Cryptocurrency mining proof of concept (with actual numbers)

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Forums › Finance and wealth management › Cryptocurrency mining proof of concept (with actual numbers)

gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#136859 11-Dec-2013 11:47

Not too many guides to support cryptocurrency in NZ and most of the banter on here is about the price of electricity and all the usual reasons not to even try something.

I wrote this to address some concerns and as a proof of concept for myself, it is free for your entertainment with no warranties:

http://arcainsula.co.nz/2013/mining-primecoin-in-the-cloud/

I'd appreciate some feedback and experiences around this kind of thing.

Please note the article was written over the weekend when Primecoins dropped to US$3, they are back at US$5, now. I used that window of opportunity (now known as the big BitCoin crash of early December 2013) to trade my Primecoins up to Bitcoins, a method of acquiring this superior currency not often discussed in layman's circles.

Your opinions and thoughts on my written PoC is much appreciated. In particular, I'd like to hear from people using physical server grade hardware (Xeons or RISC chips) to mine (not ASICs or GPUs, yet)?

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488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#949306 11-Dec-2013 12:32

Hi, sorry I wanted to add something very important I left off that blog post - I got the idea originally from this post:

http://www.davidedicillo.com/developing/how-to-mine-primecoin-xpm-on-the-cloud/

It is a lot more compact and covers Ubuntu 13.10 x64 which has different dependencies and steps but achieves a similar outcome on a newer OS.

None of my testing showed any differences between x86 and x64 but I suspect this is because the advantages gained in this type of work is based purely around number of processor cores and I'm not aware of advantages in bitness here - this leads to my question above - has anybody tried this on a dedicated physical server with high end processors?

Or, does anybody in Hamilton have a nice 8 core Xeon server they are okay with lending me for a few weeks?

xontech

268 posts

Ultimate Geek

#949362 11-Dec-2013 13:32

Thanks for post. I think you've laid it out enough for me to finally give crypto-currency mining a try.

I'm interested to know why you chose to have 5 VPS's? Was it just a nominal number or is there some efficiency around it?

gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#949372 11-Dec-2013 13:43

I started on DigitalOcean and they have a 5 VPS limit, originally, I wanted 15 to 20 mining cores and that lead me to try various VPS providers until I found VPSNine.

Also, I think $25 is a safe amount of money to throw at something that may or may not give a return - if at day 29 you think it's a waste of time and you haven't learnt anything, you can cancel your account and not have to spend another $25 as both VPS referred to in the post are month to month, no minimum contacts.

Hint: When you setup your VPS, setup each in different data centers to spread out the load.

Please use the referral codes in the post as it took me almost 30 hours (some money and a lot of patience) to write and it would be neat to be motivated to write another.

Thanks

P1n3apqlExpr3ss

853 posts

Ultimate Geek

#949374 11-Dec-2013 13:45

xontech: Thanks for post. I think you've laid it out enough for me to finally give crypto-currency mining a try.

I'm interested to know why you chose to have 5 VPS's? Was it just a nominal number or is there some efficiency around it?

I think it would just be a matter of what the OP wants to set up and maintain or just an effort to limit the monthly costs. He could go from 5 to 10 VMs and he'd double his takings etc. It's all linear

Edit: beaten to it

gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#949376 11-Dec-2013 13:49

P1n3apqlExpr3ss:
xontech: Thanks for post. I think you've laid it out enough for me to finally give crypto-currency mining a try.

I'm interested to know why you chose to have 5 VPS's? Was it just a nominal number or is there some efficiency around it?

I think it would just be a matter of what the OP wants to set up and maintain or just an effort to limit the monthly costs. He could go from 5 to 10 VMs and he'd double his takings etc. It's all linear

Edit: beaten to it

So far, it evens out, but the return is anything but linear. There are days that are lower despite the servers all working and remember, the limitation of a VPS is that you are sharing a physical CPU, it is possible you end up on a physical host with a lot of other miners and the PPS drops to less than profitable.

That's why I suggest you create 5 to start with, spread them out and see what works best - the datacentre the VPS is in or the provider etc. Keep notes.

I'll post that spreadsheet I mentioned often so that you can keep track of how this is progresssing - As I left home this morning, I updated it to include the processor types the VPS was assigning to me and that may give a clue. I also have some unpublished data around the CPU versus the OS. There isn't too much value in it because the underlying hosted layer is transparent and shared, so any particular CPUs advantage may not be realised and you can't usually tell a VPS provider what type of host you want.

Edited for clarity.

P1n3apqlExpr3ss

853 posts

Ultimate Geek

#949379 11-Dec-2013 13:53

gundar:
P1n3apqlExpr3ss:
xontech: Thanks for post. I think you've laid it out enough for me to finally give crypto-currency mining a try.

I'm interested to know why you chose to have 5 VPS's? Was it just a nominal number or is there some efficiency around it?

