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A
complete how to guide and
profit analysis for Verium
mining on a farm of single
board computers - Part 1
9 months ago
birty 46 in verium
TLDR version
If you already have a PC with spare cores then you could do a
lot worse that pointing it at Verium mining, it is possible to
profitably build CPU mining rigs from single board computers,
and everyone should sign up for the free Azure trial and get it
mining!
Introduction
I've been with Vericoin[1] since the very beginning, through the
Mintpal theft, thought the rollback (the right decision IMHO),
through the usual trolling, through the Proof of Stake Time[2]
innovation to give a fully decentralised coin and now into the
beginning of the new era of Verium[3] with it's Proof of Work
Time protocol and the soon to be released integration between
the two coins. Vericoin as the currency and Verium as the
commodity.
I was lucky enough to get in on Vericoin with a batch of newly
purchased gridseed miners so was able to mine at a reasonable
pace even with the skyrocketing difficulties scrypt coins had
back then. I wanted to be prepared for Verium so I duly built a
water-cooled Core i7 6700k based machine overclocked to
4.6GHz with 16GB of RAM and it has been mining at a good
rate since launch (very early hours of the morning here in the
UK, but worth it to get in on those initial easier blocks!).
From my gridseed days I had a few Raspberry Pi's kicking
around that had been used as controllers. I was curious as to
what rate these cheap little boards might be able to mine
Verium at, so downloaded, compiled and set off mining. The
hash rate was not that impressive but the per H/m (Verium
mining is measured in hashes per minute because of its scrypt
n factor - 10242) was pretty intriguing compared to the PC that
I had custom built... So I searched the web for what appeared
from the spec sheets to give the best number of cores, clocked
the highest with the right amount of RAM and settled on a
Raspberry Pi 3 and an Odroid XU4 for testing.
This is the first in a series of articles covering my investigation
into the Pi 3 and XU4 single board computers to mine Verium.
This one is an analysis of their profitability (that's first as that's
the bit everyone wants to know about right!?!). The second is a
detailed set of instructions (including tweaking the mining
software to get the best out of these boards) that anyone
should be able to follow to recreate the set-up for themselves.
The third is how to get all this up and running on Docker
containers for easier maintenance at scale, and hopefully
Docker Swarm if I can get it running on these devices.
Vericoin (VRC) and Verium (VRM) Overview
This section gives a brief overview of Vericoin and Verium -
more info can be found on the Vericoin website
[http://www.vericoin.info/] including some cool new explanation
videos that have been contributed by community members.
Overview
The coin has non-anonymous and active developers. There is
also an active community over bitcointalk, the vericoin forums
and rocket chat channel.
Vericoin and Verium pairing coming in near-term future update
Verium has 10x lower supply that Vericoin, and is 10x most
costly to
send
Verium will have auxiliary mining of VRC and bonus VRC
rewards
Speed up the Vericoin block time to ~20 seconds
Further decentralises Vericoin
In wallet swap from Verium to Vericoin
Verium
Proof of Work Time Phase:
Protocol invented by the developers
Variable block time depending on network hash rate
Rewards in VRM per minute mining between blocks
Reward halving per minute decrease in block time
Scrypt2 algorithm, Scrypt N with N of 1024 - 128MB memory
required per thread
Memory hard mining - ASIC and GPU resistant
Block 1: 564,705 VRM minted for ICO participants who
purchased VRM using VRC
50% of IOC used for stake endowment fund
Address: VFEndownxxnHea9mv59kZx8c7TysGbndYx
Coins will never be moved, just interest from staking used in-
perpetuity for infrastructure costs
How to use remaining the 50% of the VRC from ICO was voted
for my community[4]
-20% Development
-20% Marketing and Design
-10% Third party partnerships
Profit Analysis
First off a bit of a disclaimer - I'm basing this all on the prices of
the hardware that I have bought and the hash rates I've got out
of that hardware with the specific mining software I will link to
in a latter article modified as per the instructions. The XU4's
that I've had each have a bit of variation in hash rate that they
can manage and I've taken the middle ground that I've
observed in this analysis - I haven't recorded and taken any
kind of scientific approach to finding the mean hash rate over
all the miners over x days. Having said that I'm pretty confident
that you can achieve equivalent results by following the same /
similar steps just don't go buying huge amounts of hardware
without satisfying yourself these results are correct!
I'm also going to be using as my unit of currency (being from
the UK!) throughout but it's the ratios between the different
options that count regardless of which currency is being worked
in. However you might get a better price for buying hardware
where you live in the world so I've also linked the spreadsheets
used to do the calculations so you can enter your own figures
for comparison.
