Alternative folding support idea - mining for coins to fund F@H

CougTek

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Litecoin mining is pushing my graphic cards harder than running the FAH client. My systems need almost 50W more each now than they used too.
 

CougTek

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I don't know why, but the worker on my Radeon HD 7950 system is listed as being down on hashfaster.com, despite the fact that the program appears to be working fine and producing ~650KH/s.
 

Handruin

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Have you looked into how to sell your LTC?

Have you run any calculations on reinvesting?

Only a little bit. I don't have any conclusive steps or experience yet in selling coins.

Reinvesting which part? The coins for other coins? The money earned into other investments? The money earned into more mining equipment?
 

Handruin

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So it's done ; I'm in too. I've configured both my Radeon HD 7870 and my Radeon HD 7950 to mining Litecoins. The 7870 did ~325KH/s while the 7950 reached ~620KH/s when I checked a minute or two after I've configured them. I could add both my GeForce GTX 580 too, but at ~250KH/s each, I'm not sure I want to sacrifice the Folding@home production they bring me (about 35Kppd each). We'll see hoe worthy this adventure is in a few days and then, maybe I'll reconsider converting my GTX 580.

Good luck. I hope this works out for you too. I've already mined 0.50501197 LTC ($14.96854) since I've started this with the new rig 08:30PM yesterday (or 21 hours).

Litecoin mining is pushing my graphic cards harder than running the FAH client. My systems need almost 50W more each now than they used too.

That seems like a lot more per card. Are you sure that's right?

I don't know why, but the worker on my Radeon HD 7950 system is listed as being down on hashfaster.com, despite the fact that the program appears to be working fine and producing ~650KH/s.

Maybe recheck the password or spelling? You could try deleting the worker and adding a new one on hashfaster's website.
 

Handruin

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It's a consideration but nothing more than that right now. I've talked with other people who I work with and a few others to see if anyone was interested in getting involved with me by way having them add a GPU to my rig and they get paid a reduced portion of the work. Kind of like a maintenance and power consumption fee and they get paid in LTC. I can only make guesses at the income rates based on the current price and difficulty. By doing that I can forecast that it could take a little over a month to get enough funds for a 3rd video card assuming I can even find one but I'd also have to invest a little more in another PSU to run it properly. Had the 3rd card been an available option when I built this I would have put 3 in it to start. Given that doing this is a risk in general, adding more miners more than a month from now might not be worth doing it. I respect that this is a viable way to make some money, but I don't want to fool myself into thinking it's endless or great income. I'd be content with being able to pay for the current hardware that is presently mining for the money. Assuming I can recover the cost of this equipment, if at that time the sustainable rate of income is still closely similar I may just leave this miner running and consider more mining hardware at that time. I'll also assess it more in a few weeks to a month. This is certainly one of the weirder computer projects I've worked on in a while.
 

timwhit

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Another thing to consider is that when the difficulty of LiteCoin increases to a degree that it's no longer profitable, you could always switch to another cryptocurrency.
 

Handruin

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Another thing to consider is that when the difficulty of LiteCoin increases to a degree that it's no longer profitable, you could always switch to another cryptocurrency.

I actually looked into alternate coins yesterday and found some information on Digitalcoin being a viable profitable option right now. The difficulty to mine is very easy to the point where I calculated that I could mine on my own and still be able to discover a full block of 20 every 5.1 hours. At the time I looked into it a block was worth around $8 USD. Even if I discovered an average of 3 blocks a day I'm ahead of LTC mining.

I would have to take the gamble and hope Digitalcoin becomes worth a bunch more if I wanted to mine and hold vs mine and sell. Much like any early adopter has to face that chance. I don't know what to do there.
 

Handruin

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One other thing regarding power. I did some numbers and given the amps and voltage this rig is consuming 878W right now.

