One of the most significant benefits of 'mining' Gridcoin is that it can still be done very profitably on a CPU - something that other coins have left far behind them. The reason for this is that unlike traditional POW mining used by coins such as Bitcoin, Gridcoin 'mining' is done by contributing compute to scientific endeavours through the BOINC platform. Science computations are fickle beasts, ranging from the most simple calculation to colossal complexity which only a CPU can manage. As a result, many BOINC projects that reward compute with through Gridcoin are not able to make use of a GPU, and no BOINC projects at all can make use of ASICS.
Unfortunately, benchmarking CPU performance is not as easy as GPU performance. We cannot just compare the number of logical cores and clock speeds. This might seem counter intuitive, as wouldn't it make sense that the faster the clock speed and the more cores on the CPU, the more work we can do with it? The answer lies somewhere between a 'yes' and a 'no'...
We can successfully use the two metrics above to make comparisons within an architecture family. If we compare two Intel Haswell i7 cores, the one with the higher clock speed will outperform the slower one. This is the case because other than clock speed, the processors are architecturally identical. However, comparing between series gets more complex.
Would you believe me if I told you that Intel released the first 3.6 GHz chips way back in 2006? Well, it's true. Even though over a decade has passed, the fastest Intel cores run at factory speeds of about 4.4 GHz, which seems like a very marginal improvement. As a matter of fact, most actual headway was made in the amount of work done by the CPU in each individual clock cycle, not in the number of cycles per second. There are other factors that influence processing speed too, such as improvements in cache memory, but the work done per clock cycle is by far the most significant gain realised.
Before getting into the details of the various CPU models, lets quickly review Gridcoin mining. Just like mining other crypto, with Gridcoin:
- The amount you earn depends on how much you contribute to the network compute relative to everyone else.
- You can join a pool to get paid more steadily, rather than having to get lucky staking a block.
- More powerful hardware outcompetes less powerful hardware generally speaking.
However, unlike mining other crypto, with Gridcoin:
- Your compute power is used to solve research problems, primarily for the scientific community. These problems are complex, and vary wildly between projects that the Gridcoin Network rewards contributions on. As a result, hardware performance will vary between projects, as will your mining rate.
- Hashing power is meaningless, so hardware profitability cannot be readily compared
- The daily Gridcoin mint is spread across the 'whitelisted projects', which are projects eligible for rewards (you run these projects - you get paid GRC). If the number of projects in the whitelist changes, this will significantly impact your daily GRC mint.
The best way to maximise your yield is to select a project with minimal competition from other members of Team Gridcoin by reviewing the total contributions made here. I have been running over 80 CPUs for the last month and a half, and collected data on the income they have generated. By calculating the average yield per GHz of compute and linearly extrapolating within each architecture family, we can predict the earnings of most CPUs in these series. Processors highlighted in yellow are those for which I have actual data, which were used to linearly interpolate the rest of each series. Note that all values are averages, meaning none of the raw data remains in these tables. Further, all hardware is running stock settings - no overclocking or overvolting, which could further increase yield. However, turbo was enabled as per the default settings. Horizontal lines delimit architecture families.
I had some limited data available for Intel Xeons, but not enough to give me confidence to populate tables such as the ones above. That being said, Xeons with 8 logical cores are up there with modern i7s in terms of performance.
Some final notes on the data tables presented:
- I have not taken into account power costs as power prices vary significantly depending on where you live. However, the maximum Wattage that the CPUs will run at with their factory cooling system has been listed to make it easy for you to work out the profit you can make.
- I have assumed that your CPU will be running 24/7
- I have not considered multi-core job performance, only single core (some projects such as YAFU run many work units that take 4 or 8 cores each).
- These estimates are for the current GRC price (USD$0.033), and ATH (USD$0.13 in June). You will have to adjust the income estimates based on markets rates at the time of reading.
- This data was collected from a small subset of projects, primarily SRBase. Due to the massive number of factors to consider for these calculations across projects and across time, you need to remember these are only estimates.
If you are not sure what CPU you have in your machine, you can find out in less than a minute! Hit the start button, and type 'run'. Open the run dialogue box by pressing enter and type 'dxdiag' without the speech marks. If asked whether or not you would like to check if your drivers are digitally signed, select 'no' and wait for the window to open up. Note that on my computer shown below, I am running a Xeon E31230, which was not listed above.
If you would like to get involved, you can get started by installing the research software BOINC and the Gridcoin Wallet.
Image credit, in order of appearance:
Banner, @joshoeah
Tables all done by me in Excel
I'll have to try out gridcoin mining. Is it more lucrative than CPU mining monero now? I stopped CPU mining a few months back but monero used to be the best for CPU.
