracoin, and Microcoin to name several that I've checked:
Personally... I think that's a stupid set of N-Factor progressions. There, I said it: the standard scrypt-jane implementation has non-sensible spacing between some of the N-Factors. Take the first 48.5 days when we're below N-Factor 10 as a prime example; what purpose does it serve to use such low N-Factors? Well, early on the GPU mining speed in scrypt-jane will be much higher compared to CPU mining, whereas once you hit N-Factors of 9 and above it starts to slow down. At that point, we're still only looking at 15-50 days between some pretty severe adjustments in hash rates from 10-13, which just creates a bit of chaos. Then round about N-Factor 14, we reach the point where CPUs become roughly as fast as GPUs, give or take -- we've actually got a real example of this, as YACoin is already at N-Factor 14 -- and then we start to slow down on the N-Factor changes.
So here's the question: is a coin that's predominantly limited to CPU mining a good thing? While I'm happy to mine such coins when it makes sense from a profitability standpoint, I generally assume that any good coin that sticks around long enough will end up with a GPU miner port, unless it's simply impractical to make one. But if the algorithm is simply not portable to GPUs for whatever reason, I don't inherently think that it's a bad thing. My problem with scrypt-jane is that it sort of goes the opposite route: it starts out by opening the floodgates for GPUs, but then after six months or so (194 days), we reach N-Factors where GPU mining becomes quite slow. That will result in most if not all GPUs leaving to go to "greener pastures", which is sort of the opposite of what you want to happen.
The typical progression is usually the opposite. We start with a CPU-only coin (BTC started this way, and so did LTC, QRK, and now DRK). After the coin/algorithm gains some momentum, smart people figure out a way to use GPUs to speed up the work. More time passes and if the coin(s) using the PoW algorithm remains viable, maybe people even try to make an FPGA or ASIC for the core algorithms. If you want to stop this sort of progression, well, honestly you can't truly stop it -- all you can do is make it more difficult. Remember that scrypt was originally created to be a CPU-only PoW, but that failed. Quark and X11 have now been ported to GPUs with varying degrees of success. Considering GPUs are becoming more like CPUs, at some point in the future it's not a stretch to assume that if something can't be mined (effectively) with a GPU, it probably can't be mined with a CPU either.
Wrapping up, I wanted to quickly look at the most common scrypt-jane coins and check on hash rates profitability -- for CPUs as well as GPUs. This is obviously just a snapshot in time, but going with the four coins mentioned earlier (which are similar in most respects in terms of PoW implementation, though the block reward schedules vary), here's what we have (as best as I can tell -- again, correct me if I'm wrong as it's a bit tricky to find the current N-Factor for most of these coins):
So it's worth pointing out that the start times for the various coins determine when the N-Factor changes; Microcoin has a start time of 1389028879 (06 Jan 2014 17:21:19 GMT) while Ultracoin has a start time of 1388361600 (30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT), so UTC is currently one N-Factor ahead of MRC. As for YAC and YBC, other than their reward structures they're both close enough in start times that they're on N-Factor 14. Also, I couldn't find a CPU miner that didn't hard-code the start time so I couldn't test CPU rates on MRC and YAC (yet -- if you have a binary for Windows, let me know).
The short summary: YAC and YBC are mostly not worth your CPU/GPU time, while for the time being MRC and UTC are doing okay. MRC will have a lot of coins, and the current exchange rate fluctuates around 2-4 satoshis, so you can see pretty large swings in value over the course of a single day. If you want to dump a bunch of MRC, you'll probably get 2 satoshi whereas being patient can get you 3 or 4 satoshi.
The big problem with mining any of these is that the scaling N-Factor happens so early that if you're not in before N-Factor 12 or so, you've missed the boat for GPUs. Which means if you are in early enough, holding the coins for the first 100-150 days or so (until we reach N-Factors of 12) isn't a bad idea. Check back in a couple months and I'll let you know how that strategy worked out for me!
