What is Ergo

As you can see on the official website, Ergo positions itself as smart money. According to the website, Ergo builds advanced cryptographic features and radically new DeFi functionality on the rock-solid foundations laid by a decade of blockchain theory and development.

The developers outline six main components that make the project stand out against others in the crypto niche. They are vision, consensus, light clients, survivability, economy, and applicability.

Vision of Ergo Developers

According to the website, Ergo was created in response to stagnation in the blockchain area. As a result, the developers implemented various technical and economic ready-to-use ideas that add value but do not reduce the known advantages of blockchain systems.

Ergo’s primary focus is to provide an efficient and secure way to implement financial contracts, which are the most widely used application of blockchain technology. Unlike the traditional financial system, no bailouts, blacklists or other forms of discrimination should be possible on the core level of Ergo protocol.

So they want to implement something similar to what Ethereum looks like today. It's important to note that Ergo works on a separate blockchain.

Ergo Consensus Algorithm

Autolykos, Ergo consensus protocol, is based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. PoW was chosen because it’s widely studied and has high security guarantees.

However, Autolykos has several meaningful differences from Bitcoin’s PoW. For example, you can mine Ergo’s native token ERG with just 3GB of RAM, which makes the niche much more accessible. Ergo also has storage rent to reclaim lost and forgotten coins.

Ergo’s Light Clients

The developers are making an example of Bitcoin Core full chain wallet: it takes a few weeks to sync and load all the data. This is highly frustrating, so Ergo enables light clients (i.e. programs that let you interact with the network) to synchronize with the network by downloading less than a megabyte of data. Thus, a regular user with any device can join the network and start using Ergo.

Thinking Long-Term

Ergo is prepared for the changes that might be expected in the future. For example, miners can vote to increase or decrease maximum block size, storage fee factor, etc.

For more fundamental changes Ergo is going to follow a soft-forkability approach. If an overwhelming majority of the network accepts a new feature, it is activated. Old nodes which vote against the new feature continue to operate normally. Thus hard forks should not be required in Ergo.

Ergo’s Economy

This is the most curious part of the project. What makes Ergo special is the storage fee for outdated coins. If a cryptocurrency remains in the state for 4 years without being moved, a miner may charge a small fee for every byte kept in the state.

It is similar to cloud storage services when users pay to store their documents, music, and other files outside their devices.

It gives Ergo several advantages. First of all, ERG mining will always be stable. On the other hand, Bitcoin’s max supply is 21 million which means that transaction fees will be the only source of income for miners after the last coin is issued. In this case, Ergo miners will have an additional source of income.

Secondly, state size growth becomes controllable and predictable reducing hardware requirements for Ergo miners. And lastly, by collecting storage fees from outdated boxes, miners return lost coins to circulation. It helps prevent a drastic decrease of circulating supply due to lost keys.

Ergo Applicability

The developers want to make the Ergo network a popular place for smart contracts execution. Ergo’s script is Turing-complete which means that the functionality of Ergo-based apps is unlimited.

Ergo’s Price

On July 22, 2021 ERG costs $4.98. It’s a 5100% increase compared to the minimum of $0.09 registered on March 13, 2020. But it’s also a 83% decrease compared to the maximum of $29.58. This price was registered on April 27, 2018, according to Coingecko.

You can't see this leap on the chart, but ERG reached $5-6 in April 2018.

Ergo’s local peak in 2021 was registered on May 19. Back then the price reached $18.

ERG increased by 1775% over the last year. This is more than the yearly growth of Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Where to Buy Ergo

Ergo (ERG) is traded on several popular crypto exchanges: Coinex, Waves, and Gate. According to Coingecko, Waves offers the best liquidity. You need more money to move the ERG exchange rate by 2% in either direction.

Wallet for Ergo

Ergo offers two options: Ergo’s official wallet and Yoroi. The former is a fully functional desktop wallet, whereas the latter works in the web browser. Ergo wallet offers a wider range of options. It has a multi-signature feature that allows you to perform crypto transactions on the wallet only by mutual consent of several people.

You can download Ergo wallet here or Yoroi here.

Ergo Mining

As we already mentioned, requirements to mine Ergo are reduced. GPUs with 3GB of RAM would suffice, similarly to the popular Ravencoin cryptocurrency.

