Re: [Guide] Solo mine testnet bitcoins with bfgminer, Bitcoin Core, and a CPU/GPU
I just catched an instance where the last block was 20 minutes ago and bfgminer never adjusted the difficulty setting from its '125M' value.
It sounds like this could be the reason it doesn't mine any blocks: if it never knows the difficulty is low, it won't find a block at low difficulty.From your screenshot:
Quote
125M (894.7T)
I'm starting to think difficulty=1 doesn't mean it takes picoseconds to mine a block:Quote from: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet
Minimum difficulty of 1.0 on testnet is equal to difficulty of 0.5 on mainnet.
At difficulty 1, that is around 7 Mhashes per second.
That would explain why ASICs still beat any CPU miner as it would take me about a second, while it takes the ASICs a fraction of a millisecond.Quote from: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate_results_in_a_given_difficulty.3F
The expected number of hashes we need to calculate to find a block with difficulty D is therefore
D * 2**256 / (0xffff * 2**208)
Actually, if we use this formula, it appears that with difficulty=1, you need on average 4295032833 or ~4.3GH to find a valid one. So on a 7GH/s machine, that's 613 seconds or 10 minutes. Impossible.. D * 2**256 / (0xffff * 2**208)
But on the other hand, it can't be right since people here did succeed with CPUs. What if the article is outdated / wrong?
Do we know @ETFbitcoin 's hash rate?