Bitmain Antminer K5 7 Days of Mining Profitability & auto-exchange mining CKB to BTC on NiceHash testing

7 days of mining profitability with the Bitmain Antminer K5

The Bitmain Antminer K5 is a Nervos CKB ASIC miner, which means it is a device that ONLY mines the eaglesong algorithm. Currently, it is difficult to exchange Nervos CKBytes for BTC or any other coins if you are a US citizen. After reviewing the mining profitability of the new Bitmain Antminer K5, I will elaborate on my auto-exchange mining experiment with the K5.

In the last seven days my Bitmain Antminer K5 has mined about 19000 CKB coins, and at current prices this translates to about $95 dollars.

The Bitmain Antminer K5 has been a steady and reliable mining rig, for example here is the mining performance when measured from the antminer cgminer dashboard.

I have always mined Nervos CKB on F2pool, it’s been a great experience from mining on the Nervos testnet and getting rewarded in mainnet tokens to mining the CKB mainnet such as Lina. I am now going to test the mining results and profitability when connecting my Nervos CKB ASIC miner, the Bitmain Antminer K5 to NiceHash. NiceHash will automatically convert my CKB coins mined into BTC, and I will be paid out in BTC. Several VoskCoin community members have reported issues connecting their Antminer K5 to @NiceHash. We are going to be using these configuration settings below.

URL - stratum+tcp://eaglesong.usa.nicehash.com:3381
Worker - 37QrLxbUL98gacQhp7M1rP9mYcnNs2gKgT.k5
Password - x

After using the exact settings that NiceHash specifies, our Bitmain Antminer K5 eaglesong ASIC miner was unable to connect to NiceHash


HOWEVER, what is very odd, is that after adding the EU stratum for NH, the Antminer K5 was able to connect to the USA stratum? Perhaps it was the additional miner reboot and attempt to connect to their server that caused this, either way it is very unusual and not common miner behavior.

Using a service like NiceHash where they pay out to their internal wallet as opposed to directly to your external wallet, it is critical that we are being credited and rewarded on their mining pool AND that it is showing relevant mining profitability in our user dashboard.

Here’s the issue, the miner is connecting to NiceHash now, but it is not a steady and reliable connection between their mining pool and our mining rig. The miner is bouncing between being profitable and registering zero profitability.
Initially our NiceHash dashboard showed the Bitmain Antminer K5 connecting properly.

However now the Antminer K5 shows the NiceHash pool as being “alive” but it is either stalling where it is not submitting shares to any pools, or actually submitting a few shares to the backup pool in the miner config (f2pool) and not registering as mining on NiceHash as measured through the actual miner as well as the NiceHash dashboard.

To further elaborate on the above connection and mining issues, it will reconnect to the NiceHash eaglesong mining pool, and then jump in profitability giving you a wild dashboard readout saying hey your Bitmain Antminer K5 is mining hundreds of dollars per day! In reality we know this cannot be true.

Another odd piece of information is the high count of shares submitted to the EU stratum on NiceHash from our Bitmain Antminer K5, perhaps NH is currently not setup to handle the high hashrate from the new eaglesong ASIC miners like the Bitmain Antminer K5. We will be sending them this data and hope that they can solve the issue. The early mining profitability of a brand new ASIC mining class is imperative to getting a good return on your investment or ROI, where your number one focus should be breaking even on your mining rig as soon as possible.

For reference here is our 1.13 Th/s Bitmain Antminer K5 Nervos CKB Eaglesong ASIC miner
Imgur

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I’ve gone with Sparkpool and have 2800 coins first 24 hours, it seems to be getting 10gh less poolside than stated on the K5 itself. Seems to be nice and stable though, would be nice to be able to overclock!

Could you post a screenshot of your earnings and/or link out to your pool results?

That’s with about 30mins of downtime due to the wife wanting me to move it to the shed due to the noise; it’s a bit of a higher pitch than usual unfortunately! (The miner not the wife).

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Seems to be getting 1.13Th/s poolside now but reads 1.15Th/s at the miner

Please enable xnsub at the end of the stratum line. Example: stratum+tcp://eaglesong.usa.nicehash.com:3381#xnsub

This way, you enable extranonce subscription. Let us know if this fixed the issue for you.

Unfortunately due to the Bitmain Antminer K5 firmware (mining software) the mining rig does not support extranonce subscription, which is how NiceHash bounces your miner from different hashpower orders and basically runs their hashpower marketplace. This is why our Antminer K5 miners can connect to NiceHash for a short period, but then run into issues. This is unfortunate because this would be a very unique addition to Nervos CKB mining as no pools offer a CKB->BTC payout option.

Antminer K5 is now supported on NiceHash!
https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/antminer-k5-is-now-compatible-with-nicehash