Coinlab Faq: How To Earn Silver Coins With Your Graphics Card

[Wulfgar 1,128]

It totally depends on your hardware.  My work laptop that is ~4 years old can earn 60-100 iron per day, give or take.  My work laptop is not efficient enough to justify the energy costs. 

Did you get access to client stats on what kind of hardware Wurm players use?

The majority of Wurm players use old hardware, intel graphics chips or Nvidia graphics cards. I think the people that will be able to get something out of this because they have dual new ATI cards can be counted on 2 hands.

I can hardly see why this is worth your while at all. Also did you consider that 99% of the Wurm players that are not able to purchase silver with credit cards is because they are children, and they probably hardly care if their parents electricity bill quadruples just so they can earn a few coppers a day.

I fail to see any benefit for Rolf in this at all.

[Zakiah 66]

I can hardly see why this is worth your while at all. Also did you consider that 99% of the Wurm players that are not able to purchase silver with credit cards is because they are children, and they probably hardly care if their parents electricity bill quadruples just so they can earn a few coppers a day.

I fail to see any benefit for Rolf in this at all.

Rolf's benefit is that he'll be gaining a few more cents of cash every so often and he doesn't have to lift a finger to make it happen.  Every penny counts, right?

Ultimately, in this scheme, CoinLab is an end-user of the bitcoin mining system.  Given the penny-stock scheme of the bitcoin mining system (it's not a pyramid scheme), CoinLab is trying to increase their potential to make a profit while profit can still be made before cashing out.  They have an account, all transactions are performed in their name, all profits go directly to them.  The way for CoinLab to increase their profit is to increase processing power and/or reduce their costs.  That's where the rest of us come in.

Anyone who signs up for their "Bitcoin for Silvers" service becomes a bot or zombie performing work in CoinLab's name on CoinLab's behalf, the exception being that CoinLab promises to compensate them to some degree.  Users trust that the work they do will be repayed.

CoinLab isn't (necessarily) complicit in any potential scams that the Bitcoin mining system may be operating, though they may be running a scam of their own.  But they may not be running a scam and this could be totally legit; there is motive for CoinLab to be honest about this.  Basically, you are trading increased power consumption and associated costs for the hope that it's a legit service.  It's still a gamble, and some people love to gamble for the hopeful payout.  For kids who don't care about their parents' bills, college students in campus housing, and probably some other groups, there is no downside.

Consider, though, in about a year and perhaps as early as Jan 2013, the rate of blocks generated, and thus profits, will be cut in half.  And if there is a sudden surge in blocks generated in one week, the rate for subsequent weeks will be reduced to ensure that the target of blocks generated per week are met (currently 2016 blocks per week).  Wikipedia can tell you why these things are true.

Over time, CoinLab will rely less on blocks they generate on their own and more on blocks others generate for them.  They will have to, or they have to cash out earlier.  Thus they reduce their direct costs (energy bill) in exchange for metered costs per client.  It's a definite benefit to CoinLab in the long run, so there is incentive for them to run a legit service.

Just make sure if you participate, that you constantly evaluate your costs compared to your returns, not just once in the beginning.

And if possible, please don't use just iron as a currency. Seeing huge strings of 0 makes things hard to read.

Don't assume that you'll see long sequences of zeros

[Enola 53]

Don't assume that you'll see long sequences of zeros

1s is already 10000i. That's long enough.

Interesting to know the data. Currently, I'd get around 50c (if that's what Coinlab says is true) with my setup per day. That's, unfortunately, far from cost effective. Too bad.

[sinnistrad 0]

Can the client be installed on multiple computers but fund a single Wurm account?

I run Wurm on 3 different machines depending on what else I happen to be doing at the time.

[Eyesgood 2,121]

Sorry for the negative, but this is reality.  Would you let your neighbor come over to your house and plug in his computer and let it run all day, every day if he agrees to pay you $2 a day?  That's what this is.  You will pay more in electricity costs than you will ever gain from lending your computer for mining.  You may as well go to the coin shop and buy silvers from Rolf.  At least you are getting an equal value and so is Rolf.

[CoinLab 10]

Consider, though, in about a year and perhaps as early as Jan 2013, the rate of blocks generated, and thus profits, will be cut in half.  And if there is a sudden surge in blocks generated in one week, the rate for subsequent weeks will be reduced to ensure that the target of blocks generated per week are met (currently 2016 blocks per week).  Wikipedia can tell you why these things are true.