Wrapping this up, sorry if I'm pissing any anybody's favorite pool, but I call it as I see it. There have been plenty of questionable coins released in the past year, and while early adopters have often made out with big winnings, johnny-come-lately is often left wasting their time and energy on a dead-end coin. Plus, I had some people ask about Ultracoin in particular (since it's relatively new), and this post is a result of my looking into that topic. What's really sad is the state of many of the coin releases, with poorly documented code that was clearly just cloned from another coin and tweaked as little as possible. Anyway, we'll see which coins are still around in another year and being actively mined; until then, happy (scrypt-jane?) mining!
Donations welcome
MRC: 1Ctnz6cHcMYiF9fz2pyd6orFuo1mDhKdWj
BTC: 153qS9Ze32hnV3fwirZLWNka4wBAowc21E
LTC: LfCLyykrNFftzpdWejR73hf478ZtBzQ9jE
VTC: VaYNYUUi3amUTKQAQSs9EM4xJyNRyqnoUG
UTC: Uj1rnV4fZBPAngTj7xcYHrRcxKkadRiqGo
YAC: Y1xTeeJFnwawaCPVHcvhH23w5oDGy1VRgC
YBC: Yg6wWEd2fcMyMcxbQ3eGg3dXo5aYs878pt
Fundamentally, the difference between scrypt-jane and VTC's Adaptive-N-Factor PoW algorithms is pretty simple. VTC basically went with hand-picked dates for when to move on to various higher N-Factors, while most coins using scrypt-jane have a formula that decides when it's time to move up the difficulty ladder. In fact, VTC actually adjusted it's rollout schedule in a hard-fork of the blockchain after the first couple of weeks, at the same time they introduced KGW.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I suppose I ought to quickly cover what N-Factor is used for. N-Factor represents the amount of data that a thread works on, with the N in N-Factor being the power of two (minus 1) that's used. Standard scrypt uses and N-Factor of 9 (I think? Correct me if I'm wrong and I'll fix the table!). Here's the quick list of RAM requirements (poached from the VTC announcement thread):
| N-Factor | N (2N+1) | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | 1024 | 128KB |
| 10 | 2048 | 256KB |
| 11 | 4096 | 512KB |
| 12 | 8192 | 1MB |
| 13 | 16384 | 2MB |
| 14 | 32768 | 4MB |
| 15 | 65536 | 8MB |
| 16 | 131072 | 16MB |
| 17 | 262144 | 32MB |
| 18 | 524288 | 64MB |
| 19 | 1048576 | 128MB |
| 20 | 2097152 | 256MB |
| 21 | 4194304 | 512MB |
| 22 | 8388608 | 1GB |
| 23 | 16777216 | 2GB |
| 24 | 33554432 | 4GB |
With Vertcoin, the rollout of the above N-Factors has been set such that we start at N-Factor 11, we'll move to N=12 February 25, 2016; N=13 comes in September 30, 2017, and so on. The reasoning is that right now, scrypt ASICs are just starting to show up, and they're all built for N=10; to make a new ASIC for N=11 will require a solid 6-12 months at least -- assuming you can find a company that thinks it's even worth doing, considering N=12 will supplant N=11 -- and it would require a lot of RAM. And in the meantime, those with GPUs can still do a decent job of mining.
Truth be told, scrypt-jane doesn't actually define any schedule -- it's just a flexible implementation of scrypt that can be tweaked as desired. It supports several mixing and hashing functions, with scrypt being used with a varying N-Factor. In general, scrypt-jane implementations have set a minimum N-Factor of 4 and a maximum N-Factor of 30. That's fine, but the problem is how coins are scaling the N-Factor. Here's what happens with YACoin, YBCoin, Ultracoin, and Microcoin to name several that I've checked:
- Calculate the number of seconds since the launch of the coin.
- Look at that number in binary, and basically find how many significant binary digits are used, but don't count the three most significant digits.
- With those three most significant binary digits, do a logical AND operation with 0b11 (or in other words, look at the two least significant bits).
- Using the numbers from steps two and three: NFactor = ([BinSigDigits - 3] * 170 + [{ThreeMostSigBinDigits & 0b11} * 25] - 2320) / 100
- The result is converted to an integer and limited to values between 4 and 30, inclusive.