I have never mined anything other than Gridcoin, so I could not say. If you have your rough monthly revenue, you could compare it against the tables. If your CPU isn't listed, you can compare your CPU to an i7 through the architecture family release date and clock speed to get an approximation.
I honestly cannot for the life of me remember what I used to get. Thanks for the reply though :)
I tried mining monero for a month on a two year old computer, then switched to Gridcoin and so far I'm making more through Gridcoin in a pool than I did Monero.
My understanding is when monero gets more complicated as well Gridcoin doesn't because you aren't working the block, you're working packets from the science guys.
Interesting, thanks for the info.
Hey, thanks for writing this. I like your name too. Anyway, I didn't know much about gridcoin until reading this.
I bookmarked your post as well so when I have time for research, I will reference back to this information and use it to plan some of my Gridcoin ops - should I decide to leap into it.
This coin reminds me a little of Burstcoin in the sense that it is using hardware in a fundamentally different way than many of its rivals.
I'm definitely long on anything that effectively "Democratizes" the blockchain and a better word than democracy is DECENTRALIZE but that's a topic for a blog post.
While Gridcoin and Burstcoin both do use hardware very differently to most conventional cryptos, the key defining factor is actual benefit to society achieved by the former. Burstcoin functions on a proof of capacity. I can 'mine' it by hooking massive amounts of blank storage together that does nothing and fundamentally achieves nothing.
Gridcoin requires miners to contribute to scientific endeavours through the BOINC platform. While mining, you may discover a new stellar phenomenon, or a new megaprime, or an unknown cancer marker. I honestly consider that on a per user basis, GRC does more good for society than any other crypto.
However, that is coming from a researcher, so I may be a little biased. =)
Perhaps slightly, but you make a valid point.
dutch, you impress me more each post that I read.
As an avid Gridcoin fan, I use my spare resources to 'crunch' BOINC projects for the benefit of science and human kind and as a member of the Gridcoin Team there is money to be made by running a Gridcoin Wallet.
I look at the coins I earn from Proof Of Research (PoR) as an investment for my continued contributions to science and humanity.
These coins allow me to defray my expenses and my participation in the Gridcoin Community allows me to learn more about blockchain technology.
To me it's a 'win win' endeavour!!
I actually installed BOINC Manager a few days ago, and have made a few Gridcoin since then. I have not really optimized anything yet since I don't really know a lot about mining, but I'm always happy to help out with research! :)
Wow will look into it, thanks for this information. I never thought CPU Mining can be profitable, will definitely try it out.
This is a really comprehensive and detailed guide, I'm gonna look into mining GRC. Thanks for sharing!
Great news! Any compute added to science will benefit everyone in the end! I'm a researcher, can you tell I'm biased? =D
If you would like to get further involved, or to read up on what is going on with the network, you can check out the following channels serving the Gridcoin network:
Gridcoin Developer Slack - General channels for troubleshooting, as well as developer and branding discussions.
Gridcoin IRC - Join the linked channel, then register with NickServ using the instructions at the top of the page so you can join #Gridcoin. This is required to stop someone else stealing your nickname and the associated GRC.
Gridcoin Steemit - You are here already! =)
Gridcoin Homepage - The actively maintained and developed homepage of GRC globally.
Gridcoin Subreddit - Anything GRC related. The developers read the comments posted here, and will in all likelihood directly address any questions you pose within the day.
Gridcoin Forum and Main Thread - The ongoing megathread where you are most likely to find the original GRC developer Rob weighing in.
Gridcoin Twitter - Keep up to date with GRC news.
Awesome, thank you so much for sending these resources my way! This really is an exciting project and I look forward to reading more about it, including your future posts.
Hi @dutch, thank you very much for the article.
From my point of view Gridcoin has a lot of potential.
Hi @dutch, I posted a question at reddit. Here is the link:
~~~ embed:gridcoin/comments/72l7jb/how_come_my_quad_core_eight_thread_laptop_cannot/?ref=share&ref_source=link reddit metadata:fGdyaWRjb2lufGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnJlZGRpdC5jb20vci9ncmlkY29pbi9jb21tZW50cy83Mmw3amIvaG93X2NvbWVfbXlfcXVhZF9jb3JlX2VpZ2h0X3RocmVhZF9sYXB0b3BfY2Fubm90Lz9yZWY9c2hhcmUmcmVmX3NvdXJjZT1saW5rfA== ~~~
I got an answer from u/Cr1318, and I am very interested in your opinions too.
