What are you mining expectations? And what hardware have you got set up?

I have a 3.5ghz dual core with 8gbs of RAM. From September through December, I’m hoping to mine a block (12.5 ZECs then 40)? about every 2-4 days. Is that a realistic at all? Please dont give me the standard answer of this question is unknownable/unaswerable. What approximately is the hardware you are planning to use and how many blocks do you think you will strike per day/week/month?

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I would love to know the type’s of mining setup’s people will be aiming for.

I mean its pretty straight forward to build a GPU miner, plenty of litecoin mining guides exist to build a mining rig but I had heard debate it might be better to CPU mine, which would change the mining rig setup dramatically wouldn’t it?

Its hard to plan ahead at this point without concrete information on what we should be expecting, or maybe there has been clarification and I have missed it?

I’ve been mining on a very part time basis, only for a few hours at a time but I did manage to mine a block last weekend (a four to five hour session). I have zcash installed on an i5 laptop with ddr 1600 memory. I’ve also found that turning on additional cores makes negligible difference.

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On my test, 4 core PC almost has double amount of blocked mined compared to dual core pc.

Do you know what kind of memory those systems are using? On that topic, has anyone been able to wring out more performance from dual and quad channel memory?

Edit: Also, what is the ‘hashrate’ of those systems? ie: What results do you get from entering

zcash-cli zcbenchmark solveequihash 50

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Would be nice to know what hashrate one can achieve on Raspberry Pi.

I wonder how it compares with other GPU/CPU rigs…

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This is an interesting topic,

I’ve got a older 3.0ghz 8 core i7 with 8GB of ram and I am averaging about 2.1 sec for equihash, but I am running Ubuntu in a VM so its probably not the fastest it could be. I also have an old Motorola RAZR that I plan on rooting with linux just to see how the 1.2ghz dual ARM processer with 1GB of Ram does.

With the way equihash works it directly ties Cores to RAM so the many cuda Cores on a GPU board will be bottlenecked by its amount of RAM. St4rd has mentioned he is working on this correlation before: Equihash currently implemented? - #11 by Shawn
So I think anyone building a rig will be better off focusing on CPU and RAM rather than tons of GPU.

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As I reported in other topic, my faster PC gave higher number from zcbenchmark command (which mean lower hash rate) but generated more blocks than slower PC. Weird behavior.

Hmmm…That makes me wonder just how accurate the solve equihash command is for a “hash” rate metric.

Initially i thought the same. However GPU had much higher memory bandwidth than desktop RAM. I’m not sure about economic efficiency of mining with GPU, but i do believe with proper mining software GPU has better performance in term of hashrate.

@hud, how many blocks did each produce, and over what period of time (roughly)?

It’s possible that the behavior you saw was a statistical anomaly.

I don’t have any big expectations. I hope that, by the end of the year, I’ll be able to pick up a few hundred ZEC for no more than ~$1 each. That’s about as high as my hopes get.

As for hardware, if my reading of the Equihash paper is correct, many smaller rigs is better than one powerful rig. I plan on using the minimum amount of off-the-shelf DDR3 memory (I imagine about 2Gb for each rig, but we won’t know until the final parameters are set).

In theory, if one wrote a custom GPU miner and ran it on a state-of-the-art GPU with high memory bandwidth and low memory latency, they could get a 20x increase in performance. I’m not convinced that they could do so for significantly less than 20x the cost of my cheap setups though. So it’s (roughly) a wash between many cheap rigs and one expensive rig.

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We do not want very cheap machines to be able to mine at all otherwise the coin will turn into a botnet coin… Just look at Monero, 90% of the hash comes from botnets…

I had two PCs mining for 2 days, starting from second day of current testnet. The dual core PC got ~70 blocks and 4-core had ~130.

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In the other thread you are suggesting CryptoNight algo for Zcash because it is more CPU-friendly. In this thread you’re saying it is dominated by botnet because … CPU-friendly, I’m not understand why so conflicting arguments ?

I do share your same concern about botnet mining. Equihash is claimed to be botnet resistant because heavy usage of RAM would trigger the PC owner. But, isn’t slowed PC and heavy usage of CPU already a massive indicator of something wrong? I don’t see how Equihash make the botnet mining any noticeable than other algos.

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CryptoNight is not really efficient on low-end machines, if it was the hash rate would be 100x what it is now. Equihash on the other hand allows low-end machines to mine as long as RAM is available (2GB+). If this doesn’t change we will see botnet mining 100 times bigger than monero’s network hash rate.

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Wow. That is interesting. My best guess is that the parameters are so low right now that you aren’t hitting the memory bandwidth bottleneck on either machine. So the additional cores are speeding up how fast you’re filling up the memory.

It will be interesting to see if your results change once the parameters are raised.

I understand your concerns about botnets but it seems you are missing the vision of Zcash. The key is Decentralisation, if you raise the difficulty bar high to be like Bitcoin then few huge mining operations in China with huge money to build server farms end up having a disproportionate influence on the future of the coin. Then you get political stale mates and blame games like we saw with the block size adjustment mess.

But if you get mining into the hands of as many people as possible then you can attempt to make a truly decentralized network. There are many lessons to learn and there may be setbacks along the way but this is just the beginning, and Zcash will learn and adapt.

I got this answer from Zooko himself on another thread when we were talking about hardware:

zooko
May 8
Shawn:
So then what hardware would be the most cost efficient for mining?
To be honest, we don’t know the answer to this. Our goals are to make mining profitable for casual enthusiasts, using hardware that they already own, when it is idle (e.g. your smartphone while it is plugged in overnight). This would be a revival of the original Satoshi Nakamoto vision of a very decentralized network of miners.

However, our actual process isn’t guaranteed to achieve that goal — it is just our current best attempt. Our process is:

to study Equihash and ask others to do so in order to minimize the chance of us later being surprised by how much of an advantage people can get from proprietary optimizations or custom-hardware-implementations,

implement an optimized implementation for 64-bit CPUs (Optimize Equihash implementation · Issue #857 · zcash/zcash · GitHub)

choose final parameters (Select feasible Equihash Parameters · Issue #856 · zcash/zcash · GitHub)

maybe we would consider tweaking the algorithm a little if it seems like there is a really valuable tweak to be made to give more advantages to laptops, tablets, and smartphones (in particular I’m thinking of Solar Designer’s MAXFORM tweak for Argon2d, and also his suggestion to make memory reads come in 1 KiB spans in order to reduce TLB misses for CPUs). But we probably won’t have time to mess with that before launch.

Now, what hardware setup will be most cost-efficient after we do the above, and whether the above will succeed in our goal of rewarding enthusiasts who don’t put in a capital investment, your guess is as good as mine.

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Hello Shawn I have asked some people arround to help me get started I have VM and Ubuntu on a new i7 32 gb machine but I can get past the installation can you spare time

will glady support you in btc to help me

Thx