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| layout | title | subtitle | tags | gh-badge | ||||||
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| post | Monero Miners Research | Researching the miners |
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The goal of this research is to gather information on people who run mining cryptocurrency software and map their behavior regarding system administration with the emphasis on security practices. For this purpose, an online questionnaire was created and is available in the Appendix Figure C. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first work that studies cryptocurrency miners. Specific research questions are based on cryp- tocurrency mining setup patterns, used software and problematic areas regarding computer and data security in general.
8.1 Research questions
The survey was designed around seven question groups. Some of them were shown only if the participant chose the appropriate answer.
- G01 - Introductory information
- G02 - Mining setup
- G03 - Mining software
- G04 - Pool choice
- G05 - Windows platform
- G06 - Linux platform
- G07 - Demographics
Following this pattern, five research questions were set:
- R1: Who are Monero miners in general? What are their typical mining setups?
- R2: Which types of software do participants use as operating systems, management, and mining tools?
- R3: What security and update policies miners follow?
- R4: Do miners suffer from security incidents like compromised mining operation? How do they deal with them?
- R5: What are the factors that affect pool choice?
8.2 Participants and survey’s background
As mentioned in the Chapter 5, the survey was not hosted on third party servers, but instead on dedicated VPS running Lime Survey self-hosted software with HTTPS interface using signed Letsencrypt certificates. This means that data exchanged between participants and survey software stays only between these two parties, so Google or other big data companies cannot analyze them. To allow extended privacy features, Tor and proxy connections were allowed, but each participant had to solve the CAPTCHA before starting the survey.
8.2.1 Methodology
Data collection method was online only and was using the survey website software. Participants selection was based on opportunity sampling, links for the research were shared among dedicated Reddit Monero community, Facebook Mining groups as well as Cryptocur- rency forums. This form was distributed together with the Monero User Research survey in mentioned mining communities. Study limi- tations are described in the Section 6.3. To reduce nonresponse rate, participants were asked only to fill out parts that were significant for them, e.g., Windows OS part stayed hidden in the form if the user selected that he/she used Linux OS only. The data from the respondents were collected from 11.15.2018 to 01.27.2019. The complete survey is attached in the Appendix Figure C.
8.3 Collected data
Before entering the survey, each participant had to pass the bot test by entering the correct CAPTCHA, which resulted in 323 participants of the questionnaire in total. As for survey data cleansing, following measurements for valid dataset were taken:
- Partially answered or unanswered questionnaires were not taken into account (261 out of 323).
- Respondents that filled out the survey in less than two minutes were discarded (0 out of 323).
- Responses with more than four entries with the same IP were filtered (0 out of 323).
- Responses containing invalid answers, e.g., not using Monero or repeating the same answer pattern in multiple submissions (2 out of 323).
Usingg eoiplookuppackage in Ubuntu on the filtered dataset, most of the responses were from the USA (10 out of 60) as well as from the Czech Republic (10 out of 60) followed by Germany (6 out of 60). Detailed list of countries with the corresponding number of responses is available in the Appendix Table C.1.
8.4 Results
Upcoming pages are based on the final filtered dataset with 60 re- sponses of people who voluntarily entered the research based on opportunity sampling.
General information
When asked about the motivation for mining Monero, two-thirds of the respondents 67% (40 out of 60) think about Monero as an investment, but also as a way to gain some profit from mining cryptocurrencies 62% (37 out of 60). Although Monero is not considered to be more profitable to mine by the majority in the dataset 77% (46 out of 60), almost half of the miners 47% (28 out of 60) favor this cryptocurrency due to its mining characteristics CPU minable and the fact that they directly help to secure the network by mining 60% (36 out of 60). Note that the reasons for mining Monero are biased by the way the respondents in the dataset were selected. In general, there would be a higher percentage of the cryptocurrency miners that care only for the profitability rather than cryptocurrency features [68].
8.3 Mining setup question.
Gathering information about mining setups was designed as a multiple- choice question where every choice was described in detail as illus- trated in the Figure 8.3.
Even through dataset cleansing, from the final 60 respondents, 15 of them chose both Regular PC only and Mining rig option. Therefore, only 45 respondents are taken into account in this part.
