Solo mining Ergo pays off! Our experience
Is mining on your own rather than in a pool profitable? To find out, we mined Ergo solo for just over two weeks with two graphics card rigs. In this video (in French), we present the Ergo project, explain how to estimate your solo earnings with a calculator, then share our results and overclocking settings.
Video from 2022, about a test run from 2 to 19 June 2022: the figures below date from that time. See "What about today?" at the end of the article.
Ergo, a coin designed for GPU miners
Ergo was launched in 2019 with the aim of following Bitcoin's philosophy and offering true proof of work. Its mining algorithm, Autolykos, is "memory hard" and ASIC-resistant: it is built for graphics cards. Like every coin, ERG was not spared by the market downturn: it was worth just under €2 at the time of the test, after climbing as high as €14 or €15.
Ergo is also a smart contract blockchain, like Ethereum, with a whole ecosystem of decentralised applications (ErgoMixer, ErgoDEX, Ergo Raffle…), NFT marketplaces and a very full roadmap. To store your ERG you can use the Nautilus wallet, or even a Ledger; the coin is available on exchanges such as KuCoin or Gate.io.
Software and pools for mining Ergo
Watch the unit: on Autolykos, hashrate is also expressed in MH/s, but the values are not the same as on Ethereum. An RTX 3060 Ti running at 60 MH/s on Ethereum will not show the same figure on Ergo, since the algorithm is different.
- Mining software: NBMiner, nanominer, TeamRedMiner, T-Rex Miner, among others;
- Pools: 2Miners, Nanopool, HeroMiners, WoolyPooly… or CruxPool, a French pool that offers a short tutorial to get started and a server that is good for latency.
Pool or solo: what the calculator says
Small and medium-sized miners usually mine in a pool: it aggregates the hashrate of all its members, and each block found is shared out in proportion to each miner's hashrate. Solo, you mine on your own: when you find a block you keep the whole reward, but luck plays an even bigger role.
Before starting, we entered our hashrate into a mining calculator: about 2,400 MH/s on Ergo with two rigs, one with 7 RTX 3060 Ti and one with 8 RTX 3070. The result for one month:
- in a pool: about 176 ERG, i.e. $349;
- solo: about 3 blocks, i.e. 189 ERG or $375.
In theory, solo is therefore more profitable, and you don't need a mining farm: two small rigs are enough.
The result: 4 blocks in 17 days
We mined solo from 2 to 19 June, i.e. 16 to 17 days. We found 4 blocks of about 60 ERG each, the equivalent of about €470 in two weeks, whereas the calculator predicted 3 blocks per month.
To measure luck, you look at the personal luck percentage: below 100% you have been luckier than normal, and the closer you get to 0%, the luckier you have been. It is not very intuitive, but at 58% we had better luck than average.
Overclocking settings for Ergo
On Ergo there is no need to touch the memory clock: keep the same one as on Ethereum. What changes is the core clock, which needs to be raised. The best settings we found: 1,600 on the RTX 3090 and 1,800 on the RTX 3080. It is paradoxical, since the core clock is lower on Ethereum, but in the end power consumption is not higher.
- RTX 3070: about 178 MH/s for 120 to 125 W. Hashrate also depends on the memory: around 145 to 150 MH/s with Hynix memory, 165 to 170 MH/s with Samsung;
- Value for money: the RTX 3070 cards hold their own, the RTX 3080 does well too, while the RTX 3090 is a bit expensive for what it delivers.
Another plus: the cards run cooler. The GPU stays below 60 °C and the memory around 80 °C or less, whereas it climbs close to 100 °C on some cards when mining Ethereum.
A HiveOS tip for switching from one coin to another without changing the overclocking by hand: in the Overclocking tab, duplicate your profile (your Ethereum one, for example), choose the algorithm you want, enter your values and save. You can then activate the profile straight away, or leave the option that selects it automatically by algorithm ticked.
Mining difficulty, the figure to watch
What matters most is not the dollar value at a given moment but the mining difficulty, which determines how many coins you accumulate for a given hashrate. On Ergo it was about 2.23 P, fairly stable since November between 2 and 2.5 P, after a peak of 4.5 P during the previous year's bull run. As a result, you were accumulating roughly as much Ergo as in 2021, which was nevertheless a very profitable year.
What about today?
Since Ethereum moved to proof of stake in September 2022, graphics card mining income has collapsed, and the figures in this video are out of date. The method still applies: watch the difficulty, compare pool and solo with a calculator, and keep in mind the luck factor of solo mining.
To choose the right pool, read our article How to choose your mining pool, and for the background to this test, our article What to do after Ethereum's move to Proof-of-Stake?. To mine today, browse our ASIC miners, or contact us for advice.
This article summarises the content of the video and is not investment advice.