I think it would just be a matter of what the OP wants to set up and maintain or just an effort to limit the monthly costs. He could go from 5 to 10 VMs and he'd double his takings etc. It's all linear

Edit: beaten to it

So far, it evens out, but the return is anything but linear. There are days that are lower despite the servers all working and remember, the limitation of a VPS is that you are sharing a physical CPU, it is possible you end up on a physical host with a lot of other miners and the PPS drops to less than profitable.

That's why I suggest you create 5 to start with, spread them out and see what works best - the datacentre the VPS is in or the provider etc. Keep notes.

Changing difficulty as well as pool/worker difficulty would affect that. In my experience my VMs have had stable output, just there is variation in shares found due to quite a high worker difficulty

Nice guide, just you might want to make it clearer that it is an XPM address and maybe add BTC/LTC addresses?

gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#949400 11-Dec-2013 14:25

Nice guide, just you might want to make it clearer that it is an XPM address and maybe add BTC/LTC addresses?

Sorted, thanks. I'll add the BTC addresses when I get home.

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gjm

808 posts

Ultimate Geek

#949438 11-Dec-2013 15:22

ok I thought I would give this a go as never tried any of this mining properly before. So I spun up an Ubuntu server instance on a hyper v host I have running, followed your guide and everything seems to be working. Question I have now is if I spin up another instance will it still work properly seeing as how I only have a single external ip address?

Im using a server I have spare which has dual xeon processors running at 2.2ghz. Currently the VM is utilizing approx 15 - 20% of the processing power. With Ubuntu can I shut down the VM and dynamically add more processors and then boot it back up again, modify the config file and get it really using the CPU?

Last question...how often does the stats site update so I can see when Ive made my first digital coin :)

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gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#949445 11-Dec-2013 15:34

Hi

This is not IP dependent, you don't need a public IP, just visibility of the Internet; each running server will download some 'work' and send up the results. The post makes note of DNS and such because those VPS servers are public. My build machine, for example, is behind a residential ADSL line.

I would say run one virtual machine per hyper-v or virtual host but add as many cores as you can spare and modify the parameter '-genproclimit=1' for number of cores as there will be less operating system overhead in your virtual environment. At the Ubuntu server, you can use the utility 'htop' to check how many cores it 'sees' and what they are doing. Htop is not default and needs to be installed:

sudo apt-get install htop

Updates to your wallet are about every 20mins, but the number of primes you 'find' is somewhat random, so I'd say: let it run for a day before you make another change and keep notes of the things you change so you can restore more profitable settings and be aware of things you tried as you go along. The wallet shows your daily average and this is a good indication of when you have the server configured optimally.

Good luck, keep us posted.

gjm

808 posts

Ultimate Geek

#949461 11-Dec-2013 15:52

ok cool. I threw another 2 cores at the VM, booted up and changed the proc limit to 4. Guest VM usage is now sitting at 46% proc usage. Tail log is showing probable prime chain found for block.... , is that what I should be looking for?

Ill leave it running for a day or so and see how we go :)

Thanks for your help

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gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#949492 11-Dec-2013 16:24

Yeah, every now and then: 'probable' appears and about 15mins later, you get a small credit to your running wallet log.

And yes, don't make too many changes all the time, you'll get yourself in knots and may confuse yourself.

Good luck.

gjm

808 posts

Ultimate Geek

#950694 11-Dec-2013 22:34

woohoo, Ive made .1 of a coin. Spun up another Ubuntu VM at home but just have this using 20% of CPU. For anyone else following the instructions I did run into a problem after rebooting the server which read - error another program is already listening on a port that one of our http server.....etc.

To fix this I had to run sudo unlink /run/supervisor.sock and then start it again, sudo /etc/init.d/supervisor start

After this everything was fine.

Cheers

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gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#950713 11-Dec-2013 23:40

Hi

Yeah, sorry, I tried to keep the blog without too much depth.

When supervisor is installed, it runs whatever it sees in /etc/supervisor/conf.d and since supervisor is installed earlier, it is always running, this is why later, we start these services by stopping, then starting after a primecoin.conf is created in that folder - this is expected behaviour for supervisor. This is also true for rebooting; supervisor is always running - this way, if for whatever reason your server reboots while you are on holiday this year, it will start mining normally, on recovery.

In summary, the above mentioned error indicates supervisor is already started and is by design.

Cheers, good luck.

nathan

5695 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#950715 12-Dec-2013 00:09

cool blog post, thanks for taking the time to write it up

gundar

488 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#950752 12-Dec-2013 08:22

nathan: cool blog post, thanks for taking the time to write it up

It's a pleasure and very encouraging to see that it has helped some people already.

I'll be redirecting any technical queries I get to this thread so that the forum can gain more traffic.

Last night, I acquired an 8 core physical server, I hope to have it running today and I'll post some statistics tomorrow to compare VPS to physical.

Thanks

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