Ethereum GPU mining?

[IntelUser2000]

Try the light sync mode. I think that's what got it working for me. It won't need 500G of space to make it work. I'm working on my XPS 12 that has a 128GB SSD, and has 30GB free space left over. Open the Mist application and set it to light sync mode.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Mist and Eth wallet is still a pile of garbage. Last time I tried it official Eth wallet did not have option to run in light sync mode, Mist did, but it would inevitably crash a day or two into running. They really need to fix that.

 

[wege12]

I just got a ledger nano s so I'm in the process of moving my ethereum from my mist Wallet to the nano s. But I'm wondering how I can access the airdropped ethereum Classic and OmiseGo I was given. Will it all transfer to my ledger nano s?

Also, I'm wondering the same thing about my Bitcoin I've had for years in my armory wallet. How do I claim and store the Bitcoin gold and Bitcoin cash I should have?

 

[Madpacket]

I just got a ledger nano s so I'm in the process of moving my ethereum from my mist Wallet to the nano s. But I'm wondering how I can access the airdropped ethereum Classic and OmiseGo I was given. Will it all transfer to my ledger nano s?

Also, I'm wondering the same thing about my Bitcoin I've had for years in my armory wallet. How do I claim and store the Bitcoin gold and Bitcoin cash I should have?

Any ERC20 based token can be sent to your freshly created Ledger Nano S Ethereum address. You'll have to use something like MEW to transfer the tokens. Don't forget to transfer all your air dropped tokens that have at least some value.

As for BTC/BTG/BCH etc, you'll have to find a software Bitcoin wallet that allows for coin splitting unless you risk importing your private key or derived private key words to your Ledger, but I don't recommend it for security reasons. Much safer to start with a freshly generated wallet by the Ledger.

I'm not sure if Armory Wallet allows to send split funds but I think the Core Bitcoin wallet does. You could probably import the Armory private key to the Bitcoin core wallet (or any other wallet with proper support) and then send the split coins to your Ledger Nano S wallet(s).

Before using your Nano S, please ensure you've updated to the latest firmware and then perform the restore functionality. Send a tiny amount of Ether to your Ledger, ensure the funds appear on etherscan, and then wipe the Ledger device by keying in the wrong device password 3 times. After the device is wiped restore your wallet from your 24 word key words and ensure you can send the small amount of Ether back to where it came from.

This wipe/restore is a crucial step that many forget to do, or simply ignore. If not successfully tested it could put your coins at great risk if you ever lose your Nano S, or need to perform a firmware upgrade that wipes the device first in the process (Ledger firmware 1.0 to 1.3 forces a complete wipe for example). Don't skip this step or you'll kick yourself down the road. This step ensures you properly wrote down the 24 words which is your private key just in a derived format!

I also recommend splitting up the 24 keyword pair and storing 12 words in a sealed envelope with tamper proof stickers (these stickers can be purchased for cheap off Amazon) and then stored in a trusted bank safety deposit box. Write down the serial numbers of the tamper proof stickers for future reference. Finally store the other 12 words in a fire proof safe using the same sealed envelope method.

Never keep all 24 words in the same physical location as these words are all that's required to steal your coins.

For good measure buy another Ledger (or Trezor) as a backup device in the event of theft/damage/loss/ etc. You can always restore your derived 24 words to the backup device which is safer than restoring to something like My Ether Wallet.

If you have any other questions please ask. I've helped around a half dozen people more safely store their crypto and even managed to restore 3.2 BTC from an old corrupted BTC wallet from 2013 for a cousin (painful process).

Good luck!

 

[Headfoot]

Awesome write up, thanks for the information dude

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

bitmain to make an eth miner?

http://news.8btc.com/bitmain-to-release-ethereum-asic-miner-f3-with-72gb-ddr3-dram-in-q2

if true a world of hurt is coming to eth farms, especially amd based ones as they generally arent too good at other algos.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yep just read that now. On one hand, it might actually make GPUS available again, on the other hand, difficulty is going to shoot up and GPU farms will no longer be viable. Not sure what to think of it.

 

[fleshconsumed]

I'm getting 404, but by the sound of it it's going to be expensive with 72GB of RAM, and with PoS on the horizon I'm not sure it's going to make much difference. It took a while for Bitcoin ASIC miners to make GPU mining unprofitable, it's quite possible that Q2 will be too late. But of course anything can happen, if PoS gets delayed, again, then maybe it'll pay for itself. I wouldn't buy it myself though, too much risk.

 

[IntelUser2000]

The whitepaper for Ethereum says

However, one notably interesting feature of this algorithm is that it allows anyone to "poison the well", by introducing a large number of contracts into the blockchain specifically designed to stymie certain ASICs. The economic incentives exist for ASIC manufacturers to use such a trick to attack each other. Thus, the solution that we are developing is ultimately an adaptive economic human solution rather than purely a technical one.

