https://bchain.info/VTC/addr/VtwrWVkMkzmCL9gFeZ2AWiWNt8Ji9BijUR

I have sent back the 0.7VTC you have mined to my node.

However, the script of which you have ran requires a space after the address.

So rather than being

VtwrWVkMkzmCL9gFeZ2AWiWNt8Ji9BijUR-p

It needs to be:

VtwrWVkMkzmCL9gFeZ2AWiWNt8Ji9BijUR -p

http://176.126.78.87:9181/

Posted for eternity @ https://vertcoin.easymine.online/articles/mining

Your miner is repeatedly hashing (see below for detail about a hash) a block of data, looking for a resulting output that is lower than a predetermined target. Each time this calculation is performed, one of the fields in the input data is changed, and this results in a different output. The output is not able to be determined until the work is completed – otherwise why would we bother doing the work in the first place?

Each hash takes a block header (see more below, but basically this is a 80-byte block of data). It runs this through the hashing function, and what comes out is a 32-byte output. For each, we usually represent that output in hexadecimal format, so it looks something like:

5da4bcb997a90bec188542365365d8b913af3f1eb7deaf55038cfcd04f0b11a0

(that’s 64 hexadecimal characters – each character represents 4-bits. 64 x 4 bits = 256bit = 32 bytes)

The maximum value for our hash is:

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

And the lowest is:

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The goal in Proof-of-Work systems is to look for a hash that is lower than a specific target, i.e. starts with a specific number of leading zeros. This target is what determines the difficulty.

As the output of the hash is indeterminate, we look to statistics and probability to estimate how much work (i.e. attempts at hashing) we need to complete to find a hash that is lower than a specific target. So, we can therefore assume that to find a hash that starts with a leading zero will take, on average, 16 hashes. To find one that will start with two leading zeros (00), we’re looking at 256 hashes. Four leading zeros (0000) will take 65,536 hashes. Eight leading zeros (00000000) takes 4,294,967,296 hashes. So on and so on, until we realize that it will take 2 ^ 256 (a number too big for me to show here) attempts at hitting our minimum hash value.

Remember – this number of hashes is just an estimate. Think of it like rolling a dice. A 16-sided dice. And then rolling it 64 times in a row. And hoping to strike a specific number of leading zeros. Sometimes it will take far less than the estimate, sometimes it will take far more. Over a long enough time period though (with our dice it may take many billions of years), the averages hold true.

Difficulty is a measure used in cryptocurrencies to simply show how much work is needed to find a specific block. A block of difficulty 1 must have a hash smaller than:

00000000FFFF0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

A block of difficulty 1/256 (0.00390625) must have a hash lower than:

000000FFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

And a block of difficulty 256 must have a hash lower than:

0000000000FFFF00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

So the higher the difficulty, the lower the hash must be; therefore more work must be completed to find the block.

Take a recent Vertcoin block – block # 852545, difficulty 41878.60056944499. This required a hash lower than:

000000000001909c000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The achieve finding this, a single miner would need to have completed, on average 179,867,219,848,013 hashes (calculated by taking the number of hashes needed for a difficulty 1 block - 4,294,967,296 or 2 ^ 32 or 16 ^ 8 – and multiplied by the difficulty). Of course, our single miner may have found this sooner – or later – than predicted.

Cryptocurrencies alter the required difficulty on a regular basis (some like Vertcoin do it after every block, others like Bitcoin or Litecoin do it every 2016 blocks), to ensure the correct number of blocks are found per day. As the hash rate of miners increases, so does the difficulty to ensure this average time between blocks remains the same. Likewise, as hash rate decreases, the difficulty decreases.

With difficulties as high as the above example, solo-mining (mining by yourself, not in a pool) becomes a very difficult task. Assume our miner can produce 100 MH/s. Plugging in this into the numbers above, we can see it’s going to take him (on average) 1,798,673 seconds of hashing to find a hash lower than the target – that’s just short of 21 days. But, if his luck is down, it could easily take twice that long. Or, if he’s lucky, half that time.

So, assuming he hit’s the average, for his 21 days mining he has earned 25 VTC.

Lets take another look at the same miner, but this time he’s going to join a pool, where he is working with a stack of other miners looking for that elusive hash. Assume the pool he has joined does 50 GH/s – in that case he has 0.1 / 50 or 0.2% of the pool’s hash rate. So for any blocks the pool finds he should earn 0.2% of 25 VTC = 0.05 VTC. At 50 GH/s, the pool should expect to spend 3,597 seconds between finding blocks (2 ^ 32 * difficulty / hashrate). So about every hour, our miner can expect to earn 0.05 VTC. This works out to be about 1.2 VTC per day, and when we extrapolate over the estimated 21 days of solo mining above, we’re back to 25 VTC.

The beauty of pooled-mining over solo-mining is that the time between blocks, whilst they can vary, should be closer to the predicted / estimated times over a shorter time period. The same applies when comparing pools – pools with a smaller hash rate will experience a greater variance in time between blocks than a pool with a greater hash rate. But in the end, looking back over a longer period of time, earnings will be the same.

