I'm Evo and I just wanted to pop in and say hello. I "discovered" Burst and started mining in February and have been mining a bit more seriously since April. I was taking a look at BN and met some really nice people there, but I got a bad vibe from Fat Bastard from the start. Seeing how he treated @Estie-Trixie and others during last weeks implosion was the last straw for me. May karma work it's magic on him and his "empire". It was time for me to find a different Burst-Team (see what I did there?) So here I am and I'm really refreshed by the, well, different feel of this site. It seems a lot more like a proper Burst home and I look forward to being part of the community. Take care everyone!
Best posts made by Evo
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What a refreshing change!posted in Introduce Yourself
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RE: 100TB Burst rig questionsposted in System Builds and other hardware stuff.
@Dtrade16, hi there. Kinda surprised your thread sat for so many days without some feedback. I started mining in February, and by April had a 50TB rig. From April to May I made around 50,000 coins. Between May and June, I've mined about 42,000 coins. That was with a larger rig (87.9 TB), but there was a big swelling in network capacity and the difficulty levels shot way up. Also, there is a certain randomness to Burst mining. Some days I'll make next to nothing, then the next day I might forge three blocks and get 600 to 900 coins in historical pool earnings as well. I don't have enough months under my belt to know how it varies strictly due to this randomness.
There are a lot of variables that go into mining, but here are my thoughts, for what they are worth. You can CPU mine and plot, but GPU mining and plotting should be quicker, and quicker is better. I have one machine with an RX-480 GPU and it is OK, but the other has a GTX-1060 and it works a lot better for me (although some say the NVIDIA cards can be difficult). But the 480 was a lot cheaper and still works well. My advice would be be to use a decent GPU, but one your budget can afford.
GPU plotting is fast enough that it outpaces the speed at which data can be written to a drive. You can actually have the plotter calculate for several drives at once and write to the drives in parallel.The GPU needs an allotment of RAM for each drive and more RAM for larger stagger sizes as well. For that reason I'd say get all the RAM you can, without getting silly. I have 16GB in my miner and am expanding my plotting rig from 10GB to 16GB or perhaps a bit more.
Yes, you can mix internal and external drives. I filled up my miner with five x 6TB SATA III, 7200 RPM internals. Everything else is external, all on USB 3.0 connections. USB 2.0 or less is too slow: don't use it!
The externals can cost less, so you can get more plotted space for less money. Mine are all Seagate 5Tb or 8TB externals, 5400 RPM, and are a kind of drive known as SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). This makes the drives cheaper, but VERY slow to plot. Mining speed is fine. I'm not independently wealthy, so cheap, slow plotting drives work for me. I actually plot to faster internal drives and then copy the finished plot files to the SMR drives. These long, continuous writes are much faster than the intermittent plotting writes when it comes to SMR drives.
Your miner will scan faster with optimized plots. You can plot normal plots and then optimize them or you can directly create optimized plots. I do the latter. I fill my drives as full as I can with plot files and I use multiple files per drive so that the plot files are between 2 to 3 TB each. There is no speed penalty for multiple files versus one large file. I've had the plotting software fail on larger plots, but never on files around 2TB.
A given USB controller only has so much bandwidth, and all of the drives plugged into it share that bandwidth. The mining software will access the drives in parallel, so things slow down as you add more and more drives. I've got too many on one card right now. When I had four externals, I was reading all my drives in about 15 seconds. With nine, it now takes 20 to 30 seconds. I'm plotting three more, so I'm sure it will just plain crawl with twelve drives.
The solution is to divide the drives up between multiple USB controllers. I'd like to see no more than four drives per controller. There are PCIEx1 cards that will give you one extra USB controller. There is at least one PCIEx4 card out there with four separate controllers. The key is having the right motherboard with the right expansion slots. Speaking of this, you can also get expansion cards that will give you extra SATA/SAS ports so you can add extra internal drives too. Of course you need enough drive bays and a PSU that can supply the needed power. And, again, you need the right motherboard expansion ports.
You can also use multiple PCs to mine; all of them looking at one wallet server running on one machine. I haven't done this yet, but it is my next step since my miner is pretty well out of expansion options. There are how-to's out there for implementing this.
That's it for me right now. I'm crazy tired. I'm afraid to even proof-read what I wrote. Sorry if it rambles on! I'm sure others can provide you more detailed information. The main thing is to dive in and get started. Everything can be upgraded down the road, but even a modest rig can get you earning some coins. Good luck! I'm off to bed...
