Gridcoin Pool Mining 101 - Start Here!
Like most other mineable coins, Gridcoin can be mined as part of a mining pool. This means that each individual miner contributes to the work done by the pool as a collective, and in turn the pool pays out individual miners for their contribution. As a result, miners can be paid for work without having to stake any blocks themselves - an occurance that may be very unlikely if the miner has a low balance or magnitude. There has been significant confusion on the Gridcoin IRC channel recently about pools not paying out users, or being inactive, so I hope to point potential pool miners in the right direction with this article.
In response to there not being any good, open source Gridcoin mining pools, the Gridcoin foundation put up a bounty of 100,000 GRC for the first developer to create and release an open source mining pool. This feat was achieved by Brian, aka @bgb. Although he is yet to claim the Foundation bounty, the pool has been operational for almost 6 months now and can be visited here. GRCpool is fully transparent, having a full financials page and maintains incredibly low fees.
As at the time of writing, GRCpool is the only actively developed and maintained pool serving the Gridcoin network. As such, I strongly suggest anyone pool mining for a different pool to switch their hosts over to mine for GRCpool. If you have any concerns or questions about the pool, the developer is very active on the Gridcoin Slackchat, which features its own GRCpool channel. There is further contact information available on the GRCpool website.
It is likely that in future more pools will appear and be actively developed, in which case this advice becomes outdated. As Steemit does not allow editing of articles over a week old, it is important that you do your own research after this point.
I would like to wrap up here by showing you the membership numbers for GRCpool over the course of roughly the last 6 months. This huge influx of Gridcoin miners, not captured in the CPID growth, is the reason the magnitude of miners has been dropping across the board. In fact, GRCpool now almost has a staggering 30,000 mag.
This is the easiest it will ever be to mine Gridcoin, and likely near the cheapest it will ever be to buy. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them below or pop into the Gridcoin Slackchat. If you would like to get started with Gridcoin pool mining, this 12 minute video will take you from a cold start to being fully set up:
Keep crunching!
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 further channels serving the Gridcoin network:
Gridcoin Github Repo - Full source code and development discussions.
Gridcoin Developer Slack - Chat with the devs, as well as general channels for troubleshooting 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.
Image credit:
Banner, @joshoeah
Upvote and Resteem for you dutch. Thank you for this helpful information concerning gridcoin. Cheers.
I did this for a little bit and its very easy and informative about your mag, rac, daily income and has plenty of charts and whatnot, almost wished i stayed but i dont think i can transfer my solo crunching over..... :(
That depends on what projects you were running. If you turn all your BOINC clients to the pool running a new set of projects, then your wallet will continue to collect the trickle of rewards of the projects you were running solo until they taper off to zero.
So if i do the same four projects im running now, just switch account manager over to grc pool my mag/rac will stay the same? Cause cpid will be that of the pool then, i like the pool because of detailed stats though, i figured switching my mag/rac would reset and my bam cpid stats would keep goin till it ran down
Informative posts
That looks promising. I'll take a deeper look. Thanks for the hint.
I appreciate this kind of articles. You're a very smart guy
Sweet! I ran folding programs for years! What a wonderful project! Followed you for further updates! Thank you!!!
I use grcpool. It's easy to setup and just works. Its fun contributing to some of these projects and you get some gridcoins in return (not sure if it covers the electricity costs).
It will, unless you are running particularly old hardware (with some exceptions), or you have very expensive power in your area.
Regardless, the primary end goal here is moving humanity forward through encouraging, promoting and supporting scientific research. Even if you break even, that is a phenomenal goal to achieve!
I currently have 8.196¢/kWh Would that be considered high /low/ middle? I'm doing it on a desktop computer core i5 with at GTX 970. Do you think that would break even, better, or loss? I love the encouraging, promoting and supporting scientific research side of things, but I can't afford to do it for free. My notion is to roll it in to steem once I have a decent amount. I am mining as we speak. Just have not received any coins yet. I don't have a clue how long it will take on my rig.
In my books 8.196¢/kWh is very cheap power. Your CPU may or may not run profitably as it is, depending on what i5 you have. Regarding the GPU, you can definitely break even on that, as it is almost top-of-the-line from last generation.
Remember that the price of GRC is currently practically bottomed out, like most altcoins, as investors are moving their money into BTC. When BTC settles or corrects, I would expect a significant rise in GRC price. Best to mine when it's easy!
About receiving coins, have you sent a beacon yet? If so, have you staked a noobie block (about 1 GRC)?
That makes sense. Would the same be said of the Steem price? ie. It's affected by the move of investors to BTC? That would explain a lot. I hope it settles soon! Lol. I don't have bitcoin.
I have not sent a beacon yet. I don't have any coins to send lol. I tried the traditional faucets, but they were all dry last time I checked. I'm mining in a pool at the moment. Once I get a few coins I'll send a beacon. I'm still not clear on why I have to do this, but I think it is something I'm supposed to do as early as possible.
I would definitely say so. If you look at the altcoin market, everything (bar a few) has been falling as investors move onto the BTC train.
You only have to send a beacon if you want to solo mine. So, if you are happy pool mining, you don't have to do it at all. The beacon registers your CPID with the Gridcoin network, which allows the network to reward you for the research you have done. When pool mining, you are mining for the pool CPID, so the pool has to send the beacon (which it did when it was first formed).
In my opinion, the best faucet is here. That is also the home of our best block explorer.
Yeah, that is what I figured. I do want to solo mine eventually. I'll check that faucet out. Can you explain to us what magnitude is? How is it earned? What effect does it have on your earning?
Sure. When you run any BOINC project on your machine, you earn credits. The rate at which your earn credits is called Recent Average Credits (RAC) by BOINC. Your magnitude on each project is a function of your RAC, relative to everyone one else on Team Gridcoin's in that project.
RAC builds up over time, and takes about 4 to 5 weeks to peak. This means your mag will also peak after 4-5 weeks.
Your magnitude is the translated to how many Gridcoin you mint per day through a number called the mag_unit. Currently this is 0.175, meaning that for every unit of magnitude, you will mint 0.175 GRC per day.
I just checked out that faucet, and it requires my cpid. I don't have a cpid because I'm only mining in a pool. So I guess I'm out of luck on that one too. It's ok, I'll just wait for my pool payout. Ideally you would say solo mining is the way to go long term though?
My bad on that one - I had forgotten that @sc-steemit (who operates that faucet) recently changed the rules to only accept CPIDs and not wallet addresses to prevent abuse.
I definitely think solo mining is the way to go long term - it is how the system was designed to be used. You will be able to participate in community votes, stake interest on your whole balance as soon as you mine it, and improve the security of the network. You will also not be paying any pool fees.