That's one of those formulas that just doesn't seem too sensible to me, and the code unfortunately doesn't shed any light on why these numbers were selected. Why 170, 25, 2320, and 100? As my computer science instructor used to call such numbers: GOK (God Only Knows). This is why we have constants defined in code, so that you can give a short comment on what the number is used for. Bad coding practices unfortunately are par for the course in the cryptocurrency world. So what does this formula actually mean? Well, it means the N-Factors will be changed on the following time schedule:
| N-Factor | Seconds Since Launch | Days at N-Factor |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 0-524287 | 6.07 |
| 5 | 524288-786431 | 3.04 |
| 6 | 786432-1048575 | 3.0 |
| 7 | 1048576-1835007 | 9.1 |
| 8 | 1835008-2097151 | 3.1 |
| 9 | 2097152-4194303 | 24.2 |
| 10 | 4194304-5242879 | 12.2 |
| 11 | 5242880-8388607 | 36.4 |
| 12 | 8388608-12582911 | 49 |
| 13 | 12582912-16777215 | 48 |
| 14 | 16777216-33554431 | 194 |
| 15 | 33554432-41943039 | 97 |
| 16 | 41943040-67108863 | 292 |
| 17 | 67108864-100663295 | 388 |
| 18 | 100663296-134217727 | 388 |
| 19 | 134217728-234881023 | 1166 |
| 20 | 234881024-268435455 | 388 |
| 21 | 268435456-536870911 | 3107 |
| 22 | 536870912-805306367 | 3107 |
| 23 | 805306368-1073741823 | 3107 |
| 24 | 1073741824-1879048191 | 9320 |
| 25 | 1879048192-2147483647 | 3107 |
| 26 | 2147483648-4294967295 | 24855 |
| 27 | 4294967296-5368709119 | 12428 |
| 28 | 5368709120-8589934591 | 37283 |
| 29 | 8589934592-12884901887 | 49710 |
| 30 | 12884901888+ | (Indefinitely) |
The typical progression is usually the opposite. We start with a CPU-only coin (BTC started this way, and so did LTC, QRK, and now DRK). After the coin/algorithm gains some momentum, smart people figure out a way to use GPUs to speed up the work. More time passes and if the coin(s) using the PoW algorithm remains viable, maybe people even try to make an FPGA or ASIC for the core algorithms. If you want to stop this sort of progression, well, honestly you can't truly stop it -- all you can do is make it more difficult. Remember that scrypt was originally created to be a CPU-only PoW, but that failed. Quark and X11 have now been ported to GPUs with varying degrees of success. Considering GPUs are becoming more like CPUs, at some point in the future it's not a stretch to assume that if something can't be mined (effectively) with a GPU, it probably can't be mined with a CPU either.
Wrapping up, I wanted to quickly look at the most common scrypt-jane coins and check on hash rates profitability -- for CPUs as well as GPUs. This is obviously just a snapshot in time, but going with the four coins mentioned earlier (which are similar in most respects in terms of PoW implementation, though the block reward schedules vary), here's what we have (as best as I can tell -- again, correct me if I'm wrong as it's a bit tricky to find the current N-Factor for most of these coins):
| Coin | N-Factor | CPU Perf. (i7-4770K) |
GPU Perf. (HD 7970) |
Difficulty | BTC Rate | BTC/Day (CPU / GPU) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microcoin | 10 | ? | 450 | 2.319 | 0.00000003 | ? / 0.0134 |
| Ultracoin | 11 | ? | 235 | 6.828 | 0.00034 | ? / 0.0118 |
| YACoin | 14 | 0.97K | 1.4K | 0.0167 | 0.000031 | 0.00184 / 0.00258 |
| YBCoin | 14 | 0.97K | 1.4K | 0.119 | 0.0037 | 0.00191 / 0.002^8 |
The short summary: YAC and YBC are mostly not worth your CPU/GPU time, while for the time being MRC and UTC are doing okay. MRC will have a lot of coins, and the current exchange rate fluctuates around 2-4 satoshis, so you can see pretty large swings in value over the course of a single day. If you want to dump a bunch of MRC, you'll probably get 2 satoshi whereas being patient can get you 3 or 4 satoshi.