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RE: What a refreshing change!posted in Introduce Yourself
@ScreamIndevnull, @socalguy, @splash-of-wild, @keyd0s, @croydan1, @Propagandalf and @darindarin, thanks for being so welcoming. I appreciate it!
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RE: Has BURST LOST it's Community Spirit?posted in General Discussion
@keyd0s your comment about feeling the other end of the stick struck a chord with me. I am part of the "new" Burst crowd and found out about Burst via YouTube videos. Unfortunately this included BN/AG videos at a time I was looking for a community. So I joined right before the poop hit the fan. The total AG dictatorship, talk of his "empire", petty bannings, etc. totally turned me off.
I found this wonderful place as a result. I made a personal decision to not be part of the hatred and negativity at BN, left, and haven't been back. Several of the nicer people I met at BN either felt the same way or were banned and ended up here. I wish I had "discovered" Burst-Team first. Or...maybe not. Maybe the sad experience over there makes me appreciate this community that much more.
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RE: Need help - GPU plottingposted in Mining & Plotting
@Weasel, I use a GTX1060 6GB and I had the same issue. It was the devices.txt settings. Here is what I have now for values:
0 0 2048 128 2048
I've tried some different settings, like you I'm not convinced I've found optimal values yet.
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RE: WTH Net DIff ??? bipolar muchposted in General Discussion
@Gibsalot said in WTH Net DIff ??? bipolar much:
what is with the difficulty i have seen it as high at 64k and as low as 32k today just randomly looking at my miner. its always fluxed but have never seen it swing so far in just a matter of a few blocks
I know! Ugh! Somewhere there was a post about the global size of total hard drive space dedicated to Burst mining growing rapidly in the last few weeks. So basically lots of new miners and/or lots of Petabyte or near Petabyte sized rigs being added to the network. So the network hashratehas gone way up.
I found the following online regarding Bitcoin:
*The Bitcoin difficulty started at 1 (and can never go below that). Then for every 2016 blocks that are found, the timestamps of the blocks are compared to find out how much time it took to find 2016 blocks, call it T. We want 2016 blocks to take 2 weeks, so if T is different, we multiply the difficulty by (2 weeks / T) - this way, if the hashrate continues the way it was, it will now take 2 weeks to find 2016 blocks.
For example, if it took only 10 days it means difficulty is too low and thus will be increased by 40%.
The difficulty can increase or decrease depending on whether it took less or more than 2 weeks to find 2016 blocks. Generally, the difficulty will decrease after the network hashrate drops.* -from a post on StackExchange authored by Meni Rosenfeld.
Since it is often quoted that Burst blocks are mined on average every 4 minutes, I'm guessing the Burst difficulty must follow a similar procedure to modulate or throttle the mining with regards to more or less hashrate.
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RE: Is this the End, the Beginning of the End or the End of the End?posted in General Discussion
@haitch, no, it definitely is not. But I don't think this is megalomania or delusions of grandeur. I think it is another well-conceived scam appealing to the same kind of people who send their savings to televangelists. It costs him nothing and who knows how many weak minds will send their coin to him. Cha-ching! He is a devious S.O.B. And he has to go. The question is, what will it take?
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RE: A Few Beginner Questions!!!posted in General Discussion
@BigBear, that drive will mine just fine, once it is plotted. The reason the price is good on this unit is that it uses an SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drive, which is very slow to write to under certain conditions. Unfortunately, these are exactly the conditions that plotting creates. So you can either plot to the drive and expect it to take quite some time or, if you have the space on another non-SMR drive, you can plot several small plot files to the faster drive and then copy them to the 8TB unit.
I'm actually doing this right now with the same drive you bought. I have two 2TB drives: I gpu plot direct to one while copying a previous plot on the other to the Seagate 8TB. I'm ending up with 6 plot files per 8TB drive. This is just as fast in mining as one large plot file. I need a bit more RAM...if I had it I would plot to both 2TB drives at once.
I have also had power failures and they are maddening when a plot is at 90+ percent...which is exactly why you should use many smaller files. Good luck!
