Do you still want to burn your CPU trying to mine for Steem? forget it definitely!
In my previous posts ( 1 - 2 - 3 ) we already saw that, since last month, only a few CPU miners still managed to grab some crumbs of the mining cake.
A bygone era
Have a look at the mining stats from this month:
Wow, a radical change in the "successful miners" distribution occurred!
Starting from latest hardfork’s day, all miners except gtx-1080 and rabbit have disappeared.
Vanished hollywood , dodl, b0y2k and aizen. They are mentioned on this graph only because they had an important place last month.
Vanished the small resisting clan of Others CPU miners. There are a few lucky ones who manage to steal a block from time to time. But we can count them on fingers.
The duel
Not only was it a massacre, but it is also the beginning of a fight between our two protagonists.
The day after the hardfork, gtx-1080 began hunting and crushed all the little rabbits, stealing his pow-carrots and starving him (and his revenue).
Rabbit tried to strike back from 25th to 27th of October, and for that moment started its slow descent to hell.
I can't wait for next month to see what will happen.
Challenger spotted
There was also an interesting event in the middle of the month: a small appearance of djm which, to my knowledge is also, working on the development of a GPU based mining code.
The bounty
CPU mining is over. Place to GPU mining and why not the ASIC mining.
A Community Bounty has been set up for the one who will open-source GPU mining code but no one has grabbed it yet. Read @picokernel post for more info.
Here an interesting conversation with Nobody, the known coder of gtx-1080
The end of "The end of ..."
The last thing I have to do now is to replace my intro image with this one:
Image credits 1 2 (Warner Bros. Cartoons) 3
Support me as a witness - read more here
You like this post, do not forget to 
upvote or follow me or resteem
At this point, if just two people are going to be competing for the 21st witness slot with proof-of-work, the miner slot might as well be eliminated.
That might speed up the release of an open-sourced GPU miner code.
If it exists, and the two (if it even is two) aren't using some undisclosed exploit or just massive botnets.
Agreed. Stop fucking teasing people.
It wasn't just GPU mining that killed CPU miners. The last straw was hardfork 14 and the absence of a compiled binary of steemd for Windows.
You're partially right.
But why spend time to build a Windows miner if it's no worth mining using Windows (i.e. using CPU).
There are several tutorials on how to setup a mining node on Linux .
It's not so difficult if you really want to mine (i.e. get free SP) to deploy one in a VM under Windows.
Then, my conclusion is that the major cause is GPU.
Thanks for commenting tho!
I agree. The major cause was undoubtedly the GPU miners. But I was still squeezing out a few blocks here and there. The finish line was drawn by hard fork 14. After that, as you noted, it just wasn't worth the time to download all the dependencies and work through compiling it myself or to set up a linux vm.
Exactly. I didn't bother updating on the HF it just wasn't worth my time. Even before the GPU miners arrived it wasn't very profitable.
I had like one week, right after hard fork 13, where my son and I were hitting 10-15 blocks a day between the two of us. At least I didn't entirely miss all the fun. Of course, those blocks were worth something like $1.00 or $1.50 each at the time...
The lack of windows binaries makes sense. I remember @steem-id built one?
//Edit: link is here: https://steemit.com/steem/@steem-id/windows-x64-binaries-for-steem-v0-14-2-mingw , however @steem-id said it's not recommended to mine with it.
Yep, but not suitable for mining, built using MinGW following arhag's guide. Hashrate is really slow.
Tried to build using MSVC but always failed. Download link is here: https://github.com/jemekite/Steem-MinGW
So the steem algorithm makes mining pools difficult but not GPU or ASIC mining? I remember getting my little laptop mining for a day a few months ago. I was so hopeful I'd at least catch one lucky POW. I knew even then low-end CPU mining was dead.
RIP
You mention the battle between gxt-1080 and rabbit, but I wonder if this is a battle between two different miners, or is it just one person running two machines? Perhaps they are tweaking their mining software and running the two machines in competition so see if the tweaks are an improvement.
Who knows ... but I really don't think so.
Nobody has ever talked openly and honestly after he made public he is the coder of gtx-1080 in Mining channel on steemit.chat
Hard for me to believe he is as Machiavellian.
Steemit on that asic mining race soon. Might as well just blog.
Me tuned!