Is it still worth mining using your CPU?
Two months ago, I setup a mining node. I was a bit disappointed because I hadn’t caught many pows in several days. Anyway, I was quite happy to grab a few and see my SP growing. I was more interested in acquiring technical knowledge on how Steem mining works than earning thousands bucks.
Then came the mining hack allowing supercomputing and gtx-1080 to take control of the mining queue.
For more information on how they did it, read this exhaustive and awesome post from @arhag
The dev team worked hard to fix it and few days later, came hardfork 13. The mining queue went back to diversity and I was able to re-enter it.
Even better, the new algorithm looked more efficient as with the same hashpower I started to find more pows than before.
Unfortunately, it didn’t lasted long before gtx-1080 when back.
What was going on? A new hack, GPU mining?
On August 24th, I saw an interesting discussion on the steem.chat #mining channel
It looks like nobody (aka supercomputing aka gxt-1080-sc-nnnn) succeeded to code a miner using GPU. Give a look at the witness queue and you will see it's dominated by gtx and rabbit miners.
The mining score last month (as of 2016-08-30) clearly show that the 61.47% of the pow were produced by 8 miners (duplicate account merged) who trust the mining queue.
Red account name staring with a # means miner has several account starting with same name
Here a day by day graph of produced pows by those 8 top miners
We can clearly see hackers were kept out of power mining after hard fork and new pow2.
- Gtx-1080 is back with his miners one week after the hardfork.
- Rabbit joins the race one week later and even outshines gtx-1080 power.
- The only one able to continue to efficiently mine after hard fork deployment was dodl. I guess he hadn’t used hack nor GPU mining but a huge hashpower. Anyway, he can't compete anymore with any of both previous one.
So … what’s next …
Looking at stats, CPU-mining will be soon inefficient. Chances to get a spot in the mining queue will be near zero.
Looking at my block graph, you will see I didn’t found pow anymore for 2 days were I used to get between 4 and 7 before.
Therefore I think CPU mining is over as it’s no more worth spending money for the required resources.
Give me your opinion.
Great post, hopefully the bounty for GPU mining code will produce results and all those with a GPU can get a share of the mining again.
Yes it seems that with no word from the devs about this its over.
I still think steem is better as a CPU coin, that way it is decentralized and accessible to anyone with a computer.
As it stands now 2 people will own all of the que and that sounds very centralized to me...
Before hardfork I found 1 POW per day with my i7-4770
Now I have 2-3 POW per day. This is not bad.
I cant understand why do they crying around?
After you will got GPU miner you will start mining steem with your GPUs.
I think it will no more then you can get now on Ethereum. May be even less.
On my opinion the best solution would be changed POW so there will be not advantages in GPU.
Great post. This is exactly how I feel after investing time, resources, and effort to help Steem with POW and getting no reward.
It's probably easier and more profitable to just post pictures of cats... or whatever, than burning your CPU's, electricity, and bandwidth on futile mining efforts that never get their due rewards.
I think there should be a code change to prevent GPU mining from happening.
If this issue is not addressed, GPU mining will take over and it will be managed in a centralized way by a few.
Mining centralization is not the original idea behind Steem
Steem developers: Please fix the code to prevent GPU mining from happening!
It may not be over yet. The official CPU miner has a good potential for optimization — I was able to get about 60% increase in hash rate and I believe that more is possible. I'll write a post about it later today when I have time.
I wish CPU mining still has some days ahead. Everyone does not have GPU infrastructure and CPU mining allows access to mining to more people.
Moreover, having only a few miners who controls block production could pose some security problems at the blockchain level.
Waiting for your post ...
Here it is.
Good
Good Share
Thanks !
Excellent Analysis!
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