To start mining on 2Miners pool, you need to create a wallet (one of the mentioned earlier) or use a crypto exchange address. Then download the mining software. We recommend lolMiner which we already covered here, nbminer, TeamRedMiner and T-rex.

lolMiner and nbminer work with both AMD and Nvidia GPU. TeamRedMiner works only with AMD cards, while Nvidia is suitable only for Nvidia GPUs.

You can find all mining software in the archive linked here. The password to the archive is 2miners, no spaces or dots at the end.

After you download the files, edit the bat file. You should replace the wallet address with yours, the one you created before. You can also change the rig name and replace RIG_ID with a new name containing only Latin letters, numbers, and symbols “_” and “-“.

Here is lolMiner setup to mine Ergo:

lolMiner.exe --algo AUTOLYKOS2 --pool erg.2miners.com:8888 --user YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID

Here is nbminer setup to mine Ergo:

nbminer -a ergo -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID

Here is TeamRedMiner setup to mine Ergo:

teamredminer.exe -a autolykos2 -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID -p x

Here is T-Rex setup to mine Ergo:

t-rex.exe -a autolykos2 -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID -p x

Ergo Mining on Miningrigrentals and NiceHash

Hashpower rental is possible for Autolykos2 algorithm. Please find below the settings for the most popular rig rental services: Nicehash and Miningrigrentals.

Here is Miningrigrentals setup to mine Ergo:

Name: 2Miners ERG
Type: Autolykos v2 (ERGO)
Pool Host: erg.2miners.com:8888
Workername (-u): YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS
Password (-p): x

And this is how to setup NiceHash to mine Ergo:

Custom pool name: 2Miners ERG
Algorithm: Autolykos
Stratum hostname or IP: erg.2miners.com
Port: 8888
Username: YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS
Password: x

All the settings are always available on How to start page of the pool. If you know what is SOLO mining and if you want to go SOLO for Ergo join follow these simple steps.

Remember to follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

New Servers for Ethereum Mining Pool

Despite the decreasing ETH price this month 2Miners Ethereum pool hashrate has exceeded 20 TH/s on average.

Due to the high demand, we needed to add more servers to the Ethereum PPLNS pool system to keep the service going at the same high level. In June we released 2 more servers in Europe, 1 in Asia, and 1 more in the US. So there are 7 servers for Europe, 3 for Asia, and 3 for the US in total right now.

New Pool API

We are still developing the new pool API and the new statistics dashboards. This June we successfully released it for the Expanse (EXP) pool. The same dashboards would be available for Ethereum and other coins very soon. If you are curious about how is it going just go to EXP pool and choose any miner you want. All the statistics are transparent as always.

This process takes a little more time than we expected as we are constantly improving the code and implementing new ideas. Next month we expect the new API and statistics to be available for many more pools on 2Miners. Expanse is just our testing ground.

Node Updates

All the mining pools require constant monitoring and upgrading. In June we updated the nodes of multiple coins.

• Aeternity Node 6.1.0 – bug fix
• Beam Fierce Fermion 6.0.11647 – hotfix
• ZCash 4.4.1
• Flux (ZEL) 5.0.2

New Mining Software

New mining software has been released so we’ve updated our Quick Start Archive. The archive password is 2miners

• gminer 2.57
• t-rex 0.20.4
• teamredminer 0.8.3

We’ve also updated the Firo bat files.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Ethereum Mining Pool News

This month cryptocurrency prices have spiked multiple times. This has caused the huge Ethereum network load which brought extra rewards to the miners. Some days we’ve even stopped the Ethereum payouts for a short period of time. This lets the pool mine the blocks with extremely high rewards. May 13 was a very lucky day for the miners as we’ve seen the rewards as high as 10 ETH or even more. However, May 19 was even more outstanding with the 20-40 ETH per block.

Please remember that the standard reward is just 2-3 ETH. Why does the Ethereum block reward change that much?

Currently, the Ethereum transaction fees are very low. We have not seen them like that for a long time.

Still, the number of Ethereum miners in the 2Miners pool is growing. That’s why this month we’ve added 2 new ETH servers to satisfy the constant demand for high-quality service. Currently, more than 40 000 miners are Online in our Ethereum pool.

Follow these simple steps if you have not started ETH mining yet.

Ethereum Classic Mining Pool Update

We’ve increased the number of PPLNS shares from 12 000 to 50 000 for Ethereum Classic (ETC) PPLNS Pool.

