My experiences mining this and other coins.


I have had mixed experiences mining with the various pools on this and other coins. This coin has suffered from quite a lot of DDOS attacks on the major pools which has been annoying. In fact it had become so irritating that I decided to go the P2Pool route instead. Again that proved a bit hit and miss with poor up time on various nodes and quite high latency at times.

I finally concluded that the best approach for me was to create my own personal P2Pool node - and wow has that made a difference. Payouts have been good, mining has been completely uninterrupted and by manually setting the diff for my miners I am making maximum use of their capacity.

My conclusion now is that for any new coin, even for first hour mining, I will simply setup and use my own P2Pool node and mine against that with my various miners.

I won't get in to the actual nuts and bolts on how to do it in this post, but here are a few tips I have picked up.

1. I subscribed to AWS and use their free tier virtual server to run my P2Pool node(s). Zero cost, quite low latency and excellent uptime.
2. I use Ubuntu ( any version will work).
3. To get it to work just download and compile the daemon version of the coin wallet you are mining
4. I used the detailed instructions available on setting up P2Pool for Dogecoin (lots of Google links) and just modified it for blackcoin.
5. One slightly technical tip - i did need to download the miniunpnp application to get the wallet to compile.

Hope this is of interest. Just to show you that you can escape reliance on pools and their frees with just a minimal amount of effort

SCryptoMiners Update

The payout calculations got stuck which is why many haven't seen any credits in their accounts. We are processing over 100 blocks that were found, you will see the credit for ALL mining you have done soon. Please be patient as there are quite a few blocks the database needs to process and each one takes around 1 minute to process.

Mining is working fine, and has been. Any and ALL mining that has been done is getting paid out as we speak, but it will take a bit of time for all of the blocks to process. You should see credits going to your accounts shortly.

If the website goes down, it's because I'm trying to take load off of the database to speed up the processing of all the found blocks. Stratum is in no way affected by this.

yeah but how much hash power do you have?

Very modest hash power. Just 2 mh/s  - and even at that amount I find P2Pool works ok. But like many posts say, it does take about 24 hours for payouts to ramp up to full amount. It does not reward pool hopping - but then if you have your own node, why would you need to hop anywhere.

What happend to BC.scryptominers?
Did they just leave?

Pretty sure they owe me coins!

Yea, I justed noticed all of their pools are down. I sure hope they haven't skipped town with my $0.50 worth of BC that I should have with them

So you are basically solo mining through a local p2pool, right?  What is the advantage over just solo mining?