Mining on testnet

Question

I am very new to Ethereum. I have setup two machines, a Windows 10 machine and a Ubuntu 17 Server in the Cloud. Both of these nodes are synced to the testnet.

But when I start mining on these to machines using miner.start(2), I am not getting any ethers on the Ubuntu machine.

Below is the log from the Ubuntu machine;

INFO [06-29|10:00:22] Imported new chain segment               blocks=1 txs=3 mgas=0.295 elapsed=19.224ms  mgasps=15.330 number=1207253 hash=7777de…72e5ce
INFO [06-29|10:00:22] Commit new mining work                   number=1207254 txs=0 uncles=0 elapsed=1.124ms
INFO [06-29|10:01:14] Imported new chain segment               blocks=1 txs=0 mgas=0.000 elapsed=11.038ms  mgasps=0.000  number=1207254 hash=14ed4a…c924ab
INFO [06-29|10:01:14] Commit new mining work                   number=1207255 txs=6 uncles=0 elapsed=8.730ms
INFO [06-29|10:01:28] Imported new chain segment               blocks=1 txs=6 mgas=0.195 elapsed=14.005ms  mgasps=13.895 number=1207255 hash=433ba1…e37dbf
INFO [06-29|10:01:28] Commit new mining work                   number=1207256 txs=0 uncles=0 elapsed=2.002ms

Please advise on what am I missing here.

Answer 1

The issue is simply that despite being a testnet, there is about .05GH/s of hashing power currently on Ropsten which can make it impractical for small computers to mine their own ETH.

You can get around this issue in a couple ways:

1. Use a faucet. A few can be found on google, and will give you a few ETH for free.
2. Use the Kovan testnet. This requires you to use the parity client, but it does not use proof of work and instead has a semi-centralized system for distributing test ETH.