This will not change the average reward anyhow. This should just help the small miners with a low hashrate (for example a single GPU) to participate in a larger amount of blocks.

How does PPLNS pool reward system work?

New Dashboards – Work In Progress

We are working hard to implement the new version of the dashboards. It will contain such features as reported hashrate and detailed share statistics. This requires a complete code redesign. Actually, we’ve already started to deploy it. The current statistics pages you see now are working much faster than before even if they look the same.

We plan to release the new statistics pages in the nearest weeks (or even days). Below you could find the first teaser screenshot from the Beta testing server.

BEAM and Callisto Node Updates

Callisto (CLO) 2Miners nodes were updated to the latest version Geth/v1.9.15-stable-8d80fb96
You could always monitor the current state of the nodes on a special Stats Page.

Beam nodes have been also updated to the latest software version Fierce Fermion 6.0.11638
The Beam 6.0 Hardfork is expected on block 1 280 000. There is nothing special to do for the miners. If you use 2Miners pools you are all set. However, it is required though to update your wallets to the latest software version to continue using the network. All details of the future update could be found on the Beam website.

Telegram Bot Updates

6 new currencies were added to our Telegram monitoring bot @pool2minersbot

• INR – Indian rupee
• GBP – British pound
• CHF – Swiss franc
• AUD – Australian dollar
• CAD – Canadian dollar
• MXN – Mexican peso

We highly recommend our bot for rig monitoring purposes. You could also use one of the third-party applications.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

60 000 Miners Online

A new milestone has been reached. More than 60 000 miners are currently mining in our pools. 35 000 miners in Ethereum pool, 15 000 miners in Ravencoin pool. Thank you for mining with us.

Ethereum Berlin Hardfork

A hard fork has happened in the Ethereum (ETH) network at block 12 244 000. 2Miners Ethereum pools were updated. At the moment we use the latest node software Geth v1.10.2. You could always check the node operation on Ethereum Network Stats page.

At the moment of the fork, we stopped the payouts in the Ethereum pools for about 2 hours just to make sure the new network was operating fine.

The miners don’t need to change anything in their settings. This hardfork had no influence on Ethereum rewards. However, now they are lower than before. Why does that happen? Read our post Ethereum Mining Profit Is Down. What Happened and What to Do?

Transparent MEV Rewards on 2Miners

2Miners Ethereum Pool Blocks tab shows now MEV-rewards if they were included in the block.

MEV stands for Miner-extracted Value. Ethereum mining pool gets extra profits by including some special arbitrage transactions in the blocks. You don’t need to add any additional settings to your mining software to get MEV rewards. Just keep mining and you get this extra ETH. Read more in our FAQ. We also recommend you to have a look at our post 2Miners MEV Strategy: More Profit for Miners with Help of Archer DAO.

Monero PPLNS System

We’ve increased the number of PPLNS shares from 20 000 to 100 000 for Monero (XMR) Pool. This will not change your average reward anyhow. This should just help the small miners with a low hashrate (for example a single CPU) to participate in a larger amount of blocks.

How does PPLNS pool reward system works?

ZEL Is Now FLUX

Flux Hardfork has happened at block 835554. Our miners didn’t need to change any settings. ZEL is now called FLUX. We’ve updated the ticker on 2Miners as well. The URL has been updated too. The old URL for ZEL is just redirecting you to the new one now.

Block reward was decreased from 56.25 FLUX to 37.5 FLUX!

Right after the fork, the payouts were stopped for about a day. We needed to be sure that the network was operating fine. Now everything works fine.

New Minining Software

This month our Quick Start Archive with mining software has been updated multiple times when the software developers were releasing the new versions. At the moment it contains such programs:

• gminer 2.53
• lolminer 1.26
• t-rex 0.20.1
• teamredminer 0.8.1.1

The archive password is 2miners
All you need to do to start mining is to download the archive and change the wallet address in the bat file.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Pool Website Translated to 20 Languages

This month we’ve added 2 new languages: Arabic and German.

We understand that it is not always very easy to make a translation. Some words like “share”, “pool”, “uncle block” etc. could be translated or could be kept in English. Every language is different. We kindly ask you for help. If you see any error please don’t hesitate to contact us. We will fix that.

50 000 Miners Online

We’ve reached another important milestone. More than 50 000 miners are currently mining in our pools. We are thrilled to have you here. We are doing our best to provide the highest level of services to our miners.