There's also the fact that we're getting closer and closer to PoS.

Fact: There's no gain to be had using ASIC over GPUs. Why? Because even if ASICs improve performance a thousand fold, so will the difficulty, because everyone would move to one. Thus, you are back to square one. It's just a waste of resources creating a silicon chip that becomes a complete garbage after 2 years or so. GPUs can be re-purposed, and the guys creating the GPUs aren't creating fabs, investing in R&D, electricity, and human resources as an extra. The infrastructure is already there.

Technically though, it is possible from the specs they outline. They are talking about putting 576 separate DDR3 chips that potentially can deliver 12.8GB/s for a total hash of 900MH/s if each chip has its own channel. It would be an incredibly complicated board consisting of over 20,000 copper lines for the memory chips per board, but possible.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

Yep just read that now. On one hand, it might actually make GPUS available again, on the other hand, difficulty is going to shoot up and GPU farms will no longer be viable. Not sure what to think of it.

short term a lot of amd 4xx/5xx series might wind up being retired, but most nvidia stuff will keep on cranking on non eth stuff that amd isnt very good for. so the nvidia shortage may not be affected much.

but if bitmain can pull if this off (merging large amounts of ram to an asic), asic miners for other ram intensive algos wont be far behind. which would affect nvidia too.

i recall come coins have mentioned they would change their algo if asics ever came out for that coin. maybe by increasing ram requirements so much that an asic with that much memory wouldnt be cost effective due to cost of memory or complexity to interface to it? it would almost be like the war of btc asics with each generation obsoleting the previous generation, only this time its memory instead of node size. of course changing to huge ram sizes needed would kill a lot of gpus for mining too.

i wonder how adaptable that bitmain asic is.. update the firmware to mine some other algo maybe?

 

[IntelUser2000]

The difference is increasing memory sizes come at a cost. ASIC performance increases have happened at similar power usage and cost.

Ethereum mining takes majority of the GPU-based PoW work. That moving away from PoW will have a big impact on the overall market. The viability of creating a chip dedicated for one algorithm is going to be significantly reduced. Not to mention the whitepaper thing about making ASICs undesirable.

i wonder how adaptable that bitmain asic is.. update the firmware to mine some other algo maybe?

The nature of ASICs are that it runs as few algorithms as possible(usually one) so it can be optimized to run it the fastest possible. If it can run other algorithms, naturally the performance have to be sacrificed. Then you have a case where you aren't good for anything. It's too slow for the main algorithm compared to the dedicated ones, and its not general purpose enough to really move to another one.

 

[Red Squirrel]

What I wonder is how viable FPGAs are. You can program them to do pretty much anything. You can program memory you can program cpus you can pretty much program anything, as it's basically a bunch of logic gates. So one could presumably program some cuda cores or similar. Just not sure what the speed is like. Maybe it would just be too slow for the power it uses. I don't know much about FPGAs though so maybe I'm off my rocker here. I'm sure if it's viable someone would have done it by now. Did not find much on Google when I searched.

 

[Charlie22911]

The advantage of an FPGA is that it is field programmable - you can update a design without respinning silicon. Versatility is its advantage, not speed.

I remember when FPGAs came about in the bitcoin world, they didn’t last very long before the first ASICs dropped.

 

[thilanliyan]

Fact: There's no gain to be had using ASIC over GPUs. Why? Because even if ASICs improve performance a thousand fold, so will the difficulty, because everyone would move to one. Thus, you are back to square one. It's just a waste of resources creating a silicon chip that becomes a complete garbage after 2 years or so. GPUs can be re-purposed, and the guys creating the GPUs aren't creating fabs, investing in R&D, electricity, and human resources as an extra. The infrastructure is already there.

Isn't that same thinking supposed to apply for other coins? And yet we have ASICs for several different types. Bitmain will probably make a bunch, mine for themselves, then start selling to the public.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Isn't that same thinking supposed to apply for other coins? And yet we have ASICs for several different types. Bitmain will probably make a bunch, mine for themselves, then start selling to the public.

There's that slim window between the first versions being used and first mass usage, but after that it'll go back to being business as usual. They call that an ASIC Arms race for Bitcoin ASICs. Just like the real Arms race, its pointless.

