Author Topic: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum  (Read 11889 times)

Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
on: April 02, 2016, 19:00:39 PM
I know some of you have been involved with Bitcoin in the past, so maybe this will be of interest for you.

There is a newer crypto currency on the scene called Ethereum, and it is currently very profitable to mine on graphics cards and it's also the second largest crypto-currency by market cap.

Official Site - https://www.ethereum.org/

Wiki Page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum

Microsoft like it - http://www.coindesk.com/microsoft-ethereum-3-million-developers/

Mining Guide - https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/guides/how-to-mine-ethereum/

Although I initially followed this mining guide, I now mine for a pool rather than solo mine. The pool is here - http://eth.nanopool.org/ There is sufficient help on there on how to mine for the pool.

I've been mining it for 5 weeks now. For the first two weeks of mining I used a couple of Radeon 7950s. I set my payment address to my account on https://poloniex.com/ and mined directly to it, selling every day whatever I mined. In two weeks that netted me 0.48 BTC, around £140. Electricity cost is naturally a fraction of this.

I've since added two more Radeon 290x and a Radeon 7970 and for the last three weeks I set my payment address to my account at https://www.bitfinex.com/ where there is now a ETHUSD market. Everyday I sell what I mine directly for USD. After three weeks I now have over $400 in my account there.

Essentially, in 5 weeks I've mined around £400, even with the first two weeks only being with 2 graphics cards. Note: 2 x 7950s gave me about 45mh/s. I now get 127mh/s across all 5 cards.

As you can see, this is very worthwhile whether you already have the equipment or not. Hopefully there are enough links here to help anyone out that fancies giving it a go.

Good luck.  :ptu:

Last Edit: April 02, 2016, 19:07:40 PM by Walrusbonzo #187;

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #1 on: April 02, 2016, 23:41:28 PM
have you been mining the whole time ?   I thought mining was long dead


I mined about £2500 worth back in the day, then lost it all in MtGox and gave up after that

if I can just set it going and forget about it I'll give it a go again

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #2 on: April 03, 2016, 00:14:21 AM
have you been mining the whole time ?   I thought mining was long dead


I mined about £2500 worth back in the day, then lost it all in MtGox and gave up after that

if I can just set it going and forget about it I'll give it a go again

Nah, I quit mining about 18 months ago because it wasn't profitable any more. Then Ethereum came along and changed all that.

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Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #3 on: April 03, 2016, 12:36:26 PM
I'm tempted to get back into it as my GTX 970 seems to get a steady return but got I stung badly with BTC, losing out to the tune of about 10k in profit which puts me off bothering again. Have you looked into the cloud mining contracts? Are they worth it if you did't want the hassle of building a dedicated rig?

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #4 on: April 03, 2016, 14:30:35 PM
I'm tempted to get back into it as my GTX 970 seems to get a steady return but got I stung badly with BTC, losing out to the tune of about 10k in profit which puts me off bothering again. Have you looked into the cloud mining contracts? Are they worth it if you did't want the hassle of building a dedicated rig?

nVidia cards aren't great at mining. I believe 7950s are as quick as a GTX 970.

I've never bothered with cloud mining contracts, they appear to cost as much as what you get in return, which means, whatever crypto currency you mine you need to go up in value to profit. Whereas mining Ethereum on my own PCs is netting me 5~6x electricity costs and having been mining for 5 weeks now I've covered the costs of the 3 graphics cards I bought. To me, it's a no brainer. Build a PC!

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #5 on: April 03, 2016, 16:22:38 PM
what the hell, I'll give it a go

downloading the block chain now... it's taking forever ?

linked my nephew to this, he set his going yesterday and it's still going now ?


are you auto-sending to bitfinex ?  when they auto sell, can you make it auto cash you out to your bank (or whatever) too ?

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #6 on: April 03, 2016, 19:14:11 PM
what the hell, I'll give it a go

downloading the block chain now... it's taking forever ?

linked my nephew to this, he set his going yesterday and it's still going now ?


are you auto-sending to bitfinex ?  when they auto sell, can you make it auto cash you out to your bank (or whatever) too ?

You don't need to download the blockchain, f**k that. Mine off the pool and get payments directly to an account on an exchange like Polo or BitFinex. When you've installed the ethereum wallet I never bothered firing it up to download the blockchain, it's not needed. I should probably make it clear, you only need to download the blockchain if you want to solo mine or you actually want an Ethereum wallet on your PC.

All you need to do is create a .bat(Assuming you're using Windows) file to run the miner on the pool. Here is mine for example.


setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
"C:\Program Files\Ethereum 0.9.41\Release\ethminer.exe" -F http://eu1.nanopool.org:8888/0x9c4545befe9bfec17ffcdfbebe34a7ecc80e9165/Main/walrusbonzo@gmail.com -G



There is no auto-sell on BitFinex, at least not that I've noticed. I just use zTrader app on my phone, or login to BitFinex website to sell when I think the price is right. I don't think there is an auto-cash to your bank feature. Remember you'll have USD on there, and there may be charges to have it paid to your account. What I'm doing is leaving the USD on BitFinex, and when the time is right I'll buy BTC to send to Coinbase, which is where I normally cash out in GBP. But at the moment I'm happy for it to remain in USD. The landscape is much different now to how it was with MtGox. I wouldn't say it was likely that BitFinex goes the same way as MtGox.
Last Edit: April 03, 2016, 19:29:02 PM by Walrusbonzo #187;

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #7 on: April 03, 2016, 20:16:45 PM
getting this error


Creating one big buffer for the DAG
Allocating/mapping single buffer failed with: clCreateBuffer(-61). GPU can't all
ocate the DAG in a single chunk. Bailing.
clEnqueueWriteBuffer(-38)



googled it, means not enough gfx ram

gave my 7990 to my nephew, only have a 2gig card now :-s

the block you need to work on is 1.3gig, but the miner programs tries for more free space too (or something like that)
Last Edit: April 03, 2016, 21:32:44 PM by knighty #187;

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #8 on: April 03, 2016, 20:56:57 PM
How much ram has your gfx card got? I know a lot of people are struggling with 2gb cards and less.

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Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #9 on: April 03, 2016, 21:00:49 PM
I just looked up your gfx card code name, Bonaire. Honestly, I think that'll be too slow to mine anything worthwhile.

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Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #10 on: April 03, 2016, 21:33:42 PM
R7 360 ?

no worries, I bought a cheap card after the 7990 because I play naff all games, and even with the 7990 I played everything on min. settings :-o

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #11 on: April 03, 2016, 22:30:12 PM
did you mix up £ and $ in first post ?

45mh/s for 2 weeks and £140

then 3 weeks at 127mh/s £260  (for £400/5 week total)

3x hash, 1.5x time, should be £630

and £770 for the 5 week total ?



Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #12 on: April 04, 2016, 07:36:10 AM
No mix up. What I put is exactly what I meant.

Remember, the price of Ethereum can change at any time, and it has been volatile the last few weeks. Also, like any crypto-currency, the difficulty of mining can and will increase, as has happened with Eth. So you can't do pure mh/s calculations to establish how much you will earn.

Calculator here which takes into consideration current price and difficulty - https://etherscan.io/ether-mining-calculator
Last Edit: April 04, 2016, 08:09:46 AM by Walrusbonzo #187;

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #13 on: April 04, 2016, 11:35:56 AM
that calculator with default settings says I'll be earning 20p an hour? :/

Re: Crypto-Currencies : Mining Ethereum
Reply #14 on: April 04, 2016, 11:53:57 AM
What is your hash rate?

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