Ethereum MEV Extra Profit

2Miners has announced its Miner-extracted Value (MEV) profits strategy. Archer DAO has been chosen as a strategic partner for the MEV extraction. Let’s describe MEV in simple terms. The specialized software is watching the incoming transactions in the blocks to seek opportunities to step in the middle of a chain of token exchanges and profit from the exchange rate difference.

We are distributing MEV rewards among our Ethereum miners. In the nearest future, we add a monitoring system that allows everyone to track the additional MEV profit being earned. Read more on this post 2Miners MEV Strategy: More Profit for Miners with Help of Archer DAO.

Monero Minimum Payout

We have decreased the minimum payout on Monero (XMR) pool from 0.1 XMR to 0.01 XMR.

xmr.2miners.com

That means you could reach the minimum payout 10 times faster now.

GRIN and MWC Updates

GRIN developers found a problem in their code on March, 18. This was an official GRIN devs message: “We identified an invalid BP rangeproof on the main chain about 8 hours ago. We expect to release a fix that would invalidate those 8 hours. Please consider halting further mining until then.” Because of that some of the GRIN blocks were rejected and the miners lost their rewards. Our GRIN pool was completely stopped for 2 days. Now they are back online.

Just 2 weeks before that network issue (at the beginning of March) gate.io exchange upgraded its Grin wallet and started to support slatepack addresses for Grin. The address was absolutely the same for everybody. The exchange gave a special memo number for each of the users. You could not deposit any amount of Grin you want. You needed to deposit the amount ending with your memo number. The Grin address on gate.io was always grin1n26np6apy07576qx6yz4qayuwxcpjvl87a2mjv3jpk6mnyz8y4vq65ahjm. Let’s say your memo was 456789. That means you could only deposit 100.456789 Grin or 345.456789 Grin etc. Read more

Unfortunately, after the recent GRIN problems, the deposits on gate.io are closed again but we hope they would be re-enabled in the future. You still needed to mine to Grin++ wallet as it is the best solution for GRIN network.

MWC is a fork of GRIN so they had exactly the same problem. The only difference is that miners lost not hours of mining rewards but days! At the moment the MWC network is operating fine. The pools are working too and the hotbit exchange is receiving the deposits without any issues.

Cortex News

Great News for Cortex (CTXC) Miners!

1. We’ve reduced the reward confirmation time in the 2Miners pool from 10 000 to 500 blocks (from 2 days to 2 hours).
2. Binance Exchange has re-enabled CTXC deposits.

POOL: ctxc.2miners.com
SOLO: solo-ctxc.2miners.com

2Miners Overclocking Guides

Overclocking is a very important and popular topic in all our chats and media. Thanks to our miners we’ve prepared a couple of posts with overclocking basics.

1. How To Overclock Nvidia and AMD Graphics Cards on Different Algorithms. This post is more application-oriented. You could find the basic settings for both Nvidia and AMD GPUs and read the basic overclocking principles.
2. Beginning Miner’s Guide and GPU Overclocking on Different Algorithms. This post has a more theoretical nature and it is much longer. If you want to understand the overclocking process better we would highly recommend it as well.

New Blog Posts

We’ve prepared some interesting mining-related and crypto-related posts this month that we strongly recommend you to read.

• Ethereum Mining Profit Is Down. What Happened and What to Do? – provides you the answers to the most common mining rewards-related questions.
• Nvidia RTX 3060 Mines Ethereum without Restrictions. GPU Test Results – tells you the 3060 story. The first GPU with an intentional hashrate-drop on Ethereum mining has been cracked 🙂
• Definitive Guide: How to Create and Sell NFTs. 2Miners Crypto Art Collection – NFT is one of the most popular topics this year. We’ve created a guide on how to create and sell them.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Miner-extracted Value (MEV) has been a hot topic more and more lately, especially with the future adoption of EIP-1559 which would make the miners’ profits lower (as there will be no high-priced transactions in the blocks). Therefore, each and every mining pool is seeking opportunities to make up for the decreased revenue — and we are no exception.

How does MEV work? In essence, it is an automated process when some additional income may be made by arbitraging certain transactions — mostly for the p2p exchange platforms when the funds swap is done without a centralized exchange. Specialized software can watch the incoming transactions in the blocks to seek opportunities to step in the middle of a chain of token exchanges and profit from the exchange rate difference. For this to work, the intercepting transaction has to be executed early in the block so it takes over the exchange process and gains an advantage.

