Yesterday @picokernel has reported about bug being descovered in steemd regarding the use of multiple threads for mining Steem, a bug found by a user of the Russian Golos platform. It seems that although the hashrate is being reported properly by the miner when using multiple threads, starting with Steem 0.14.2, the bug caused the actual speed to be just like if you are just using a single thread. That fact and the mining-witness queue being dominated by just 2 users that apparently use private GPU miners to mine Steem has made pretty much everyone give up on even trying to mine with a CPU.
After the bug was discovered and a fix posted I have patched and compiled from the Windows source repository maintained by @alphabeta to give mining another try - https://github.com/alphab3ta/steem. Now, a day later after I started mining to try the fix, with about 35000 hps (10 core Xeon CPU running at 20 threads), I still haven't found a single block. Some people that have also tried the patch have reported successfully getting a block, so luck plays a role here too. My point is that even with this bug fixed and an improvement of the competitiveness of CPU mining, it is still not very viable to even try to compete with the 14 GTX-1080 GPU's that @nobody says he is using for his supercomputing miners along with his private GPU miner currently mining Steem.
Meanwhile @alphabeta has also released a compiled Windows binary of the patched Steemd and has also added the patch to the source code of his repository, so if you want to give it a try you can download it from https://github.com/alphab3ta/steem/releases
I'll probably leave the computer mining for a couple of more hours, though after that I will stop the mining...
If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.