Add to that ASICs are incredibly wasteful because you are creating physical waste, garbage that's going to pollute the environment which is far worse than little extra bit of CO2. We seem to be at a point where certain technological advancements are happening for the sake of advancement, and have forgotten what the point of the advancement was for in the first place - benefit for us. If we go beyond that then we should scrap it.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

The nature of ASICs are that it runs as few algorithms as possible(usually one) so it can be optimized to run it the fastest possible. If it can run other algorithms, naturally the performance have to be sacrificed. Then you have a case where you aren't good for anything. It's too slow for the main algorithm compared to the dedicated ones, and its not general purpose enough to really move to another one.

true but i was thinking of the baikal x10 (i think thats the one) it can mine several algos, and firmware has added more as time went on. perhaps the algos are so similar a fpga controller can use the asic blocks in different orders or with different arguments to get the different algos? update the fpga to tweak/change the algos to something the asic can use.

as for a fpga only miner with huge gobs of memory i guess that if the limiting factor is memory access speed rather than the fpga speed one could make a multi algo fpga miner thats fairly competitive, at least against gpus.

dunno really, i leave that to the more knowledgeable folks here to figure out. me, im just wondering out loud.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Isn't that same thinking supposed to apply for other coins? And yet we have ASICs for several different types. Bitmain will probably make a bunch, mine for themselves, then start selling to the public.

That's the crux of why people made ASICs for Bitcoin in the first place. They were relatively cheap to produce (after the initial work of optimizing properly for the algorithm) and there was a release window during which ASIC manufacturers found it more profitable to mine for themselves without releasing anything to the public.

Once they self-mined a bit, they sold to the public at exorbitant prices.

Outside of contracts that can/will be used to mess with possible ETH ASICs (and I've heard rumours of ETH ASICs existing for over a year now), I was always under the impression that the kind of memory controller you'd want/need to build into an ASIC to make it useful for mining ETH was too expensive to implement profitably; namely, you'd be rebuilding one of the major parts of a GPU into your ASIC just to get performance up to an acceptable level. Not many companies really know how to make a fast, wide memory interface, plus there's the cost of using something like GDDR5 to complete the trifecta.

 

[Headfoot]

TBH I don't see an Ethereum ASIC being super viable even if they can pull it off. As soon as its on the market, the Ethereum devs will make the move to Casper/PoS priority 1. The payback period on any Ethereum ASIC is gonna be actively opposed by the Ethereum devs. I for one don't intend to invest a lot of money betting against them on that, especially now that Casper is pretty far along.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah seems risky to make an ASIC with PoS around the corner.

Though given these ASIC companies have the capabilities of rolling silicon they should get into the GPU business instead. It's a bit more long term sustainable imo.

 

[Headfoot]

all that aside, from a pure technology perspective it would be really cool to see a machine dedicated to really fast random reads from a big data set. Like a weird mix of enterprise grade server gear loaded to the gills with the highest density ram meets a GPU

 

[Head1985]

They talking about POS 2years already.
Bet both AMD and NV have some interest to ETH not get to POS.They make fortune because miners.

 

[Headfoot]

They talking about POS 2years already.
Bet both AMD and NV have some interest to ETH not get to POS.They make fortune because miners.

It's been academic so far but once ASICs are actually threatening the currency I bet dollars to donuts they will kick it into high gear

 

[IntelUser2000]

It's been academic so far but once ASICs are actually threatening the currency I bet dollars to donuts they will kick it into high gear

You haven't read the Ethereum whitepaper have you? You should go up a few posts and read the paragraph I quoted. I guess the community can always vote to hard fork for a new algorithm. Unlike the previous years, there's already a testnet for Casper.

There's also development going for scalability solutions. PoS is easier to make more scalable solutions because of the nature of PoS. It's easy to buy enough hashing power to do a 51% attack - its another entirely to do a 51% attack by owning 51% of total staked Ethereum. Also PoS penalizes malicious users by killing their entire stake.

 

[Feld]

You haven't read the Ethereum whitepaper have you? You should go up a few posts and read the paragraph I quoted. I guess the community can always vote to hard fork for a new algorithm. Unlike the previous years, there's already a testnet for Casper.

There's also development going for scalability solutions. PoS is easier to make more scalable solutions because of the nature of PoS. It's easy to buy enough hashing power to do a 51% attack - its another entirely to do a 51% attack by owning 51% of total staked Ethereum. Also PoS penalizes malicious users by killing their entire stake.

The whitepaper also describes how specific contracts can be tailored to overload and defeat ASICs that might show up, without requiring a fork or change to the algorithm. So any ASIC would also have had to find a way around that defense measure.

 

[TempAcc99]

They talking about POS 2years already.

Yeah and I hope they take as much time as they need to do it right. Just think about it. If there is any kind of security issue in this, the crash would be gigantic and trust would be completely gone. It could destroy the whole idea.

Besides that with the price now back over $900 my hope of cheap GPUs in the near future as all but vanished. This really sucks also for the future. I bet NV will drag out the launch of Volta as long as possible. From a project management point they probably have already moved most people to the next projects because they have 0 need to release it anytime soon if your several year old cards sell for more than when launched. I bet the next Volta release will be another halo part below the volta titan. GV102-based priced at $2000 or something similar ridiculous.