Is it still worth mining using your CPU?
Two months ago, I setup a mining node. I was a bit disappointed because I hadn’t caught many pows in several days. Anyway, I was quite happy to grab a few and see my SP growing. I was more interested in acquiring technical knowledge on how Steem mining works than earning thousands bucks.
Then came the mining hack allowing supercomputing and gtx-1080 to take control of the mining queue.
For more information on how they did it, read this exhaustive and awesome post from
The dev team worked hard to fix it and few days later, came hardfork 13. The mining queue went back to diversity and I was able to re-enter it.
Even better, the new algorithm looked more efficient as with the same hashpower I started to find more pows than before.
Unfortunately, it didn’t lasted long before gtx-1080 when back.
What was going on? A new hack, GPU mining?
On August 24th, I saw an interesting discussion on the steem.chat #mining channel
It looks like nobody (aka supercomputing aka gxt-1080-sc-nnnn) succeeded to code a miner using GPU. Give a look at the witness queue and you will see it's dominated by gtx and rabbit miners.
The mining score last month (as of 2016-08-30) clearly show that the 61.47% of the pow were produced by 8 miners (duplicate account merged) who trust the mining queue.
Red account name staring with a # means miner has several account starting with same name
Here a day by day graph of produced pows by those 8 top miners
We can clearly see hackers were kept out of power mining after hard fork and new pow2.
- Gtx-1080 is back with his miners one week after the hardfork.
- Rabbit joins the race one week later and even outshines gtx-1080 power.
- The only one able to continue to efficiently mine after hard fork deployment was dodl. I guess he hadn’t used hack nor GPU mining but a huge hashpower. Anyway, he can't compete anymore with any of both previous one.
So … what’s next …
Looking at stats, CPU-mining will be soon inefficient. Chances to get a spot in the mining queue will be near zero.
Looking at my block graph, you will see I didn’t found pow anymore for 2 days were I used to get between 4 and 7 before.
Therefore I think CPU mining is over as it’s no more worth spending money for the required resources.
Give me your opinion.