Ethash-Based Alts

I must've posted something like this on Facebook, because I don't see it here.

WhatToMine shows that often Ethash-based altcoins like Expanse (EXP), Ubiq (UBQ), and Musicoin (MUSIC) are at times more profitable than ETH.  Trezor supports EXP and UBQ via MyEtherWallet.  Musicoin apparently can be supported via MEW.  There aren't any such instructions for Metaverse, which for a while last week was the alt on top.  There are a few options, but the lack of easy support makes it a hassle.

The reason I started looking into this is because 1060 cards were still north of $300, but 1050s (non-Ti) were around $150.  The Ethash hashrate of 1050s is shown to be around 13.9 MH/s, whereas 1060s are 22.5 (somewhat optimistically); the power usage is 53W for the former and 70W for the latter.  So the thought was to build a rig of 1050s.  At least before the Antminer E3 came out.

I should've snagged one while it was $800, because I knew I'd be able to use it.  The real problem was that I didn't know where I'd put it...I'm out of space and circuits as it is.  Chance favors the prepared, and I was unprepared when Bitmain opened it up to 5 per person--and of course after Vitalik Buterin's announcement that they weren't going to fight ASICs (until PoS, that is), Bitmain jacked up the price to $1800.

The thing is, a build of 1060s would cost more than an E3 at that price, but the power usage would be 2/3, and it could mine other alts as well.  There's utility in GPUs still, but it's costly and troublesome to maintain.

Bonus: In MEW's FAQs is a link to a place with free SSL certs, which could be useful.  There's gotta be a catch, though.

Python Scripts

If I don't clean these tabs off my phone, they'll be there forever!  Two more:

1. noethfee.py, a hack to redirect the mining devfee via IP tables, specifically for Claymore
2. watchdog.py, a script to drive the USB hardware watchdog dongle available on Amazon

I had to run with the latter because the one featured in a YT video, the SSR, is out of stock, and I got sick of the crummy system locking up.  The USB dongle is nice because it has power and reset buttons on it: it avoids the need for a separate cable, and it's nicer, too.  The one I got has a heartbeat LED, although Kid#1 commented it'd be more like a heartbeat if it were red instead of blue.

As one might expect, there's a gotcha.  If the GPUs lock up but the script can still run, then the system doesn't reboot, so there's a window between the software watchdog in Claymore and the hardware watchdog where the rig stays in zombie mode.  Perhaps an IoT power outlet is required to address that case, as well as to log power usage.

Maybe I'll have to learn Python after all; these useful scripts are after all in that language.

Nvidia GPUs & Linux

A couple more non-link-dump link dumps:

1. Ubuntu Nvidia binary driver howto, which has some troubleshooting info
2. Using integrated graphics for display, albeit with a laptop; I ran into the login loop, and found elsewhere driver installation via PPA

This is tricky stuff.  Lots of compatibility problems, disinformation, and apathy, and money hangs in the balance.  Mining definitely isn't for everyone.  I'm not sure I'd do it again if I could go back--but I'm kind of committed now, at least until I recoup the hardware costs.

Mining Disinformation

One page on how to build a mining rig claims that WhatToMine shows stock numbers.  No...for GeForce GTX 1060s they list 22.5 MH/s on Ethereum, which is an average overclock.  I have some cards that start out at 15 stock, and only make it to 20 OC'ed.  Some go up to 23.5.  It seems to be the hardware lottery.  I've read that Hynix memory is the stuff that sucks, but I can't run the hardware check because they're all for Windows.

Speaking of, the aforementioned page links to another site that has activation keys for cheap.  I'm thinking it must be pirated somehow, but at $43.49 for Windows 10 Professional and Office 2016, it's tempting....

Mining Rig Power

One amusing thing is that all the GPU risers I see for sale include a SATA-to-6-pin adapter cable.  According to this hugely useful page on "PlayTool", the SATA port can only handle 54W through the 12V pins, whereas the PCIe spec shows the 6-pin connector as required to supply 75W.

