The Altcoin Thread

SunnyD said:
I have 3x 6950's currently running on a single Corsair TX850... no idea what the power draw is on them though. It's also powering the rest of my LGA2011 box too, so I'd venture a guess it's pretty high. The only saving grace is that all three of those cards are undervolted to 1.025v.
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I have 4 on an EVGA 750w gold just fine. I can check power draw at the wall later
 
Well I'm an idiot - I did it again. The vertcoin pool is now working, for real this time. I forgot to add the stratum port to the firewall when I put the pool up. Of course MY personal IP addresses are completely whitelisted on the server, so in testing I never see these things. Oops.

Now here's an odd question: I thought I was supposed to get a bunch of rejects and errors and whatnot if I used the normal cgminer to try to mine vertcoin. Right now my 6950 rig is happily pushing roughly 1.3MH/s with an effective WU of 1095, and I'm not getting any more rejects than usual. Something doesn't seem right here...
 
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What miner are you using?
I didn't follow the instructions properly when I first tried it, using the standard cgminer, and it "appeared" to be running fine locally.
Turned out I was getting nothing on the pool side. Not a single milli-hash.
If you are not using the vertminer you are not actually mining.
 
Core32 said:
What miner are you using?
I didn't follow the instructions properly when I first tried it, using the standard cgminer, and it "appeared" to be running fine locally.
Turned out I was getting nothing on the pool side. Not a single milli-hash.
If you are not using the vertminer you are not actually mining.
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cgminer 3.7.2... plain vanilla.

Thing is, I am most definitely getting share credit on the pool side.
Round Shares
Est. Shares 688,665 (done: 0.88%)
Pool Valid 6,058
Your Valid 5,710
Pool Invalid 435 (6.70%)
Your Invalid 160 (2.73%)
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That seems like a ridiculously low invalid rate to me especially if it's not supposed to be working.
 
cgminer will not work according to the vertcoin website.
So most likely you are seeing false data.
No idea why but that's what I read and experienced.
 
Core32 said:
cgminer will not work according to the vertcoin website.
So most likely you are seeing false data.
No idea why but that's what I read and experienced.
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This is interesting. According to what I'm seeing, the stratum server hasn't supported vertcoin until 4 days ago, yet there's been vertcoin pools for a month now. If that's the case, how the hell have these pools been running?

Something fishy is going on.

And according to what I've looked at in the VertCoin code as well, I tend to wonder exactly how much this "ASIC resistant N-factor" code actually even does anything. I'm half tempted to see if I can get any blocks and whether they confirm or not on the network. That would be a major blow to the coin, basically dismantling it.

edit: Okay, got that all fixed up. It WAS the stratum server. Which makes me wonder how the f the various MPOS pools have been running for the past month.
 
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They ran some beta testing I believe but not sure how what you've found impacts that.
They may have been some type of invitation only deal to test the code.
I stopped after an hour when I saw my hash rate less than half normal cgminer and the pool I was on had some huge miners in place.
I would have been looking at less than .01% of the returns with HW of normally 3MH/s.
 
mkrohn said:
there is absolute no capital gains tax system in place... As of right now it goes on income with a basic revenue minus expenses.

Things like mining are not stocks and falls more in the service realm in our current tax codes. In the future they WANT to figure out how to get it into capital gains but its not possible for miners. End of year filing taxes unless you're really big and have a corporation setup but individuals its end of year income
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Yup. You have to declare it as income so you pay income tax + both sides of the FICA taxes (15.3%). So yeah... expect to get raped profusely.
 
jwcalla said:
Yup. You have to declare it as income so you pay income tax + both sides of the FICA taxes (15.3%). So yeah... expect to get raped profusely.
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so its pointless to cash out coins pretty much? it seems like id get half of what i cashed out.
 
SunnyD said:
edit: Okay, got that all fixed up. It WAS the stratum server. Which makes me wonder how the f the various MPOS pools have been running for the past month.
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Sunny, if you think you are able to keep the same hash rate and stability using vanilla cgminer AND get pool credit, I will throw some 270x power at it to see if you are correct.
 
Core32 said:
Sunny, if you think you are able to keep the same hash rate and stability using vanilla cgminer AND get pool credit, I will throw some 270x power at it to see if you are correct.
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I would have to set up another pool specifically to test, and then we'd need a shedload of hashrate to see if we could get a block to be found in a timely manner. If I'm right, the way the algo works they're being a bit stupid and simply doing "too much work" which ends up being useless in the end, but it does thwart ASIC's once the N-factor kicks in.

But on the other hand, I figured out what was going on with the pool... so I can't be quite sure that it can be thwarted without actually stepping through code on a testnet and seeing what happens. The stratum was accepting work being submitted by the workers, but from what I was seeing the work was never being counted upstream. The weird thing was if the work was never being counted upstream, was was the stratum crediting shares?

Something simply felt off with the whole thing and I'm not convinced that this whole "N-factor" thing can't just be bypassed.
 