The big problem with mining any of these is that the scaling N-Factor happens so early that if you're not in before N-Factor 12 or so, you've missed the boat for GPUs. Which means if you are in early enough, holding the coins for the first 100-150 days or so (until we reach N-Factors of 12) isn't a bad idea. Check back in a couple months and I'll let you know how that strategy worked out for me!
Wrapping this up, sorry if I'm pissing any anybody's favorite pool, but I call it as I see it. There have been plenty of questionable coins released in the past year, and while early adopters have often made out with big winnings, johnny-come-lately is often left wasting their time and energy on a dead-end coin. Plus, I had some people ask about Ultracoin in particular (since it's relatively new), and this post is a result of my looking into that topic. What's really sad is the state of many of the coin releases, with poorly documented code that was clearly just cloned from another coin and tweaked as little as possible. Anyway, we'll see which coins are still around in another year and being actively mined; until then, happy (scrypt-jane?) mining!
Donations welcome
MRC: 1Ctnz6cHcMYiF9fz2pyd6orFuo1mDhKdWj
BTC: 153qS9Ze32hnV3fwirZLWNka4wBAowc21E
LTC: LfCLyykrNFftzpdWejR73hf478ZtBzQ9jE
VTC: VaYNYUUi3amUTKQAQSs9EM4xJyNRyqnoUG
UTC: Uj1rnV4fZBPAngTj7xcYHrRcxKkadRiqGo
YAC: Y1xTeeJFnwawaCPVHcvhH23w5oDGy1VRgC
YBC: Yg6wWEd2fcMyMcxbQ3eGg3dXo5aYs878pt
Friday, February 14, 2014
Taking the DOGE for a Walk
A couple of things have happened in the past few days. First, in anticipation of the block reward halving, the price of DOGE shot up quite a bit -- from around 0.0000016 BTC/Doge to a current 0.0000025 BTC/DOGE (and a high of as much as 0.0000029 or so). If you were mining and holding DOGE for the past month or two, right now you're sitting on a pretty healthy balance and you could trade it all in for some good BTC gains. But now that the block reward has been cut in half and the price didn't double, the result is that mining DOGE is no longer looking so attractive -- especially when you look at other scrypt-based coins.
Right now the difficulty and exchange rate of LTC (2674, 0.0252) means mining LTC will net you about 0.0095 BTC per day, whereas mining DOGE will net you around 0.0105 BC per day. So yes, DOGE is still beating LTC, but only barely. Looking at scrypt coins in general, the top contenders right now for your hashing power are (depending on the time of day) Noblecoin, Lottocoin, Smartcoin, Anoncoin, and Klondikecoin. Others occasionally show up as well at the top of the profitability charts, but looking at the 14-day averages at Coinwarz, I'd recommend sticking with coins that are clearly above LTC during that time span (so 110% or more). Of course, if you're looking to trade for BTC, you shouldn't be mining any of those scrypt coins!
I keep mentioning alternative Proof of Work coins simply because right now, they make the most sense for GPU mining. There's really no other way to put it. The best scrypt-based coins are still profitable, but coins using something other than SHA-256 or vanilla scrypt seem to be the better option. It's not that these coins are inherently better, mind you, but that they're at least different enough to create some buzz, which in turn creates value. And if the buzz fades, so does the value, perhaps with some large coin holders sticking around to prop up the value of their millions of coins. If I were holding millions of DOGE right now, I'd probably be singing a different tune, but I've never viewed DOGE as more than a one-trick-pony and so I've moved on to greener pastures. Maybe I'll be back, but not just yet.
The other interesting thing to happen is that BTC has continued its rollercoaster performance since the start of the downward trend that apparently was sparked buy Russia declaring Bitcoins illegal (or something like that). What's truly awesome is that Russia declared Bitcoins illegal apparently because "it could finance terrorism." Maybe the US and all of the Middle East should do the same? "Ain't nobody gonna finance these here terrorists unless they do it with hard currency, dadgummit!" Anyway, if you're trying to day-trade BTC, the past few days were likely either great or terrible -- depending on whether you managed to properly "buy low, sell high" or if you ended up playing the fool and using the "buy high, sell low" strategy.
