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Comment by phren0logy | Hacker News Reader

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phren0logy

I started mining doge just to give it a whirl. It's good, clean fun for those of us who don't expect to get rich.

In the event you decide to give it a shot, a few pointers:

1. Block rewards will be halved in 8 days, so giddy up.

2. Obviously, use a GPU-based miner if you have a decent GPU.

3. Sign up for a pool other than dogehouse, which has a highly disproportionate number of of the mining horsepower.

last but not least

4. Enjoy the community, and throw doge around like a high roller. The community is the best part of the whole experience.

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There's a huge directory of everything from Pools to Exchanges maintained here: http://www.doktorrf.com/dogecoin/index.html

Is CPU mining still remotely sensible to do at this point?

Also, what's the recommended client for CPU mining on Linux at this point?

CPU Miner: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpuminer/files/

Sensible or not, that depends on what you expect. It's definitely not profitable if you're paying for electricity or hardware.

BFGMiner and CGMiner (3.7.2 -- you must use an old version) are both good choices for ATI or CPU. CUDAMiner if you are using a Nvidia card.

CPU mining is not profitable. But absolutely reasonable to do if you just want to mine a small amount of dogecoin to see how it all works. My only caveat is I'd strongly discourage anyone from mining on a laptop for an extended period of time if they care about the laptop's lifespan.

I have a pooler's cpuminer (https://github.com/pooler/cpuminer) running with spare resources on my server, and while I wouldn't recommend keeping a dedicated machine for CPU mining, it does cover about half of my server costs.

If you have a nice Xeon quadcore maybe. Either way CPU mining isn't profitable as you're not making enough to pay for electricity. I set up my Windows dev machine to mine when the computer is idle, can't hurt. I've leaving it on when I take a lunch break for instance.

I go for pooler's cpuminer.

Mining on all four cores of my CPU with CPUminer gets me about 80 kh/s, while mining on my GPU gets me about 270 kh/s. The GPU also uses about twice as much electricity when it's mining, so the CPU isn't completely terrible in comparison (although my CPU gets a lot hotter while mining, and the fans get a lot louder). However, I have an Nvidia GPU, which is less good at mining than an otherwise comparable AMD GPU. With an AMD GPU the disparity would be a few times greater.

CPU mining isn't really profitable unless you don't have to pay for electricity. I just do it because it's more fun than using a space heater for warmth.

A CPU will be better off mining Vertcoin in the long-term, as it uses what they call Adaptive N-Factor scrypt algorithm, meaning that RAM becomes more important over time than raw processing power.

That, of course, is assuming that they have equal value, which clearly they don't.

Also, as it's still a new coin with less take-up than Doge you may be able to 'get in on the ground floor', so to speak, but it's less likely to soar in price in my opinion.

> 3. Sign up for a pool other than dogehouse, which has a highly disproportionate number of of the mining horsepower.

Why not Doge House? Any problems with them? Or is it specifically because you want to encourage people to spread out between pools more?

The common knowledge (although I don't know the exact reason and technical details yet - cryptocoins are amazing, they have lots of quirks to learn) is that a pool getting more than 50% of the network hashrate at any given moment is a Very Bad Thing. If that happens they can manipulate the network somehow. I hope someone can explain it better.

At some points last week, dogehouse was bordering 50% so there were warnings in the community to switch to other pools. Not that dogehouse has any problem, it works fine.

51% would let you double spend coins.

Only if everyone in the pool was in on it, right?

Yes, though generally, that's what you do when you join a pool.

I meant in on the deception not in on the pool, but I could easily be mistaken.

Highly recommend multipool.

Multipool also has a huge share of the network hashing power, but is designed to hop between whatever happens to be the most profitable coin. So for someone looking to get into DOGE for fun, it's not the way to go.

They have both the profit-hopping hostname:port , and, a dedicated Dogecoin hostname:port. So if you only want to mine Dogecoin, you can do that.

Huh. Didn't know they had that option. But either way, along with #3 in the top level comment, Multipool also holds a massive share of the total network: http://i.imgur.com/n9xaRQo.png, and if a lot of that is profit-hoppers, when they change coins, that will leave Dogehouse with even more share.

In a similar vein, Waffle Pool is smaller (and thus less dangerous for network health), and is also a coin-hopping profit-focused pool. It is different (I think) in that it always mines multiple coins simultaneously, in order to prevent huge changes in the market based on what a big pool is mining. Since a big pool like Multipool can effectively move the market for smaller altcoins, it's probably useful to spread the hashing love around a little.

It does, however, pay out in Bitcoin only. So, if you're wanting to mine Doge and hold them, it's not the right choice. I have a Multipool miner running and I keep some of the proceeds in the coins that result; though I mostly sell the also-ran coins (anything that has nothing significant to differentiate it from Bitcoin) and trade them in for Bitcoin or Peercoin. I keep some Doge, however.

Highly discourage using multipool and ilk if you care at all about the coins you are mining. The hash-n-dash behavior of these pools overwhelm a chain with hash power causing difficult adjustments upwards, then disappear as quickly as the come leaving the network high and dry with hours or days between blocks. Coins have been destroyed this way.

Heck, even if you don't care about the underlying coins, it's simply not as profitable (because you decrease the value of the coins you mine before you even have a chance to sell them).

I would suggest that if a coin can be destroyed by a multipool it's probably not a viable coin and deserves to be destroyed.

Bitcoin at the beginning could've been destroyed by this behaviour, it's only the quirk of being first that means it couldn't have happened. In other words, your statement there is kinda pointless :/

Just about any coin could be destroyed by this behavior, if one or more of the large pools started acting as a multipool. Even Bitcoin could be hurt badly.

This is a problem of mis-aligned incentives that hurts everybody, not just particular coins.

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