Description

Here, you will find our frequently asked questions.

Where you see COIN, substitute this to the coin's Name, e.g. monero

What is mining and why should I be interested?

Cryptocurrencies achieve decentralization via a process called mining. When new transactions are created, they need to be validated. Miners compete with each other to validate a group of transactions (a.k.a. block). The first successful miner or pool of miners that validates a block is paid a block reward and collects transaction fees for the work carried out. Block rewards are also how new coins are generated and help regulate the economy of the currency.

How do I start mining?

You can start mining today if you have a computer that sits idle. Crypto can be mined on CPUs, GPUs or even a raspberry Pi. To start mining you need to find the right mining software for your hardware and get going.

What is pool mining?

If you are mining on a small scale, it becomes extremely hard and unpredictable to earn a stable profit on your mining income. Pool mining gives you the opportunity to join a group of miners and share earnings for a consistent payout. Pools function as a profit sharing endeavor, depending on the payout scheme that is implemented. Pool mining will distribute the block reward and transaction fees to all participants in the pool. In theory, solo mining will grant you the entire reward but will take time and luck to achieve; pool mining ensures for more consistent blocks validated, but with the rewards being shared among the pool miners proportionally.

Is mining profitable?

Mining can be profitable depending on the conditions involved. Your primary cost is your electricity and the cost of your hardware. It is not practical to calculate the exact amount you would earn as it depends on the total hash rate of the network, difficulty and your luck. An accurate estimate of earnings of the pool can be calculated by observing average daily number of blocks found ... followed by some mathematics?

How payouts work?

Once a block has been mined, it needs to reach maturity (Homepage shows Block Maturity Depth required), then payouts are calculated, followed by your Total Due being updated, and finally, payouts kick off an hour later. This is normal and is how the payment cycle is designed to work. Every 1 hour a master payment check is executed which pays out all dues. If everything goes as planned all dues that exceed the set payment thresholds are paid out. In case of a wallet lock up or failure, the pool automatically re-queues further checks at 15 minute intervals until all payments are successfully completed. Once everything is paid out the system returns to the hourly master cycle.

Payout thresholds?

Payout threshold is the minimum amount that needs to be earned before the pool pays out to your wallet. Since transactions have a significant miner fees, it's cost effective to set a higher payout threshold for your pool. To change your payment threshold, click the wrench after you login via "Login" button on the top right. You could also adjust your payout threshold to regulate your payout schedule etc daily/weekly etc depending on your hash rate. NOTE: There is a known cache issue with the Pool UI, so you may have to open the browser in Private mode, to make sure changes are saved.

What is the Pool Scaling Transaction Fee?

The pool has to pays the transaction fee when it pays you, just as you pay the transaction fee when you pay someone or send your coins to an exchange. The pool will deduct a scaling amount every time it pays you. To save on fees, it is recommended that you increase your minimum payout. The higher your payout, the lower the transaction fee. If you set your minimum payout high enough, your fee is waived and you will receive your full payout. You can view the Fee scale on the pool's homepage, as a scaling graph.

IP Banning?

Your IP gets banned if you submit invalid shares to the pool server. This usually happens if your card is overclocked or unstable. The ban is temporary and usually cleared in 15 mins.

How Fixed / Variable Difficulty works

When you select a pool port, the starting difficulty only represents your initial setting. As soon as your miner starts submitting shares the server will try to adjust your difficulty to reflect your hash rate. This assures you are not creating too many or too few requests to the pool's server which optimizes bandwidth consumption and server loads. Optionally you could set a fixed difficulty via your miner command line options, though if you set a difficulty too high, you could exceed the 60 seconds job limit and lose earnings. Your validation of work is calculated as the number of shares submitted to the pool along with the difficulty of those shares. As long as your shares are not invalidated by being submitted late, your effort will be rewarded upon the pool's next block's successful addition to the blockchain.

What is a block?

Transaction data is recorded in blocks. New transactions are being processes by miners into new blocks which are added to the end of the blockchain.

What is an orphan block?

An orphan is a block that didn't meet the requirement as a solution to the block found. Also, there can be a situation where another pool or solo miner found the block solution first, and narrowly won the race. Blocks are confirmed by hash verification by all the nodes on the coin's network. If there is a consensus of which node (pool,solo) found it first, then that block is added to the block chain permanently with credit applying to that pool/solo/node. Orphan blocks are rare but they do occur.

What is difficulty?

Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target. The target difficulty changes from block to block based on the network hashrate attempted by all nodes on a coin network.

What is luck and effort?

Mining is probabilistic in nature: if you find a block earlier than you statistically should on average, you are lucky, and if it takes longer, you are unlucky. A perfect pool would find a block on 100% luck value. Less then 100% means the pool was lucky. More then 100% means the pool was unlucky. Over a long period of time, luck should thread towards 100%. You can check the average luck the pool has on the last 25 blocks, on the pool's dashboard. Effort is used somewhat interchangeably with luck. A low effort block is similar to high luck, a high effort block is similar to low luck.

Why have I not earned for days?

The dashboard shows you your estimated earnings, if a block is mine at 100% effort. If the pool has experienced bad luck, the effort can go over 100%, so everyone mining will not get any balance due until a block is mined. Once a high effort block is mined, and confirmed, the total due is updated for all miners, and won't be as much as the estimate, due to the amount of effort it took to mine. Subsequent lower effort blocks will make up for this, as your reward will be higher.

Why does the hashrate shown on the Pool differ from my Miner?

The pool calculates your hashrate base on the hashes sent and the timings of when they were sent. This process is a rough indication, and normally shows a result which is close to your miner, after 24 hours. This is only an indicator, and can occasionally be way off. Do not rely on these stats to be very accurate, always rely on your miner stats.

IP Banning?

Your IP gets banned if you submit invalid shares to the pool server. This usually happens if your device is overclocked or unstable. The ban is temporary and usually cleared in a few minutes. You could also contact your pool admin and request an unban, if you are seeing longer bans.

How do I run my own CLI Local Daemon?

The Daemon executable is typically suffixed with a d, so to run it with basic parameters, you would run:

• COINd --rpc-bind-ip 0.0.0.0 --confirm-external-bind --restricted-rpc.

You can check for all available parameters by running COINd --help.

How do I connect my CLI Wallet to my Local Daemon?

The wallet executable is typically named `COIN-wallet-cli', so you would run (replacing the daemon address, port, wallet location and password with the appropriate details):

• COIN-wallet-cli --trusted-daemon --daemon-address 192.168.1.11:12345 --wallet-file=C:\Wallets\WALLETNAME --password X#$1Pd_z4~ta!3d

What coins can I mine?

Check out our Pools homepage https://pools.gntl.uk

Hardware?

• CPUs:
  • ARM64 architecture such as:
    • Apple Silicon's M1
    • Broadcom's BCM 2711 (Raspberry Pi 4B)
  • x86-64 (also known as AMD64) architecture such as:
    • Intel's consumer line Core i3, i5, i7, i9
    • Intel's enterprise line Xeon
    • AMD's consumer line Ryzen 3, 5, 7, 9
    • AMD's workstation line Threadripper
    • AMD's enterprise line EPYC
• GPUS:
  • AMD's Radeon series
  • NVIDIA's GTX, RTX series

Software?

We recommend XMRig.