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