I'm bad at predicting where BTC values will go -- or any stock or cryptocurrency for that matter -- so I'm sticking with mining as best as I can! Good luck to you all. I've got a separate post to put together as well as to "what to mine", but before that I want to get into a separate topic. Stay tuned....
Right now the difficulty and exchange rate of LTC (2674, 0.0252) means mining LTC will net you about 0.0095 BTC per day, whereas mining DOGE will net you around 0.0105 BC per day. So yes, DOGE is still beating LTC, but only barely. Looking at scrypt coins in general, the top contenders right now for your hashing power are (depending on the time of day) Noblecoin, Lottocoin, Smartcoin, Anoncoin, and Klondikecoin. Others occasionally show up as well at the top of the profitability charts, but looking at the 14-day averages at Coinwarz, I'd recommend sticking with coins that are clearly above LTC during that time span (so 110% or more). Of course, if you're looking to trade for BTC, you shouldn't be mining any of those scrypt coins!
I keep mentioning alternative Proof of Work coins simply because right now, they make the most sense for GPU mining. There's really no other way to put it. The best scrypt-based coins are still profitable, but coins using something other than SHA-256 or vanilla scrypt seem to be the better option. It's not that these coins are inherently better, mind you, but that they're at least different enough to create some buzz, which in turn creates value. And if the buzz fades, so does the value, perhaps with some large coin holders sticking around to prop up the value of their millions of coins. If I were holding millions of DOGE right now, I'd probably be singing a different tune, but I've never viewed DOGE as more than a one-trick-pony and so I've moved on to greener pastures. Maybe I'll be back, but not just yet.
The other interesting thing to happen is that BTC has continued its rollercoaster performance since the start of the downward trend that apparently was sparked buy Russia declaring Bitcoins illegal (or something like that). What's truly awesome is that Russia declared Bitcoins illegal apparently because "it could finance terrorism." Maybe the US and all of the Middle East should do the same? "Ain't nobody gonna finance these here terrorists unless they do it with hard currency, dadgummit!" Anyway, if you're trying to day-trade BTC, the past few days were likely either great or terrible -- depending on whether you managed to properly "buy low, sell high" or if you ended up playing the fool and using the "buy high, sell low" strategy.
I'm bad at predicting where BTC values will go -- or any stock or cryptocurrency for that matter -- so I'm sticking with mining as best as I can! Good luck to you all. I've got a separate post to put together as well as to "what to mine", but before that I want to get into a separate topic. Stay tuned....
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
How to Calculate Coins per Day for Any Cryptocurrency
By this point in time, it's probably pretty obvious that I like numbers. Some people hate/hated taking math classes in school, wondering, "What's the point!?" Ironically, I was the opposite: I hated all those English and history classes... and now I basically write for a living. Side note: kids, stay in school, work hard, and don't think the world owes you anything! Instead, go out there and make something happen. I digress....
So if you follow all the cryptocurrency stuff (which you must or why would you be reading my blog?), you're certainly familiar with Coinwarz and Coinchoose, and maybe you even try to decide what to mine based off of their charts. There are a couple major problems with that approach unfortunately: first, tons of other people (and multi-pools) are basically doing the same thing; second, you're inherently limited in what coins you can mine as neither pool comes close to listing every current cryptocurrency.
Take Vertcoin, Microcoin, Darkcoin, and Maxcoin as four prominent examples. Whether or not you believe any of those coins have merit, the fact is that they don't use scrypt or SHA-256 algorithms and are not listed on any of the major "which coins should I mine?" sites. So how can you determine the approximate profitability of those coins? More importantly, how can you determine the profitability for pretty much any cryptocurrency? Well, there's a way, and short of someone modifying a core aspect of the code to change things up it's not too difficult. Ready for this? The number of coins per day you can expect to mine with a given hash rate can be expressed with the following equation:
Now I know what you're thinking: "Thanks, that's just what I always wanted: equations and formulas to help with my mining operation!" Actually, some of you might be happy to have that equation, but now that you have it, what do you do with it? See, the problem is that denominator on the bottom -- yes, I'm throwing out math terms here. The numerator is on top, and that's easy enough to come up with the inputs, but now do you create the denominator on the bottom? The trick is to understand how computers work, and what the big long string of 0's and F's really means.