System Specifications
For each section below I will be basing the comparisons the
following systems:
A top-end desktop PC running Windows 10 (Core i7 6700k at
4.6GHz with 16GB RAM) - referred to as "PC" from now on
An Odroid XU4[5] running Ubuntu (Samsung Exynos5422 - four
big cores (ARM Cortex-A15 at 2GHz) and four small cores (ARM
Cortex-A7 at 1.4 GHz) with 2GB RAM) run headless - referred to
as "XU4" from now on
A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B[6] running Raspbian (ARMv8 quad
core at 1.2GHz with 1GB RAM) run headless - referred to as
"Pi3" from now on
Windows Azure "Standard DS3 v2" hosted in Northern Europe
running Ubuntu (2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) 4
cores, 14 GB memory) - referred to as "Azure" from now on
Profit Summary
Table 5 contains a summary of the profit that can be generated
from each system in hours, days, months and years post
electricity costs. These are all calculated with the following
parameters (correct at the time of writing):
VRM/BTC - 0.0004 BTC
BTC/GBP - 492
Network Hashrate - 970 kH/min
Block Time - 4.51666667 min
Reward - 5.72994331 VRM
The spreadsheet at [10] can be used to input different prices,
hardware and network information to look at potential returns.
The unique algorithm that Verium uses linking hashrate, block-
time and reward means that mining should be profitable for
longer than with other PoW coins.
From the table it can be seen that the Odroid XU4s are by far
the most profitable option for CPU mining, and so the next
article will focus on how to build a scalable miner based around
Odroid XU4s controlled by a Raspberry Pi3. A picture of the
completed miner can be seen below - making around 15kH/m
and consuming around 600W.
Table 5 - Gross Profit Summary (after electricity costs)
System Per Hour Per Day Per Month Per Year
Single XU4 0.0041 0.0976 2.9293 35.6393
10 x XU4 0.0427 1.0244 30.7326 373.9128
10 x Pi3 0.0100 0.2397 7.1910 87.4905
Single Pi3 0.0009 0.0228 0.6831 8.3111
PC 0.0124 0.0216 0.5178 15.5340
Azure -0.2535 -6.0848 -182.5445 -2220.9576
Return on Investment
With the current prices and VRM reward (as above) return on
investment is in the order of 28 months. Clearly this is a long
time, however price can go up and down a lot over this time
period and comparing Verium to other coins with similar total
supplies it does seem vastly undervalued currently.
It is likely that a technology re-fresh of the miner would be
desirable at some point in this timescales to take advantage of
the latest processors to maintain its compatibility. This is where
hardware resale would come into play.
This one might be a bit of moot point for those that want to
keep their computer after it's no longer profitable to mine with
it / it's time to move on to the next project but for those people
that have bought the hardware for the specific purpose of
mining then re-sale will enter into the equation. All the
hardware is easily resalable however it's hard to predict price
and likely isn't anywhere close to being a deciding factor for
which hardware is best (and so hasn't been included in the
profit analysis) but can be viewed as a nice bonus!
Solo vs Pool Mining
As the hash rate on the network rises the rate at which those
with smaller miners manage to hit blocks will drop as they have
a smaller percentage of the overall network rate, however
statistically the small miners will still hit their expected share of
blocks over time.
The psychological advantage of pool mining is that small
amounts of VRM will be earned more frequently, however with
the VRM transmission fee structure it is relatively expensive to
send from the pool back to the wallet. Pool fees also have to be
taken into account over and above the transmission fees.
Taking both these into account in the long term it will be more
profitable to solo mine, but then probability of hitting a block
comes into account and this has to be balanced by the miner to
match their risk / reward appetite. Realistically most people will
rather take the hit on fees and pool mine as they like to see the
rewards trickle in instead of waiting to hit that block. This is
good news for the pool operators!
Summary
Takeaway from this is that if you already have a PC with spare
cores then you could do a lot worse that pointing it at Verium
mining, it is possible to profitably build CPU mining rigs from
single board computers and everyone should sign up for the
free Azure trial[11] and get it mining, but it's not worth paying
for. There might be other options in terms of configurations on
Azure but don't think it would be possible to find a profitable
combination from the look that I have done.
References
1
- https://www.vericoinforums.com/, https://bitcointalk.org/index.
php?topic=602041
2 - https://www.vericoinforums.com/threads/vericoins-post-
white-paper.1002/
3 - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1540023
4 - https://www.vericoinforums.com/threads/ico-poll-for-
remaining-50.1327/
5 - http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?
g_code=G143452239825
6 - https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-3-model-
b/
7 - https://github.com/effectsToCause/veriumMiner
8 - https://www.vericoinforums.com/threads/verium-hashrate-
comparision.1392/
9 - http://kb.netgear.com//how-many-clients-can-you-
connect-wirelessly-to-a-netgear-router
10 - https://goo.gl/VUavUn
11 - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/free/