The cryptographic principles underlying such hashing make random selection of nonce almost impossible. This means that the only way to find the correct nonce is to cycle through the entire range of possible solutions until the correct one is found. In such a case, the solution can serve as a “proof of work”—that the computer that discovered the correct nonce must have actually done the work, that is, used the computing power to run the hashing algorithm.
The miner who finds the correct nonce value decrypts the block and receives five ethers, after which the process begins again. The cycle repeats every 12 seconds.
Before you decide to assemble a farm of video cards, let us immediately note that now it is more profitable to invest in cloud mining services, where you rent the power of the same video cards and ASICs, but they are located in a remote data center and are serviced by specialists of this service, thereby freeing you from solving a bunch of problems that accompany the process of mining Ethereum on your own equipment, read more about cloud mining here.
For 2022, the best alternative to buying your own equipment is cloud mining, in which you do not buy equipment, but a contract to rent a certain power (hashret) for mining cryptocurrency. This option is much more profitable and easier to implement because... requires only purchasing a contract in your personal account and withdrawing the mined cryptocurrency to your personal wallet, exchange or exchanger.
Why compare ETH mining software?
The answer is obvious. All miners (we mean people) want to know which miner (we mean program) is the best, namely the most reliable and with the highest hashrate. Moreover, the hashrate is important precisely on the pool, and not in the program window. Yes, this is important, because the pools pay you for the balls that they received from the miner, and how fabulous the hashrate is drawn in the farm console is absolutely not important.
The so-called “Reported hashrate” does not affect profits, remember this.
Holy wars on the topic “which miner is better” are conducted regularly on all fronts: on YouTube, Reddit, in Telegram chats, on forums. “T-rex is the fastest, Phoenix inflates the hashrate, Gminer beats them all, lolMiner is the most adequate, nothing compares to TeamRedMiner, NBMiner can only be understood by the Chinese” - we hear these and many other phrases every day.
Miner Nvidia
But why is our old test bad, and why carry out a new one? There are several reasons.
- new versions of programs have been released.
- The old test was not accurate enough, and we figured out how to make the study more accurate.
- the price of Ethereum is breaking all possible records, so you need to squeeze the maximum possible out of your equipment.
Advantages and disadvantages
The advantages of mining Ethereum are as follows:
- It’s convenient and easy to figure out the process yourself.
- Fast software update for mining.
- Maximum security of the procedure and its transparency for miners.
- The system is accessible and inexpensive.
- Constant improvement of calculator performance for Ethereum.
- Protecting users from external attacks.
The currency is promising and continues to gain popularity among miners. But it has a number of disadvantages, namely the instability of the exchange rate. Ethereum has a high volatility rate, so the direction of the currency's movement often changes.
Experimental conditions
We took the best ETH mining software and ran a test to determine the best of the best. How is this possible? Very simple. The more balls the miner sends to the pool, the more reward he will receive. It does not matter which reward system the pool uses: PPLNS, PPLNT, PPS or PPS+.
More ball on the pool = more money. This is the law.
It didn’t matter to us at all what the miner’s commission was. We compared only those balls that reach the pool and are counted towards our miner’s account. How many minutes the program spent mining on the developer’s wallet and how it did it is absolutely unimportant. The test in each program lasted three hours, which means that in three hours the miners managed to mine their commission several times.
Miner
For the experiment, two configured rigs were selected: one of 9 Nvidia 1660Ti cards, the other - of 4 AMD 5700 cards. These rigs successfully mine ether on the 2Miners mining pool around the clock, so we did not change any settings and did not change them “for each miner.” The Rigs worked exactly three hours on each program. The time countdown always began from the beginning of the program launch.
We have created a special Ethereum pool with a low difficulty share. You can engage in full-fledged ETH mining using the link.
More details about balls are described in the article “What are balls in mining. How the complexity of decisions affects cryptocurrency mining.” By the way, share is a word that is simply taken from the English language, that is, “share” or share. The miners did not come up with Russian terminology, which is why they began to use the English “share”. If you think that we are talking about balls/balls - like in billiards, for example - then this is not so.
