Mining Qubic, explained

Bitcoin mining makes a machine guess trillions of numbers and throw almost all of them away. Qubic uses useful proof of work. The network hands your machine a tiny AI candidate, called an “ant”, and your hardware trains it. When the trained ant beats the one you started with, that improvement is a solution. Solutions are checked and paid, and the work feeds Aigarth.

• Epoch: one mining week, Wednesday 12:00 UTC to the next Wednesday 12:00 UTC. Rewards settle at the end.
• it/s (iterations per second): how fast your card trains. It measures speed; money comes from solutions.
• SOL and $ per SOL: a solution, and roughly what one is worth right now.

This is the most expensive misunderstanding in the whole Discord. Someone rents a big machine, watches a huge it/s number, and cannot understand why the payout is tiny. it/s is lottery tickets per minute: more tickets improve the odds, they do not guarantee the win and do not set the prize. You are paid for solutions found and what each one is worth that week. A fast card behind a weak CPU is a race car behind a blocked fuel line.

There is no single break-even. It is your cost against this week’s rate. Two things move underneath it.

The start-of-epoch mirage. When an epoch opens almost no solutions exist yet, so the estimate divides the reward pot across nearly nothing. That is how people saw $0.46 per SOL at the opening of epoch 230. As the week fills with solutions the rate slides toward reality.

Dilution. Even if you change nothing, your earnings drop when other people start mining: more miners, more solutions, a smaller slice of the same pot. One miner watched it fall 35% in a day.

Mining Qubic pays unevenly. You are betting you will end up holding more QUBIC than if you had bought it, and that Aigarth pays off in the long run. Some epochs you win that bet, some you don’t. Size it like a bet.

• PPLNS smooths luck. In shared-reward mode payouts are averaged per share, so a modest rig looks similar to a big one over a short window. Solo mode is where strong hardware pulls ahead on the highs, and eats the lows.
• Old cards can still find solutions. That is deliberate: Qubic keeps the barrier low so many people can join.

But $/SOL still separates winners from losers. The cheap box earns similar only until you divide by what it costs to run. Raw power was never the point; cost per solution is.

The old advice was: on a rented box, skip CPU mining and let the cards work. Unlearn it. The CPU side, with the AVX-512 instructions of modern chips, now does real training work of its own. The modern setup is combo mining: both engines on, two it/s readouts, one pool.

E:229 | SHARES: 1/1 | [CUDA] 49 it/s … [AVX2] 5 it/s … GPU #0 found 148 exact ant candidates

Two servers with the same GPU and the same it/s can differ three to five times in solutions, purely because of the CPU behind the cards. The CPU must be modern, with AVX-512.

Beyond the family: at least 8 CPU cores per GPU, PCIe x8 or better (gen 3 or 4), host reliability of 99% or more, and a region that can reach the pool’s servers.

16 GB of VRAM is plenty. “How much is a 5090 earning now?” has no fixed answer: this epoch’s $/SOL times its solutions, minus rent. Measure, don’t assume.

Your own PC is free, already yours, and fine for learning and one card; it runs hot and loud. A rented cloud GPU scales, and you can pick exactly the hardware from section 06. Marketplaces people use:

• Clore.ai: decentralized, usually cheapest, crypto-friendly, mining allowed.
• Octaspace (cube.octa.computer): clean access-token flow; the good cards sell out fast.
• Vast.ai: the other big decentralized option.

Our referral link, labelled openly: if you rent on Clore anyway, signing up through clore.ai/register?ref_id=tgwpwvbi sends a few credits our way, and we spend them on mining Qubic. The hardware advice is the same either way.

Make the wallet at the official wallet site; type the address yourself, don’t follow a link someone sends you. You get two strings:

• Seed: 55 lowercase letters, the master key. Paper only. Never a screenshot, a chat or a “wallet validator” site.
• Address (Qubic ID): 60 uppercase letters. Safe to share; this is what the pool and miner use.

Give every rig its own worker name, for example QC-5070ti-a, QC-5070ti-b. If two machines share a name, the dashboard blurs them and one looks dead.

On a rented Linux box you get a web terminal. Whatever pool you choose, two rules never change: point it at your address, and launch it detached so it survives you closing the tab. With the JetSki client that looks like this:

# your 60-letter address and a unique worker name
nohup ./qubjetski-Client -wallet YOUR_ADDRESS -workername QC-a -gpu -cpu -start > miner.log 2>&1 &
sleep 4 && tail -n 20 miner.log

nohup and the trailing & detach the miner, so it keeps running after you log out. Miss them and the rig goes dark the moment you look away. For shared-reward mode add -pplns before -start; leave it off for solo.

• JetSki: the simplest. No account, one line, the least fiddly place to start.
• QLI (qubic.li): get qli-Client from dl.qubic.li/downloads, put an appsettings.json next to it with your access token and trainer settings ("cpu": true only with a real AVX-512 CPU), run ./qli-Client. QLI ships its own background-service installer.
• MinerLab: account first. Register, add your payout address, create a worker; the dashboard gives you the exact command to paste.

New epoch? Do nothing. At an epoch transition the miner idles by itself until the backend has the update, so it does not waste electricity.

In QUBIC, at the end of the epoch, to your address. Once a week. An epoch that closes on Wednesday usually pays the following Wednesday or Thursday, sometimes Friday. If the revenue tab seems to “lose” the epoch that just closed, the calculation is not finished yet; it comes back.

Because you are paid in QUBIC a week later, you hold the coin between earning it and seeing its dollar value. The price can move either way in that week. That lag is part of the bet.

Android mining exists and comes and goes with the epoch cycle. Fun to run; real solutions come from the hardware in section 06.

“Why rent at all? I would rather buy the coin.” Both sides are right. Renting out hardware gives the owner a steady income; mining is a lottery. If you only want QUBIC and hate variance, buy it: simpler and often cheaper per coin. Mine if you also want to learn the machine, contribute compute to Aigarth, and take the bet that mining nets more coins than buying. Rig owners renting instead of mining is a real signal about this week’s odds.

Anna is the reference solver for Aigarth, the system the mining is training. Right now she is being optimized, not maxed out: versions move, modes change from epoch to epoch, and the target is a model that generalizes over bluffing. For now the network asks for careful optimization over brute force.

So the winning move today is to be built and ready: the AVX-512 CPU, the combo launch, the right host, a $/SOL number you actually know, and a workflow that is reflexive. When the phase flips, the people who used the quiet window to prepare point tuned power at it from the first hour.

Setup order (once)

Wallet → seed on paper → copy 60-letter address → AVX-512 CPU + NVIDIA card → unique worker name → launch detached → measure on the dashboard.

Combo launch

nohup ./qubjetski-Client -wallet YOUR_ADDRESS -workername QC-a -gpu -cpu -start > miner.log 2>&1 &

Rules that keep money

Judge by $/SOL. Cost per solution = rent ÷ solutions. Start-of-epoch spikes are a mirage; dilution is real. CPU must be AVX-512. A 5070 Ti with a strong CPU beats a 4×5090 on $/SOL.

Health checks

tail -f miner.log · pgrep -f qubjetski (exactly one) · pkill -f qubjetski · nvidia-smi

Don’t panic

0 shares in the first hour is fine · frozen at rollover is backend lag · blank dashboard is a duplicate worker name · payout about a week later · miner idles between epochs on purpose.

Safety

The 55-letter seed goes nowhere but the official wallet. Pools and hosts only need the 60-letter address.

You make the calls; run the profit maths yourself. Nothing here is financial advice and nothing on this site promises returns. Questions: ask in #mining-general on the Qubic Discord. See also the network monitor and the book chapter on UPoW.