11
There are several options for Mining Bitcoins some of these are no longer profitable, but for the sake of being thorough here they are in order of efficiency lowest to highest:
Methods
CPU Mining (minerd)
GPU Mining (cgminer, bfgminer)
FPGA Mining (Custom software - https://github.com/fpgaminer/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner)
ASIC Mining (cgminer, bfgminer,...
6
The higher difficulty means you will be reporting results less frequently to the pool. This reduces network load on both your system and the pool. It also reduces the restart delay for your mining hardware as it prepares for the next work unit. Most pools base the rewards on the number of difficulty 2 shares accepted. So they increase the reward based on ...
6
I was confused by this as well, but I figured it out through trial and error. AM means arbitrary message (they should have explained this), which is a regular message you send to the forging pool through your wallet.
First you must join the forging pool (Account Balance -> More Info -> Account Leasing). No additional message is necessary at this point.
...
6
Bitcoin is a gossiping network. There is no hierarchy among the nodes, each node operates at equal privilege level. Bitcoin has an established protocol defining how nodes communicate with each other, and some stepping stones to find the first peers (although they could easily be replaced by other on-boarding mechanisms).
Whenever a node learns new data on ...
6
The setgenerate built-in background miner was removed.
There is however still a test-only on-demand miner, which will try to mine N blocks whenever requested by RPC (see generatetoaddress /generatetodescriptor/generateblock RPCs in recent Bitcoin Core versions). It is many times less efficient than even the built-in CPU miner was. Its only purpose is in ...
5
You need to be online because mining is sort of like a mathematical race: whoever finds the hash of the next block (with value less than the current target) wins. And in order to prove that you found this value before anybody else, you need to be online in order to broadcast it to other users.
4
If you are after bitcoins I wouldn't even spend time on CPU or GPU. It is now difficult with specialized hardware (butterfly labs, kncminer ... ). You can have a look at cloud mining (cexio) as well it is expensive and you have to have bitcoins already but you can buy and sell GH/s and you can actually make more from trading than mining.
4
With the advent of ASICs, Bitcoin GPU mining is no longer profitable. I would recommend mining a Scrypt coin such as Dogecoin or Litecoin. (You can then trade it in for Bitcoin on an exchange, if you prefer.)
To answer your original question, yes, you can use one card for mining and the other for actually running the computer.
4
I would highly recommend using Ubuntu Server for this, as long as you know what you are doing without a GUI. Not having a GUI at all means smaller OS size and much less OS tasks. This translates into more power savings. If you are using graphics cards, a non-GUI OS will improve your mining performance. If using an ASIC/etc. you probably will not see ...
4
Even on testnet the difficulty is sufficiently high that it will take you a long time to mine anything using cpu. (Lots of people testing ASICs, presumably.)
Your best bet is probably Testnet in a box. Then you can cpu mine just by using ´setgenerate true´ in Bitcoin Core.
4
In order to be able to calculate the nonce for the next block you need all the information from the last known block. The time between the blocks is 10 minutes in average, so if you stay offline for more that 10 minutes you will not be able to perform any valid calculations and essentially you will be in a solo, forking mode, solving the wrong block.
4
If you look at recent blocks on https://blockstream.info/ (as of today, Aug 15 2020), nearly all blocks are very close to 4000 kWU. The variation is due to availability of sufficiently small transactions to fill up the last part, and differences in selection algorithms.
Occasionally, an empty block appears instead. These happen as a result of pools learning ...
4
Yes. Bitcoin Core has a RPC submitblock, which, as the name implies, allows you to provide a block to be submitted to the Bitcoin network.
In fact, Bitcoin Core supports the getblocktemplate protocol which means you can solo mine with Bitcoin Core. Furthermore, pools are probably running Bitcoin Core in their backend and their pool software just uses the ...
3
Your intensity is very low (I:8) - dynamic intensity does not work well with scrypt. You will need to increase it manually. You can set a value to use when starting the program by adding --intensity 13 to your command line options/batch file. Replace the number 13 with the desired intensity. For a HD6850, I suggest you try values from 10 to 15.
If ...