The Ethereum pool currently uses a 8.72G ball difficulty. On the test pool, we set the difficulty to 64M, that is, 136 times less, in order to receive a lot of shares and not conduct the test for months. We consider this the optimal value for obtaining the maximum number of shares, but at the same time so that the miner can cope with the work, and the processor is not overloaded and slows down the process.
Mining Ethereum using a cloud mining service
Cloud mining is the best option for Ethereum mining in 2022, thanks to the flexibility of contracts and more favorable working conditions than mining on your own equipment.
Cloud mining is the extraction of cryptocurrencies using special cloud services that accumulate power in their data centers and farms.
This is a new model for earning cryptocurrency that creates groups (mining pools) with one goal: to generate more income compared to conventional distributed mining, through the management of equipment by a contractor who resolves all issues regarding technical and software components.
TOP 3 reliable cloud mining services according to Mining-Cryptocurrency.ru:
| Service | Grade | Detailed review |
| IQ Mining (editor's choice!) | 9.8 | Read review |
| HashFlare | 7.1 | Read review |
| Genesis Mining | 6.8 | Read review |
The criteria by which the rating is given in our rating:
- Profitability and profitability – we calculate payback periods, clarify the reality of mining.
- Prices and commissions – we take into account the validity of tariff plans and compare them with competitors.
- Deposit/withdrawal, discounts, reliability - we analyze reviews, test the correctness of accruals and withdrawals.
- Convenience of the platform and website – we evaluate functionality, errors and failures when working with the service.
- Features of the company are unique services and useful services, duration of work on the market.
- The final score is the average number of points for all indicators, determines the place in the ranking.
How is the hashrate determined on the pool and in the miner?
We agreed that the number of balls on the bullet at the end of the test is the most important parameter. In addition, the table with the results shows the hashrates:
- real , that is, the hashrate that was obtained on the pool. It is worth noting that here we are talking about the average hashrate for the entire experiment time of three hours.
- hashrate in the miner or what you see in the program when it is running. It was taken from the miner’s log at the very end of the operation, that is, the last hashrate value was taken before the miner was turned off.
Miner logs
The hashrate in the miner is determined quite simply; the program goes through the solutions of the block - millions of solutions per second. Be sure to read “What is mining? Good luck in mining." The program counts how many decisions it has already gone through: good, bad - it doesn’t matter. With each new solution, +1 is added to the counter.
Miner and farms
Let’s say you see 200 MH/s in the miner window, this means that the program, using your video cards, goes through 200 million solutions per second.
The hashrate on the pool is a calculated value. Each ball sent to the pool has a difficulty of at least 64M, because the difficulty of the ball is set by the pool. Let's say that in ten minutes the miner sent 1200 shares. This means that per second the miner sends on average 1200 / 10 / 60 = 2 balls. We multiply 2 balls by the difficulty of the ball 64M and we have a hashrate of 128 MH/s.
Remember that in mining and in cryptocurrencies everything can be understood on your fingers and calculated. Blockchain remembers everything. If you don't understand something, read the Cryptocurrency Bible.
Equipment selection
You can use any video card for mining, even your own, without additional installations, provided you have at least 2 GB of free RAM. It is important that the load on the processor does not exceed the earning potential. To improve PC efficiency, you can combine two video cards using the CrossFire technique.
It is believed that the following types of video cards are suitable for Ethereum mining:
- ATI Radeon R9 -280x;
- Radeon Rx 480;
- Radeon RX 470 Ethereum Mining;
- Radeon Rx 480;
- Radeon HD 7950.
Such devices can be purchased and connected to your home PC. And also on the cryptocompare website you can compare all video cards and see how many days the equipment will pay for itself.