I'm having some serious discussion with my buddy about moving this rig to his house where he has a solar power grid array. His grid generates him a bit of excess power which in turn has given him a credit on his bill of a decent size. His power company doesn't let him sell it for actual cash to them so he'd have to go to his neighbors to try and sell it which is a pain. Our plan is for me to pay a lower kW/h than my current rate and in turn this would heat his finished basement area (albeit slightly). This could help reduce my ROI and help him get cash for his power credit. We figure this might consume more than he can generate thereby consuming his credits.
 

CougTek

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cgminer --scrypt -u CougTek.xxxxx -p xxxxxx -o stratum+tcp://stratum.hashfaster.com:3333 -I 19 -g 1 -w 256 --gpu-powertune 20
 

Handruin

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cgminer --scrypt -u CougTek.xxxxx -p xxxxxx -o stratum+tcp://stratum.hashfaster.com:3333 -I 19 -g 1 -w 256 --gpu-powertune 20

That looks fine to me. Is this the only machine using that worker name? Can you try deleting the worker and creating a new one with a different name and see if it picks up the new worker?
 

CougTek

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That looks fine to me. Is this the only machine using that worker name? Can you try deleting the worker and creating a new one with a different name and see if it picks up the new worker?
Yes, it is the only machine with that worker's name. I'll let it go for the night and I'll recheck tomorrow. If there's no apparent improvement in the stats, I'll delete the worker and make another one.
 

Handruin

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I finally got some scripts working in Linux to help manage cgminer. I borrowed the examples from some I found online. Now it should auto-start on boot in case of a power outage. I'm able to monitor the cgminer interface using the Linux tool 'screen' which seems pretty neat. I just open my ssh terminal and type cgm. When I'm done, just do ctrl+a then ctrl+d to exit the screen.

mine_litecoins.sh
Code:
#!/bin/sh
export DISPLAY=:0
export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
cd /home/doug/cgminer/cgminer-3.7.2-x86_64-built
/home/doug/cgminer/cgminer-3.7.2-x86_64-built/cgminer -c /home/doug/cgminer/cgminer-3.7.2-x86_64-built/cgminer.conf --auto-fan

miner_launcher.sh
Code:
#!/bin/bash
DEFAULT_DELAY=0
if [ "x$1" = "x" -o "x$1" = "xnone" ]; then
   DELAY=$DEFAULT_DELAY
else
   DELAY=$1
fi
sleep $DELAY
su doug -c "screen -dmS cgm /home/doug/cgminer/mine_litecoins.sh"

/etc/rc.local
Code:
/home/doug/cgminer/miner_launcher.sh 30 &

.bashrc
Code:
alias cgm='screen -x cgm'

cgminer.conf
Code:
{
"pools" : [
        {
                "url" : "stratum+tcp://stratum.hashfaster.com:3333",
                "user" : "PerplexedMiner.xxxx",
                "pass" : "XXXXXXXXXXX"
        }
]
,
"intensity" : "20,20",
"vectors" : "1,1",
"worksize" : "512,512",
"kernel" : "scrypt,scrypt",
"lookup-gap" : "2,2",
"thread-concurrency" : "32765,32765",
"shaders" : "0,0",
"gpu-engine" : "1025,1025",
"gpu-fan" : "0-85,0-85",
"gpu-memclock" : "1500,1500",
"gpu-memdiff" : "0,0",
"gpu-powertune" : "20,20",
"gpu-vddc" : "0.000,0.000",
"temp-cutoff" : "94,94",
"temp-overheat" : "92,92",
"temp-target" : "89,89",
"api-mcast-port" : "4028",
"api-port" : "4028",
"expiry" : "120",
"gpu-dyninterval" : "7",
"gpu-platform" : "0",
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"hotplug" : "5",
"log" : "5",
"no-pool-disable" : true,
"queue" : "1",
"scan-time" : "30",
"scrypt" : true,
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",
"shares" : "0",
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}
 

CougTek

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Good for you.

Meanwhile, I have some results for my effort. I made 16¢ since I've started some 16 hours ago. Is it possible that they simply don't send me something to compute? If it doesn't improve, I'm gonna stop this soon because it seems like a waste of ressources for me. I'm happy it's working out well for you though.