In other words, the card could try to draw 75W through a connector only designed for 54W.  Sounds like a fire waiting to happen.  It's unclear how a 120W card would draw power, i.e. if a standard 6-pin is used for the riser and the adapter cable is used for the auxiliary connector, would most of the power come through the riser first?

Well, since I run close to the minimum, 60-75W for 120W cards and 90W for 150W cards, it shouldn't be a problem if 50-50, but if power is pulled through the SATA connector primarily, that wouldn't be good.  I think I'll spend a few extra bucks and get the right kind of cables.

Gigabyte & Mining

Well, I had a hell of a time debugging stability problems with an AX370 Gaming 5.  (Purchased because I didn't want to support Intel after their hardware bug fiasco, so I bought an AMD, and that mobo had a rebate....)  The thing would run for anywhere from 30 minutes to 8 hours, and then lock up.  I had no idea it was the PCIe version, until I saw on an Amazon page for a riser card that you need to use something lower than version 3.  Version 2 didn't help with the Leboo expander card I was using, but version 1 is solid.

The other problem I ran into was that the mobo gets stuck in a boot loop when trying to plug in more than 6 GPUs.  (Note that all 7 are Gigabyte branded!)  This is particularly nasty, because not only do I have to reset the CMOS (push the button), I have to unplug all video cards to get it to work: doing just one or the other is insufficient.  Having one card in the slot, the BIOS a message saying to plug in the auxiliary power connector, and that breaks the boot loop.

Now, I had the F5 BIOS on there, so I flashed F20, which gave a couple more options, like enabling memory above 4GB.  Well...that didn't help either.

Gigabyte has a page on mining using their "Ultra Durable" motherboard line.  The suggestions are:

1. Update BIOS to the latest one, and enable mining mode
2. Disable the CSM option for UEFI mode OS
3. Change Max Link Speed setting from Auto to Gen2
4. Change Initial Display Output setting from PCIe 1 slot to IGFX
5. Change Above 4G Decoding setting from Disabled to Enabled
6. Change Internal Graphics setting from Auto to Enabled
7. Use UEFI mode to install the OS

Amusingly, elsewhere Gigabyte says to not update the BIOS unless necessary.  I changed Max Link Speed and Above 4G Decoding; there's no option for this board for internal graphics when a PCIe card is plugged in.  Besides, on an Intel system with Nvidia graphics and Linux for an OS, trying to use the internal video causes annoying problems.

The only thing I haven't done is change the CSM option.  Based on my luck so far, I doubt that'll make a difference; then again, one page claims that CSM is a boot support option that is necessary for some video cards.  Even so, that the mobo somehow corrupts the CMOS--as the boot loop persists after switching the PSU off, unplugging it, plugging it back in, and turning it back on--seems like either a hardware compatibility problem or a firmware bug.

Anyway, this screwed me because I wanted to put 12 or 13 cards in this one frame I built.  Now I can only have six.  Perhaps I should try putting more than 6 in the ASRock board I added to my collection....

Monero Mining

Nanopool has support for XMR, but only through Claymore, which doesn't have a Linux version for the CPU miner.  One site uses xmr-stak-cpu and another uses cpu-miner-multi.  Looks like a 1060 does about 470 H/s.

CryptoCompare's guide also has several options.  Gotta wonder how a 12-thread Ryzen would do at reduced load concurrent with Ethereum mining.

OC at Last

Well, the problem was trying to use the onboard video.  Once I shut off the IGA and disabled multiple adapters, gpu-manager quit overwriting my xorg.conf and I was able to follow the rest of the usual steps to overclock the GPUs.  I started off with +100 MHz graphics clock and +500 MHz memory clock, and once I got the EVGA 1060 SC up to +1000 MHz memory, claymore started throwing errors.  Anything over +500 didn't seem to help the hashrate, although I needed to kick the power target on the #3 card up to 80W.  With 100/500 across the board, I'm getting about 21 MH/s rather than 19.5 MH/s, a total of 84 MH/s, up from 79 MH/s.  Not quite a 10% kicker, but it's welcome.