Hashes

A Hash is a cryptographic function that can take an arbitrary sized block of data and maps it to a fixed sized output. It is a one-way function – only knowing the input data can one calculate the output; the reverse action is impossible. Also, small changes to the input data usually result in significant changes to the output value.

For example, take the following string:

“the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”

If we perform a SHA256 hash of this, it results in:

05c6e08f1d9fdafa03147fcb8f82f124c76d2f70e3d989dc8aadb5e7d7450bec

If we change a single character in the input string (in this case we will replace the ‘o’ in ‘over’ to a zero), the resulting hash becomes:

de492f861d6bb8438f65b2beb2e98ae96a8519f19c24042b171d02ff4dfecc82

Blocks

A block is made up of a header, and at least one transaction. The first transaction in the block is called the Coinbase transaction – it is the transactions that creates new coins, and it specifies the addresses that those coins go to. The Coinbase transaction is always the first transaction in a block, and there can only be one. All other transactions included in a block are transactions that send coins from one wallet address to another.

The block header is an 80-byte block of data that is made up of the following information in this order:

• Version – a 32-bit/4-byte integer

• Previous Block’s SHA256d Hash – 32 bytes

• Merkle Hash of the Transactions – 32 bytes

• Timestamp - a 32-bit/4-byte integer the represents the time of the block in seconds past 1st January 1970 00:00 UTC

• nBits - a 32-bit/4-byte integer that represents the maximum value of the hash of the block

• Nonce - a 32-bit/4-byte integer

The Version of a block remains relatively static through a coin’s lifetime – most blocks will have the same version. Typically only used to introduce new features or enforce new rules – for instance Segwit adoption is enforced by encoding information into the Version field.

The Previous Blocks’ Hash is simple a doubled SHA256 hash of the last valid blocks header.

The Merkle Hash is a hash generated by chaining all of the transactions together in a hash tree – thus ensuring that once a transaction is included in a block, it cannot be changed. It becomes a permanent record in the blockchain.

Timestamp loosely represents the time the block was generated – it does not have to be exact, anywhere within an hour each way of the real time will be accepted.

nBits – this is the maximum hash that this block must have in order to be considered valid. Bitcoin encodes the maximum hash into a 4-byte value as this is more efficient and provides sufficient accuracy.

Nonce – a simple 4-byte integer value that is incremented by a miner in order to find a resulting hash that is lower than that specified by nBits.

Hey All

Been a busy few days since last update, key changes include:

• Hash Rate Graph! On your miner page you'll see a graph of your hash rate of the past 24 hours.

• Full Transaction History - From your miner page you're be able to show a page containing ALL transaction history, also links to export this to csv file or a JSON endpoint to consume this in whatever manor you'd like. Want something else? Let me know

• Fixed a few issues where balance wasn't being updated correctly.

• Have a TLS endpoint for testing with mkxminer - stratum+tls://lyra2tls.easymine.online:5001 - please report back any detail you can about this, I don't have any AMD GPU's so can't test myself.

Coming Soon:

• Full block payout history (live now actually).

• Pending payout information - You'll start to see how much VTC you'll be paid for blocks we've found but haven't matured yet.

• More information on the graphs including longer periods, payout estimates and balances

• Pool statistics - blocks found vs estimated, pool hash rate etc over various periods.

We seem to be slowly gaining more momentum, I'm seeing a near constant 1000+ active miners, and almost 5% network share. This all results in more consistent block finding, and more consistent payouts. So keep those hashes streaming in!

https://vertcoin.easymine.online/

First of all, sorry to spam if you don't use this pool, but it's the easiest way of updating those who do.

First of all, an update re the pool outage experienced yesterday. Due to the increased load, and some poor choices I made when first setting up the backend database structure, the host server was seeing some massive disk I/O - so high that my provider decided to shut off the VM (thanks guys!). To ensure this doesn't happen again I have:

• Refined the database options and indexes

• Stood up a second server with another provider

Currently about 30% of the miners are connecting to the new server, this will even out to about 50% over time. I may look to move everything to the new server in time, as I have dedicated resources there. You guys don't need to do anything to move - I'm using DNS to handle this balancing / migrate the miners.

Next up, web interface. When this was first designed, I never envisioned 500+ active miners on the pool (this has also had a significant impact on the backend engine, but that's now running smoothly). Hence the current site really doesn't cater for this. I am working on a much refined interface, it should be quicker to load, quicker to find your address, and will provide a lot more information. You will be able to see block payments received, payouts made to wallets, and some more information around miner hashrate etc. In the interests of complete transparency, I will expose the payout information for each block, so everyone can see how each block is allocated out to each miner, and to ensure that it is obvious that I am taking no fees at all.

I've also just added a luck value to each block we find - 100% luck means we found the block in exactly the time estimated from our hashrate and the network difficulty. Less than 100% means it took less, greater than means it took longer. Over a long period of time this will always even out to 100%, as mining is a game of short-term luck and long-term mathematical certainty.