As you may guess, this requires two sides of the story — first, a miner (or a mining pool) with a high enough hash rate that could execute the insertion of the transaction, and second, a sophisticated algorithm that seeks for such exchange opportunities and prepares such transactions for the mining pool.

Of course, 2Miners has been closely following the topic for quite some time now, and now there are several different solutions available for the MEV integration for the miners — the most known, perhaps, is FlashBots. However, the most known does not necessarily mean the most profitable or smart. Therefore, we have been carefully surveying the scene to find the MEV partner for our pool to work with.

For several months already we have been closely working with Archer DAO, our chosen partner for the MEV extraction, and are deeply impressed by the algorithms they carry and the agility of the team behind it. As you’re reading this, we are already including some of the MEV transactions in our blocks, bringing the increased revenue for the miners. Of course, like any emerging technology, there are still questions to be solved to make MEV mining at 2Miners be up to par with everything else we make — transparent, useful, and totally open, but please be assured that by the time EIP-1559 lands, we will be making every effort in having our miners benefit from each and every MEV transaction executed through our pool — with no additional work required to be done by individual miners.

MEV rewards are already being distributed among our Ethereum miners. Ethereum Pool Blocks tab shows now MEV-rewards if they were included in the block. These extra rewards are distributed like the normal ETH rewards according to the PPLNS-scheme.

Please follow our blog in the coming months as we keep improving the reporting and unveil the way for our miners to see and track the additional MEV profit. With the help of Archer DAO we are also working on adding the new MEV-providers to our blocks right now.

If you have not yet tried our pools, today is a great opportunity to try and see why we are the platform of choice for thousands of loyal miners — from relatively big enterprise farms to hobbyists with just a couple of GPUs. They value us for great monitoring options, transparency, live support in Telegram, and more.

Learn how to make your mining more effective in our article “How To Overclock Nvidia and AMD Graphics Cards on Different Algorithms”.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

What Affects ETH Mining Profitability?

Let’s get straight to the point. Say, you have a mining rig that operates 24/7. It doesn’t cause you any issues, doesn’t freeze, and has a stable hash rate. The rig size doesn’t matter. It can be an enormous factory or just one GPU in a gaming computer. All the factors that we are going to discuss affect all mining rigs regardless of their size.

Clearly we assume that a rig works without failures. If your graphics card disconnects every two hours or your rig reboots for an unknown reason, make sure to solve these problems before getting to mining profitability.

What affects Ethereum mining profits?

1. Ethereum network difficulty: the higher the difficulty (that is, the competition with other miners), the worse.
2. Ethereum blockchain load: the more contracts and transactions are executed in the ETH network, the better.

Let’s get into more detail about each.

Ethereum Network Hash Rate and Difficulty

The average block find time in the Ethereum network is 13.2 seconds. It may take you one second or one minute to find a block, but the average time is 13.2 seconds. This is the most important parameter in ETH network. The network always monitors it and makes sure that it stays at 13.2. The more miners there are in the Ethereum network, the higher the network difficulty. Higher difficulty means that the network is giving miners more difficult problems that they need to solve to find a block. And vice versa. The fewer miners there are in the network, the easier the problem.

In other words, once the number of miners in the network increases, they find blocks more often, and so the network increases the difficulty. When there are not enough blocks found and there are few miners, the network lowers the difficulty.

Since the average block find time stays the same, the number of blocks found daily stays the same as well. The reward “pie” is the same every day. There are 6500 blocks found by all Ethereum miners daily. Say, your hash rate is 100 Mh/s and it always stays the same. Clearly if the hash rate of all miners in the world is 1000 Mh/s, you get one tenth of the “pie”. If the hash rate of all miners in the world is 10000 Mh/s, you get one hundredth of the “pie”, and so on.

The more miners there are in the network, the higher the competition and the fewer ETH you mine daily.

Luckily Ethereum network hash rate is so high at this point that another hundred miners would barely affect the hash rate. But if you consider the network hash rate growth on a yearly basis, you could notice a 2.5x increase. You can always find the current and lifetime Ethereum hash rate on this chart.

Read more about the hash rate in: Ethereum Network Difficulty and Hashrate Explained.