Computers work in binary digits -- zeroes and ones -- so when we talk about the number 100, a computer doesn't represent it as two digits; instead, it would use seven digits, called bits, and 100 would be represented as 1100100 -- or to help people know that we're talking about a binary number, we would write 0b1100100. Of course, writing out just zeroes and ones like that isn't always super useful, and so we have hexadecimal notation, with "digits" of 0..9 and A..F.
Any programmer already knows where I'm going, but the short summary is that hexadecimal allows you to use one character to represent four binary digits (bits). The denominator within the denominator is in hex notation, 0x00000000FFFF.... If you count the number of characters in that string, there are 64 (eight zeroes, four F's, and then 52 more zeroes). In binary, that big long hex number would be even longer: 32 zeroes, sixteen ones, and then 208 more zeroes. The problem now is finding a way to deal with those big numbers.
If you pull up the Windows calculator as an example, we can calculate 2256, and it gives us: 1.1579208923731619542357098500869e+77. As you might expect, there's a loss in precision with that "e+77" part. The second number is a bit more difficult to deal with. 0x0000000FFFF.... ends up being the same as sixteen ones followed by 208 zeroes in binary, which is the same as:
2208 + 2209 + 2210 + ... + 2222 + 2223, or if you prefer it's: 2224 - 2207 - 1 (I thnk?). There's still a loss of precision however, as the result is 2.6959740979080974643911745715872e+67 (so we're missing about 37 digits worth of precision). Just running that calculation in the Windows calculator, however, we can make a substitution and the result becomes (the number is a bit off, but it's okay):
That's actually "close enough" given that the difficulty and hashrate aren't exactly stable on any coin, but we can actually be a lot more precise. You see, 2256 is actually the same as 0x1000... with 64 zeroes after the one. So we can get a more accurate number by recognizing that 0x1[64 zeroes] / 0x00000000FFFF[52 zeroes] is the same as 0x1000000000000 / 0x00000000FFFF, and those are easy enough to calculate. It ends up being 248 / 65535, which is 4295032833 -- so my above estimate is off by 0.00076% -- nothing to worry about, but I just wanted to be "100% accurate".
But enough talk. You probably don't want to create your own Excel spreadsheet, and I don't have the inclination to try and write a web application that will pull down the information for an arbitrary coin. If you want an estimate on the number of coins -- of any cryptocurrency! -- however, I can help. If all goes well, the form below should do what you need; it's messy but still potentially useful. I personally like having something like this because it's usually very easy to find out the current difficulty and block reward for any cryptocurrency, but sometimes determining things like network hash rate is not so simple. Note that I didn't try to account for electricity costs, mining pool fees, or exchange fees.
Fun facts for current profitability (determined using my awesome calculator):
DRK (X11 PoW for CPU mining) will generate about $3.75 with a Core i7 CPU
MAX (SHA-3 kekkac PoW) will generated about $5.95 per day with a Radeon 7950
MRC (scrypt-jane alternative PoW) will generate about $7.70 per day with a Radeon 7950
VTC (adaptive-n-factor PoW) will generate about $7.30 per day with a Radeon 7950
Donations as always are welcome:
BTC: 153qS9Ze32hnV3fwirZLWNka4wBAowc21E
DOGE: DD9iTWf8diPkvKdB8roPJepTyp6BGVQtct
DRK: Xd3EaCJg6G8ZnGuKkpvwyRMwyHzbaRDnob
LTC: LfCLyykrNFftzpdWejR73hf478ZtBzQ9jE
MAX: mf5DXTLiZFCnJC2x13MXSyigyUjmBnrwjG
MRC: 1Ctnz6cHcMYiF9fz2pyd6orFuo1mDhKdWj
VTC: VaNuRCj73JVAwR1YMnt8CXaqoiPgykiMTk
So if you follow all the cryptocurrency stuff (which you must or why would you be reading my blog?), you're certainly familiar with Coinwarz and Coinchoose, and maybe you even try to decide what to mine based off of their charts. There are a couple major problems with that approach unfortunately: first, tons of other people (and multi-pools) are basically doing the same thing; second, you're inherently limited in what coins you can mine as neither pool comes close to listing every current cryptocurrency.