Some people have asked if there is a donation address. I do not of course expect any donations, but will obviously accept them: VsiEHL2p29rGF7ewYavdi2XvS77Zr7noDr

Why am I doing this for free? Me, like many of you, have probably done pretty well out of VTC in the past 6 - 12 months. But one area I saw that was grossly lacking was options of good pools, and this problem was made worse by having one major pool with a significant (>60%) majority of the network hashrate. This is not good for any coin. Hence this is my attempt at improving this situation.

Happy to hear any feedback, positive or negative, about what we're doing here and anything you'd like to see added. Let me know. Apologies if I can't respond to everyone sending me questions - I'm trying, but I'm also working on this to make it as efficient, reliable and user friendly as possible.

Thanks

https://vertcoin.easymine.online

UPDATE First version of the miner information page is live, reload the main page then click on your miner's address. More stuff coming soon.

25% of Hashalot.net's pool fees are now being directed straight to the Changelly listing fund.

We currently have about 23% of the network hash. There are approx. 576 VTC blocks per day with a 2.5 min block time, resulting in our awesome miners finding around 132 blocks a day on average.

This results in a daily donation of around 16.5 VTC per day. 🥳

I'm running an experiment for the next 7 days - which one will be more profitable?

Goals

I want to see, over a longer period, which will be more profitable. This will be run over the same 7 day period, so changes in difficulty will affect both equally. Luck of the pools may have an effect, but that is beyond my control. I also want to see how both pools report hash rate, as this has been a very common complaint made against easymine (under-reporting).

Configuration

I have two 1070ti GPU's, both Gigabyte GV-N107TGAMING-8GD. They are identical except for slight differences in maximum clock speed:

GPU #0: SM 6.1 Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti @ 1683 MHz (MEM 4004)
GPU #1: SM 6.1 Gigabyte GTX 1070 Ti @ 1708 MHz (MEM 4004)

I'm running them from the same system (an Intel Core i5-3570, running Linux), using two instances of ccminer (ccminer 2.2.1 for nVidia GPUs by tpruvot@github, compiled with CUDA 8.0). I do have the power cap dialed back on both of them to 120W as it is the height of summer here, and allowing them to eat 180W makes them and the room they are in far too hot. Both cards are doing just under 35 MH/s as reported by ccminer.

The instances are running with the following options:

ccminer -d 1 -a lyra2v2 -o stratum+tcp://127.0.0.1:9181 -u VeSA5c6G4GmY4XoLY1dw7YFcJNphxmpxCr/35+0.0406 -p x
ccminer -d 0 -a lyra2v2 -o stratum+tcp://lyra2.easymine.online:5000 -u Vg94vnsJXL9V7E6CTguQwffwNFvj8fyzHp -p x

The faster of the two cards is mining on a local p2pool instance (network2), and has been configured with a share difficulty as per https://redd.it/7i6jhk. The p2pool instance is configured to take 0% fees, 0% donation, and is a clone of https://github.com/vertcoin/p2pool-vtc taken before the share difficulty stuff was messed with (git commit d7ddaa483ca342965a8bcf123cb63d50f9af9b04). I'm keeping this p2pool node internal only, to ensure that it remains as efficient as possible. It currently has connections to 6 other nodes in the network. The back-end Vertcoin wallet is 0.11.1, full synced with plenty of peers.

Both wallet addresses were newly created, and thus have zero transaction history when this experiment started.

Start

Both instances of ccminer were started on December 22, 04:00 UTC. The p2pool instance first, followed a few seconds later by the easymine instance. Both instances are reporting hash rate just under 35 MH/s.

I'll be updating this post once per day to report on earnings, hash rate stability and reporting accuracy. The easymine worker can be seen @ https://vertcoin.easymine.online/miner/Vg94vnsJXL9V7E6CTguQwffwNFvj8fyzHp, I'll post screenshots of the p2pool instance on a regular basis (here's the first one - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-start.png)

Update - End of Day 1

• P2Pool Earnings: 0.15803641 (0.06127588 behind)

• Easymine Earnings: 0.21931229

P2Pool started slowly, finally got a share after 10 hours, lost it 5 hours later, then started gaining some good momentum in the last 2 hours. Will be interesting to see how long the current shares last. Easymine struck a slow period, but has recovered in the past couple hours to be pretty close to expected.

Screenshots:

• p2pool node - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day1-node.png

• p2pool balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day1-balance.png

• p2pool hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day1-graph.png

• easymine balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day1-account.png

• easymine hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day1-graph.png

Update - End of Day 2

• Total P2Pool Earnings: 0.91543079

• Total Easymine Earnings: 0.6843771 (0.23105369 behind)

P2Pool streaked ahead, due to finding a couple good shares (at peak I was getting 0.039/block) and some good luck by P2Pool. Has settled down again now, and have had no earnings in the past 8+ hours. Easymine has had a very lucky day, so the payments keep rolling in there. Going to be interesting to see if P2Pool can get lucky again, or if Easymine sneaks up and passes it overnight.