Thanks,
Brian
Hey rainclear, my apologies for my very late reply. I have been away due to my research commitments and my laboratory being burgled, but back now!
I had a look at the thread and you have gotten some good responses. My first question was whether the two machines are actually running the same project. If they are, then the reason for the mag discrepancy will just be the age of your architecture. A 7 year old CPU will have a slower clock, but more significantly it can complete far fewer FLOPs per clock cycle.
That being said, there is a way to get better mag out of your laptop due to it having 8 threads. The project WCG awards credit differently to all other projects, based only on the number of thread-hours you commit. The actual work done by each thread does not factor in. Therefore, you may want to move your laptop onto WCG.
Hope that helps, let me know if you have any more questions and I will try my best to answer (punctually). =)
Hi @dutch,
Thank you for the information. I did participate the same project, TN Grid.
I will switch to WCG then. WCG uses different clients, right? Do they use different clients for both Windows and Linux?
Thanks,
Brian
Thanks @dutch. It is really good detailed article about benefits of GridCoin. But can you share step-by-step guide to start Gridcoin mining on a normal computer or from a Windows laptop? Because, I'm completely new to Crypto currency mining.
@dutch any ideia of what ryzens make?
Unfortunately, I do not yet have any Ryzens to play around with. We are getting two Threadrippers for the lab soon, so I will report back! =)
Nice. Another coin to look out for.
Glad to see quite a few of these CPU only based mining pop up quite a bit recently.
You can mine Gridcoin with a GPU as well, but it is not as profitable as many other coins. Those who do mine GRC with GPUs do so mainly to contribute to the scientific endeavours.
GRC is one of the, or maybe even the, most profitable coin to mine with a CPU. Further, CPU miners only compete with other CPU miners, and GPU miners only with other GPUs (generally speaking).
So it's actually better to mine Gridcoin with CPU than a GPU, if you are looking at it as profitable?
If you are looking at the best return, then yes. Assuming you do a good job on project selection, you will earn much more with a CPU than a GPU per Watt of power you invest.
Of course, a GPU will get a lot more work done. This is important if you are trying to make a big discovery with your machines. The more work your machine completes, the more likely it is that you will make a big discovery and get published in an academic journal.
That is the whole gimmick of GPU's - they are much faster, but much 'dumber' than CPUs. Therefore, they are good at running simple jobs really fast, such as decoding Enigma messages.
I am a huge fan of gridcoin myself.
Your clickbait titled post is very misleading and optimistic. You did bold the text stating that you ignored energy costs, but it should have been bold, italicized and blinking.
Gridcoin is not trivial to configure, extremely volatile (as with all cc) and I'm pretty certain most people doing this blindly will actually be operating at a loss.
Of course there's the chance gridcoin will be worth more in the future but you'll still have to pay the power man with fiat if you want to reap that sweet sweet future money.
We all shoot for the moon but please be realistic.
My question to you is who is paying for the electricity on those 80 CPUs of yours?
Haha if you make a .gif I will replace it. =)
I did mention in the title this is revenue, not profit. It is too difficult to calculate profits based on all the factors that differ between me and every other user.
Our lab has several cash-in-hand grants that pay for everything from hardware to utilities. So, in running BOINC on idle cycles I suppose our grants are? Or us, depending on how you look at it, as the money passed through an account I have total control over.
Just to be a pedant, I mine on solar power :)
@scalextrix - you're based in England and mine using solar power? That's an incredible achievement in and of itself! Would love to give this a go one day if I can ever get myself set up with solar power :)
Yeah, of course I dont run 24/7 and the summer mining day is twice as long as the winter mining day. I dont have batteries so I can only mine for 'free' in the daylight.
If we are talking CPU mining only, my PC, Laptop, 2 Raspberry PIs and 3 Android devices only need ~230watts (measured at the wall), If I add my GPU then thats ~360Watts.
My solar install has a peak theoretical output of 3.975kW. On misty, misterable mid-winter days, the solar output might only be 2-300Watts, but on a fairly bright winter day we can still get 1kW, even more if its sunny. Cold weather actually makes solar panels more efficient, for our ones every drop of 1deg C, the panels gain 0.7% output compared to their factory test rating at 20 degC.
People think you need to live in hot sunny climates for solar PV to work, but I can tell you first hand that is not the case.
Going offgrid in the UK is un-feasible really, unless you are prepared to be extremely energy efficient, as crypto miners we obviously dont fall into that bracket. But I do have LED lighting and high efficiency appliances (my PC has a Platinum rated PSU) so it all helps.
Of course as a solar PV generator, I also claim my free SolarCoin grant, even more profits yay :)
Wow, that's really interesting! So many questions, but primarily I'm concerned that solar is unfeasible for me due to general cost of the purchase / installation.
