Environmentally Responsible Cryptocurrency - Part 2

Getting Software Running + Performance

December 31, 2017 (originally posted on LinkedIn Publishing)
First, if you haven't read the first part of this series of articles, you can go the beginning here: Environmentally Response Cryptocurrency.
Also, note that this was originally part of the first article. I'm breaking these up into separate article to improve readability and follow up progression.
Progress has been slow doing setup + experimentation on Raspberry Pi Zero W for the operations related to Cryptocurrency . Without some performance investigation, it will be tough to know where the time is being spent. Someone on the Magi Slack has a really good suggestion which was: get everything running on Linux and then copy over all the initialized state, blockchain, etc. over to the RPi. I've begun this and the speed difference between running on an Ubuntu VM compared to RPi Zero W is astounding. It really makes you appreciate the speed difference between a modern Intel chipset vs a relatively modern power efficient ARM. Even though is is 4 cores and 2.8 Ghz (in a VM) vs 1 core at 1Ghz, it is considerably more than an 12x speedup. Of course, it is at a 100X greater power cost!
It may be that the lower practical limit for running the wallet application is above what the RPiZeroW can provide. This is only technically necessary for solo mining (outside of a pool). Perhaps a practical workaround for solo mining could be to run the wallet on a more performant (but still energy efficient system) and then run the miners on lower spec hardware.
Speaking of more performant hardware, I've been looking around at some other hardware platforms. I ordered a RPi3 Model B (based on BCM2837) which, in addition to being 4 core and 64 bit, uses the 40nm process compared to the ZeroW's BCM2835 at 65nm. Some other interesting boards are:

  •  51mm square
  • Allwinner A33 Quad-core A7 SoC
  • 512MB DDR3 RAM.
  • CPU: Allwinner H3, Quad-core Cortex-A7 Up to 1.2GHz
  • RAM: 512MB DDR3 RAM
  • Storage: 8GB eMMC
  • WiFi: 802.11b/g/n
But by the new year, I had two RaspberryPi Zero W's set up to mine XMG at a brutally slow hashrate of 0.7 kh/s. They report to a wallet set up on a Linux VM for now. I'll probably move the wallet to a RPi3.
Also, I'll look at the power consumption of Pi3 vs ZeroW. I recently ordered a USB power meter, this AVHzY Model CT-2.
We'll see how it does. I'll calibrate it with my power supply and hopefully it will provide an easy way to track the power consumption while I'm experimenting. I expect the Pi3 will be more power efficient with 4 threads per watt.
You can find the next article in the series here: Environmentally Responsible Cryptocurrency - Part 3

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