3
One instance of minerd is all you're going to need. The application also synchronizes with the pool. So opening more than 1 instance of minerd is just going to cause your network to be used twice for the same information. Also, the operating system has some overhead for running the application. Opening another instance will mean more overhead and thus less ...
3
Warning: doing what is described below will not gain you any coins at all with exceedingly high probability, and just burn electricity (see other answer).
Bitcoin Core still has a built-in miner. It is not efficient, not optimized, does not use any special hardware (like special CPU instructions, GPUs, FPGAs, or ASICs), and is only useful for testing on ...
3
I am using a slightly overclocked AMD 6850 and get around 270kh/s.
When running cgminer you need to set two environment variables. In windows I use a batch file with the following:
TIMEOUT 10
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer
Timeout is just there so it waits 10 seconds to make sure MSI Afterburner has overclocked the ...
3
You shoud instead use cudaminer for this. I use the same card and I have a mining rate of 150khash.
The reason why you get a low mining rate is because Nvidia cards use CUDA cores to do most of their calculation and most of the miners do not use them since the best graphic cards for mining are AMD cards (and they do not have CUDA cores).
I dont know where ...
3
The following program will show you the OpenCL-capable devices on a given Macintosh:
// clang -framework OpenCL dumpcl.c -o dumpcl && ./dumpcl
# include <stdio.h>
# include <stdlib.h>
# include <OpenCL/opencl.h>
int main(int argc, char* const argv[]) {
cl_uint num_devices, i;
clGetDeviceIDs(NULL, CL_DEVICE_TYPE_ALL, 0, ...
3
You'll attain about 0.1MH/s with an overclocked and overvolted Raspberry Pi. 963437 years on average to generate a block, or averaged to 0.00000007 BTC a day when using a pool. Not enough to cover the 5W power draw.
3
Many exchanges don't have a fixed deposit address for each client.
This means that when you want to make a deposit, it will give you an address and it will log that you are depositing to it. However, when they don't receive anything on the address, the address expires and might be reused for another client.
So when you use the address for mining, it's ...
3
The only downside to more connections is increased bandwidth usage and slightly more CPU usage. Here, it's estimated that 2000 transactions per second is 7.8 megabits/second (average residential connect speed) and Bitcoin operates at the most at 7 TPS currently so you're in the clear.
Why you should connect to more nodes.
The more nodes you are connected ...
3
Absolutely not. The bandwidth required to mine Bitcoin is very low as shown here: What are the bandwidth requirements of a mining rig?
So that's 700 bits per second out and about 2,000 bits per second
back. Essentially, zero.
This means that your son can mine 24/7 and your daughter won't notice any slowdowns whatsoever.
3
Yes, the failover setting will tell cgminer to mine on a secondary pool when the first pool is unavailable.
Run cgminer with the following:
cgminer.exe --scrypt -o http://p2pool.org:9327 -u username -p password
--failover-only -o http://backuppool.org -u username -p password
This example mines LTC at p2pool and will mine at another pool of your ...
3
-S all will attempt autodetection.
3
GPUs are obsolete for mining. You won't get any reward worth even close to your electricity and hardware degredation cost. This has been true for over a year at least.
CPUs are 1000x more wasteful.
You're too late to the home-mining game.
3
You are using an ancient version of bfgminer
CPU mining was disabled by default even in bfgminer 3.10.0, your gpu doesn't seem to get detected
You're about 4 years late for CPU mining and 3 years late for GPU mining: Even if you get bfgminer to run, your PC will not be powerful enough to even find shares that would be accepted by a pool. See e.g. Can I do ...
3
The official Bitcoin full node software always had the mining feature built in, and will probably always have. If you have the line gen=1 in your .conf file, then you will start confirming transactions when you open the wallet. Take a look at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin
3
I've had to do this, so I'll try to describe exactly what you need to do to get mining on testnet to work in a local setup. For our purposes, we'll have 2 instances of bitcoind running, the first set up to be a miner, the second as a peer.
First, create two directories, one for the miner, the other for the peer:
$ mkdir 1
$ mkdir 2
Now create this file in ...
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