I was reading how ethminer has better optimization for Cuda, so I'm going to have to check out ethminer vs. claymore once I get it compiled.  WhatToMine says I should be getting 90 MH/s for four 1060s.  At least the system power consumption's lower than the 360W they quote; 345W for the whole box.

Mining Mobo

I'd been wondering why no one bothered to make an out-of-form-factor motherboard with slots spaced for multiple GPUs.  One just showed up in my feed!  The manufacturer's page is a bit sparse, information-wise, so it'd be a bit risky to buy.  They're available on eBay for about $232, shipping included, with estimated delivery in 8-10 weeks.

Installing Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu

After installing Ubuntu with the Nvidia drivers, nvidia-settings wouldn't display the overclocking options.  Modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf didn't help, because gpu-manager was overwriting the file.  The Bumblebee module (bbswitch), which is for switching between an integrated GPU and a standalone one, was failing to load, causing gpu-manager to behave badly.  Bumblebee isn't what I need, since I want to run the display on the Intel video and keep the GPUs running for mining.  Apparently this is still a problem with people, since complaints turn up on the BB Git page.

The devs seem to ignore the requests, possibly because it's due to misconfiguration.  Based on my log, it seems that the Nvidia drivers are being loaded prior to gpu-manager invoking modprobe bbswitch.

Two pages turned up with hints on how to resolve the problem.  The first one was easier to follow, but the Nvidia run script failed to build the DKMS module.  There's a second page that may be of help since that first one didn't do the trick....

Incidentally, at one point I'd used nvidia-prime to switch to the Intel driver and upon reboot the login page would freeze.  A page suggested reinstalling ubuntu-desktop, which surprisingly worked.

Follow-up [1/14]: Well, none of that stuff worked.  In fact, using the Nvidia run file, I couldn't even log into X, as it got stuck in a "login loop".  So I ripped out all of that, installed the PPA drivers, and I'm back where I started--what a waste of time.  I guess that's why Linux is free and you have to pay for Windows.  The last thing I have to try is switching off the IGA and using the GPU as the video adapter in the hope that gpu-manager won't screw with xorg.conf.

Cryptocurrency Regulation

FinCEN apparently has a broader definition of a money services business than the state of Minnesota.  From the former:

  (uu) Money services business. Each agent, agency, branch, or office within the United States of any person doing business, whether or not on a regular basis or as an organized business concern, in one or more of the capacities listed in paragraphs (uu)(1) through (uu)(6) of this section. Notwithstanding the preceding sentence, the term ‘‘money services business’’ shall not include a bank, nor shall it include a person registered with, and regulated or examined by, the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
  (1) Currency dealer or exchanger. A currency dealer or exchanger (other than a person who does not exchange currency in an amount greater than $1,000 in currency or monetary or other instruments for any person on any day in one or more transactions).
  (2) Check casher. A person engaged in the business of a check casher (other than a person who does not cash checks in an amount greater than $1,000 in currency or monetary or other instruments for any person on any day in one or more transactions).
  (3) Issuer of traveler’s checks, money orders, or stored value. An issuer of traveler’s checks, money orders, or, stored value (other than a person who does not issue such checks or money orders or stored value in an amount greater than $1,000 in currency or monetary or other instruments to any person on any day in one or more transactions).
  (4) Seller or redeemer of traveler’s checks, money orders, or stored value. A <15>seller or redeemer of traveler’s checks, money orders, or stored value (other than a person who does not sell such checks or money orders or stored value in an amount greater than $1,000 in currency or monetary or other instruments to or redeem such instruments for an amount greater than $1,000 in currency or monetary or other instruments from, any person on any day in one or more transactions).
  (5) Money transmitter—(i) In general. Money transmitter:
  (A) Any person, whether or not licensed or required to be licensed, who engages as a business in accepting currency, or funds denominated in currency, and transmits the currency or funds, or the value of the currency or funds, by any means through a financial agency or institution, a Federal Reserve Bank or other facility of one or more Federal Reserve Banks, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or both, or an electronic funds transfer network; or
  (B) Any other person engaged as a business in the transfer of funds.
  (ii) Facts and circumstances; Limitation. Whether a person ‘‘engages as a business’’ in the activities described in paragraph (uu)(5)(i) of this section is a matter of facts and circumstances. Generally, the acceptance and transmission of funds as an integral part of the execution and settlement of a transaction other than the funds transmission itself (for example, in connection with a bona fide sale of securities or other property), will not cause a person to be a money transmitter within the meaning of paragraph (uu)(5)(i) of this section.
  (6) United States Postal Service. The United States Postal Service, except with respect to the sale of postage or philatelic products.

