128 lines
9.3 KiB
HTML
128 lines
9.3 KiB
HTML
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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Pablo here</title>
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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<meta viewport="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css">
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</head>
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<body>
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<main>
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<h1>
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Hi, Pablo here
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</h1>
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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<hr>
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<section>
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<h2>My first petahash</h2>
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<p>I've recently started mining Bitcoin at a scale I never had before, so I thought it would be interesting
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to jot down a few observations on my recent errands.</p>
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<p>My friend Unhosted Marcellus has been following closely the evolution of the
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<a href="https://ocean.xyz">OCEAN mining pool</a> since its launch. I hadn't used it personally until
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recently, so for years all the info I had on it was second hand. What he was most excited about was the
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<a href="https://ocean.xyz/docs/datum-setup">DATUM Gateway</a>: the great innovation is that you are
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building your own block templates, which is something no other pool does. By using OCEAN with DATUM, you
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enjoy the benefit of more stable mining rewards as opposed to lotto mining, while still being a sovereign
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miner in the sense that you rely on your own node and you do your own templating. Great news for
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decentralization.</p>
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<p>The reason I had not bothered with setting all of this up so far was... that I really don't mine much. I
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got gifted a cute <a href="https://bitronics.store/collections/bitaxe/products/bitaxe-supra">Bitaxe
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Supra</a> from the <a href="https://bitronics.store/">Bitronics Shop</a> that produces some humble
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600GH/s, so it felt pointless to do all the setup for such a tiny hashrate.</p>
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<p>But then, Unhosted Marcellus started to tell me about these new markets started by Braiins called
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<a href="https://hashpower.braiins.com/">Hashpower</a>. Other articles explain the market better, so
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I'll leave it up to you to find those to learn about it. Although I must say, if learning is what you
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want, nothing beats using it. The TLDR is that you can sign up, send sats, and rent hashrate that you
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can point to your own DATUM gateway. And the surprise (at least for me) is how you can literally rent
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petahashes for peanuts, when you account for the fact that most of the sats you put towards buying
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hashrate will come back as mining rewards.</p>
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<p>Unhosted finally triggered me with this tweet. Cheeky bastard.</p>
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<p>I started toying around with a few PH/s, eventually trying out double digit petahashes. There is this
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funny feeling to suddenly be controlling the equivalent of tens of thousands of little bitaxes.</p>
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<figure style="width: 75%; margin: 10px auto;">
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<img width="100%" height="auto" src="../static/many-phs.png" alt="Double digit petahashes on OCEAN">
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<figcaption>Double digit petahashes on OCEAN</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p>The economics around it are interesting. The bidding prices in Hashpower are usually (not always!) above
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hashvalue. It's common to pay a 1%-5% premium over hashvalue. So, the most probable thing is that you
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end up operating at a small loss. This is not strictly guaranteed if you mine with OCEAN, since the luck
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factor is important and can easily swing rewards +-10%. So unless you mine at a stable rate with a
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months-long time horizon, luck is going to play a more important role than the premium on the
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hashrate.</p>
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<p>To optimize your outcome, it is important to constantly update your bids in Hashpower. Bids are set at a
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fixed price in sats, so as the market auction moves every few seconds, you will be either overpaying or
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end up unserviced.</p>
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<figure style="width: 75%; margin: 10px auto;">
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<img width="100%" height="auto" src="../static/order-book-bids-here.png" alt="Hashpower order book">
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<figcaption>Hashpower order book</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p>On the first days I was using Hashpower, I would log into it multiple times a day to adjust my bids to
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stay at the right height of the order book. At first it was fun, then it felt tedious, and it started to
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generate this Twitter-esque addiction feeling I didn't like. I quickly concluded I wanted to automate
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this out so my only task was to contemplate how pretty my OCEAN hashrate dashboard looked like, and I
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could leave behind pulling levers in Hashpower's webpage like a financial monkey.</p>
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<figure style="width: 75%; margin: 10px auto;">
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<img width="100%" height="auto" src="../static/dreaming-bids.jpeg" alt="Dreaming of automated bids">
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<figcaption>Dreaming of automated bids</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p>I solved this problem for myself with
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<a href="https://github.com/counterweightoperator/hashbidder">hashbidder</a>. It's a small CLI tool
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that I run every couple minutes with cron. The TLDR is you can give it a config file that reads "I want
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to mine at 5PH/s" and the tool will set your bids with two goals in mind:</p>
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<ul>
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<li>To bring your hashrate in line with your goal (e.g. if you want to be at 5PH/s, and you're
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currently averaging 3PH/s in the last 24 hours, it will drive your bids to a total of 7PH/s. If
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instead, you're scoring an average of 10PH/s, it will stop your bids completely to let your average
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go lower).</li>
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<li>To pay as little as possible, but guarantee you get served. The logic here is to set the price right
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above the cheapest bid that is being served currently.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>The result is quite pleasant. Delivery is choppy because, even with frequent updates, trying to be cheap
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means you often get dragged into being overbid by others and you stay there for some minutes. But the
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self-adjusting hashrate compensates for it: if you've been falling behind a lot recently, hashbidder
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will just hash at a higher hashrate to make up for it. I'm currently targeting 5PH/s, and this is what
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my OCEAN hashrate timeline looks like.</p>
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<figure style="width: 75%; margin: 10px auto;">
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<img width="100%" height="auto" src="../static/recent-hashrate.png" alt="OCEAN hashrate timeline">
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<figcaption>OCEAN hashrate timeline at ~5PH/s target</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p>There are still a few more optimizations I'll add to hashbidder to reduce cost and decrease the
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volatility of delivery, but they're just marginal improvements. The gist of it is already there and it's
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doing its work fine.</p>
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<p>My next steps are simply to sit and watch. I've decided I will pour 10 million sats during a few months
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into this setup and then stop to measure what my rewards have totalled to, so I can provide people
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interested in this with a real-life report of how everything turned out.</p>
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<p>Overall, I'm having lots of fun. Setting this up made me excited in a way that felt oddly similar to the
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first time I was setting up lightning nodes. The night I started out my DATUM gateway and pointed some
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hashrate to it felt like the night I spun up an LND and started doing some lightning triangles in
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<a href="https://lightningnetwork.plus/">Lightning Network+</a>.</p>
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<p>Some interesting links in case you want to learn more or give it a shot at mining with rented hash
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yourself:</p>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="https://rentsomehash.com/">rentsomehash.com</a>, guides on how to set up your DATUM
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gateway and start mining with rented hash</li>
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<li>A video guide from Matthew Kratter:
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<a href="https://x.com/mattkratter/status/2043692900190753089">on X</a></li>
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<li>You can check what Unhosted tweets here, since he's pretty much obsessed with this and doesn't pay
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attention to anything else: <a href="https://x.com/oomahq">https://x.com/oomahq</a>. Also, some
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podcasts and articles from him. Many kudos for starting this fire:
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<ul>
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<li><a href="https://x.com/oomahq/status/2042692591469367692">Interesting tweet #1</a></li>
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<li><a href="https://fountain.fm/episode/zwmdkwdhy0jQT5dVkhah">Once Bitten! episode</a></li>
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<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8ZRNyr3ofA">The Bitcoin Libertarian episode (in
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Spanish)</a></li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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</ul>
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<hr>
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<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
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</section>
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</main>
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</body>
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</html>
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