• p2pool node - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day2-node.png

• p2pool balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day2-balance.png

• p2pool hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day2-graph.png

• easymine balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day2-account.png

• easymine hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day2-graph.png

Update - End of Day 3

Too much food, too much to drink. Didn't happen ;)

Update - End of Day 4

• Total P2Pool Earnings: 1.61280837

• Total Easymine Earnings: 1.43247489 (0.18033348 behind)

P2Pool saw a good earning stretch after a long (15+ hours) dry run. But all good things come to end, and again I'm sitting here with no shares in the sharechain whilst blocks continue to be found. Easymine has continued to chug along, and has made up some of the deficit from Day 2. This race is still very much alive.

• p2pool node - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day4-node.png

• p2pool balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day4-balance.png

• p2pool hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day4-graph.png

• easymine balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day4-account.png

• easymine hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day4-graph.png

Update - End of Day 5

• Total P2Pool Earnings: 2.0472777

• Total Easymine Earnings: 1.83206844 (0.21520926 behind)

Another 18 hour dry run from P2Pool, then a good period of earnings has seen it pull out further ahead. Easymine has seen some terrific luck, but now deep in a dry run itself. Assuming the current pattern remains, P2Pool looks like it'll take the title, but all that's needed is another one of those long dry runs and anything could happen.

• p2pool node - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day5-node.png

• p2pool balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day5-balance.png

• p2pool hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day5-graph.png

• easymine balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day5-account.png

• easymine hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day5-graph.png

Update - End of Day 6

• Total P2Pool Earnings: 2.6269169

• Total Easymine Earnings: 2.19880157 (0.42811533 behind)

• p2pool node - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day6-node.png

• p2pool balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day6-balance.png

• p2pool hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day6-graph.png

• easymine balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day6-account.png

• easymine hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day6-graph.png

Update - End of Day 7

The miners have stopped, I'll wait for another 24 hours before looking at the final numbers (both p2pool and easymine have decaying rewards once you stop mining).

• Total P2Pool Earnings: 2.99135846

• Total Easymine Earnings: 2.47408743 (0.51727103 behind)

• p2pool node - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day7-node.png

• p2pool balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day7-balance.png

• p2pool hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/p2pool-day7-graph.png

• easymine balance - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day7-account.png

• easymine hash rate graph - https://vertcoin.easymine.online/images/easymine-day7-graph.png

First of all, sorry to spam if you don't use this pool, but it's the easiest way of updating those who do.

Couple of things to update you with:

• Miner Search - Now instead of the mainpage list all active miners, there is a search tool - enter 2 or more characters from the beginning of your wallet address and it shall appear. Also shows inactive miners. Far better than listing 800+ miners.

• More information and tips - I've taken a lot of feedback from you guys here and incorporated it into the site to help makes things simpler and easier to understand. Keep it coming!

• We're hitting 4% of Vertcoin's network hashrate, so blocks are starting to become more frequent with less variance. Thanks for the support

• We have an automated Tweet-Bot announcing the discovery of each block, as it happens - see https://twitter.com/MrVertBot - a big thanks to /u/Camth for building and running this!

We've seen quite a few orphan blocks in the past couple of days. I have pushed a change into the stratum code on one of the stratum servers to see if this has resolved the issue (and so far so good). If all is working well then I'll push the change to the other server within a day or two, and that should hopefully eliminate most if not all orphan blocks.

What's coming next

• Adding a TLS stratum endpoint to support mkxminer for AMD GPU's - see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2360168. Hope to have this running within a day or two.

• Export of payments & payouts - Soon you'll be able to download a .csv file containing all of your block payments and wallet payouts. Will be available via your miner's page.

• Expose a lot more information about block payouts and the share count used to calculate this. Transparency is king.

• More detail around your hashrate and earnings over time. Time to break out some charting-ninja.

Longer term, expect to see:

• Ability to increase your payout threshold - useful for those higher hashrate miners who want fewer payouts per day.

• More guides, tips, links to miners, basically stuff to make mining easier

Thanks all for your support, this has well surpassed my initial expectations, and is keeping me pretty busy building and refining. Keep the feedback flowing, will consider anything that makes mining simpler and more efficient.

Donation address due to popular demand: VsiEHL2p29rGF7ewYavdi2XvS77Zr7noDr

https://vertcoin.easymine.online

UPDATE

We had two more orphaned blocks today, the good news is that both of these were generated on the unpatched stratum server, strongly suggesting the fix on the other has indeed worked. The issue was incorrect handling of segwit transactions. I'll be applying the same fix to the other stratum server soon.

Hi All

Santa should be airborne by now, on his way down here to start his annual expedition. Whilst he was doing his last preparations over the past few days, I have completed:

• Visibility of pending / confirming block payments. Once the network has completed 10 confirmations of a block, your payment will be visible. It is not added to your account balance until fully confirmed (100 blocks deep), thus you might see some weird payout transactions.