Take Vertcoin, Microcoin, Darkcoin, and Maxcoin as four prominent examples. Whether or not you believe any of those coins have merit, the fact is that they don't use scrypt or SHA-256 algorithms and are not listed on any of the major "which coins should I mine?" sites. So how can you determine the approximate profitability of those coins? More importantly, how can you determine the profitability for pretty much any cryptocurrency? Well, there's a way, and short of someone modifying a core aspect of the code to change things up it's not too difficult. Ready for this? The number of coins per day you can expect to mine with a given hash rate can be expressed with the following equation:
Computers work in binary digits -- zeroes and ones -- so when we talk about the number 100, a computer doesn't represent it as two digits; instead, it would use seven digits, called bits, and 100 would be represented as 1100100 -- or to help people know that we're talking about a binary number, we would write 0b1100100. Of course, writing out just zeroes and ones like that isn't always super useful, and so we have hexadecimal notation, with "digits" of 0..9 and A..F.
Any programmer already knows where I'm going, but the short summary is that hexadecimal allows you to use one character to represent four binary digits (bits). The denominator within the denominator is in hex notation, 0x00000000FFFF.... If you count the number of characters in that string, there are 64 (eight zeroes, four F's, and then 52 more zeroes). In binary, that big long hex number would be even longer: 32 zeroes, sixteen ones, and then 208 more zeroes. The problem now is finding a way to deal with those big numbers.
If you pull up the Windows calculator as an example, we can calculate 2256, and it gives us: 1.1579208923731619542357098500869e+77. As you might expect, there's a loss in precision with that "e+77" part. The second number is a bit more difficult to deal with. 0x0000000FFFF.... ends up being the same as sixteen ones followed by 208 zeroes in binary, which is the same as:
2208 + 2209 + 2210 + ... + 2222 + 2223, or if you prefer it's: 2224 - 2207 - 1 (I thnk?). There's still a loss of precision however, as the result is 2.6959740979080974643911745715872e+67 (so we're missing about 37 digits worth of precision). Just running that calculation in the Windows calculator, however, we can make a substitution and the result becomes (the number is a bit off, but it's okay):
But enough talk. You probably don't want to create your own Excel spreadsheet, and I don't have the inclination to try and write a web application that will pull down the information for an arbitrary coin. If you want an estimate on the number of coins -- of any cryptocurrency! -- however, I can help. If all goes well, the form below should do what you need; it's messy but still potentially useful. I personally like having something like this because it's usually very easy to find out the current difficulty and block reward for any cryptocurrency, but sometimes determining things like network hash rate is not so simple. Note that I didn't try to account for electricity costs, mining pool fees, or exchange fees.
Cryptocoin Mining Calculator |
|
| Hash Rate | |
| Difficulty | |
| Block Reward | |
| BTC Rate | |
| BTC Price (USD) | |
| Coins per Day (Month) | 0 |
| BTC per Day (Month) | 0 |
| USD per Day (Month) | 0 |
Fun facts for current profitability (determined using my awesome calculator):
DRK (X11 PoW for CPU mining) will generate about $3.75 with a Core i7 CPU
MAX (SHA-3 kekkac PoW) will generated about $5.95 per day with a Radeon 7950
MRC (scrypt-jane alternative PoW) will generate about $7.70 per day with a Radeon 7950
VTC (adaptive-n-factor PoW) will generate about $7.30 per day with a Radeon 7950
Donations as always are welcome:
BTC: 153qS9Ze32hnV3fwirZLWNka4wBAowc21E
DOGE: DD9iTWf8diPkvKdB8roPJepTyp6BGVQtct
DRK: Xd3EaCJg6G8ZnGuKkpvwyRMwyHzbaRDnob
MAX: mf5DXTLiZFCnJC2x13MXSyigyUjmBnrwjG
MRC: 1Ctnz6cHcMYiF9fz2pyd6orFuo1mDhKdWj
VTC: VaNuRCj73JVAwR1YMnt8CXaqoiPgykiMTk
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)