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RE: Some Questions About Steem Mining

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Some Questions About Steem Mining

anarcharos (42) in mining • 8 years ago

Hi there,
Thank you for your reply and although the answer is pretty clear ... your answer to point 1 still confuses me..

If you have N computers mining, then you want:
N accounts in the miners section on all computers (I want all the proceeding to go to my one account @anarcharos, having other accounts in the miners section would it not spread the proceedings to the different miners/accounts? even if those accounts are mine?

-and-
N accounts in the witnesses section on one (and only one) computer; preferably the most stable.

The witness section only has space for a name not a computer ....

Would you mind posting a copy of your config file to actually see what you mean?

Many thanks bro!!

mining

8 years ago by anarcharos (42)

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remlaps (74) · 8 years ago (edited)

"Would you mind posting a copy of your config file to actually see what you mean?"

Can't do that. It's got private keys in it. But see the examples in this link by @orly, from the top-level post. Near the bottom of the article.

"would it not spread the proceedings to the different miners/accounts? even if those accounts are mine?"

Yes, it does. If there's a way to avoid that, I'm not aware of it. It also distributes the work alphabetically, so it's not even a balanced split. The first account in alphabetic sort order gets most of the blocks.

Update: Because of that sort order work distribution, I also should have noted that in practical terms, there may not be much benefit from having more than 3 or 4 accounts, no matter how many computers you are running. I'm running three computers, but only two accounts, and I've been seeing some missed opportunities, but not enough to justify the hassle of managing another account.

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anarcharos (42) · 8 years ago

Hi,

thank you for your reply and link.

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anarcharos1 (25) · 8 years ago

Hi,

I have read the article that you linked in, and is a pretty good explanation. It still puzzles me that (as in the example given in the article) you would only have a list of witnesses on just one of the mining machines, while the other two machines have no witness defined ....

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remlaps (74) · 8 years ago

Yeah, I was confused about that at first, too. Short version is, try it and you'll see that it works. That's what I did. If you watch the log messages and various web sites, you'll start to intuit what's going on.

I don't know exactly what happens "under the hood", but at a high level it seems to go something like this:

Miner on some machine finds proof of work and gets added to the back of the miner-witness queue as a witness (see steemd.com/witnesses on the right side of the desktop, or the 2nd table for mobile.)
At that point, that particular miner acccount stops mining on all machines. If you have another account configured, and it's not already in queue, then the next one will start mining.
Once per minute, the witness moves up a slot in the queue.
When the witness gets to the front of the queue, it gets a chance to produce a block. Regardless of which machine found the proof of work, the machine running the witness produces or misses the block. As long as it's running with a good network connection, it should produce. If it's down or the network lag is high, then it won't.
If it produces a block, you'll see your vests increase by like 0.0004 or something in steemd.com/@[userid], and you'll see your steempower increase by 1 in your wallet at steemit.com/@[userid].
If it doesn't produce a block, you'll see your missed block count increase by one in steemd.com/@[userid].
Either way, once it comes off the queue, the miners on all machines are free to mine with that account again (depending on sort order of available accounts).

Not sure how the signaling between machines is handled. I guess it might be purely network communication or it might be storing and referencing some sort of flags in the blockchain.

The bad news is that right now, one miner is mostly dominating the queue, so it won't be easy to be looking at the screen at just the right time to see the log messages if/when you hit. You have to be lucky or patient to be watching the miner output when you happen to find proof of work.

Hope that helps.

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anarcharos1 (25) · 8 years ago

Hi Remlaps..
I tried to reply to your latest reply but there is no reply button ??!!?? .. anyhow...thank you so much for your time and explanation, it has helped me lots to understand what am doing.

Happy mining :)

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