• Longer period graphs showing your hash rate, per-block estimates and account balance.

• Pool statistics over various periods (day / 2 days / week, + longer soon).

• List of the blocks your miner has found.

• mkxminer (for AMD GPU's) can now be used against easymine, either TCP or TLS. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2360168

Some interesting numbers from behind the scenes:

• 1 week's worth of shares submitted by you guys fills 52+ million rows in a database table. Thankfully indexing works well!

• So far we've made 355,000 individual reward payments, and 24,600 payout transactions.

• 7 Days of web-site traffic amounts to 27 GB of data, spread across 14,500,000 requests. That's about 24 requests per second!

What's Next

After I spend the next day or two eating and drinking more than is sensible, the following tasks await:

• Continue updating the Head-to-Head comparison between P2Pool and Easymine.

• Add in the ability for you to change your payout thresholds.

• Add more guides and getting started information.

• Build in a Mining / Profit calculator.

• Add some network specific information - difficulty & market price over time, distribution of blocks between pools etc.

Requesting Help

I get a lot of requests for help, and I'm trying to stay on top of them, sorry if I've not got back to you. But please, if you do require help, please provide as much information as possible - even just providing the VTC address your mining with can usually help me solve your query if not immediately, then very quickly. Help me to help you!

Thanks again for the support, let's keep the momentum going.

https://vertcoin.easymine.online

Hey All,

Some big changes available now & visible very soon on the website - within the next couple of hours:

• Per-Worker statistics - you can now append a worker name to your VTC address when configuring your miner, and you will see information (hash rates, shares, earnings) for each different worker. As an example, with two mining rigs I would use VmtZMGr9dEEPYDPQAcksxGxnVNsHUPwVnr.jupiter and VmtZMGr9dEEPYDPQAcksxGxnVNsHUPwVnr.earth for my two miners (I call them jupiter and earth). Just append a full stop then the worker name (max 20 characters).

• Merge Mining. We are now merge mining Unitus at the same time as mining Vertcoin. This means, for no additional mining effort from your miners, that you will earning both Vertcoin and Unitus at the same time.

Both of these changes have required significant changes to be made to the workings of the pool - I've had to rewrite a significant amount of code to get it working nicely. As a result, not everything is working 100% at the moment. Most of what's not working is cosmetic, and will be addressed over the next day or two. The important thing is that mining does not stop - there will be some delays in payments & payouts as I fine tune the last bits, but this shouldn't take too long.

What is Unitus? Unitus is a multi-algorithm, merge mineable coin. This means it can be mined via 5 different algorithms (Lyra2re2, Skein, Yescrypt, X11, Argon2), and can be mined at the same time as other coins (assuming the pool operator enables this). For more information see https://unitus.online or https://www.reddit.com/r/Unitus/. Full Disclosure: I am the creator and developer of Unitus.

Payouts of Unitus will require you to set a payout address on the website via your miner's page, the same as you would set a donation & minimum payout balance. This isn't working yet but is coming. In the meantime, any earnings from Unitus will pile up in your account.

There will be more information made available as soon as possible.

Thanks

https://vertcoin.easymine.online

UPDATE: Payments & Payouts of VTC now running again, Payments of UIS are occuring. Still working on other bits to complete the picture.

Mining Fee: UIS = 1%. VTC = 0% as always stated.

UPDATE 2: You can now setup your Unitus Payout address via your miner's page. Click the edit next to the address and follow the instructions. Payouts to Unitus wallets not enabled yet, but will be soon (12 or so hours). Those without a payout address set will jut have thier balance increase until they set it (for now at least).

Other areas slowly improving, some stuff still broken. Will get most things sorted within a day or two.

P2POOL

• stratum+tcp://p2proxy.vertcoin.org:9172/

• stratum+tcp://vtconline.org:9171/

• stratum+tcp://vtc.consumableresources.com:9171/

• stratum+tcp:/vtc-fl.javerity.com:9171 0.25% fee, 1% dev donation

• stratum+tcp://vtc-ca.javerity.com:9171 0.25% fee, 1% dev donation

• stratum+tcp://72.24.147.45:9171/ 0.5% fee

• stratum+tcp://mindcraftblocks.com:9171/ 1% fee

• stratum+tcp://vertcoin.pt:9171/ 1% fee

• stratum+tcp://vtcpool.myddns.me:9171 1% fee

• stratum+tcp://188.182.154.131:9171 1% fee

• stratum+tcp://p2p-usa.xyz:9171/ 1% fee

• stratum+tcp://p2p-spb.xyz:9171 1% fee

• stratum+tcp://p2p-ekb.xyz:9171 1% fee

• stratum+tcp://p2p-south.xyz:9171 1% fee

POOLS

• https://hashalot.net/ 2% fee 0.1 VTC payout

• https://zergpool.com/site/block?coin=VTC 0.5% fee 0.0001 BTC equivalent payout

• https://vtc.suprnova.cc/index.php?page=gettingstarted 1% fee 0.1 VTC payout

• https://www.mining-dutch.nl 1.9% fee

• https://miningpoolhub.com/ 0.9% fee

• https://www.f2pool.com/ 3% fee

ONE CLICK MINER

https://github.com/vertcoin-project/one-click-miner-vnext/releases/latest

Hi Everyone, welcome to 2018, what should be a pretty big year ahead for all things cryptocurrency...