If I bring back all my systems to the FAH project, I'm less than two months away from overtaking P5-133XL for the team's crown (without the server boost at work, I would heve been almost four months away from overtaking him). So routing my ressources elsewhere for less than 25¢ a day won't be worth it for very long.
 

Handruin

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Good for you.

Meanwhile, I have some results for my effort. I made 16¢ since I've started some 16 hours ago. Is it possible that they simply don't send me something to compute? If it doesn't improve, I'm gonna stop this soon because it seems like a waste of ressources for me. I'm happy it's working out well for you though.

If I bring back all my systems to the FAH project, I'm less than two months away from overtaking P5-133XL for the team's crown (without the server boost at work, I would heve been almost four months away from overtaking him). So routing my ressources elsewhere for less than 25¢ a day won't be worth it for very long.

What's your total kh/s for all your workers? The amount you've mined doesn't seem right. Maybe the hash faster pool isn't working for you? Are you seeing a high percentage of invalid results compared to your valids?
 

CougTek

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My shares : 846/3 (valid/invalid)
My total KH/s for all my workers : 28

I expected to be closer to 970KH/s for all my workers.
 

CougTek

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Here's the screenshot from my Radeon HD 7870 system :
ltc_7870.png

I seem to receive a lot more work to compute from this one. However, according to Hashfaster's website, it only does between 28KH/s and 45KH/s (when I check the stats in my workers' list).

I don't get it.

It really is always hard to make money. No matter what I try.
 

Handruin

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Here's the screenshot from my Radeon HD 7870 system :
View attachment 732

I seem to receive a lot more work to compute from this one. However, according to Hashfaster's website, it only does between 28KH/s and 45KH/s (when I check the stats in my workers' list).

I don't get it.

It really is always hard to make money. No matter what I try.

It looks like you may be driving the card too hard. See the HW number? I believe those are hardware issues found. That could be why your numbers are registering so low. You shouldn't be getting HW counts greater than zero if it's running properly. Try reducing the intensity or drop the powertune a bit and zero-out the counters. Then let it run and see if you still get HW errors.
 
Last edited:

CougTek

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Well, fuck it. This whole thing has been a gigantic waste of time for me. I'm going back to running the FAH client on both. My cards might not be ok for mining LTC, but they are great at computing FAH WU.

I hope this project will work out better for you. Good luck.
 

Handruin

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Well, fuck it. This whole thing has been a gigantic waste of time for me. I'm going back to running the FAH client on both. My cards might not be ok for mining LTC, but they are great at computing FAH WU.

I hope this project will work out better for you. Good luck.

I believe you've come incredibly close to having a proper setup. This isn't as easy as folding at home which is why you have the possibility to be rewarded with some short term capital gain. I know this can be frustrating and you're not alone in getting this going. I recommend toughing it out only slightly longer or consider using less hardware for this as a test before jumping in head first. I get that it's a pain and time consuming. Nothing worth trying for is easy. I spent 9 hours straight trying to get Xubuntu to install before almost giving up and calling it quits. I've had never encountered such difficulty in installing Linux before but I'm glad I pressed through it. Even though Xubuntu wasn't about making money I learned several new things which caused me a bunch of frustration and waste time but now I know how to deal with this in the future. Give it another try. I think you're so close.
 

CougTek

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Maybe if I find a support forum about litecoin mining, I'll give it another try. Hashfaster's support is through IRC or chat and I don't do those. Call me a dinosaur, but I prefer forum to anything else.

I'll wait some time before I retry, if I retry. I have an horrible temper and where someone else would be simply annoyed, I become furious. I feel I'm on the verge of entering that state regarding LTC, so I'll move to something else. Today, I felt a bit sick (stomach pains), so I couldn't channel my anger elsewhere. I need to avoid frustrating situations as much as possible for the time being.

Thank you for your support.
 

Handruin

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Maybe if I find a support forum about litecoin mining, I'll give it another try. Hashfaster's support is through IRC or chat and I don't do those. Call me a dinosaur, but I prefer forum to anything else.

