Posting resumes

Its been while since last post! Deleting a few old ones, and some new ones coming up.

New LTC commodity exchange opens, cloud LTC hashing just got serious!

Many crypto fans has been mining at cex.io and scrypt.cc, but now comes the best of each of them wrapped into one: LTC cloud mining with a eerily familiar interface.

As LTC was just added to huobi while cex.io just got a pure LTC mining pool after a week of 1.25x and 2x bonus awards as well, and with LTC clound hashing at markets.cx, LTC is gaining momentum.

All those three links are referral links, btw, so if you sign up, I get some trading bonuses from the services. (does not cost you). You can then refer users for personal bonus.

I worked out that selling my khash at scrypt.cc gave me BTC 0.64 and then I exchanged LTC 22.3 at cryptsy and then sent that to markets.cx deposits. I went from 440 khash on scrypt.cc to 1012 khash on markets.cx :) That is rather sweet.
SCAM YOU GUYS OWE ME .63 BTC

Scrypt.cc Profit Analysis

What is Scrypt.cc ? In the same way that you can rent SHA256-based ASIC mining power at cex.io, you can rent scrypt-based computers at a per-Kh/s rate. This site mines various Altcoins and exchanges them for BTC for you. You can then withdraw that BTC at any time.

This is just a preliminary analysis of the potential income on Scrypt.cc so far. I've been renting hash power there for about a month now, and it looks fairly good.

It is a fairly new website, and it is under development. They plan to add more control to the users, for example to choose which types of coins to mine.

When I joined, the stock price was B0.00144, but when sold out, prices rose to the B0.00155 range.
The income varies a lot. You get mining rewards every 10 minutes, like this:

Mining rewards are paid every 10 minutes. For me, at my speed, it varies between 0.0000100 and 0.0000300.

This is just the raw data logged for 5 days

The BTC income on that list can vary up to 200%, so I spent a week logging the estimated income from the Scrypt.cc dashboard. 

The 'Conclusion so far' column shows my own monthly estimate, while the average Scrypt.cc estimate is under the 'Scryot.cc Profits Average' column. As you can see, we differ by just B0.001.

The reason I am interested in renting is because summer is coming, and I cannot justify keeping 1000 watts running just for mining. That is only worth it during winter. Want to sign up at Scrypt.cc ? Just click that banner. It's a referral banner that will get me a little extra bonus. And so will you if you pass on you own referral link. The site is a bit unclear as to where the bonus comes from; some people thought it came from the referee's own money but the devs themselves clarifed this in a chat with me. The bonus comes from the pool itself ! So don't worry!

Trying to rent out my Antminers!

bitcoinminingmarket is a leasing site where you can rent out your mining gear, like betarigs and leaserigs.

Here is my humble rig for rent:: Mining speed 4GH/s 24h rental on stable EU server

The site is snappy and responsive and is easy to use. I've had no luck so far, but I've had the account for under 24 hours.

CGminer for scrypt mining tutorial

First off, the original CGminer for GPU is dead. All 3.8 and newer builds are made for ASICs only. Luckily, it has been forked, and scrypt-mining on GPU has been kept. Get kalroth's CGminer fork at http://k-dev.net/cgminer/. Also have a look at this thread at overclock.net.

Configuring CGminer is quite complicated (it is JSON formatted), but my basic one goes like:

{
"pools" : [
{
"quota" : "20;stratum+tcp://server1:3333",
"user" : "x.x",
"pass" : "x"
},
{
"quota" : "50;stratum+tcp://server2:3333",
"user" : "x.x",
"pass" : "x"
},
{
"url" : "stratum+tcp://server3:3333,
"user" : "x.x",
"pass" : "x"
},
{
"quota" : "10;stratum+tcp://server4:3333",
"user" : "x.x",
"pass" : "x"
},
{
"quota" : "20;stratum+tcp://server5:3333",
"user" : "x.x",
"pass" : "x"
}
],
"failover-only" : true,
"load-balance" : true,
"scrypt" : true,
"kernel" : "scrypt",
"intensity" : "15,13",
"thread-concurrency" : "4476,3198",
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"gpu-platform" : "1"
}

This config turns on the normal scrypt module, as you can see.