Were you one of the lucky few that was able to get your installation back when there were all kinds of grants / at a better feed-in rate? Or did you fund and install it yourself? Just trying to get a feel for general cost at the moment - it's something I'd love to try out.
Batteries sound like they'd make the world of difference, though I imagine efficient and safe energy storage is an issue that's still yet to be solved within the confines of 'reasonable cost'?
Thank you for the detailed post!
I had my system installed in Nov 2014, It was £7,900 then but we went for a more expensive system because we have a roof that has multiple angles and we needed 'micro-inverters' to maximise the yeald. I dont know the market but I should expect with a single 'string-inverter' you would get a similar size system for half the cost today.
Feed-in-Tarriffs wer drastically cut here, but I expect with reduced costs it still pays back on a similar timescale, mine is around 8 years.
Thanks for taking the time to reply @scalextrix, really appreciate it. I'll take another look at the possibility of getting a system installed - that's actually cheaper than I expected for a reasonable system. I'm sure I remember looking at it some years ago and the price was astronomical!
I see you say you don't have batteries? Why not some glass mat or deep cycle gel cells? I am confused as don't you have storage charing with what you are not currently consuming and for non light hours? Also we have someone who is on a diesel generator too , out in Puerto Rico where ( pre Maria and Jose mind you still hundreds of thousands still without power 8mo latter) was already in an area where the power provider by the power company only during the daytime and reliability was iffy at best , I wont name him he can do that if he wishes but is an avid Android and pi miner although one of the first I saw to get a Ryzen. Cool to know you are solar.
Batteries just aren't economic based on the grid cost of electricity here. If grid power was high cost or intermittent, then batteries would be worth It, but as it stands the batteries would degrade before we saved enough energy to pay for them.
I hope as battery tech gets cheaper/as electricity costs increase, we can get batteries and at least break even on cost.
Very helpful information... I should look into this, another welcome opportunity to earn using only my computers.
I wasn't able to make mining at all profitable on my i5 while mining BitConnect Tokens. I was able to earn less then 1 penny a day. Do you think I would have greater success with Gridcoin?
Maybe, yeah. At least you'll be contributing to scientific research at the same time though :)
I used Gridcoin a VERY long time ago. They went through some changes and I lost the original gridcoin that I had (not enough to cry about, though)
I love the concept and have to get back to them again. Would love it if you could share how to mine gridcoin. Either a link to a past article that I might have missed or if yo could write something for people just starting with gridcoin.
Thanks.
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STOPRun computer all day and make 70 per month? Hmm, only for those with free electricity I think.
You're missing the fact that this is only utilising your CPU. CPUs are often left idle when someone is GPU mining, as most coins cannot be mined effectively with a CPU. Girdcoin 'mining' needs a CPU for many projects due to the high complexity of the operations performed in doing actual research relative to hashing. At USD$70/m you will easily pay for power.
But surely the PC runs hot when the CPU is crunching away and thus consuming power?
My PC (core i7 [email protected]) at idle = ~90 Watts measured from wall
My PC (core i7 [email protected]) at 100% CPU load on BOINC = ~150 Watts measured from wall
So the marginal energy use of running BOINC 24/7 for a month on my CPU is:
150W - 90W = 60W x 24H x 30D = 43200Wh /1000 = 43.2kWh
Based on my energy cost of £12.2/kWh (16cents US) that monthy cost is:
43.2kWh x 0.122 = £5.27 (roughly $7)
As above I have solar so my real profits are much higher, but even though I only mine in daylight (16 hours a day at the moment) the 60 watts of energy to run my CPU is a no brainer even if I did pay for power.
I was going to write some words, but your numbers speak louder than any explanation I could offer! =)
Its nice having a socket mounted energy monitor, it gives me confidence in my numbers :)
Hey thanks for the CPU chart.
I used this to scout out some old computers and found some old used Dells (THB 6800) with a i7 3770 cpu available.
Running this 24/7 I can mine about 4.5 GRC a day and this matches up with what I figured from your chart.
One point I think you could point out is threads, it seems like the more threads you have the better (even if the processor runs a bit slower) because each extra thread means you can run an extra job.
So something like a i9 that runs 6 X CPUs with 12 threads or the AMD 1700 with 8 cpus and 16 threads would be even better BUT a lot more expensive.
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You should stop doing this. Not only will people flag you and not follow you, but anyone that DOES follow you based on your spam will most likely contribute very little to you and the platform.
Try create some quality content, and the followers will come.
@dutch I couldn't agree more.