I'll wait some time before I retry, if I retry. I have an horrible temper and where someone else would be simply annoyed, I become furious. I feel I'm on the verge of entering that state regarding LTC, so I'll move to something else. Today, I felt a bit sick (stomach pains), so I couldn't channel my anger elsewhere. I need to avoid frustrating situations as much as possible for the time being.

Thank you for your support.

There is forum support for Litecoin here if you are interested: https://litecointalk.org/. I agree that hashfaster's support is a pain in respect to needing to go through IRC (which I'm also less inclined to bother with).

Once you start feeling better and your frustration level has subsided a bit, try a different pool before you tear everything down. I just added a backup pool because hashfaster is down (again). If this continues I may just move elsewhere. My config now has a backup pool called coinhuntr (https://coinhuntr.com/). Note they take a 1% fee. You can also consider http://lite.coin-pool.com/ as a pool also. It operates under a different style known as PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, it looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries. ). I may join that one if coinhuntr doesn't work out.

Best of luck in whatever you decide to try. I hope something works out for you and your temper doesn't get the better of you from the frustration with all this.
 

Clocker

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I agree that setting this up is a pain in the arse! But when you finally get it going, it feels rewarding.

It really is trial and error and lots of research to get your card going at a good clip. What I've found is that cgminer really is sensitive to gpu memory speed (on my R9 270X). You want to get that up there. Overclocking the ram from 1400 to 1500 mhz got me about 70 more Kh/s. I was going to call this a bust and sell the GPU for profit if I could not get something consistently above 400Kh/s. GPU clock doesn't do nearly as much. If I can get this going, you can do it Coug.

My single R9 270X seems to be doing OK. I've noticed that it has a tendency to want to get unstable (cgminer locks once in a while) if I RDP into the machine so I need to figure that out. If I just leave it alone it's fine though. Now that I have the one card running pretty good, I'm hoping that the second (identical) card will just plug in a double my production.


Doug-
I want to use the same pools as you so we can compare notes. Right now I have 1.) Hashfaster 2.)CoinHunter (primary) 3.)CoinHunter (secondary) 4.)WeMineLTC

What are your pools/order?

R9-270X.JPG
 

Handruin

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I agree that setting this up is a pain in the arse! But when you finally get it going, it feels rewarding.

It really is trial and error and lots of research to get your card going at a good clip. What I've found is that cgminer really is sensitive to gpu memory speed (on my R9 270X). You want to get that up there. Overclocking the ram from 1400 to 1500 mhz got me about 70 more Kh/s. I was going to call this a bust and sell the GPU for profit if I could not get something consistently above 400Kh/s. GPU clock doesn't do nearly as much. If I can get this going, you can do it Coug.

My single R9 270X seems to be doing OK. I've noticed that it has a tendency to want to get unstable (cgminer locks once in a while) if I RDP into the machine so I need to figure that out. If I just leave it alone it's fine though. Now that I have the one card running pretty good, I'm hoping that the second (identical) card will just plug in a double my production.


Doug-
I want to use the same pools as you so we can compare notes. Right now I have 1.) Hashfaster 2.)CoinHunter (primary) 3.)CoinHunter (secondary) 4.)WeMineLTC

What are your pools/order?

View attachment 733

My pools are 1.) Hashfaster 2.)CoinHunter (primary). I want to add a third and I'm not sure what to pick so maybe Ill just do the same as you and pick the same four so we can compare.
 

Clocker

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Radeon R9 270X + R9 270 (non-X). This is about as good as they will run.

mining_good.JPG
 

Handruin

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So you are using the 270 over the 290 because of a bang/buck ratio? Or is it actually faster in this application for some reason?

The entry price point to try out mining is pretty good and low risk when getting into the R9 270 cards. The two AMD cards with the best performance per dollar ratio are the 7950 and the R9 280X in that order. A single R9 290 or R9 290X would produce as much as his two R9 270 & R9 270X but cost and wattage usage offer lower return.
 

Handruin

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I love how hashfaster just sent me a notification (per my settings) that says my worker is down...it's down because their stupid pool is not working again. I'm going to make sure I add in a third pool now. I'm debating switching over entirely to another pool if this crap keeps happening.
 