Also it enables failover and load balancing. As you can see, server 1,2,4,5 shares their quota amd server 3 is only a fail-over, but it will still failover to any alive pool as long as a server with quote demand is dead.

20+50+10+20 = 100 %.

Notice the "quota" parameter replacing the usual "url" parameter, and that is add a comma separator after the quota specified before the url!

Intensity: Is just how much steam the cards can handle. If you see in the CGminer console that you are getting HW errors, lower the intensity. 15 is a bit high, but I get no errors. 13 is more common, but still gives me a HW error of 1 per day or so. That is not good, so I should lower intensity to 12 and see how it goes.

Note the comma-separation on the parameters that supports it. Generally PCIe slot 0 is the first, PCIe slot 2 is the second, etc!

Thread concurrency: Is calculated by taking number of GPU shaders and multiplying by 4 (for the 6xxx and 7xxx series, other models has other optimal calculations.) and remove 4.

GPU Platform: Normally, the platform available on PCIe slot 0 becomes gpu-platform 0. That means if you have an Nvidia card in slot 0 like me, and 2 AMD cards on slot 1 and 2, it becomes platform 1. So platform 1, card 0 and 1 is my active cards in CG miner. cudaminer would then need the opposite config, pretty much.

Starting up CGminer from a batch file:

@echo on
ECHO "cgminer miner startup"
ECHO.
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer.exe --config=cgminer.conf

setx works on Windows, as some people dispute. Look at the 'succeeded' return-message in the console.

PandaCoin launch at Valentines day 2014

WARNING: SCAMCOIN
ALSO APPLIES TO STACKCOIN!

So for once, I got in on an Altcoin at launch date.

PandaCoin is a Vertcoin variant, and must be mined using the special edititons of CGMiner.
Vertcoins require a whopping 2GB on CudaMiner.

At diff 40, I pointed my miners at the newest pools and overnight I mined something like 40K PandaCoins.

Remember to use Vertminers!
Vertcoins will halve your usual Scrypt rate, wich again is half your SHA256 rate.
So your 1 MH/s rig does 250 Khash on a VTC algorithm. Dont be alarmed if you are not used to these numbers. It's normal.

Vert coins (VTC) are a newer type of coin that is designed to kill off any ASIC chips made for it every 6 months. And the memory requirements makes it nearly impossible to manufacture. So I believe that this coin is here to stay. It is Doge 2.0 they say, let hope so! I do keep some Doge miners on as well :)

TMB and Nitro's networks was DDOS'ed several times and left my failovers to regular VTC.

Some alternative PandaCoin pools:

panda.miningwith.us

This list will be updated as whenever I add more failovers to my setup.

Update:
Ofcourse, the mining pool i chose was a small one that grew quite a bit in the beginning, but we were plagued by bad luck and we only found 3 or 4 blocks. My biggest share was 59K PandaCoin.

I mined just short of 180k, which is not too shabby. I, for one, hope Panda is the new scrypt-n coin :)

Simple calculation for two popular cloud miners

bit-miner.com and cex.io

bit-miner.com:

ASSET #1

6x180GH/s = 1080 Gh/s
Number of shares = 10000
1080/10000=0.108, this is the Gh/s per share.
0.108x=1 => 1/0.108 = 9.25 shares per Gh/s
Asset #1 has a price of 5-7, depending on the time. That means on average $55.5 per Gh/s

ASSET #12

3000 GH/s
Number of shares = 30000
3000/30000=0.1, this is the Gh/s per share.
0.1x=1 => 1/0.1 = 10 shares per Gh/s
Asset #12 has a price of 1.5-2, depending on the time. That means on average $17.5 per Gh/s. That is a sweet deal now, but remember that it doesn't start until May!

CEX.IO:

BTC 0.35 per GH/s = $28.25 per GH/s

But this is mining at current difficulty! So even if Bit-Miner.com's Gh/s is about $10 more expensive not, you should recover that by mining at current block difficulty.