From the latter:

The Minnesota Department of Commerce licenses and regulates individuals and businesses that cash checks, transmit money, own and operate ATMs, and provide electronic funds transfers.

The MN license is $4k.  Didn't see a price on the FinCEN one.

Crypto Wikis

• Bitcoin: in particular for the FAQ, technical articles, and protocol documentation
• Ethereum: in particular for the FAQ and info on Ethash, mining, and problems
• Litecoin: wiki currently down (Cloudflare error); mored from GitHub page
• Zcash: in particular for the FAQ as well as the spec info

Side-note: Ripple apparently is being called a cryptocurrency because transactions are signed, but from a cursory view it appears that the consensus algorithm of the ledger requires trusting nodes to not collude:

During consensus, each node evaluates proposals from a specific set of peers, called chosen validators. Chosen validators represent a subset of the network which, when taken collectively, is "trusted" not to collude in an attempt to defraud the node evaluating the proposals. This definition of "trust" does not require that each individual chosen validator is trusted. Rather, validators are chosen based on the expectation they will not collude in a coordinated effort to falsify data relayed to the network.

The lack of this trust requirement is one of BTC's desirable attributes, at least to liberty people.  However, it's easy to see why Ripple is supported by banks: they have a place in the XRP ecosystem.

More Ether

So my phone's browser is filling up with tabs and I need to dump them ASAP!

About using 1060 3GB cards to mine ETH: Well, they're actually still obtainable, since everyone else is buying RX 580s and GTX 1080s.  But also salient is that the power consumption is much lower, as posted previously.  (Actually, without overclocking, 19.8 MH/s is achievable at 70W.)

Even mining with 1060s has taken off: articles from 6 mo ago show prices for the 6GB cards as being sub-$200, and now they're closer to $300.  Even 3GB cards, which may be getting close to outmoded for the increased DAG file size at more recent epochs, are selling for ~$230.

OC'ing Nvidia cards on Linux is a hot mess.  Everyone appears to be using Windows, but I'm too cheap to pay MS, and I don't really want to pirate it.  Going from ~20 to ~23 hashrate would be nice, though.  Some hacking of the xorg.conf file is necessary to enable memory OC; the problem is under Ubuntu, gpu-manager runs and rewrites xorg.conf upon reboot.  When I effectively disabled that using "sudo chattr +i /etc/X11/xorg.conf", the system wouldn't boot into X.  Then I had to figure out how to get into the Grub startup page (old docs say hold down shift, but I found that Esc is necessary these days) and get into single-user mode to restore the attribute.  At least power target can be adjusted down without coolbits.

On my laptop I had another guide open that I realized I hadn't fully tried.  Need to give it a shot.

It was amusing to read about how mining pools calculate "shares": by having the miner submit work and verifying that it meets a standard of difficulty below the network standard for the sole purpose of computing the miner contributions.  Of course, a given share may be the block solution, but the miner doesn't have enough information to know.  Furthermore, at least if we were talking Bitcoin, the coinbase / generation transaction's address would be the mining pool's.  Of course, a malicious miner could return bogus data and cause blocks to be missed....