Ethereum Blockchain Load

Ethereum network is used for:

1. Transactions. John sends 1 ETH to Mary, Sara sends 0.3 ETH to Jack, etc.
2. Smart Contracts. This could be anything: crypto kitties and other NFTs, decentralized finances like trade exchanges, etc.

For each found block in the Ethereum network miners get 2 ETH. This is a standard reward that encourages miners to mine. Miners will get rewards even if users are not executing any transactions.

Each network user wants their transaction or smart contract to be executed as fast as possible as nobody likes to wait. The more active the network users, the higher the fees for transactions and smart contracts. Miners are smart. And so first of all they include in blocks transactions with the highest fees to maximize their profits.

When we say "miners", we mostly mean mining pools. Ethereum solo mining is almost impossible as it requires too much power.

A mining pool gets 2 ETH for each found Ethereum block plus fees for transactions and smart contracts included in the block. On a not very busy day transactions can account for an additional reward of 1 ETH. Add it to the standard reward of 2 ETH, and the pool gets 3 ETH per block. On busy days fees within a block can reach 7 ETH, 8 ETH, 10 ETH, etc.

Here is an example. The block reward is 24.88 ETH, out of which 2 ETH is the reward for the found block and 22.88 ETH is the fee for transactions within the block. So the 2Miners pool got 24.88 ETH for one block and then distributed the reward among their miners.

If you want to see what the fees are at the moment, you can go to the Found Blocks section of the 2Miners Ethereum pool. Look at the Reward column. The bigger the blocks, the better for miners and the worse for regular Ethereum network users as they have to pay higher fees.

Smart contracts load the network much more than regular transactions. If you see that the network is overloaded, the cause is smart contracts, that is DeFi projects, various exchanges, kitties, etc. If you want to understand how ETH network fees are measured and learn about the gas and its price, make sure to read: What is Gas in Ethereum? Ethereum Transaction Fees.

The more the network is loaded by transactions and smart contracts, the more ETH you mine daily.

In July 2021 Ethereum plans to implement the EIP-1559 network upgrade. It will lower the fees for Ethereum users, but also lower miner rewards. How much lower will rewards be? It is still unclear, but we will update the article as soon as we have more details.

Why Do Mining Calculators Lie?

Mining calculators can’t predict the future. They work with past data. A calculator is just a tool that helps you estimate mining profitability. A calculator doesn’t know what the network load is going to be in an hour or what the mining pool luck is today, tomorrow, etc. Nobody knows.

Here is an example.

The network is filled with crypto kitties. Everybody is selling them. Or a certain project promises free tokens, and everybody is rushing to send a request to get them. Fees in Ethereum network increased, miner reward doubled. You open the calculator and see that at the moment your GPU is going to bring you $5 daily. You happily start mining. But on the next day it turns out that you only made $2. Why did this happen?

When we started mining, the kitties frenzy had ended and free tokens had already been given away. The network load went down. The total block reward decreased from 6 ETH to 3 ETH. Plus, the Ethereum rate went down, and the pool wasn’t lucky on that day. This is how $5 can turn into $2.

And vice versa. A calculator may estimate your profit at $2, whereas in reality you would get $10. It also happens.

If you want to learn how to use mining calculators, read: How to use 2CryptoCalc Mining Profitability Calculator.

Remember that in the calculator you should estimate your profit in the cryptocurrency you are going to mine.

Mining Profitability: Dollars vs ETH

Miners often look at their profit in dollars or their national currency. It makes sense as they are mining to maximize their profit in dollars or another currency by using their mining power. It’s completely normal.

But they are often puzzled by the same question: why did mining profitability go down? The answer is quite simple: the Ethereum price went down. If you look at the profit in your national currency instead of ETH, make sure to check the current Ethereum rate before looking for problems with your hardware or pool.

Why Did Ethereum Mining Profit Increase?

The 2Miners pool team rarely gets this question. When miners get more than they should, they usually keep their joy to themselves and don’t share with anyone. But if you are wondering why the calculator estimated 0.1 ETH per day while you actually got twice as much, make sure to re-read this article thoroughly.

You are likely to find the factor that triggered the increase in profit in your case. Usually you might need to consider ETH network load and then the network difficulty. You may also consider the pool luck on the last day. And if you estimate profits in dollars, then the first thing you should do is to look up ETH exchange rate. Who knows, It might have skyrocketed making you a millionaire.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

First, let’s see what happened. In the second half of February before the launch of the RTX 3060, Nvidia announced that Ethereum mining performance for the new graphics card will be restricted. There were two reasons for it. The first is to resolve the short supply issue that Nvidia was having with the RTX 30 series right after the launch. The second reason is that Nvidia was promoting a new device for Ethereum mining called Nvidia CMP.