At the moment, CEX,.io is the best place for GH/s trading right now.

Here is some referall links for me, if you sign up with my reference, I get a transaction percentage bonus.

If you feel this article helped you, please consider signing up at cex.io

Here you also co-mine IXC, NMC and DVC.

Reserving the right to miscalculations.

ICX and DVC coins can be traded at Vircurex and Cryptsy.
NMC can buy GH/s at CEX.io

Bitcoin mining and profits in the post-homemining era

Bitcoin mining at home is dead. It went completely dead around summer 2013. The rise of ASIC mining has left everyone in the dust.

Luckily there are alternavtive digital coins, so called 'altcoins', and these are mined using traditional GPU rigs and doesn't use 'SHA256' hashing like Bitcoin and it's direct siblings. They use an hashing algorithm called 'scrypt' that is somewhat resistant to ASIC mining.

Depending on the exchange rates and hashing power that goes into the various altcoin mining, it is more profitable to mine certain altcoins at certain times.
Check out dustcoin.com for an overview of the profitability of some alt coins.
At the moment, Dogecoin seems to be on the rise, and is over 2.5 times more profitable to mine than LTC. Want to Dogetip me ? Go right ahead, my crypto coin tips adresses are to the right clolumn,

If you are good at jumping pools, you can still scoop 0.01-0.02 BTC each day with about 1Mh/s of equipment.

Power is expensive, but right now in the winter, I would still need 2000-3000 watts to keep my apartment warm. Now I am heating my place with about 2000 watts of GPU and CPU mining. So in that sense, during winter, mining is pure profit. Keeps the place warm and makes me money too.

There are also a coin called PrimeCoin (aka XPM) that are mined only by CPU power. You can mine with a pool or solo mine with a highly optimized wallet.

You can exchange certain coins for other coins on exchanges like Cryptsy and even buy cloud mining at places like CEX. If you sign up to those two places and start trading from these links right here, I get a referral bonus too :)

Other good coin exchanges are BTC-e, Vircurex

AMD cards are still king of coin mining, but the newer CUDA miners can squeeze a lot more out of Nvidia cards today. My GTX 660 used to mine at 90 k/hs, with the new miner out now, it spiked to 180. I get about 0.15 BTC and 0.010 XPM daily. This money I invest in cloud mining for the long term.

cgminer flags (GUI-miner scrypt edition)
All at intensity 17. 16 Adjust after your liking. Intensity 18 will give me about 10-20% invalid shares. 17 about 5-10. 16 seems to approach around 1-2%.

Thread concurrency should be you memory divided by 32kb.
--shaders: specify the number of shaders in your unit. (notice two --)
-w flag: set worksize. usually 256 seems to work best on all cards.
-v flag: set to 1 to use GPU vectors for speed boost.

CUDA miner flags:
-H flag: Set to 1 to borrow some CPU for 10% mining boost.
-C flag: set to 1 to use texture cache
-l flag: specify kernel and warp configuration. Just use auto.

At the moment, my mining rigs are as follows:

GPU's:

185 kh/s: GTX 660 (Gigabyte factory OC'd)
90 kh/s: GTX 550 TI (Gigabyte)
144 kh/s: Radeon 7750 (Sapphire fanless)
96 kh/s: Radeon 7750 (Gigabyte with fan)
198 kh/s: Radeon 6790
198 kh/s: Radeon 6790
283 kh/s: Radeon 6870
30 kh/s: BeaverCreek APU
30 kh/s: Caicos APU

CPU mining (XPM):

0.044 chains/d :AMD 1100T (0.050+ idle)
0.020 chains/d :AMD 960T (1 core disabled, too hot)
0.022 0.008 chains/d :Intel Core Duo
0.010 chains/d:AMD A6 APU

0.002 chains/d:Celeron M

Update: It appears that when you find a prime higher difficulty prime, you get a bigger share unlike regular mining. Awesome :D

Also, check http://www.letslearnthis.com/cryptocurrency/how-to-solo-mine-primecoin-xpm for solo ming tips