The last time I tried something like this was when NameCoin was getting going and it took the best part of a week to download all the data and even then it didn’t work anyway because it was too buggy and I eventually gave it away. ZCash is the first time since then that I have been motivated to try something like mining again - mostly because of the ZCash philosophy and partly curiosity about running a node.
It has been a bit over 13 hours so far and I am a bit over half way with downloading blocks (ADSL2+ connection) but the Linux Fedora build went very smoothly (except for one error reported in the short tests - the longer testing was fine) and it has been an interesting exercise so far.
So from reading the mining forum it appears that I will be wasting my time trying to earn any coins with an 8-core CPU but maybe I should keep the node running anyway and get a bit more familiar with everything. I am interested in doing buying and selling etc from the command line and generally learning as much as I can about the system.
Eventually I am interested in selling building lots for people who want to put up houses in my “Life Extension Village”:
and I am thinking of selling these lots (or even the first house that is nearly finished) for crypto - has anyone here done anything with crypto and real-estate? Would it be fair to say most people here are interested in BOTH the ZCash philosophy AND earning some ZCash / making money?
The second half of block went very quickly - a few hours instead of another 13. Now the node has completed 4935 Equihash solver runs and is averaging 5.6508 Sol/s.
Using:
./src/zcash-cli listaccounts
displays:
{
“”: 0.00000000
}
which is to be expected but in the unlikely situation that some zcash is earned, would the amount show up with that listaccounts command?
You are right, nowadays the difficulty of Zcash is so high that there very little chance that your CPU mining will find a Block on its own. At 5.6 Solutions per sec on your PC, and an average network hashrate of 350,000,000 Solutions per sec you can see the odds are not good.
But that’s not to say the learning experience and running a Node are not worth the effort. You can run the Node (not mining gen=0) and it will only use about 400mb of system memory and barely any CPU power. When you have mining enabled (gen=1) thats when it uses alot of your CPU and RAM resources. I enjoyed learning how to use the command line interface from the beginning Zcash Alpha and Beta days.
I use my Node as my wallet to send/receive private and public transactions, and verify transactions on the network. This helps secure the integrity of the entire system. If you receive funds you can use z_gettotalbalance to see the balances of both Private and Public (Z&T) addresses. Many of the old Bitcoin RPC commands like getinfo do work in Zcash but they only show the balance of transparent addresses.
If you do decide that you want to use your GPU (or buy a new GPU) to mine there are several choices of software that runs on it’s own that will let you connect your GPU hash to a Mining pool and earn some Zcash.
Either way, have fun and welcome to the community!
But in the end the successful finds should be proportional to the rate of solutions - my quick calculation is that I should have a better than even chance of finding one block over the course of the year. Using GPUs and more electricity will increase the rate but in the end the finds should be proportional to the electricity used?
Yes, I would like to get familiar with all the CLI commands - I guess I will need to buy some ZCash to get started . .
Right - I am thinking I might do that with my big workstation and maybe put a GPU in an old PC in another room.