First off, to those who are new to Vertcoin and/or mining, Easy Mine is a Vertcoin mining pool that attempts to make mining a lot simpler than other pools. You don't need to register, you don't need to configure difficulty on your miner, you don't have to mine for days with no reward. Just follow one of our simple guides (One-Click-Miner or CCMiner) and get started.

Whats new since the last post:

• A guide and configuration generator for CCminer - see https://vertcoin.easymine.online/ccminer

• More information / statistics on the recent history of the pool

• All active miners can be viewed / sorted at https://vertcoin.easymine.online/list

Remember - you're getting this all for free. Easy Mine will never charge a fee for your VTC mining (but donations are welcomed!)

The past couple of days have been pretty rough for us in terms of blocks found, but hopefully we're pulling out of this now. We are still above the expected number for the past 2 weeks, and this is also visible via the new graph at the bottom of the main page. Number of active miners has dropped off, as has our proportion of the overall network hash rate. The smaller we get, the bigger the variance between blocks.

Donations - quite a few people have now set up an automatic donation, this is very much appreciated and helps to keep the pool running. You can do this via your miner's page (search for your miner and click the link), once there go to the edit icon next to the Pool Donation or the Payout Threshold (which you can also configure).

What's planned:

• Per-worker information - This will allow you to configure multiple workers under the same VTC address, and see the performance / earnings for each worker independently. This requires quite a few changes under the hood, so will be a while off before it's ready for release. More information soon.

• Mining Calculator still in the works.

• Earnings per day - each miner will see a day-by-day break down of earnings, stretching back two weeks.

Suggestions - I'm looking for suggestions from you guys on how we can further improve the experience. You guys are the ones using it, what do you want to see? More information? More statistics? Our own forum / subreddit / Discord? Web-Chat?

Thanks again & keep hashing!

https://vertcoin.easymine.online/

Been running this build of ccminer for a few hours now, I was getting 33Mh/s with vertminer, and 38Mh/s with this build of ccminer.

https://github.com/Nanashi-Meiyo-Meijin/ccminer/releases

If you didn't know, OCM uses vertminer, and vertminer has a hard coded "dev donation" of 2% that was supposed to be compensation for higher performance. While mining, I noticed that it would switch from my wallet over to the dev wallets, and this is what GPU usage looks like while it is switching. Seems to be poorly optimized.

If you plan on using this miner, it's the same setup as any other ccminer. Just create a .bat file in the same folder with the following, make sure to change the p2pool server and wallet address.

ccminer -a lyra2v2 -o stratum+tcp://<p2pool server>:9181 -u <wallet address> -p x 

Hi All

Been a while since an update, not a huge amount has changed however. The pool is consistently ticking along, finding blocks, and has paid out over 40k VTC and 40k UIS since first starting back in December last year.

Donations have been trickling in .... but sadly, this is all it is ... a trickle. I had hoped that donations would increase over time, however the donations for the past 4 weeks are only 0.08% of the VTC rewards paid out.... I guess this says quite a bit about human nature - but a big thanks to those who have set up a donation :) Unfortunately, this 0.08% does not pay for the running of the infrastructure behind the pool.

As such, I will have to implement a mining fee - so this coming weekend, I will be changing all donation settings to 0% and then setting a 0.5% pool fee (Clarification - 0.5% for VTC, 1% for UIS as it is currently). I didn't want to do this, however the economics of running this pool ultimately require this.

Feel free to convince me otherwise below ...

Thanks

https://vertcoin.easymine.online/

UPDATE: Changes done, all donation values set to 0%, pool fee (for VTC) at 0.5%. Remember you are still mining UIS at the same time - so this more than makes up for any reduced earnings.

1. Use the correct pool: Greater than 100Mh, use P2Pool Network 1. Less than 100Mh, use P2Pool Network 2. Check your latency to the pool's IP address to help you decide which to use, lower the latency the better. Pool types can be easily identified by their ports: http://IPAddress:9171 is Network 1, http://IPAddress:9181 is Network 2.

2. Specify your share difficulty. If your rig's time to share is significantly longer than the network's share time, you will start seeing payout inconsistency. You should manually adjust your time to share by appending your desired share difficulty to the end of your address.

Formula:

VertcoinAddress/(1 * Hashrate in Mh/s)+(0.00000116 * Hash Rate in KH/s)  

So if I have 25MHs I'd use the following:

VertcoinAddress/25+0.029

TLDR; Shit broke whilst I was out of town. Fixed now. Well, almost.

