I just set up my first mining operation this past weekend, and had some questions about how it all works. If anyone can help with these, it would be greatly appreciated. I suspect there are others that have these questions as well :)
(1) If you have multiple mining computers, is it more beneficial to use the same account to mine on them all, or use separate accounts for each? It seems the downside of using separate accounts would be that your SP would be divided across many accounts. I don't know if using the same account on multiple machines though would reduce its throughput, or even possibly corrupt its mining. The Mining steem on multiple machines article by @orly seems to indicate that each mining node must have its own account. Is that correct?
(2) Where is the best place to go to see your history of blocks mined?
(3) If the price of Steem were to go way up in the future, will the reward for one mined block still remain one Steem of Steem Power?
(4) What are the main factors that will increase/decrease the amount of blocks mined (assuming static computing power)? Will more miners decrease the amount of blocks available to find? Will the difficulty to mine blocks increase as the size of the Steem blockchain increases? Are there any other factors?
(5) About a month ago, @cryptos posted How Much Can You Earn By Mining STEEM. At the time, he estimated that a 33 KHS hashrate miner could expect to get between 1 and 3 blocks per day if you were mining STEEM 24/7. Has that changed a lot with the addition of new people mining, or is it about the same today?
(6) What allows miners with relatively low computing power to still find blocks, when there are other miners out there with way larger operations and more computing power?
(7) Are there such things a "mining pools" for Steem? Would it make sense to have/join one, or would it be better to mine individually?
Also, I want to give a shout out / thanks to @cryptos for posting Getting Started Mining Steem on Windows - a great how-to guide on how to setup mining on a Windows computer. It was super helpful, and I was able to get started by just following the instructions!
Here are opinions from another novice, so take 'em with a grain of salt.
(1)
If you have N computers mining, then you want:
N accounts in the miners section on all computers -and-
N accounts in the witnesses section on one (and only one) computer; preferably the most stable.
(2)
I don't know the best places, but I use steemd.com/@[userid] and steemstats.com
(3)
Yes, I believe so, although I haven't powered down yet, so I could be misunderstanding something.
(4)
Yes. Speed of your processor, number of threads, sufficient memory, network latency, and numbers of competing miners are the factors I'm aware of.
(5)
With about 27k hash power on 3 computers, my son and I have been getting about 11-14 blocks per day until the last few days. Starting last Thursday, it has been tailing off, and one miner seems to be basically dominating the queue again today. It remains to be seen how/if this will be addressed.
(6)
Lots of blocks and the absence of mining pools. Also, the two year withdrawal period makes it unattractive to people with enough hash power to get significant returns from other coins.
(7)
Not yet. I believe it's set up to make mining pools difficult because it requires private keys.
Cool, thanks for your response!
Hi there,
Thank you for your reply and although the answer is pretty clear ... your answer to point 1 still confuses me..
If you have N computers mining, then you want:
N accounts in the miners section on all computers (I want all the proceeding to go to my one account @anarcharos, having other accounts in the miners section would it not spread the proceedings to the different miners/accounts? even if those accounts are mine?
-and-
N accounts in the witnesses section on one (and only one) computer; preferably the most stable.
The witness section only has space for a name not a computer ....
Would you mind posting a copy of your config file to actually see what you mean?
Many thanks bro!!
Can't do that. It's got private keys in it. But see the examples in this link by @orly, from the top-level post. Near the bottom of the article.
Yes, it does. If there's a way to avoid that, I'm not aware of it. It also distributes the work alphabetically, so it's not even a balanced split. The first account in alphabetic sort order gets most of the blocks.
Update: Because of that sort order work distribution, I also should have noted that in practical terms, there may not be much benefit from having more than 3 or 4 accounts, no matter how many computers you are running. I'm running three computers, but only two accounts, and I've been seeing some missed opportunities, but not enough to justify the hassle of managing another account.
Hi,
thank you for your reply and link.
Hi,
I have read the article that you linked in, and is a pretty good explanation. It still puzzles me that (as in the example given in the article) you would only have a list of witnesses on just one of the mining machines, while the other two machines have no witness defined ....
Yeah, I was confused about that at first, too. Short version is, try it and you'll see that it works. That's what I did. If you watch the log messages and various web sites, you'll start to intuit what's going on.
I don't know exactly what happens "under the hood", but at a high level it seems to go something like this:
Not sure how the signaling between machines is handled. I guess it might be purely network communication or it might be storing and referencing some sort of flags in the blockchain.
The bad news is that right now, one miner is mostly dominating the queue, so it won't be easy to be looking at the screen at just the right time to see the log messages if/when you hit. You have to be lucky or patient to be watching the miner output when you happen to find proof of work.
Hope that helps.
Hi Remlaps..
I tried to reply to your latest reply but there is no reply button ??!!?? .. anyhow...thank you so much for your time and explanation, it has helped me lots to understand what am doing.
Happy mining :)
Those are some good questions. I am keen to learn of the answers myself.
Whilst I can't answer your questions, in the case anyone is having trouble completing their initial sync...
Slow to sync? This tiny config trick should speed up your initial sync immensely when trying to CPU mine Steem on Windows
Hope it can help someone, saved me about 10hrs and lots of frustration :)
Upvoted, followed.