Core32 said:
They ran some beta testing I believe but not sure how what you've found impacts that.
They may have been some type of invitation only deal to test the code.
I stopped after an hour when I saw my hash rate less than half normal cgminer and the pool I was on had some huge miners in place.
I would have been looking at less than .01% of the returns with HW of normally 3MH/s.
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With Vertcoin, I read that you will get ONLY up to half of your hash rate even using the specially modified version of cgminer. But everyone is on that same footing so you're not getting shafted at all... it's supposed to work that way in other words. Apparently the payouts are above average right now, but still nothing spectacular.
 
SunnyD said:
And according to what I've looked at in the VertCoin code as well, I tend to wonder exactly how much this "ASIC resistant N-factor" code actually even does anything. I'm half tempted to see if I can get any blocks and whether they confirm or not on the network. That would be a major blow to the coin, basically dismantling it.
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On the one hand, I say "woopty frickin' doo... another alt coin" (even being a new coin newly added to Cryptsy, the returns are still not stellar enough to make me switch) but then on the other hand I applaud them for being the first to try to implement some "GPU only" measures. It won't be long before we will NEED these measures in order to keep GPU mining viable. Whether this first attempt works or not is another story. I don't see a whole lotta ASICs floating around in the wild at the moment to test their theories with.
 
watertown28 said:
270s are great cards. I got like 11 of them running right now... so be it they are xfx ones from best buy.... but they all hit 450khash with most times around 380-410 WU ( which is more important that hash speed ). It takes a lot of tweeking though sometimes. You can also edit the bios a bit to drop the vddc a bit on them. The ASIC quality sucks though on them... when I look at the 7850s which are at 87% vs the 72% on the 270s.

Though I hit the jackpot the other day... I got 2 open boxed 6950s for 165 each... they actually do better than the 270s lol. One does run kinda warm.... around 87C load. I changed the paste on it with some cheaper stuff might get some AS5 for that. It seems that someone else may have had the same idea but they put way too much on. Damn newbs. But the redo on it and dropping the vddc from 1.1 to 1.081 has helped. I was hitting over 95C and a shut down from cgminer before I did that work.

Guess with all that babble the bottom line is you still can not go wrong with the 270s. You can run 3 of them easy on a basic system with a 800 watt quality power supply so :)
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Funny, the ones I'm looking at are the XFX from BBY. Supposedly the Fry's had an MSI 270x for like $239 by me but they sold out minutes before I placed my order. So Best Buy is the only place that has anything in stock that isn't totally gouging the hell out of the prices.

Never thought I'd say that last sentence.
 
Remember what I said about KlondikeCoin...

Take a look at Coinwarz... :p
 
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Carbon_Rod said:
With Vertcoin........But everyone is on that same footing so you're not getting shafted at all... it's supposed to work that way in other words.
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That's not what stopped me. The issue was, after halving my hash rate, the miners already on the pool had extremely large hash power. So much so that my payouts would have been miniscule.
Not sure if all heavy hitters had just jumped into this one for the early pump, but it made me a little skeptical, that as new as the coin "appears" that so many had gone through the hoops I just struggled with to get it working, including reading threads and tuning every card completely differently, with a LOT more HW.
I had to wonder if some "fortunate" miners weren't given a little head start.
 
nvgrim said:
so its pointless to cash out coins pretty much? it seems like id get half of what i cashed out.
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You would get half and the people who never mined a single coin, never took the risk, never paid for the electricity, never bought the expensive GPUs and never took the time to know or understand anything about setting up the system and software would get the other half.

So yeah, it's just like being self-employed. ;)
 
What settings are you guys using for your XFX 270x cards? I just got a couple and am going to set em up.
 
How do you undervolt the XFX? On my MSI cards I flashed the bios which worked well, but I don't know if you can do that on the XFX cards.

I'm running them on BAMT so I can't use the software undervolting methods. It seems to run a little warm at the stock voltage.
 
yes, used atiflash(or atiwinflash) to save your bios to a rom file. use vbe7 to edit the rom file. flash back to your card using atiflash. Pretty simple.

Edit: on the 280x I set v to 1.1
 
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Interesting, 1.1v still seems pretty high. My 7950s are all undervolted to 0.968v and they run really well. Do you think that's too low, or should I try it?

How can you tell if it's undervolted too much? Just won't run without crashing?

Edit: For anyone else going to do this, I went ahead and did 0.968v on the XFX 270x and that worked great. Same speeds, 20C cooler. I'll let it run overnight and make sure all is well, but so far I'm really happy.
 
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Those temps are pretty good. I haven't messed with undervolting my cards yet because I'm still trying to ensure they are stable. Still get one card going sick after a day or so of running.
 
Those temps are at stock volts on the 270s. I've only undervolted the 280x cards so far. Not sure if that's clear from my dialog. Really sleepy atm hah.
 
Undervolted my 270x seems to stabilize at 460kh at about 68C. That's at 1100/1250/21568.

One weird thing is after a few minutes, the card seems to run fine but the reported fan speed drops to 0. The fans are still spinning like normal, just says 0 on the web dashboard. Has anyone else seen that?
 
Nice temperatures, how did you get to 0.968v? On VBE I only see 1.0 or 0.975 when I load my bios. Using a Sapphire 270 BTW.
 
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