In my Earlier Post I wrote about my experience with wallet setup and that I wanted to explore the mining side of the coin as it is a vast departure from other crypto mining.
The initial plotting took far longer than I had expected. This was probably down to the hardware I had deployed on, an old laptop to desktop conversion with i6 4200U with 8GB ram. The fact I had the wallet performing a full sync and the first 500GB plot taking place slowed everything down loads.
The plot of the drive took about a day to complete and the sync a similar time, both were fighting over resources but I know this was a one time thing. When that completed I plotted an extra 250GB usb drive I had spare.
If I were to do this again I would use my games rig and gpu to ease the process. Thinking further I would also generate multiple plot files each 100GB in size to ease relocation instead of the initial 500GB and secondary 250GB file. Hind sight is 20-20 vision though :)
With everything setup it was time to get ready to mine. First you need 2 Burst coins. One to assign you account name which also appears to activate your wallet and the second to assign the mining pool, this costs nothing as most pools normally have a faucet for new wallets to remove costs which is nice.
Assignment of the mining recipient is set from the wallet tools menu shown below.
The pool you select will normally display their wallet address so just paste that where shown in the image and press Set Recipient. This creates a transaction for which you need a few confirmations before you can pool mine.
Once the transaction is confirmed start the miner from the tools menu again and put in the server address and port details for the pool, normally the same for all three addresses and hit start mining. If everything is correct you should see the miner start.
NOTE: The text layout corruption at the bottom of the window is because I resized the windows. I assume they use some text cursor library and and only redraw what is required.
You can see how little resources mining uses, a small blip in CPU for a couple of seconds for every block, next to nothing. This means I should not even notice the different when I access the Plex server running on this box.
I also set the miner to trigger disk wake up before each block so it does not need to trigger wake up on the USB drive when it accesses it.
The mining pool I joined is 0-100.burst-team.us. This is a 0-100 share pool, recommended for low drive capacity in that you get no share for finding a block and your share based on contribution to the pool. Different pools operate different shares from 100-0 for all from blocks you find to anywhere in-between.
First 12 hours and I have earned $0.03, I will update my progress next month but as I said in the other post (linked earlier) this machine runs 24/7 and this uses so little resources it costs next to nothing to mine so though I would give it a go.
If you can put aside GBs of space for plots you could get a nice extra stream of coins for zero effort and if you have a machine running 24/7 it is really zero power costs as the machine was running anyway. You could even run on any mining rig you already have for no real extra drain or hit to your normal mining activity.
It would be interesting to see if there is a miner for a Raspberry PI, given the resources used that with USB hub and a rack of drives would be a great rig.
Hope you found interesting :)
Woz