Uhh...balance is still zero...am I doing this right?

Mining Mining Support
1

First of all: I’m a noob to zcash—and cryptocurrency mining in general, really—today is my first attempt.

I followed the 1.0-User-Guide, turned on the `tromp’ solver, and it appears to be mining away. Yay! Except…well…my balance still 0.00000000. How many “equihash solver runs” do I need to mine before my balance starts ticking up?

To give a little more info, I’ve been staring at the following:

Thank you for running a Zcash node!
You're helping to strengthen the network and contributing to a social good :)

You are running 8 mining threads.

Since starting this node 21 minutes, 27 seconds ago:
- You have validated 1296 transactions!
- You have contributed 13.8329 Sol/s on average to the network solution rate.
- You have completed 9358 Equihash solver runs.

[Press Ctrl+C to exit] [Set 'showmetrics=0' to hide]

Also, when I do a zcash-cli getinfo, I see:

{
    "version" : 1000050,
    "protocolversion" : 170002,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 700,
    "timeoffset" : 0,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "difficulty" : 16761.68271725,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1477673489,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "relayfee" : 0.00005000,
    "errors" : ""
}

Someone help me out here. I’ve mined many blocks, but balance is still zero. Am I doing it wrong? Or does it just take a really really long time before even 0.00000001 ZEC gets mined?

2

You haven’t mined any blocks, you’ve only submitted solves. If you are solo mining with 8 you have a very small chance of mining a block.

3

Ok, then what does "blocks" : 700 mean?

4

It means 700 blocks have been mined in total by other miners. To reinforce what @abromide says look at https://explorer.zcha.in/ and find the global hash rate - solo mining you can expect on average to get around 3 blocks a year (that’s at current hashrate which is rapidly increasing). I’d suggest you try a pool if you want to get fractions of a ZEC - there are a million pool posts listed below this one :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

Hi @notfed,

from noob to noob: what’s the command to get the zcashd metrics?

Since starting this node 21 minutes, 27 seconds ago:

  • You have validated 1296 transactions!
  • You have contributed 13.8329 Sol/s on average to the network solution rate.
  • You have completed 9358 Equihash solver runs.

Thanks!

6

Start zcashd in non-daemon mode with flag of show -showmetrics or simply add showmetrics=1 to your conf file

./src/zcashd -showmetrics

7

Thanks, garethtdavies, that helps explain a little. What formula did you use to gather the “around 3 blocks a year”? Asked another way, how many solutions do I need to solve to get a block? (And I realize that might be a stupid question.)

8

Hi nminer, I ran “./src/zcash-cli getinfo”. See Home · zcash/zcash Wiki · GitHub].

9

So nothing complicated. We know that there should be a block every 2.5 minutes (although it’s currently faster than that due to difficulty it’ll settle in at that figure) and Google tells me there are 525600 minutes in a year so we can expect 210,240 blocks to be mined each year.

Now your hashrate is 13.8329 and the current global hashrate is 1053336 (it’s gone up a lot since I posted originally!) so you can expect to mine (13.8329/153336) x 210240 a year which works out at 2.76 blocks per year. So 1 block every 12/2.76 = 4.34 months.

The difference was caused by the increase in hashrate between my original and this post. It’s obviously not an exact science as you can simply get lucky (and conversely unlucky) and clearly the hashrate is going to further increase making your chances of solo mining close to nill. It’s just a snapshot at this point in time that you shouldn’t expect to see a block for a period of months and not minutes/days.

1 Like
10

If you hit one block it will be a holiday, now. Let her run and it will happen. It may take quite a long time.

I had a cpu running .02 sol/s hit a block in testnet when the hashrate was about 20x less than right now. It is just being in the right place at the right time.

11

The testnet never got anywhere near to this in terms of difficulty- we’re over a MH already so whilst it was unlikely then it’s an order of magnitude less likely even than that. Still miracles happen and who doesn’t like lotteries :slight_smile:

12

I think you’d be surprised how often they hit…

No matter what the difficulty, it is just the being patient.

We shall see. At this price, it only takes one.

13

Whilst I admire your optimism everyone can’t be lucky!

14

Many can when most mine in pools…

15

Right there with you bud, exactly the same for me. Will be using my rigs to secure another crypto tomorrow as at the moment this mining situation won’t be profitable for me unless 1 ZEC = 5 BTC this time next year (which of courservice it will not). Back to ZEC speculation rather than mining methinks…

16

ok, but how do we mine to a pool, with ubuntu, specially steps? running a node from linux ubuntu now (git zcash) but unsure how to mine to pool with pc