The restriction worked. In the first seconds of Ethereum mining the RTX 3060 was giving out 42 MH/s, but then the hash rate was going down to 24-26 MH/s. Clearly, this made the new GPU less desirable for miners, so the Nvidia plan to tackle the short supply seemed to be working.

Everything changed at the beginning of March. There were rumors about the release of the special mode that removed hash rate restrictions. The information seemed fake at first, but eventually, the author shared more screenshots and proved that it was true.

Now, a week later, everything has changed. The new driver for the RTX 3060 removes Ethereum mining restrictions and it’s available to all users. We tested the update and can confirm that it’s working. The test results are below.

Nvidia RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Nvidia accidentally removed restrictions. The company released Nvidia Dev 470.05 Beta developer drivers. Miners tested the new software and noticed that it allowed the RTX 3060 to mine Ethereum at full capacity.

At first Nvidia added the drivers to the official website. But when they found out what the update could do, they deleted it. The webpage now says that the drivers are currently not available.

Luckily, miners uploaded the file to the cloud storage. You can download Nvidia Dev 470.05 Beta here.

The 2Miners pool team tested the drivers on the MSI RTX Gaming X 3060 12 GB. We were testing on Windows 10. The graphics card was connected to the external X16 riser. The test on Ethash lasted for about 40 minutes. No issues with the hash rate were detected. Additionally, the monitor was off throughout the whole test.

It’s important to note as according to the source mining was only possible with the monitor turned on. It turned out that the monitor is not a necessary condition.


As we found out later, the RTX 3060 12GB can maintain the hash rate only when connected through the PCI-E x16. So for mining with multiple graphics cards you need a motherboard with a lot of x16 ports. It's usually a server motherboard.


Regardless of the details, the test results are great. The RTX 3060 gave out 48 MH/s at the consumption of 120 W according to GPU-Z v.2.37.0. We used the T-Rex v.0.19.12 mining software.

Overclocking is set up through MSI AfterBurner v.4.6.3 Final. The core clock and voltage are set at a fixed Curve of 1150 Mhz and 850 mv. The memory is set at +1150.

We have a detailed guide on how to overclock GPUs for mining on different algorithms. Check it out. The article is for both beginning and professional miners.

We took more measurements. At the consumption of 105 W, the RTX 3060 gives out 44 MH/s. The temperature doesn’t exceed 50-55 degrees.

On other algorithms the hash rate is significantly lower. Ravencoin and Zcoin hash rates lag behind by 1-2% in comparison with the result of the Nvidia v.461.72 driver.

Nvidia RTX 3060 Profitability

Considering new facts, the 2Miners team adjusted the data in the 2CryptoCalc mining profitability calculator so that the information corresponding to the correct hash rate. You can expect to get $4.79 from mining Ethereum with one.

Once you adjust the profit for electricity costs that differ from miner to miner, the result will be slightly lower.

Here are the results of the RTX 3060 Ethereum mining for different time intervals. The graphics card can bring you $143 per month.

The situation is comical as Nvidia reassured everyone multiple times that the RTX 3060 mining block is secure but in the end it was them to give miners the possibility to get rid of the restrictions. So the current situation on the market is unlikely to change. New graphics cards will still be in short supply, while models in stock will be available at a much higher price.

Remember to join our Telegram chat and follow us on Twitter to get all the news as soon as possible.

Artists use NFTs because the blockchain is invariable and transparent. Each user can verify the authenticity of a certain work of art and be sure that it can’t be counterfeited. Plus, such tokens allow artists to make a profit even after they sell their works. It motivates them to create and share their collections.

The hype around NFT reached world-famous auction houses. Last week Christie’s sold the most expensive NFT in the world called EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS. The work was estimated at $69.3 million and looks as follows.

Now collectors and mining enthusiasts can get 2Miners pool brand pictures. Here is how we created them.

Selling NFTs example

We chose OpenSea, one of the most popular platforms.

Its popularity is confirmed by Ethereum Gas Tracker that shows which smart contract in the network used most gas. OpenSea is on the third place after Uniswap decentralized exchange and USDT, the main stablecoin in the cryptocurrency industry.