We plan on adding video encoding and protein folding compute jobs before the block reward halves. By diversifying the types of work that are offered, we will be able to insulate gamers who use our service (and ourselves) from Bitcoin price drops.  If Bitcoin prices rise, however, the amount of Silver you can generate will rise proportionately.

You hit the nail on the head:  Honesty is to crucial the success of our service.  We will always be forthright about whether your computer is efficient enough for our service to make sense, and plan on making resources for people to estimate their power consumption, etc.  For our Alpha, we want to test everyone to get a diversity of data, but when the Alpha ends, we will recommend that some users don't use our service.  Everyone in the Alpha will get a baseline bonus, regardless of their hardware, as long as they participate.

[CoinLab 10]

Can the client be installed on multiple computers but fund a single Wurm account?

I run Wurm on 3 different machines depending on what else I happen to be doing at the time.

Yes!  If you are running the client on another machine while playing Wurm, you will see notifications about every 10 minutes in the :Event pane as we deposit your irons into your Wurm bank account.

[CoinLab 10]

Sorry for the negative, but this is reality.  Would you let your neighbor come over to your house and plug in his computer and let it run all day, every day if he agrees to pay you $2 a day?  That's what this is.  You will pay more in electricity costs than you will ever gain from lending your computer for mining.  You may as well go to the coin shop and buy silvers from Rolf.  At least you are getting an equal value and so is Rolf.

Our service is for people with great gaming rigs.  We think many people would let their neighbor use their electricity if they were getting payed 2-3x for it. 

Our out-of-pocket bonuses make the Alpha profitable for anyone who wants to try.  Once we have collected data on how different hardware profiles perform, we will recommend that those who can not efficiently compute fund Wurm with other methods.

[Enola 53]

How long will the alpha be?

[CoinLab 10]

How long will the alpha be?

We are thinking 1-2 weeks.  As we feel confident that everything is working properly, we'll expand it into a closed beta, and then open beta.

[Vorg 5]

Do you really mean "log off" or "lock the computer"? Because locking the pc usually leaves the programs running in the background (win+l shortcut).

I said log off.

[Vorg 5]

Something else I've thought of about running it as a service when logged off. Windows does a lot of it's maintenance when the system is "idle". If the computer is kept bussy even when logged off, that doesn't get done. Have to make sure the proirity is low enough that windows background stuff is able to push through.

[BitVector 0]

Has alpha testing already started? And if so, has anyone here made any in-game money from this service yet? I'm curious in knowing if there is enough processing power in the mining pool that is capable enough to solve Bitcoin blocks.

(Edit: If you signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement to test CoinLab's software, then please ignore my question.)

Edited May 25, 2012 by BitVector

[vessenes 1]

Hi all, this is the CEO of CoinLab, Peter Vessenes. Our normal Wurm support guy is on vacation, so I thought I'd touch base here.

We didn't make anyone sign NDAs, so they're welcome to tell you how it went for them.

Did Anyone Make Any Silver?

In answer to the 'did anyone make anything?' queries, yep, our top user made 6s or so in the last 10 days; I imagine he or she will keep it up; that seems like a pretty nice stream of cash.

Our least-earning user made 8 iron in four hours, and never tried it again, understandably, I'd say.

As you guys have noted in the forums, Wurm players have a wide variety of GPUs; this impacts what earnings rate people are getting, of course. We appreciated especially the ones whose computers won't earn enough to make it remotely worth it; we needed all sorts of computers in the test, so that was great.

We will be bringing on higher-earning work to do over the next few months, so I would say that it's possible a top earner could get 3 silver a day before the end of the autumn, but that looks like about the max that we imagine we'll be able to provide in the near future.

As a side note, in my opinion, this is a nice way to subsidize one's gaming rig.

Electricity

Most of our alpha users are certainly making more than their electricity costs, if that's an outstanding question for anyone. All of our alpha users were stellar, and patiently waited through broken client downloads, urgent updates, and messages from us, all for in-game currency only. Thanks!!

Beta Coming

I am planning on opening this up to any Wurm user hopefully a week from today, we'll have a beta signup form and client download setup in roughly the next 7 to 10 days. The CoinLab account will post here and in a new thread.

Nefarious Client Fears Were Overblown

I'm happy to have the alpha users pitch in here, but we're trying hard to make a stable, easy to deal with computational client that doesn't suck. It will never be hidden or impolite in any way.