Clocker

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So you are using the 270 over the 290 because of a bang/buck ratio? Or is it actually faster in this application for some reason?

Because I originally was only planning on trying this with one card and I wanted to spend around $200 bucks on this little experiment. When I saw my first order would take longer than I wanted I ordered a 2nd card with fast shipping from Amazon instead. Well, turns out the first order could not be cancelled and now that I have both cards, I'm thinking on keeping it.

BUT, they accidentally sent me a 270(non-X) for originally ordered card. The price was still good, even for that card though, so I'm thinking about keeping it.
 

Clocker

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Hey Doug,
Check out the dynamic signature thingy I found on the hashfaster website.
 

Handruin

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Both BTC and LTC took a pounding today. Is it still worth mining at the current price?

I feel it's still worth it. I'd be more concerned if the LTC difficulty factor dropped significantly which would indicate miners stopped in large quantities. Market drop and market scare is for the minute traders to panic over. I'm fortunate enough that I don't need to sell my earnings right away so I'll sit on then until hopefully the market rebounds. That's the game I'm going to play. Even at $15/coin I still have a profit in my figures. It's much smaller but there is one.
 

Handruin

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There is an update to cudaminer for those with nvidia cards that have Kepler cores. I've noticed a dramatic improvement on my GTX 780 compared to the previous version of the software. Also note temperatures rise a bunch with this change. I saw a 6-10C increase.

NVidia Kepler mining improvements now in CudaMiner

Download of new build.

Here are my findings:

Stock 64-bit:

  • 320 kh/s <========previous version of cudaminer
  • 496 kh/s <========build 12/18/2013
Stock 32-bit:

  • 512 kh/s <========build 12/18/2013
Overclocked 64-bit (100Mhz core : 150 Mhz mem : 107% power):

  • 536 kh/s <========build 12/18/2013
Overclocked 32-bit (100Mhz core : 150 Mhz mem : 107% power):

  • 553 kh/s <========build 12/18/2013
 

Handruin

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For anyone interested I've taken a slight detour from LTC mining and switch full-tilt over to Dogecoin. After I did a 25 hour run, I mined a total of 108863.99994042 coins. Keeping in mind this coin only started a couple weeks ago and has been seen as a joke coin but has actual real value. At the current exchange rate with Bitcoin I mined the equivalent of around $48 minus power expenses (let's say $44). I've gone through the process of converting some of the coins for actual Bitcoins at this rate so that I can later sell Bitcoins on the market for USD. I've converted 10,000 Dogecoins into BTC and it worked well. This is a much higher return than Litecoin has provided thus far.
 

Stereodude

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For anyone interested I've taken a slight detour from LTC mining and switch full-tilt over to Dogecoin. After I did a 25 hour run, I mined a total of 108863.99994042 coins. Keeping in mind this coin only started a couple weeks ago and has been seen as a joke coin but has actual real value. At the current exchange rate with Bitcoin I mined the equivalent of around $48 minus power expenses (let's say $44). I've gone through the process of converting some of the coins for actual Bitcoins at this rate so that I can later sell Bitcoins on the market for USD. I've converted 10,000 Dogecoins into BTC and it worked well. This is a much higher return than Litecoin has provided thus far.
Would it make sense to sit on them in anticipation of their value going up?

So, you've made about $4 so far? Is this really worth it?
By my reading he made $44 in a 25 hour period if he were to convert them to Bitcoin and then to cash.
 

Handruin

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I've put some of the basic math together based on today's price per Dogecoin. The price has gone down since yesterday (no surprise) but even if I exchanged it all now and sold, I'm still doing much better than LTC.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...lYU0RiN1Zka19CU2gtaE1HVkE&usp=drive_web#gid=7

That's the game of anticipation and waiting. Do I hold and hope they go up or sell and achieve some or all of my goal. I've already exchanged some of them for Bitcoins when the price was higher and I have some sitting with open exchange orders with the same higher requested amount.
 
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