Ran the daemon for a night in mining mode, not sure if it has mined anything

Mining Mining Support
1

So, I’ve ran the zcash daemon for a night and when I woke up, I checked the balance, which was 0.29750000. That’s odd: I haven’t given anyone my addresses, yet I’ve got a number of transactions printed when I run zcash-cli listunspent. So it looks like it’s been mined, but I’m not quite sure why would it be 0.29750000 and not some round number? Isn’t block reward supposed to be 50 coins? I also don’t see anything pointing to those coins being generated (generated flag?). In fact, the transactions listed all have tids.

Can anyone offer clarifications on that? Thanks.

2

Hi roman,
The reason you are seeing the small amount of coins is because of the mining “slow start”
New Alpha Release: Mining Slow Start - Electric Coin Company

This means that for the first 20,000 blocks there will be a maximum of 12.5 ZEC issued per block. The ZEC issuance curve will ramp up over the 20,000 blocks to the full 12.5 ZEC and the difficulty algorithm will be adjusted as needed. This Slow Start is to prevent “insta-mining” and “fastmining” in the early days of the 1.0 launch and to allow the Zcash team to adjust the ZEC/time algorithm.

Also: The block interval is 2.5mins. So 12.5 ZEC every 2.5min is 50 ZEC every 10min.

Also you may be experiencing confirmation and connection difficulty due to the current DoS on the Testnet:

3

Hi, yes, I’ve read about the slow start, but I was under the impression that it would only apply when the actual mainnet is released. Is that not the case? Does slow start also apply to the current testnet?

Also, about the slow start. I’ve been reading other threads and I’m not exactly sure about how all variables work as there are conflicting statements. Can you please clarify?

  1. On average, how long would it take to mine 1 block?
  2. How would the reward change with each new block?
  3. I’ve noticed my CPU isn’t working too hard while mining (max at 30%). Is that normal? What would be the best configuration for mining (Mem/CPU/GPU)?

(apologies, it looks like you’ve answered, at least partially, some of my newly added questions).

4

I have edited my first post for clarification, and yes the slow start applies each time the Testnet is reset.

They are targeting the z9 release next week to incorporate several bug fixes and hopefully stop the network issues. This will restart the Testnet so the block rewards will also be reset.

Also, default settings have Zcash run on a single thread. You can adjust the number of threads by setting genproclimit=4 (or your number of cores) in the zcash.conf file.

For hardware discussion see this thread: How to properly mine ZCash day 1? - #4 by zawy

5

One more question for clarification. 20 000 blocks with each block taking 2.5 minutes to mine.
Is my math correct that it would take ~35 days to reach 12.5 ZEC per block or is there a mistake I made somewhere?

6

That is correct, the goal was for it to take approximately one month after Genesis to reach the full block reward.