For Bitcoin Miners

There are a few misconceptions that some experienced Bitcoin folks brought to the table here; nothing major, but I thought I'd throw some thoughts out here so that those who don't care can skip it.

In Bitcoin mining pool terms we're "pay per share," that is, we don't ask our customers to take on any delivery or payment risk from the computational work sources we sign up. So, whether or not we find a block for our bitcoin mining work over a given period of time is, while being a rather knotty accounting problem, not a user problem. In practice, our users have been getting delivered their iron every 5 to 20 minutes, depending on a few factors, one of them bitcoin block generation rates.

That said, we will not be only mining bitcoins; other work will also be 'pay per share' in nature; I just think it's helpful to see earnings come in quickly.

Thanks

Thanks again to everyone who's given us input; I'm looking forward to opening this up to more users in the next few weeks.

[Vorg 5]

I DL'd it on 5/14 and for the first few days/ week I tried to let it run 24/7. Even played wurm with it running getting 5-15fps on my GTX560Ti. Also played a bit of Shores of Hazeron with it runing which also is a low res graphics game but it was clunky because of how they render.

I have a quad core and when running, it tends to keep 1 of those cores at close to 100%. Hulu plays, but there is noticable stutter at times. I stop the program now to play games because I don't have a high end card and there isn't much left. I also went back to logging off (which means shuting down the program) when done for the night because windows does maintenance task when it's not bussy with other things. I restart it in the morning.

With the newest 64bit client downloaded on the 18th, The program reports ~20-120i/hr. Most of the time it hovers around 30-50. Don't know why the wide range as the card is at 99% the whole time the program is active. Card tems are good hovering about 72c and fan speed at 44%. But then I have a well vented case with good air flow.

In anser to the question about is it making coin. The program shows the total to date as 11859i and ingame amount as raised about that much. I didn't do an exact check before starting.

Edited May 25, 2012 by Vorg

[vessenes 1]

Thanks, Vorg!

Vorg hit most of our pre-beta fixes in his post; going multicore, lowing priority in Windows and letting it run on login so that you don't have to remember to turn it on.

[Maximusi 141]

Well I am using and liking so far on my old Nvidia 9600 GT I am earning about 1 and a half copper a day with a newer gpu I reckon I can get that up to 6 copper and thats just my first pc. As I have suggested via e-mail I am calling for a silent option for the miner to be installed and then run silently (no system tray or gui etc) That would be ideal.

[Vorg 5]

I updated the drivers from 270.61 to the current 301.42 and there was a noticable increase in reported rate. where before most of the time when I looked, it said 30-50i/hr, but starting right after the update, it was 60-80 and more spikes past 100. Also noticed web browsing speed droped. So there was some kind of shift in where what was done with the newer drivers. It still shows low numbers sometimes in the teens, but on average it does show higher.

Edited June 6, 2012 by Vorg

[skyefox 487]

I've had the miner running for a couple of weeks now. I seem to either generate ~5 iron/hour or in the 30 - 40 iron/hour range. I haven't quite figured out why some of the estimates are so low considering the computer is idle for similar lengths of time and similar times of the day.

I'm still debating whether it is worth my while to let the miner run . . . admittedly I could buy the silver for much less then it is probably costing me in electricity and wear and tear on my graphics card, but it is somewhat rewarding to come home after work and see how much iron has been added to my total.

At this point it is more a fascination rather than a means to acquire in-game currency . . . only time will tell how long I will continue to participate in this program.

[Vorg 5]

Sometimes you do get low spikes and sometimes you get high spikes. Here is what I was told in an email about low spikes when I reported it droped to 1/hr for awhile:

One possibility: the computation your computer is performing is probabalistic (trying random numbers to solve a problem), so it is possible to just get incredibly unlucky

[Farmerbob 369]

The fact you have to consider power costs when doing this makes it already not worth it.

My PC already runs all 8 CPU cores and graphics card at 100% whenever I'm not gaming because of SETI

I'd have no problem with trying bitcoin mining.

[Zephyr40k 17]

Yeah, I think I'll give this a try. At least to see how much I could earn with my home PC per day.

[Kaloth 3]

My work pc is my wurm pc, is the pc I run all day. So if I'm going to be having it on all the time anyway I might as well see what I can earn extra from it.

[CoinLab 10]

Updated OP to announce our launch of Open Beta. Now all of your friends can join in on the coin generation!

[bp1986 173]

I suppose this really is only aimed at people who either do not have a credit card (too young) or people who push electricity costs onto someone else. I personally won't be using this service but I thank you for offering it.