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RE: GPU not found when trying to plot with gpuPlotGeneratorposted in Mining & Plotting
Hi. Baffin is the graphics processor in the RX-460. I have an RX-480 and it shows up as Ellesmere. So that IS your card. For what it's worth, I also only have about 1GB show up. I plot in direct mode under Windows 10. During the first part of the plot I see speeds over 50000. Then the display stops updating till the file is written. On the second pass where it optimizes my speeds are much slower...I'm at 98% on a drive now and I'm seeing 7843 nonces/minute. I'm pretty sure I have the right AMD drives, but it wouldn't hurt to check.
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RE: New to mining questionposted in General Discussion
Hi @Jimmyg123. There's definitely a learning curve when getting started, so no one is going to think you are an idiot. Actually, if you got some space plotted and got onto a pool you are doing well!
Like @haitch said, there is really no substitute for hard drive space. The cheapest route would be to slap on external USB 3.0 drives as your budget allows. A little here, a little there; it adds up.
Be aware too that mining is all statistical and random. Over time you will generally earn a certain average amount for a rig of a certain size. But it rarely comes steadily. You might get little or nothing for days, then make up for it by finding a block or even two in a short time. I've learned to semi-ignore the round to round stuff and just look at the numbers after one (or two or three) days.
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RE: 100TB Burst rig questionsposted in System Builds and other hardware stuff.
@IncludeBeer said in 100TB Burst rig questions:
@Dtrade16 said in 100TB Burst rig questions:
This is a great community and an interesting project. I've heard people using their CPU to mine as well so I may start off with that first and see how it goes.
I broke my CPU cooler and I'm in the process of getting a new one. As soon as I do, I will get this loner desktop up and running and get a better understanding of everything.Ya, this is a good idea. Get a feel for the different tools used in plotting and see how it goes. From there, you'll be in a much better state for building an actual hdd rig.
Personally, I prefer optimized drives (meaning the stagger is the same size as the plot, increases read speeds). The cpu plotter creates these automatically. The gpu plotter unfortunately doesn't, so you would need to run a second long-running program to optimize them. For this reason alone, I prefer to let my gpus do altcoin mining and I just plot with my i7-5930k.
@IncludeBeer, actually the gpu plotter can create optimized plots. It's as simple as using the "direct" command:
non-optimized: gpuPlotGenerator generate buffer {drive}:{plot file name}
optimized: gpuPlotGenerator generate direct {drive}:{plot file name}In direct mode it will make two passes; one to generate the file and a second to optimize.
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RE: How do I use gpuPlotGenerator with an NVIDIA GPU?posted in Mining & Plotting
@vmantilla, the readme gives "extra" instructions that one would need if they were going to compile the gpuPlotgenerator from it's source code. You aren't going to compile your own binary, so ignore this who section where it refers to msys/mingw, the includes, etc. Start at the ## Setup section and ignore what is above it.
I have a GTX 1060 on a 64 bit Windows 10 machine and it plots just fine. I made sure I had the latest 64 bit JAVA installed. As far as the 1060, I installed all of the software that came with it and then updated everything to the latest version. I had no issue with OPENCL, and I don't remember installing anything to add it in or get it working. My GeForce driver is version 381.65.
The NVIDIA did not like the suggested devices.txt settings; i have these values in use currently: 0 0 2048 128 2048. The gpuPlotgenerator would crash when the third value of 2048 was set to 4096. I think it is because my monitor is also being driven by this same card.
Did you try the gpuPlotGenerator listPlatforms, gpuPlotGenerator listDevices and gpuPlotGenerator setup commands per the file instructions? Your card may not show up with a name you recognize. Mine lists the GPU chip name: Ellesmere for my RX-480 machine; I the GTX 1060 has a Pascal GPU.
If I go back therough my notes and find anything else useful, I'll pass it along. Good luck!
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RE: Is this the End, the Beginning of the End or the End of the End?posted in General Discussion
A. I utterly agree. Wow. But....
B. I'm guessing there will be those who will pay. -
RE: A Few Beginner Questions!!!posted in General Discussion
@BigBear, I wasn't trying to steer you away from these. Just passing along what I've learned. As several of us have said, they work just fine once you are mining. And you have a few more bucks in your pocket towards your next drive!
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RE: GPU not found when trying to plot with gpuPlotGeneratorposted in Mining & Plotting
@Casse, good to hear that your getting faster plotting. In my case my monitor is also attached to the same graphics card, and if the the devices.txt values are too aggressive I suspect that there is some resource overlap which kills performance.