What you might want to know about STEEM - mining

Hey guys !

Since there‘s not much info about it, and all is spread out to couple of threads/posts, I decided to put my personal experience and the knowledge I gained so far into one thread.

First of all, it‘s important to know that mining STEEM is not like mining most other cryptocurrencies.

Blocktime and Roundtime:

• 1 round of mining includes 21 blocks a 3 seconds = 63 seconds in total
• important for you to know is that 19 of this 21 blocks will always go to the top 19 witnesses which you can find here:
• 1 block will got to one of the other witnesses in this list, the chance for you to be this one is based on your votes
• leaves 1 block which goes randomly to one of the witnesses in the mining queque

What chance do I have to find/mine a block ?

Considering you are most likely not one of the top witnesses, you can basically get a maximum of 2 out of the 21 blocks each round.
If you just started mining, you won‘t have anyone to vote for your witness, which decuces your chance to 1 block within 1 round. ( @dantheman did explain this a bit mor detailed here: https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/steem-witness-scheduling-algorithm )

The time of writing there are around 110 witnesses in the quequelist, so on first view your chance is ~1/110.
(On the right side you see the current amount of miners in queque: https://steemd.com/witnesses )

Actually we did not take care for your individual mining power, because I obviously have no way to know it. (hardware comparison for STEEM: https://steemit.com/steem/@cheftony/steem-mining-hashrate-and-hardware-comparison-page ). A lot of people use some kind of a rented virtual machine from amazon, google or whatever cloudcomputing provider.

Which VM should I rent ?

There‘s no general recommendation, but for best results you will need the machine that gives the highest hashrates. I did run a few tests with virtual machines rented from google and somehow always got a hashrate between 21 and 23 kHs. Which is actually quiet confusing, because I used a lot of different 8 core cpus for. (core-i7

But in general you should get the highest hashrates with the newest intel core or xeon cpus.
Try to get the ones with the most cores/threads you can and you should be good to go.

Can I make a quick buck ?

The answer is clearly: NO, not with STEEM - mining !

What you earn while mining STEEM is SteemPower which is basically voting power for steemit.com in first place.

So I can not earn money with mining STEEM ?

You can and will earn money, BUT to convert this into STEEM takes a total of 2 years.

In detail 1/104 of your mined SP will be available each week, so you can „POWER DOWN“ and after 7 days you will have your STEEM which then could be converted into SBD, BTC or whatever fiat-/cryptocurrency you like.

Can I boost my SteemPower with mining ?

Basically yes, but to get the max possible rewards, you would have to use more then just one mining account. The problem is, that your mining rewards, will always go to the account that mined the block. And I don‘t see a way how to transfer your SteemPower to another account, besides the 1/104 that you could transfer into STEEM and power up your main account with it.

I'd like to try it. Where do I start ?

Depending on your OS you might want to take a look at:

For Windows users:

https://steemit.com/steem/@tuck-fheman/how-to-mine-steem-in-windows

For linux I'd recommend to use some all in one scrypt. It will download, compile and set up everything you need and even get the mining started.

I tried both of them and both worked:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@omotherhen/ezsteem-update-1-1-as-ez-as-it-gets-all-in-one-steem-miner-node-setup-script-windows-vm-linux

https://github.com/roylaurie/bullfrog-system

Conclusion

So overall if you can afford to wait 2 years until you get your full mining rewards, then STEEM mining could be a good investingoption for you.