Testing miners for NVIDIA video cards
Mining farm where the test took place:
- MSI Z270 A-pro motherboard
- Processor Celeron G3930
- RAM 12 GB
- SSD 120 GB
- 2 power supplies DeepCool KCAS-1000M 1000 Watt each
- 9 Nvidia MSI Gaming X GTX 1660 Ti 6 GB video cards
- Overclocking settings: core (core) -650, memory (mem) 2290, consumption limit (PL) 70
- Nvidia Driver 460.39
- Linux operating system
Rig Nvidia
If you are still afraid of the word Linux, it’s in vain. The Linux-based RaveOS system is now available completely free for users of the 2Miners pool, you can install it in a few clicks and your life will become much easier. Forget about Windows like a bad dream. We recommend.
If you don’t know how to overclock video cards, read our article “What is mining? The beginner miner’s Bible and the basics of overclocking video cards using different algorithms” and then go to our Telegram hardware chat, which already has more than 2 thousand people.
Programs that participated in the experiment:
- GMiner 2.43
- T-Rex 0.19.9
- Ethminer 0.19.0
- lolMiner 1.20
- Phoenix Miner 5.5c
- NBMiner 36.1
Unfortunately, the GMiner program did not start on our AMD farm. Perhaps the cause was inappropriate overclocking parameters. We sent a bug report to the program developers. They promised to sort out the problem as soon as possible, and we hope that in the next test we will see GMiner in the list of AMD miners.
Software
To start you will need:
1. Mining Program - See Step 1 below.
2. Overclocking program - MSI Afterburner. It works great for limiting power and temperature (this is very important for protecting your graphics cards and optimizing hashrate!)
3. Tested overclocking configuration
Power Limit : 0
Temp Limit : 75 ° C, For safe temperatures, see here and here
Core clock (core overclocking): 0 (for Ethereum, core overclocking does not affect);
Memory clock (memory overclocking): +2000, +2100
These settings were stable for the Nvidia GTX 1080 TI.
The best Ethereum miner for Nvidia video cards. Test results
Gminer took first place with a minimal margin. Right behind him is a T-rex. We would like to note that these miners were the absolute winners of the last test. This time they overtook everyone again, only now Gminer became the first.
Experiment results for Nvidia
Do miners show their hashrate honestly? We think it's fair. 285 MH/s in the miner window and 282 MH/s on the pool, the difference of a few percent is caused by the miner's commission.
Miner developer fees are charged as follows: the program mines for a short time to the developer’s wallet. Typically, once every hour for just under one minute, a miner mines for the developer.
Third place goes to the only open-source miner Ethminer. As you can see, the miner has no commission, so the hashrate on the pool and in the miner matched almost perfectly, the difference was 0.01 percent. However, as you can see, you shouldn’t think that a free open-source miner will bring you more money because it doesn’t feed the developers. If you choose Gminer or T-rex, your reward will be higher.
The fourth place was taken by test newcomer lolMiner. It is worth noting that lolMiner released its Nvidia miner just a few months ago, and has already surpassed the most popular miner at the moment, Phoenix, in terms of performance.
Video cards
The ranking is completed by Phoenix and NBMiner. What’s strange is that both of them had a much higher hashrate in the miner’s window than in reality. As for Phoenix, we have already determined during past tests that you cannot focus on its hashrate, you can only look at the so-called effective speed. In this experiment, the Effective Speed was 276.86 MH/s, which is very similar to the truth and is confirmed by the number of balls on the bullet. Phoenix has three hashrate displays: speed, Average speed (5 min) and Effective speed.
In our opinion, you can only focus on Effective speed! Be careful.
Phoenix hashrate
Example from the miner log:
- Eth speed: 284.577 MH/s
- Eth: Average speed (5 min): 284.557 MH/s
- Eth: Effective speed: 276.86 MH/s; at pool: 276.83 MH/s
Unfortunately, during the experiment, the hashrate in the NBMiner program turned out to be higher than in the pool. Surprisingly, the hashrate in the program was higher than that of all other miners! We checked the log, there were no rejected balls - stale or reject.
We conclude: Phoenix and NBMiner inflate the hashrate, but this will not bring you profit.
