Monthly Archives: April 2018

Creating a Dedicated Low Energy Burstcoin Mining Rig with ODROID-XU4

ODROID-UX4

While there are many great benefits to mining Burstcoin, it does share the drawback of other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in that you need to leave your machine on, whether it’s your ASIC, GPU rig (which may be obsolete) or just the old PC you had lying around that you decided to mine BURST with. In my case, my 9-5 job is at home doing web development, so my work laptop is on during those hours… Read more »

Optimizing Effective Capacity Test #2

After 24 hours, it looks like my Effective Capacity has actually gone down slightly. The previous screenshot from 24 hours ago had an Effective Capacity of 13.7834 TB. Currently, after my slight Target Deadline tweak, it shows 13.3888 TB. I peeked at it about 11 hours into the test and it was showing close to 15 TB, so I had high hopes.. but it looks like I’m actually down 3.9% from yesterday. So, the next… Read more »

What Is Effective Capacity, And How To Improve It?

Cryptoguru Screen Shot

I’ve been mining for a few days now 24/7 on my ODROID-XU4 (article coming soon) setup with two 8TB drives and my Effective Capacity has been knocking around a little bit between 12TB and 14TB. That means that I’m earning between 75-87.5% of my potential BURST from my historical contribution. Historical share is calculated as: historicalShare = minerPlotSize / poolPlotSize So you can see from this, the larger your minerPlotSize, the greater the payout. Thus… Read more »

The Western Digital My Book 8TB is Plotted!

Tortoise (Seagate) vs. Hare (Western Digital)

The results are in when it comes to the Western Digital My Book 8TB vs. the Seagate 8TB Expansion Drive. And the winner is… The Western Digital by a landslide! It turns out this wasn’t even a close race. The Seagate was done in chunks for testing, but it ended up being around 190 total hours plotting the full 8TB. The Western Digital finished up in just 30 hours, 11 minutes. The difference there is… Read more »

The New Hard Drive is Here!

That’s right, one more spankin’ new 8TB drive! This one is a Western Digital My Book 8 TB drive for $169.99 from Google Express. After tax, price adjustment (WTF is that?) and a $20 credit for a first time purchase, it worked out to $163.16. That’s $20.395 per TB. Not too bad! Not as good $19.78 per TB I paid for the Seagate, but I think that extra cash is going to be well worth… Read more »

Creating an ROI Calculator

The more research I do into Burstcoin, the more excited I am about it’s future, but I’m also a bit skeptical about being able to make any actual returns on mining… unless there are some changes in either value to USD or the network difficulty (netdiff) comes down. Viewing the graph over on the CryptoGuru.org website, you’ll notice that there was a huge spike in network size, starting around April of last year (2017). This… Read more »

Plotting with TurboPlotter 9000

Turbo Plotter 9000 Screen

My headaches with the Seagate taking an insanely long time to plot led me to search around for something that could possibly speed the process up. Doing a little research on the forums led me to TurboPlotter 9000. You can find it over at https://blackpawn.com/tp/. Another option would be the gpuPlotGenerator on Github. I found some information that made it sound like creating an un-optimized plot first with the gpuPlotGenerator and then optimizing it afterwards would… Read more »

My First confirmed DL!

My First Deadline

At this point I don’t know that much about pools and such, so I figure that I’ll just pick one and try it out for a bit to see what happens. I know my plot is going to be far too small at this point for solo mining. Head over to the Mining ROI Calculator to see how long a 3TB plot (which is about where I’m at) will take to win a block. Searching… Read more »

Plotting My First Drive

My first hard drive arrived in the mail today and I just couldn’t wait to get it set up and mining Burstcoin. I’ve been completely obsessed with researching everything I can just to start getting involved. I’ve seen a lot of posts on the forums with people setting up a bunch of 5TB external drives, which seems like a great size (intervals of 5 just work well in my brain), but after searching endlessly on… Read more »

Starting a Poloniex Account

Poloniex Home Screen

In order to activate my public key, I needed a place where I could actually purchase Burstcoins. Once it’s purchased, it’s a simple process to withdraw it to your wallet, which creates a public transaction, which sets up a pairing between your passphrase and your wallet address. Here’s a little bit more about that.. and what is definitely an easier process than signing up for Coinbase and Poloniex. The forum article is a little ambiguous… Read more »