You will surely need a MetaMask wallet to work with NFTs. You install it as a browser extension and it allows you to interact with different platforms within the Ethereum network.

You should transfer ETH to the wallet to pay for the account registration on Opensea. We spent 0.0726 ETH at the current gas price of 172 Gwei. Gas price can change at any moment so we recommend adding at least 0.1 ETH to the wallet to avoid problems and make sure that registration is successful.

It is equivalent to $175–$180 at the current exchange rate. This sum is enough to sell ANY number of items on the platform. The good thing is that you are charged only after you list your first item.

Go to OpenSea and click Create -> My Collections.

Choose Create New Collection.

Add your token name and description, then choose Create.

That’s it, you created your collection. Choose Add items to add items to your collection. In this case they are our pictures.

Click Edit to edit your collection. You can change the cover image of your collection by choosing a pencil icon in the upper part of the page.

Add a Featured Image, which can be the same as a Logo, and different links to your resources.

Choose the fee amount that you will get every time someone buys your picture. You can also leave it at zero. Then indicate the wallet address where you would like to get payments.

This address can be different from the wallet address on Metamask that you use to create a collection. This way you can get payments to your cold wallet which is a more secure way to store funds.

Then you can choose the item layout in the new collection and add other collection creators.

Now that the collection is ready, we can add the first item. Click Add New Item.

It can be any media file up to 100 MB. Add a description. You can also add a link to the page that describes your work.

It’s also possible to add Unlockable Content. It is additional information that will be made available to the buyer. You can only add text here, but you can add links to any file, article, etc. 2Miners content includes a bonus: a unique creation date and drafts from the creator.

Click Create.

Add all remaining items. From time to time as you are adding or editing elements you might see a notification from MetaMask to the right asking you to give consent. Nothing to worry about here – you can give consent. You will not be charged at this stage.

Our collection is ready. You can check out our collection and buy unique items here.

After you create a collection, the pictures you add are truly yours. Any blockchain user can verify it.

Now it’s time to list our works for sale. Click on the picture and click Sell in the upper right corner.

There are three selling options.

1. Fixed price, or dutch auction with a declining price.
2. Auction to the highest bidder.
3. Selling a bundle of items. Works only through an auction to the highest bidder.

We chose an auction with an initial bid of 0.1 ETH to sell the picture with Vitalik. You can choose the currency. Available options are ETH/DAI/USDC. It’s important to note that there is a Reserve Price in the settings that can’t be less than 1 ETH and can’t be disabled.

It means that if nobody bids at least 1 ETH for your item, the auction will end without selling. This way the platform protects itself against wasting money on gas needed to sell an item and going in the red.

Click Post Your Listing.

For the first listing the platform asks you to interact with the smart contract that requires you to pay 395 317 GAS. Even though you don’t transfer ETH, you use your funds to execute this smart contract. Depending on the current network load it might cost you a lot. You can find the current gas price on EthGasStation.

You can try making a transaction with a lower gas price and hope for the best, or you can wait till the network gas price goes down. However, this might not happen in the near future considering the rising popularity of the decentralized finance industry.

Click Confirm and keep the page open. Wait for the smart contract to initiate your account.

As soon as it happens, the platform will ask you for permission to spend your wETH. This time the amount will be much lower. Click Confirm and wait.

The platform notifies you that this action needs to be done only once for each account. Then Metamask will send you another message asking to authorize the transaction.

The listing is ready.

Now let’s list Trump. This time we will set a fixed price of 0.5 ETH. Then we set the Ending Price of 0.5 ETH. It means that we are not going to use the auction with a declining price. We set an expiration date to 14 days.

Click Post Your Listing. Metamask will ask you to “sign” the listing. This time it’s free. The good thing is that all further listings will be free. If you manage to sell your item, the platform takes a fee from the money you make from selling.

As you can see in the screenshot below, we listed two out of ten items in the collection.

Transforming your artwork, photo or song into an NFT is quite easy. You just need to have access to the work itself and a certain amount of cryptocurrency. Also, don’t forget to take into account the value of a picture. This will maximize your chances to sell it.

We believe that the hype around unique tokens and digital art will keep growing. Christie’s auction house has joined the industry which means it has potential. It is possible that in the future most works will be sold using this model with cryptocurrency.

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