Wallet registration
The pool must send the mined coins somewhere, since the pools do not have internal accounts where cryptocurrencies can be stored for a long time.
There are several types of cryptocurrency wallets:
- Software. They are a software shell in which coins are stored. They are divided into desktop applications, those that are stored on a PC, and mobile applications that allow you to use a smartphone as a payment instrument;
- Hardware. Special devices with a high level of protection that do not operate autonomously. They need to be connected to a computer/tablet to be able to make transactions. A very convenient way of investment storage and transportation of cryptocurrencies;
- Paper. This type of storage is a private key from a crypto wallet printed as a QR code. The probability of hacking without this key is extremely low, but keeping it in a state that allows scanning is the user's task.
Regardless of which wallet you choose, you need to register in it and generate an address to which coins will be sent.
Another way to store and circulate cryptocurrencies are trading accounts of crypto exchanges, which are also wallets.
Not all pools support automatic sending of small amounts to exchange wallets, so choosing a wallet and a pool for work must be done simultaneously.
go
Testing miners for AMD video cards
Mining farm where the test took place:
- MSI Z270 A-pro motherboard
- Processor Celeron G3930
- RAM 4 GB
- SSD 120 GB
- Power supply Cougar CMX 1200W at 1200 Watts
- 4 AMD Power Color RX 5700 Reference video cards, Micron memory, flashed in XT
- Overclocking settings: core 1300, memory 930
- Driver AMD driver 20.40
- Linux operating system
Rig AMD
Programs that participated in the experiment:
- Team Red Miner 0.8.0
- Phoenix Miner 5.5c
- lolMiner 1.20
- NBMiner 36.1
Ethereum payback in 2022
To calculate the profitability of Ethereum mining in 2022, you can use special services, for example, https://whattomine.com/coins. To do this, you need to indicate the equipment you have, indicate your energy costs and calculate your profit. At the current rate, mining the coin is quite profitable. However, given the high cost of the GPU, it will take about a year to pay for the equipment. For example, the current profit of the RX 5700 XT is $4.26 per day. With a card cost of around 80,000 - 100,000 rubles, the payback will be 256 - 320 days.
Regarding the prospects for Ether mining, it is worth noting that Ethereum developers are preparing to transition the system to the POS algorithm. In this case, the network will be maintained independently, and participants will not be able to mine new coins in the usual way.
The best Ethereum miner for AMD video cards. Test results
TeamRedMiner once again took first place. This time he pulled away much further from his competitors, his hashrate was almost 5 percent higher than second place. It is curious that the TRM hashrate on the pool and in the miner turned out to be almost identical. This may indicate, for example, that TeamRedMiner does not take into account the commission when calculating the hashrate.
Experiment results for AMD
Second and third places with a tiny difference were taken by Phoenix and lolMiner. Note that Phoenix, as usual, showed too high a hashrate, but Effective Speed was super accurate: 214.58 MH/s.
NBMiner takes fourth place, with the gap from TeamRedMiner being almost 10 percent.
It is more convenient to test miners in practice on the 2Miners mining pool. On it, users can choose from 18 cryptocurrencies.
What algorithm is used to mine Ethereum?
First you need to decide what algorithm the cryptocurrency has. Without this information, you will not be able to start mining Ethereum. The table below contains data on some digital assets:
| Cryptocurrency | Released | Reduction | Algorithm |
| Bitcoin | 2009 | BTC | SHA-256 |
| Ethereum | 2015 | ETH | Dagger-Hashimoto/Ethash |
| Ripple | 2013 | XRP | ECDSA |
| Monero | 2014 | XMR | CryptoNight |
| Siacoin | 2015 | S.C. | blake2b |
| Dash | 2014 | DASH | X11 |
| lbryCoin | 2016 | L.B.C. | LBRY |
| Radium | 2015 | RADS | Smartchain |
| Decred | 2015 | DCR | Blake256 |
| Gridcoin | 2013 | GRC | BOIN |
| VertCoin | 2014 | VTC | Lyra2RE |
| Nautiluscoin | 2014 | NAUT | NXT |
| Navcoin | 2014 | NAV | X13 |
At first, the Ethereum encryption algorithm was called DaggerHashimoto and was very reminiscent of a script algorithm. However, its hashing mechanism itself had a significant difference from its predecessor, since it created an entire graph of sequential nodes. The DaggerHashimoto algorithm has been improved and rebranded, renaming it Ethash.
