Mining Ethereum — for Fun & Profit
I stumbled on news today that GPU based mining was back in vogue and realised that this will only continue for a short-period of time, until better support of existing GPU architecture comes around (for example GTX1080s) or tailored ASICs.
Interestingly, the sweet spot right now are the GTX1060s to GTX1070s, capable of mining ~26 Mh/s (that’s Million hashes per second) — consider, that CPU mining on a 6700K would barely be able to crank out 1 Mh/s. These runs would either be nVidia CUDA optimised or AMD optimised.
As a result, global AMD GPU supply seems to have been exhausted with miners snagging these lower end cards for the ‘sweet’ spot of high-hash rates per watt.
Yes, the biggest cost in mining is power draw and to this end, wanted to run a simulation on my Intel i7 6850K productivity rig with a GeForce GTX1080 (which isn’t ideal…)
I decided to try running my miner via nanopool and you’ll find stats of this on the left, for the past 6-hours.
Setup and getting up and running was as simple as downloading Claymore from the nanopool site, configuring my wallet details and it was a case of releasing the Kraken!
I also wanted to try this on Linux, and this however, was a more interesting experience as for my linux use, I was looking to try this via CPU mining. This is due to my dedicated linux box running an Intel 6700k relying on its APU-integrated graphics — it has no discrete GPU.
Do not confuse yourself with https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum which is a Ethereum client (it runs inside an Ethereum network) but instead either consider https://github.com/Genoil/cpp-ethereum/ or https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer. Genoil’s version was a bit tedious to setup as I had to resolve all CMake dependencies by hand, whereas the latter tool uses the Hunter package-manager to nicely resolve these for you.
On my 6850K rig, power-draw is estimated at an additional 125W (using Corsair Link software tied to my PSU) which works out to ~US$25/month in total kW/h costs.
I should be able to compute ~$90/month for the time-being and am curious as to where things will lead in the cryptocurrency mining world. It’s worth to note that much higher hash-rates/watt are to be had mining zCash though.
In any case, miners will only be able to turn a profit in the short-term as long as Ethereum continues with its Proof-of-Work (PoW) model, although I hear that the switch to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is likely to happen Q4/early 2018.
Should you look to try your hand at this I recommend #ethereum-mining on Freenode as well as this Gitter group.
For those looking to build their own ethereum mining rig, this is a rather fantastic guide.
Alternatively, consider running this fantastic Docker container to mine ZCash (with CPU support!) and you can setup a local-wallet with Jaxx.
