Transistion to GPU mining?

I finally got the zcashd program up and running, blocks all read into the node and the miners working with a pitiful 4.8 Sol/s :joy: So how would one transistion into a GPU mining situation besides the obvious stuff? I tried reading available documents and got nowhere. So I ask the experienced folks here for advise.

Linux experienced.

  1. Buy GPU’s
  2. Buy risers
  3. Install gpu miner and configure
  4. …
  5. ??? profit

Can always come in handy, really depends how much experience you have in linux.

I strongly believe that if you had any “good” expierence of linux you wouldn’t need to post in here to setup a gpu mining situation:

Thank you for the reply. Just because someone has Linux experience doesn’t imply that they have cryptocurrency knowledge. Not to worry, I did finally find a link with more specifics on mining rigs etc.

I’ll eventually get my arms around the cryptocurrency world. Take care and again thank you.

Having cryptocurrency knowledge is something.
Setting up a mining rig is something else.

Mining is like LEGO, if you understand the basic knowledge of plugging in components and powering them well, then, le jeux sont fait. There is not much that you need to know. Anything you would really need to know can be found very easily in these forum, on youtube or simpling searching on google.

Any type of knowledge can be gained through time and energy. Put more energy (effort) and take your time (accept that you’ll need at least 100 hours of reading and elaborating data to have a enough to knowledge to start being able to understand the big picture).

If you do need any actual information that couldn’t be found in 30 seconds through internet search then please, ask ahead but this time don’t be so vague, asking: “how do i get a zcash public address?” is something reasonable and asking “So how would one transistion into a GPU mining situation besides the obvious stuff?” is something extremely wide and open and other than a personal opinion it’s hard to give.

I’m trying to get an understanding on how the t* address and the
mining software work together in zcash mining. The z* address is
obvious upon inspection of the wallet.

As you have indicated, a lot more research is on the plate for myself.
And I’m no stranger to research for knowledge - watching youtube
videos, visiting blogs and reading the wisdom there-in, etc. “El foto
grande!” - the big picture!

Sometimes one doesn’t know the proper wording of a question to ask and
not be vague.

@tkocou, I’ve managed to set up GPU mining on a Xubuntu machine, a couple of days ago. Not sure if you’ve figured out everything yet, but I’ll just lay down my experience with it for anyone else who might be asking the same questions.

I’ve felt a bit of a similar “hiccup” to yours, I guess, (not sure if for the exact same reasons) and I can say that I did a LOT of reading before starting to set everything up. I’m not saying that I’ve read everything out there and I might have missed some of the better articles that would have helped more, but it took me about a week of (on and off) reading before I’ve figured out everything I needed to just get started.

I tend to read a lot before starting the actual work, as I want to know I’ve covered all the main bases and I’m not missing anything essential.

The part which is sorely missing in most guides you can find online about GPU mining for Zcash is the one which actually would explain for a newcomer (irrespective of his technical level in other domains) how he can set up correctly and fast “the link” between the GPU miner – a Zcash address – a pool.

As it turns out it’s vastly similar to mining ETH/BTC and it’s as simple as pointing your GPU miner to a pool sever and (depending on the chosen pool) feeding it as an additional parameter either the Zcash address or an accountname.workername (in which case you’ll provide the Zcash address to which the pool will pay out your earnings during the pool account creation, on their website).
The Zcash address you provide, in theory can be either a z_type or a t_type but depending on the pool, you’ll be allowed to provide either of both or just a t_address (as some pools won’t execute payouts to a z_address at present time).

Basically some of the “harder to find out” pieces of info about Zcash mining (in my experience) were related to:

  1. The Zcash network kind of “moved beyond” CPU mining, since quite a while, (CPU mining is still possible but hardly profitable at present time) but unfortunately the official wiki guide kind of leaves you hanging after holding your hand through the client installation & wallet creation and the CPU mining setup part.
  2. When heading to the Internet for additional guides, most of the stuff you find has detailed instructions about the preliminary steps but not about the “meat” of the current subject which is mining software setup itself and alternatively you’ll find a lot of video guides for Windows, which also don’t bother to explain “how” the actually mining workflow happens or “why” you need to do some of the stuff they show you to do. Not complaining here, it’s good they exist and kudos to the authors, but most don’t shed enough light on certain aspects for a real noob.
  3. As a newcomer, even after reading many of the text guides that come in the first 2 pages of results in Google, it’s still unclear if you actually need to be running a Zcash node if you want to simply GPU pool-mine, and you’ll find a few seemingly contradictory hints on the matter.

So, from my (yet) limited understanding here’s how it goes (if I’m wrong on any of the facts below, anyone more experienced can step in and correct):

  1. You will actually find the most detailed guides (that I’ve seen so far) on how to set up your GPU miner of choice, on the various pools’ help pages; many of them tend to have quite detailed guides on how to set up the existent GPU mining clients and even offer for download versions pre-set for their pool (i.e. the correct fail-over server addresses will be pre-filled in the config file of the miner and the startup script file - i.e. .bat/.sh - will contain the correct parameters for their pool).
    You will STILL HAVE TO REPLACE the sample destination Zcash address in both the config file and startup file with your own Zcash address.
  2. A very simplified version of the pool GPU-mining workflow would be:
    a) Your miner submits shares for the current block by using the pool server address you set up in the miner as a destination
    b) Your shares get quantified on the pool side and when the pool actually solves a block and earns the reward for it you will get a part of the reward depending on the number of your submitted shares and according to the algorithm used by the pool (i.e. PPS, PPLNS, etc.)
    c) When your balance on the pool side reaches the payout threshold, then the pool will pay the amount you earned so far into the Zcash address you provided (either when you created your pool account, in case of pools that will require manual account creation or to the address you used as a parameter in your miner’s startup command - in which case usually the pool automatically creates an account for you when your miner submits its first share based on the parameters you provided on the command line, such as: Zcash address, worker name, email address).
    Actually all this is very similar to the way you GPU-mine other coins but since in most guides you don’t find an explicit mention of this, you have to figure it out yourself.
  3. If you’re pool-mining, it’s not necessary/mandatory to run the Zcash wallet (the zcashd daemon) in order to mine. It’s highly recommended to do it if you can, though, as it helps strengthen the network but failure to do so won’t prevent you from mining and earning ZEC via the pool you’ve chosen.
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Thank you for the extended reply. Hopefully other “n00bs” will benefit from the information. Somertimes you have to take a “leap of faith” on going forward with mining. I tried “Silent Army” and EWBF mining software. Silent Army does work as advertised, but I found that it can be inefficient - around 55 Sols/sec on a Nvidia 1080 GPU. I switched to the EWBF miner and got around 500 Sols/sec on the same hardware. Another undocumented feature of EWBF software is that one can have a minimal desktop running on the same GPU with a slightly slower Sols/sec rate as a trade off. Very nice feature. The MB which the 1080 was plugged into had the older PCIe 4 channel slots. I replaced the MB with a new “gaming” MB with PCIe 16 channel slots and gained an extra 10 percent on the Sols/sec rate (500 to 550 without overclocking the GPU). Last item is that pool mining appears to be the most efficient way to mine zcash as you have pointed out already. So, thank you very much for that information.