• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Noob questions

C

cubsfan-budman

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 29, 2013
Messages
172
1. I know this is foundational and I could probably look this up somewhere, but: why/who rewards BTC/Altcoin for solving these "blocks" that are mined? And why? What's in it for them? (don't answer if this is just too stupid of a question to bother with for you, its fine)

2. Why are AMD cards better for mining than Nvidia?

3. Can anyone share an example of what you'd imagine is a "standard" mining rig, something to consider when starting up?

Thanks!!!

C
 
The GCN architecture that AMD cards feature is just much, much better for mining. A friend of mine just got started with litecoin and he bought 2 R9 290x, added them to his rig and just moved it down to the basement and let it do it's thing. I can't answer your first question, because I don't understand it either hahaha.
 
I'm going to try and take a stab at #1. This is how i view it and may be way off... but here goes.

Before i start... I will give the general disclaimer for I'm linking stuff below. I am in no way attached to lottocoin other then the fact that my personal pool mins the coin. I simply am linking the block chain and making reference too lottocoin to assist with a better understanding of a question asked in this thread.

The blocks are what generate the coins in the wallets of either your personal mining setup or your pool setup. In personal setup, you keep all the coins that the block was worth. In a pool setup, you get your fair share of the block reward.

The amount of coins that are generated for block rewards are set by the coin developers. for bitcoin, i believe it's set to 25 BTC for every block found. For an alt coin such as lottocoin, it's a random reward for coins from 1-65k (for the next 6 days, then the chain forks and the block rewards will change). Go to http://lottocoin.org/ for the fancy countdown counter to block fork.

So lets take a look at a block my pool solved for im a visual person and it may help here.
I solved lottocoin block #236546. If you click here you will see some information about the block.
You can tell that the block was worth 20994 lotto coins and it has information about lotto coins being moved from one address to another. This (to me) means that i added to the transaction confirmation number by 1 (thus confirming that the sender who sent the coins has enough coins and that both sending and receiving address are valid).

In same cases... you will find a block (or process a block may be a better word for it) that has transactions fees which are your rewards as an extra bounus. Fee's are paid by the sender and are once again set my the coin developer. Fee's usually come in to play when you are sending X amount of coin below a threshold the coin dev has set.

To put what i typed above in visual forum, i once again reference a lotto block my pool solved.
My pool solved lottocoin block 236486 which you can view here
Again the block reward was 25429 but i also got .1 in fee's. This was due to someone sending 283 coins, which is below the threshold of fee free movement of coins.

In some cases, your block is adding to coins that can be circulated. Think of it as the US government printing new bills for consumer use. My pool solve lottocoin block 236186. If you click here you can see that i generated 22264 additional coins for circulation.

so in short... The coin dev sets how much of a reward you get for processing a block. If the block contains information about coin movement, you may get additional coins for helping to confirm the transaction. However, there is no system or person giving you the rewards... it's done automagically once the block is found.
 
cubsfan-budman said:
1. I know this is foundational and I could probably look this up somewhere, but: why/who rewards BTC/Altcoin for solving these "blocks" that are mined? And why? What's in it for them? (don't answer if this is just too stupid of a question to bother with for you, its fine)

2. Why are AMD cards better for mining than Nvidia?

3. Can anyone share an example of what you'd imagine is a "standard" mining rig, something to consider when starting up?

Thanks!!!

C
Click to expand...

2. AMD uses lots of 'simple' shaders, better for mass parallel calculations, nvidia used more complicated shaders, not so hot at mass parallel calculations. Maxwell changed this though.

3. Cheap mobo with 3-5 PCIE slots, 4GB ram, some powered usb pcie risers, fill it up with 750ti's for power efficiency or AMD cards if you're looking for $/kh. ASIC's might be more profitable but with so many invested so heavily into GPU's I'd bet that alg's will change before GPU's are totally unprofitable.

1. Crypto currencies are all based off math, basically you all keep guessing at what the answer will be until someone gets it right, it's set up so that if you have more people guessing then the difficulty of the question goes up, so that a block will statistically only be found every x minutes (bitcoin is 10, ltc is 2.5 iirc, quark is 1 min). Blocks include mining rewards to fairly distribute the coin until all are mined. After all the coins are mined blocks will only include transaction fee's as rewards.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top