Mining for Dummies? Help?
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I’m trying to learn a little bit more about how everything works and coming from a non-tech background, I’m taking baby steps. Any advise is very welcomed.
Can anyone please help me understand how to mine?
I DLed the wallet and pressed “start mining”. My computer is running pretty hot and the fans are going nuts, and the program is running 90+% of my CPU (APU) resources so I’m pretty sure something is going on. The program also says that I’m mining at 6000-6500 hashes per second… which seems comically low compared to some of the speeds I’m hearing about using those super graphics cards.
I didn’t input any additional information, just opened up the wallet program and hit the start mining button. Am I actually doing anything?
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Welcome to the world of mining! :D
You are mining on the wallet so congrats… sort of. ;) You are actually solo mining which is OK if you have around 3Mhs+ but unfortunately you don’t and you will likely never find a block at 6Khs.
Mining in the wallet itself (as opposed to using a third party app and pointing it to your wallet) only uses the cpu and it is sloooow. Even a fairly basic AMD GPU (graphics card) will outperform a CPU. In overly simplistic terms, a CPU is designed to do thing in series or one after another. A GPU on the other hand is designed to do lots of things at once.
An example is that my super duper i7-3930k is running at 4.2Ghz has 6 cores + hyperthreading so thats effectively 12 things (calculations) at once it can do. Dont get me wrong, it can do them pretty fast but not fast enough.
On the other hand, my 7970 GPU is only running at 1.1Ghz (roughly a quarter of the clock speed) BUT it has 2048 shader cores so it can calculate 2048 things simultaneously (shaders are what GPUs use to calculate the colour of pixels etc). Simple math says the GPU will obliterate the performance of any CPU. The numbers dont translate literally though… In real world numbers my CPU gets about 100Khs but one of my GPUs gets around 750Khs. And they both draw about the same amount of power.
I guess the average Joe Miner would be getting between 100 - 750Khs.
IMHO - CPU mining is not worth while on scrypt based coins (feathercoin/litecoin/etc) as by the time you’ve paid the electricity bills you’ll be worse off.
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Thanks for the heads up! I didn’t realize it was THAT far behind
At any rate it definitely seemed way too easy to just set up the program and start mining ;D
I’ll give your setup guide another read, hopefully this little bit of experience will help me understand it better. I tried following it at first before I gave this a go, but I wasn’t able to follow. Is there another program I should be using or are there settings that I’m missing?
Thanks again for the feedback, I’m looking forward to contributing what I can to the mining!
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To start off you can do whats called pool mining, thats what I’m doing now with my computer which is only using it’s CPU. My computer has 4 cores and it says it’s going at 3.75 Khz per core, so a total of 15 Khz. With the mining pool at my rate I’m getting about .6 feathercoins per day. Of course I’m spending a lot more on electricity than I’m earning with feathercoin but for me it’s about the learning process right now.
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Take a look at the starterkit: http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php?topic=685topic=486 should get you up and running in no-time.