I would like to know how current testnet mining compares to real mining once zcash releases. Currently, I am mining what seems like an absurd amount of ZEC; about 5000 after 3 days. I seem to find new blocks very fast. Is this normal for everyone? Is this because not many people are currently mining? I’m also assuming the difficulty is scaled down for testing purposes? What are reasonable expectations for release in terms of ZEC/day if I’m getting about 1666ZEC/day now?
I notice that my connection count is 1, shouldn’t I be connected to multiple nodes, or does everyone just connect to a single node (testnet node which acts more like a hub) currently for testing purposes.
Final question. I would like to understand equihash better and figure out what exactly we are computing, but the only resource I can find is the one paper with mathematical notations beyond my current understanding. I’m slowly going through it, but if anyone knows of any other material that is easier to understand and more directly related to zcash that would be greatly appreciated.
The difficulty on the Testnet is nowhere near what it will be in production.
If you run a cli getinfo you will see the difficulty is near zero most of the time, I have seen it jump up to .0000005 when more peers were on but for now your only competing against (what I would guess) a few dozen miners, but that is still nothing. And many miners, like myself only stay on long enough to test, then shut down to save electricity and wear on our machines.
And yes, the difficulty will be dynamically adjustable in production like Bitcoin but the Zcash version will be less susceptible to attacks trying to manipulate the difficulty: select difficulty adjustment algorithm · Issue #147 · zcash/zcash · GitHub
My experience with mining CPU coins (especially CryptoNote coins) during last few years is that difficulty was always extremely high since day 1. Everyone was trying to spin up AWS instances but quickly realized that this is the most expensive strategy to mine. There are always other people with cheap or even free resource to compete: free electricity, private GPU miners, many network admins with free access to unallocated hardware of their companies, botnet miners…
My plan to invest in Zcash will be avoiding serious mining, i’m going to wait several months after the launch when the hype is over then I would convert some bitcoin to Zcash via some exchanges.
My mining rig currently is running:
i7-6700K 4.0GHz CPU
16GB DD4 2666MHz RAM
For some reason solveequhash is hanging when I run it now on z6. I remember running it before (maybe z4) and getting about 1sec per hash. Is the command still:
zcash-cli zcbenchmark solveequihash 10
I also print out the nonces I am using when mining and before (in z4) I was trying a new nonce like every second, now it seems to be like every 30 seconds or more. Did the difficulty increase that much?
We switched to much harder Equihash parameters in z5, so the solver is much slower now. The benchmark command you run above only outputs once all 10 iterations are complete, so expect it to do nothing for around 10 minutes. To see just one run, change the 10 to a 1.
Also remember that the benchmark command returns the time to find on average 2 hashes.
