Pool Mining Vs P2P Mining Vs Solo mining

Pool Mining - it is where miners were to connect and congregate their hash rate to mine for coins. Such sites that is hosting the pool usually have charges. eg 1% of your share of coins. How it works is when a block is found the number of share will be determine by the hash rate you are contributing into the pool.

Simple Explanation:

block found (1000 coins)

user 1 : 10 mh/s
user 2 : 5 mh/s
user 3 : 3 mh/s
user 4 : 2 mh/s

pools charges a 1% fee.

Users will get :( (1000/total hash rate)*own hash rate)-1% pool fee
User 1 =  495 coins
User 2 = 247.5 coins
User 3 = 297 coins
User 4 = 198 coins

There are also other factors to consider, like the rejection rates and Hardware errors. even you have super good hashrate but your rejection rate is high or high hardware error, the number of shares you will receive will also be affected.

Risk invovled: if the pool gets hacked and you you did not withdraw your mined coins, you might lose them which has happened before.

P2P Mining
A easier explanation of P2P mining will be more detailed explained in this link P2P Mining, personally P2P mining as discussed with my buddy and i, is the way to go. As we whatever coins we mined is directed into our own wallet without going through a pool which in my option safer. That is of course, you did encrypt your wallet and did a backup just in case your Harddisk were to fail on you.

Solo Mining
Solo mining works the same as P2P just instead of many people connecting to each other to mine, you are all alone. Mining alone give you full block all to your self, but the chances of finding a full block depends on the amount of people mining the coin. The harder the difficulty the harder it is to solo mine, sometime if your are lucky enough within an hour you will find a few blocks, but if your are not you will go hungry for hours without coins.

My Config for mining a Scrypt Coin ( currently mining Coin Coin)

This is the settings i am getting to push each card to 750 mh/s, do note the tempreture will get abit hotter when i input gpu-engine 1080 instead of 1050. this setting is used on my 2nd rig which uses the ASUS R9 280x graphic card. Do drop me a feedback or if you need any help on set up. 

How to choose a coin

Visit these few sites to see which coin you will like to mine and feel will have a good prospect in future

- Bitcoin Talk
- CryptoCoin
- Altcoin calendar

In my personal option, do mine those coin with Kimoto's Gravity Well, this will prevent multi pool from artificially pushing the difficulty of the coin or dumping the coin; damaging the coin prospect. I will touch more on multi pool on my next post. 

Choosing a coin in my option need support from the crypto community and have a good support from the developer, constant updates from developer and not creating a hype all over cyber space; coins with good marketing and hype usually will get pumped and dumped and the end of the coin.

Things to note while choosing a coin

- Premined 

- Supply

- IPCO (initial public coin offering)

- How much coin in each block and how many coins will be out within a week. 

I have mine several coins and most of these coin got pumped and dumped, and most of the time i did not sell in time and some of these coins i have invested my bitcoins in them. note of caution, when any say its going up or anything of that sort, start selling off and just keep alittle just in case :). Currently my buddy and i are mining Coin coin, which in my option is not hyped and quite stable pricing, a good long term coin to mine for and invest. 

Depending on your objective of getting into this game, if you are in it for sustainable income, i will suggest you mine into multi pools. click on the link to view some of the multi pools in the market. current my buddy and i are using clevermining which is not listed in the forum discussion. each mh/s will earn you around 0.00924 per mh/s . 

What coins are out there today ? and what miners to use ?

Now that your system is setup its time to determine what coin you want to mine and what miner to use.

 In the market today there is 3 kind of crypto coins in the market
 - SHA-256
- Scrypt
- Scrypt -N factor

 These are the 3 types of algorithm, and it will not be worthwhile to mine SHA coins; eg. Bitcoins, Unobtanium and others, as the Hashing power for ASIC miners are in the hundreds of Gh/s not Mh/s that we have built, which we small fry should avoid.

 ASIC miners are specialized miners that cost between three thousand to tens of thousand, which takes months to reach you after you ordered it, and by then newer models and faster models are available. in short, dun waste time on this kind of coins in my option.

More popular coin types to mine are the latter 2, Scrypt and Scrypt N, which are anti ASIC which means small fry like us could get into the game.