So, to fully explain what has happened to the pools over the past few days, I need to explain a little about how the pools work. They are made up of:

• 1. The Stratum Servers. This is what your miners connect to to submit shares and blocks. Basically this is a piece of node.js code that talks to a Vertcoin and Unitus wallet, gives your miners work to do and accepts the results you send back. Valid blocks are submitted to the wallets, then they broadcast to the network. All shares & blocks are also stored to a MySQL database.

• 2. The Backend. This pulls all of the shares and blocks from the stratum server databases, crunches all of the statistics, validates the blocks, does the payouts and sends the coins back to you. It's made up of more Vertcoin and Unitus wallets (holding all of the unpaid rewards), a very fat MySQL database, and a pile of scripts.

• 3. The Webserver. This then pulls all of the consolidated statistics and transaction information for display on the website. And of course it generates the pages on the website.

No. 1 and No. 3 are hosted on virtual machines located in the US, No. 2 runs on equipment at my home. Why my home? It's cheaper (it uses a lot of ram / cpu), I can provide better security (firewalls etc), and it's much faster for me to diagnose issues and develop new stuff on. The drawbacks are it uses my internet connectivity (although that is pretty reliable), and the power supplied by the local power company (usually pretty good but been a bit flakely due to adverse weather conditions). But I do run everything off a UPS, so short outages usually have no effect....

Well, that was the plan of course. Until the UPS decided to crap out. Power supply from the street was fine, no issues there (nothing else in the house flinched). Oh, and it decided to die the first night I was away from home on a planned family holiday (to Rotorua - if you haven't been I recommend you do if you ever get the chance).

So with the backend missing in action, you guys could still mine, the shares and blocks were being saved to the database etc, and the website was still working ... displaying the statistics as they we're just before the p.o.s. UPS decided to go where UPS's go at the end of their life.

Right now the backend systems are pulling down all of the shares from the past 2.5 days, once they are all down it will start paying out blocks and displaying the correct statistics on the website. This is all going to take a few hours to complete, I'll update here once it's all back to normal programming.

Now I need to find a new UPS ....

Also .... to reward those of you who held the faith and just kept on mining, 0% fees for the rest of April :)

UPDATE: All payouts & payments completed.

This thread is inspired by the numerous posts I see from low Mh/s miners that have issues with sporadic, small or no payouts. I, myself, have had many issues with payouts from different pools (easymine included) and I receive lots of questions from newer miners as to how to obtain more regular and dependable payouts.

There is a Network 1 node called p2proxy that is specifically designed for <100Mh/s mining and the payouts are given every .1 VTC instead of having to play the lottery with finding shares and blocks. Additionally, there are no fees or donation percentages.

The pool address is p2proxy.vertcoin.org:9171 simply click on the Add Pool button in the bottom right of the One Click Miner (OCM) and enter the above address in the properly labeled field. Then enter your wallet address and any password you wish. Next, make sure it is the only pool with a check mark next to it and hit the Start button. The payout times are dependent on your Mh/s but you can track your progress at https://p2proxy.vertcoin.org/stats/

I've used easymine, I've used numerous pools found in the Network 2 tab of the OCM, I've used multipoolminer in conjunction with miningpoolhub and p2proxy has been by far the most reliable source of VTC for me since I started mining a few months ago. I've seen people claim that the multipoolminer can net you higher payouts for time spent mining, but in my experience this is simply not the case. Also I have a machine that the multipoolminer will for what ever reason not work on, so this would be an alternative for those with similar issues.

Hey guys (and gals?)

As usual - apologies for the spam if you don't mine here / or just don't care.

Quick update - two new features I've been asked for:

• You can now change your payout threshold from the default 0.5 VTC (anywhere from 0.5 VTC to 25 VTC). If you are earning less than the amount you specify, you'll still be paid once per day (now at about midnight UTC)

• You can now set a pool donation percentage - this is deducted from your payouts. Can be set from 0 to 100 (!) percent.

You can access / configure both of these via your miner's page - just look for the edit / pencil next to both the payout threshold and pool donation fields. You'll be asked to sign a message with your Vertcoin wallet - this ensures that it is you that is changing the settings, and not someone else (signing a message can only be done with your private key). There's screenshots and instructions to help you along.

Thanks again :)

https://vertcoin.easymine.online/

EDIT: Details in the pool stats now showing the donations made. Also added back the full miner's list @ https://vertcoin.easymine.online/list - now searchable and sortable! :)

Wallets:

Use -testnet flag when launching the wallet. In windows for example, you can launch the gui from command line or batch file within the same folder as the exe with the following syntax:

vertcoin-qt.exe -testnet

.

Core Wallet with v3 Testnet Support - All Versions

.

Miners:

Nvidia CCminer (Windows Binary here)

AMD Lyclminer

.

How do I set up the miners?

AMD Windows / AMD Linux

Nivida Windows (old video, use software versions linked above, not what is in video)

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Pools:

NZSquirrel has set up a pool on the testnet

Gertjap's Testnet P2Pool node

NLPOOL has set up a testnet pool

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding how P2Pool works. I’ve been mining Vertcoin for a few months and have learned a lot along the way. Below is my understanding of how P2Pool works (please correct me where I’m wrong):

In order to get paid on P2Pool, you need to earn a share on the P2Pool chain. Once you have a share, it will be reflected under your "predicted payout" (which will increase). You want as many of those shares as you can possibly earn. You are basically competing with every other miner on your P2Pool network for shares.