8.4 Mining types comparison.
When asked about mining setup, the majority of the miners mine on their PC 33% (15 out of 45) or also on mining rig 69% (31 out of 45), but there is also a small portion of miners 18% (8 out of 45) that use their employer’s hardware and electricity to run their mining operation. On the other side, only two of the respondents mentioned mining on a VPS instance and no one selected cloud mining or botnet mining as their way to mine Monero.
8.5 Mining setup properties.
97% (58 out of 60) of respondents shared their current hashrate with median hashrate value being 4.4Kh/s. This hashrate represents a typ- ical setup with 5 high-performance GPUs (AMD RX 480 8GB with 800-850h/s) or 7 high-performance CPUs (AMD Ryzen 7 1700 with 600-650h/s). Majority of miners mine in their property 87% (52 out of 60) and set up their mining rigs 93% (56 out of 60). The operating system is not dominant nor on the Windows side 65% (39 out of 60) nor the Linux part 55% (33 out of 60) described in the Figure 8.5. This is mainly because of multiplatformity of mining software and availability of guides for mining setups.
8.6 Mining setup preferences.
Miners generally tend to update their rigs 70% (42 out of 60) as well as clean them 52% (31 out of 60) but refrain from additional infras- tructure costs like buying a UPS 23% (14 out of 60) as shown in the Figure 8.7.
8.7 Mining software preference.
The choice of mining software impacts mining profitability as well as the number of shares that are donated to the developer (if any). As described in the Chapter 7.2, most popular mining software falls into open source with great moderation regarding code updates from the crypto community in general. This follows results from the dataset where XMR Stak project, that is the most active on Github, is also the most preferred way to run the mining operation 78% (47 out of 60 miners).
XMRig is used less 30% (18 out of 60), but more often in combination with other mining software like previously mentioned XMR Stak. From closed source miners, only MinerGate was mentioned 3% (2 out of 60). A small portion of miners also solo mine 12% (7 out of 60) using the official wallet software. In general, miners in the dataset tend to mine in pools 83% (50 out of 60), some of them try to combine mining approaches where the primary way of obtaining the coins is by pool mining, but they also try their luck with solo mining 13% (8 out of 60). True solo miner was represented by only one specimen.
Pool choice
Pool choice itself has the biggest impact on the final payout for the miner as described in the Chapter 7.1. This depends on the method of reward distribution, total hashrate of the pool and minimal payout. Note that often pools also have fees which are deducted from the number of coins mined by the miner. When asked about pool preferences, two larger mining pools were often mentioned Monerooceanstream 23% (14 out of 60) and nanopool.org 23% (14 out of 60). Important preference factors for choosing pool were pool fees 87% (52 out of 60), pool security history 77% (46 out of 60), total hashrate 73% (44 out of 60) and minimal payout 62%(37 out of 60). Least important are additional features to the pool like mobile apps 23% (14 out of 60) or anti-botnet policy 35% (21 out of 60).
Windows platform
Out of 60 miners in the dataset, 39 of them use Windows as their choice of OS for mining. Regarding periodic updates, only a small part of miners 26% (10 out of 39) tend to use Windows with its default update settings (automatic restart of the OS to apply updates, unattended driver updates). Majority of Windows miners 59% (23 out of 39) tend to apply updates after some time after their release and have remote access enabled. There is also a part of miners in the dataset 28% (11 out of 39) that tend to “set up and forget” with Windows update completely disabled. Setup preferences are shown in the Figure 8.8.
8.8 Windows mining setup preferences.
Linux platform
While Linux is used by 33 out of 60 miners, the majority of them tend to use Ubuntu 52% (17 out of 33) or Debian 33% (11 out of 33). The specialized OS for mining - MineOS is used by six users, least use has community derivate from RHEL, CentOS. Although information about update frequency was not submitted by all miners, many of them 42% (14 out of 33) manage updates manually, with only a small portion of other miners 18% (6 out of 33) having the process automated. Remote management is represented mainly by SSH 67% (22 out of 33) followed by VNC 9% (3 out of 33) and TeamViewer 9% (3 out of 33). Automation tools are used only by 13 miners from the dataset.
Demographics
Survey participants were mainly males 83% (50 out of 60), females 3% (2 out of 60) represented only a small portion of the dataset and some of the participants did not disclose their gender 13% (8 out of 60). Most respondents in the dataset were from the age groups 25-34 55% (33 out of 60) followed by 35-44 age group 20% (12 out of 60) as well as 18-24 18% (11 out of 60).