The types of miner in the market now for both algorithm are

- CG miner
- SG miner

Personally i am using SG miner and here is why :) comparison between CGMiner and SGMiner

The Initial SetUp

when setting up the hardware, patience is KEY !! remember be patient, if needed please be in a air-conditioned room while doing this and play some music of your liking :) Now lets start !!! Please have a wired Mouse and Keyboard (from experience hehehe :) ) DO NOT PLUG IN YOU POWER SUPPLY YET :) Remember to be careful with the CPU chip and please please please ensure the CPU Fan is secured properly on the mother, otherwise you are sure to get hardware error when you boot up the system. There will be 4 anchor point and make sure you hears a clip sound and verify under the mother board that the white piece is through. Insert the Ram should be easy :) Insert the HDD via Sata Cable mount the mother board on the shoe rack, when placing the mother board be very delicate with handling the board; and make sure the CPU fan does not come lose. if you can see the GPU sits nicely on the shoe rack.

DO NOT MOUNT THE GPU YET. Now plug in the powersupply to the mother board, CPU and HDD, (make sure the key board and mouse is plugged in). If you are not able to see anything on screen look at the motherboard error and flip the setup guide book and see where or what went wrong. If all is well then bootup the the system to test run. if all is able to boot up then proceed to Bios to change the boot settings. Insert your thumbdrive and reboot the system, install the windows. after the windows is setup use the driver disk for the motherboard to install the Drivers need for the motherboard. Connect your LAN cable to the motherboard (LAN cable connection is much much preferred than wireless connection). After all driver installation is done, restart system and mount the 2 GPU on alternate slots leaving the center for the Riser cable 16 X 16 (let me know if you need help getting a riser cable). Boot the system up and see everything is running. if all is well download the Drivers for Radeon go to AMD website and download the version get "catalyst Software Suit - 13.12" do not use the 14.2 as i have used it and it is not stable. after all have been done shutdown your system and insert the last GPU. As you can see my last GPU is sitting on the top of the shoe rack as such :)

Boot it up and see if there is any error (usually there will be due the either you have not secure the riser cable properly or the riser cable that you have brought is faulty). if all is well we can now proceed to choosing a miner and a coin of your liking :)

Bootable ThumbDrive for Windows

Step one: Have a Windows Software on your CD or HDD Step two: Have a 8GB thumbdrive (i am currently using a sony 8GB USB 3.0 green USB) Step three: Please look at the link as provided for reference :) Create a Bootable Windows Really saves alot of time and effort, waiting for that windows to load !!!! The perks - when setting up another system you have this thumbdrive ready to setup another rig at a moments notice * Remember to configure your bios to boot from USB drive as the first primary boot, after installation please change back to your HDD *

The Rigs

MotherBoard: Gigabyte Z87X-OC CPU:Intel G3220 RAM:Kingston HyperX Lovo 8GB HDD: WD 500GB GPU: Sapphire R9 280X (x3) PowerSupply: Corsair AX1200I

MotherBoard: ASRock Z87 Extreme4 CPU:Intel G3220 RAM:Kingston HyperX Lovo 8GB HDD: WD 500GB (Laptop HDD) GPU: Asus R9 280X (x3) PowerSupply: Seasonic 1250W The first setup averages around 715mh/s while the 2nd setup avearages 735mh/s, price difference per graphic card is around $75 to $100. On a personal note i will recommend to take the sapphire, which is more value for money. Please get the crosair AX1200i and no other power supply, corsair has proven it can deliver the voltage. the seasonic i am using has under volted one of the graphic card as it is not able to deliver the voltage when i input the command (--gpu-powertune 20)which i find it surprising (will talk more on the settings of the miner and the different types of miner in the later post). My personal is to get a mother board that has good spacing between PCI-E slots so that the cooling effect will be better. Gigabyte motherboard has good spacing but will be on the pricey side, ASROCK is more value for money. Remember to configure on your bios to manually set the PCI-E slots to Gen 2 for all cards leaving only one card on Gen3, (note do not let it go on default mode, will cause hardware error and system may not be able to startup. (will touch on more on initial Setup of the system) For the Hardisk do get the WD 500gb laptop version easier to manage, there is 2 version of this hdd do then the cheaper ones as it saves cost :). Windows if possible do make a bootable USB thumbdrive as the installation speed will increase significantly like half the time taken for a CD to install windows.