Examples of batch files
Ehereum on nanopool pool
ethminer.exe -P stratum1+tcp://stratum1+tcp://.org:9999 pause
Ethereum on miningpoolhub
ethminer.exe -P stratum2+tcp://:20535
Ethereum on f2pool
ethminer.exe -P stratum2+tcp://:6688
Ethereum on ethermine pool
ethminer.exe -P stratum1+tcp://e.org:4444
Ethereum on nicehash pool
ethminer.exe -P stratum2+tcp://icehash.com:3353
Ethereum on sparkpool
ethminer.exe -P stratum1+tcp://.com:3333
Ethereum on binance pool
ethminer.exe -P stratum1+tcp://:8888
Where to mine Ethereum - review of the TOP 3 popular mining pools
The profitability of the entire enterprise depends on the choice of pool. The undercapacity pools that started operating last Tuesday will bring nothing but disappointment.
We choose proven ones.
1) Open Ethereum Pool
An Ethereum mining pool open to everyone. There is no Russian version: if you don’t know English, use a translator. The operating principle is standard - you register, download the miner program, and start mining crypto coins.
2) DwarfPool
A multi-currency service that allows beginners and mining professionals to mine Ether, Monero, Zcash, Expanse.
Anonymity (registration is not required), speed, regular payments after finding each block. The reward is distributed according to the amount of power each participant has.
3) EthPool
An honest and fair pool that allows solo miners to reduce their risks and increase their profits.
Add your power to the common pot and make a profit according to the amount of hashrate. Unlike many other pools, EthPool servers are located not in one country, but on 3 continents at once.
Pool comparison table:
| № | Pools | Peculiarities | Year the service was founded |
| 1 | Open Ethereum Pool | Modern high-performance service for miners of any level | 2016 |
| 2 | DwarfPool | Multi-currency service | 2013 |
| 3 | EthPool | Servers are located in Europe, Asia, North America | 2016 |
Problem solving
Error no opencl platforms found
Use the -U command to use CUDA only.
If you have AMD video cards, then roll back the driver version to 18.6.1. In this case, uninstall the current version of the driver in safe mode using the Display Driver Uninstaller program.
The program closes after launch
If the program closes immediately after launch, then add the pause command at the end of the batch file. In this case, the program will not close immediately, but will display the error code and description.
Error exited waiting to cooldown a bit
Your wallet is configured incorrectly. Enter your wallet address according to the instructions.
All command line arguments
If two commands are presented on a line, only one needs to be entered. The second is its synonym. Example: --help and -h are the same thing. Enter either -h or -help.
Basic information:
-h,—help Display help text and exit.
--api-bind 127.0.0.1:3333 Use the API interface.
Select devices:
-G,—opencl Mine/Test using OpenCL (AMD) only.
-U,—cuda Mine/Test using CUDA (NVIDIA) only.
Connect to the pool:
-P,—pool Specify the pool address for Stratum connection to the pool or http address for solo mining.
The connection occurs according to the following diagram:
stratum1+tcp://[user[.workername][:password]@]hostname:port[/…]
protocol://[wallet[.worker][:password]@]pool_address:port[/…]
For an explanation and some examples of how to fill in these values, use the ethminer --help-ext command
-H,—help-ext Show help text about one of the following contexts:
supported options: {'con','test',cl,cu,api,'misc','env'}
- 'con' — Connections and their definitions
- 'test' — Test options
- 'cl' — OpenCL extended options
- 'cu' — CUDA Advanced Options
- 'api' — API and Http monitoring interface
- 'misc' — Other miscellaneous options
- 'env' — Using environment variables.
-V,—version Show the program version and exit.