Don't forget the PPLNS pool algorithm used by nanopool (explanation).  Pay Per Last N Shares introduces randomness in the algorithm; if I understand correctly, the pool pays based on some recent subset of shares submitted by each miner when a block is found, as opposed to all the shares, as in PPS.

CoinWarz's mining profit calculator is more detailed than CryptoCompare's calculator.  The former is more optimistic than the latter, though: 2.928 vs. 2.78 based on the same hashrate, and is still optimistic on the USD profit, even though the former also subtracts out the pool fees.

Regarding hashrate of 1050s, it appears they're 12 MH/s stock, as opposed to 19-20 with 1060s.  The 2GB model is ~$125, the 4GB ~$190.  Of course the 4GB is in greater demand.  2GB is definitely too small for ETH; perhaps it'd be usable for other alts like ZEC?  With one of those miner boards that allows for hooking up >10 cards, that'd potentially be more cost-effective, if not power-effective.

As far as the Ethereum switch to PoS, the FAQ on GitHub describes what that would look like.  Apparently there are two types under consideration: chain-based and BFT-style.  BFT is "Byzantine fault tolerance" that handles consensus-seeking in the presence of malicious actors.  Amusingly enough, the Wikipedia page notes under examples of such failures that this pertains to swarming bees:

A similar problem faces honeybee swarms. They have to find a new home, and the many scouts and wider participants have to reach consensus about which of perhaps several candidate homes to fly to. And then they all have to fly there, with their queen. The bees' approach works reliably, but when researchers offer two hives, equally attractive by all the criteria bees apply, catastrophe ensues, the swarm breaks up, and all the bees die.

My hobbies are commingling! (?!)

As far as using Radeon RX 580s, most of those seem to be sold out at under a $400 price point.  Amusingly, Newegg has an Asus 4GB card for $280 in stock: "limit 1 per customer" (lol).  I'm less enthused about using those because OC'ing them involves tweaking their BIOS.

I'm not sure why I get like this every once in a while, going full-bore into something different.  Hopefully in this case it'll be profitable rather than just another money sink.

ETH Mining

For reference:

• Tweaks for GeForce 1070 mining: presumably still applicable to 1060
• Silent mining with a GeForce 1060: perfect!--with a hardware list that influenced me to buy an EVGA card

Looking for info on running a miner in a VM with Windows running on Linux, I found the exact opposite.  Well, maybe I'll just run on Linux.

The nanopool miner is Claymore.  I like the name.

Bonus article: how to reduce power consumption of mainstream computing hardware to 5.9W...with a few hacks.

EOS and Zcash

An article on Coindesk mentioned EOS in reference to a Wikipedia competitor.  I still need to read their other article on EOS.

Zcash also looks interesting, especially when promoted by Snowden.

Ethereum Mining

It's been a quarter since my last post.  Bitcoin is up over $16k, and other cryptos are up too.  Apparently making regular buys via ACH is destined to not be easy, so mining is looking attractive again.  Well, if it's break-even with zero profit, I'm still interested, for that reason.  (Not interested in "cloud mining contracts" because I don't trust code running on someone else's computer.)

Recently I was looking at mining Ethereum because it's still profitable with GPUs.  Bitcoin and Litecoin both have ASICs available, making it a hardware arms race.  Based on several articles (Cryptocompare on hashrate, TechSpot on hashrate, Tom's Hardware on ETH's effect on card prices) it appears that the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is the best balance of cost and hashrate.  ~18 MH/s in 120W for $280 times three should pay for the GPUs in under a year's time, especially if the price of ETH keeps going up.  Of course, there's the cost of the mobo, processor, memory, and OS (if I don't use Linux).  I have an NOS Soldam case lying around, although I'll have to check if the power supply is sufficient.