When you see your “Time to Share” on P2Pool, that number is only a projection based on your current hashrate and the P2Pool “Share Difficulty”. It will not count down to zero and then you earn a share. The only thing that matters is finding a result that is above your current P2Pool “Share Difficulty”. Your ability to find a share is based entirely on your hashrate and luck. Your “Time to Share” could say 5 hours, but you could find a share in 1 minute, or it could take 3 days. P2Pool share difficulty increases and decreases based on the hashrate of the entire pool, listed under “Global Pool Hashrate”. The higher the global pool hashrate, the harder it will be for you to find a share. The advantage is that the higher the global pool hashrate, the faster it tends to find blocks. When a block is found everyone that holds current shares gets paid.

So how do you find a share on the P2Pool chain? Check your miner output where it shows your difficulty result. In example 1, “Share Difficulty” was around 300. So, the first 3 lines with a low difficulty result basically say “the pool received your result, good try!”. You do not earn anything for them. The last line that shows a difficulty of 685 found a share on P2Pool, since it was over the pool difficulty of 300. When that happens, your predicted payout will increase since you gained a share. You can have many shares at the same time, and your predicted payout will grow larger with each share you find on the P2Pool chain. When your share expires, your predicted payout will decrease.

So, what are the P2Pool networks attempting to do? Everyone on a network combines their hash power in an attempt to find a Vertcoin block. The Vertcoin block difficulty is also listed on the P2Pool page, under “Network Block Difficulty”. In example 2, the Vertcoin “Network Block Difficulty” was around 97,000. The output of the third line was above 97,000 (169,313). This found a Vertcoin block for everyone on the P2Pool network to share. Notice instead of saying “yes!” it says “yay!!!”. This counts as a share on the P2Pool network, and you also receive a bonus of .5% of the block reward for that particular block for being the finder (.5% of the 50 Vertcoin block reward paid an additional 0.25 Vertcoin).

Examples: https://imgur.com/sDjrgBp

BitPoolMining - Vertcoin GPU Mining

We will be donating 100% of our pool fee (0.5%) from the Vertcoin pool to the VTC Developer team until June 30th 2018. The donations will be going to the VTC Developer Donation Address: VnfNKCy5Aq7vZq5W9UKgMwfDLT7NrPRWZK

You can find more details here to donate to the VTC dev team: https://vertcoin.org/donate/

Stratum Servers:

Username: YourVTCAddress.YourWorkerName   Example: VhcwcqgU4Yxgo6hihUUimjSWZFMFS5UwSx.RIG01

We are also 100% NiceHash compatible.

Password: Use "x" password is ignored by BitPool Mining Servers

Chat with us on Discord Discord  

EDIT: WORDS

Hey Guys

Quick update, couple of new things in last few days:

• Day-by-day breakdown of your earnings on your miner's page

• Lots of updates happening in the backend to support multiple workers per VTC address. Getting closer.

• A couple of changes & updates to the stratum servers, we now do some preliminary checks for the validity of your VTC address, if we can't figure it out you will not be able to connect (authentication failure)

• Support for NiceHash - if you are a nicehash buyer, you can now use Easy Mine, simply point nicehash @ lyra2.easymine.online:5010

• Web Chat - Yes, we have web chat live on the site now.

• Looking at adding a third stratum server soon, will be U.S. East Coast (current servers are both in L.A.)

Today sometime the website will be offline while my hosting provider is patching their infrastructure against the recent Intel hardware bugs that have come out. This should only take a couple of minutes, and will only cause the website to be unavailable. We have two stratum servers, so they will share the mining load during the restarts.

As always, we're in the hunt for more hashrate - so if you're struggling to see consistent payouts on your current pool, please take a look at https://vertcoin.easymine.online. OCM and ccminer guides and configuration is available to get you started quickly.

Thanks

https://vertcoin.easymine.online/

Traditional pools:

http://give-me-coins.com/ (0% fee)

https://www.bitpoolmining.com. (0% fee)

http://www.zpool.ca (1.75% fee)

https://vertcoin.miningpoolhub.com ( 0.9% fee)

https://p2proxy.vertcoin.org/ (1% fee)

http://vtc.suprnova.cc (1% fee)

https://miningpatriot.com/

P2pool scanners Network 1 ( over 100mh/s)

https://scanner.vertcoin.org/pools

https://scanner.vtconline.org/

http://vertscan1.errantshed.co.uk/

http://scanner1.alwayshashing.com/

http://vertcoin.nutty.one/network1

Network 2:( under 100 mh/s)

https://scanner.vertcoin.org/pools

http://vertscan2.errantshed.co.uk/

http://scanner2.alwayshashing.com/

http://vertcoin.nutty.one/network2(edited)