Obviously long gone are the days where I could earn BTC while mining on a commodity laptop (about 4 millions years on mine according to the latest number of hashes needed 2^68).
So... with the promise of GPU mining (I am using OpenCL) with Ethereum - I decided to give it a try.
Please note that I am using Ubuntu 16.04
- Installing the Ethereum wallet was a breeze - quite easy to set up - and interestingly - as part of the set up - I was asked if I wanted to buy some ETH from my Bicoin wallet
- Of course... I did it - and issued a small transaction from my bitcoin client to the given Ethereum address
- I issued a small payment of 0.005 BTC (3.74 USD) with a transaction fee of 0.00007329 BTC (0.05 USD). I sent my transaction on 18/11/2016 at 16:39 - and at the time of writing this post, i.e., more than 15 hours later, my transaction is still unconfirmed in the memory pool! If you understand the transaction fees concept and how miners can decide to do whatever they want... it is not surprising that my transaction would be at the bottom of stack. This simply proves, if any proof was needed, that Bitcoin is not ready for micro-payments, and probably will never be until this ASIC mining non-sense - must using ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit) is sorted out
- While waiting for my transaction from BTC to ETH to go through... if it ever happens.... I decided to run the mining software in GPU mode, Ethermine
- I recommend to recompile from the source directly - it is the easiest and fastest way to get going
