I am fairly new to the whole concept of ETH and mining. Firstly, I know that my setup is weak for mining, but I wanted to get some knowledge and experience before investing money in mining…
My "setup" is a MacBook Pro 15 early 2015. I know, I know. Not the best way to mine ETH…
I have installed go-ethereum, created an account, I ran geth –rpc for about 3 days, it went to block no. arount 3900000 (I'm giving You this information, I don't know if it is relevant).
After that I started mining. It's been another few days of mining, and when I do geth attach and I check the amount, both commands, either this one: eth.getBalance(eth.coinbase), or this one: web3.fromwei(eth.getbalance(eth.coinbase) ether) are both returning 0.
Does that mean that I haven't dug up even a 0,000000000000000000001 ETH, or am I doing something completely wrong?
Best Answer
Correct, you have not mined anything in your time mining. You won't see any balance (not even 0.000000000000000000001 ETH) until you mine a full block, doing it the way you're doing.
Doing it that way is "mining solo", and you won't get anything until you get a whole block, but you'll get the whole block reward (5 ETH).
The other way to do it is to do "pool mining", which is many people pooling their computing power to find a block (using a completely separate piece of software), and when one is found, the reward is divided among them.
With a less powerful computer, you're probably better off joining a pool and getting some coins trickling in, rather than hoping you hit the jackpot solo mining.