In this thread I’m going to explain the hows and whys of mining alt coins for yourself.
The rise of alt coins happened after bitcoins were taken over by hardware that was made to only mine bitcoins, they did it a lot more effectively than GPUs so the average person couldn’t really mine bitcoins anymore.
Altcoins like Ethereum were often made to be hard to design dedicated mining hardware for so the average person could mine undisturbed by big corps, Ethereum does this by being heavily memory based (hence the high vram requirement). which doesn’t lend itself well to scaling.
Terms used.
Alt coin = any other cryptocoin than bitcoin.
Wallet = place that you store your coins
Miner = software that does computational work for the coin’s network which you get coins from doing
Hashrate = How much computational work is being done, (Different coins cannot be compared hashrate wise)
Pool = People that collaborate with mining, acting like one big network to increase the odds of getting coins, alternative is solo mining which is a bit like playing lottery.
Blockchain = A database on all the transactions and other information that has occured for a given coin
Suggested software list.
https://www.hwinfo.com/ ← great program for monitoring your system, GPU power draw, temps and so on.
Claymore's Dual Ethereum AMD+NVIDIA GPU Miner v15.0 (Windows/Linux) <— Official thread to claymore’s Dual miner. Supports AMD and Nvidia
Releases · ethereum/mist · GitHub ← Recommended local wallet for ethereum.
Sia - Decentralized data storage ← recommended local wallet for SIA Coin.
https://poloniex.com/ ← suggested site for trading different cryptocoins.
WhatToMine - Crypto coins mining profit calculator compared to Ethereum Classic ← Easy to use calculators to compare profits between different coins, hardware costs, power consumption and so on.
https://nanopool.org/ nice collection of pools for different coins.
First thing one ought to do is to get the wallets for whatever coin you’re thinking about mining, local wallets can be very slow to sync with the network (They have to download the entire blockchain to your storage)
You can also mine directly to whatever you use to trade with ( Example Poloniex)
To set up Claymore’s dual miner you first download whatever is the latest one from one of the links in the main thread.
Unzip the file to whatever you want, you do not have to install anything to just mine, after unzipping you should see something like this.
To configure your mining information you only need to open the “start” bat in notepad, right click and edit.
After opening you should see something like this.
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool us1.ethpool.org:3333 -ewal 0xD69af2A796A737A103F12d2f0BCC563a13900E6F -epsw x -dpool stratum+tcp://dcr.suprnova.cc:3252 -dwal Redhex.my -dpsw x
The wallet address that is already there is Claymore’s, so if you want you could donate computation power to him if you just want to test it from the get go.
-epool = Your Ethereum pool address.
-ewal = Your Ethereum wallet address.
-epsw = Password for Ethereum pool, use “x” as password.
-dpool = Your second coin’s pool address.
-dwal = your second coin’s wallet address ( can be worker name as well if pool supports it)
-dcoin = select second coin to mine in dual mode. Possible options are “-dcoin dcr”, “-dcoin sc”, “-dcoin lbc”, “-dcoin pasc”. Default value is “dcr”.
These are the minimum commands you need to change to get your miner working.
If you’re using AMD GPU’s it’s good practice to set these commands in the list first.
setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
Something to make filling in the bat file a bit easier.
(remember to remove any quotation marks)
EthDcrMiner64.exe -epool eth-eu1.nanopool.org:9999 -ewal “Insert your Eth wallet adress here” -epsw x -dpool stratum+tcp://sia-eu1.nanopool.org:7777 -dcoin sc -dwal “insert your second coin’s wallet address here” -dpsw x
Save it then just double click the start.bat file to run the miner.
I will expand and edit this post
(edit) Feel free to post pictures of your rig, hashrates and what hardware you’re using, overclocking/underclocking voltmods and so on.)
(Edit2) You can pause mining on individual cards by pressing the number on your keyboard that equates to the GPU’s ID number, aka 0 for GPU0, 3 for GPU3. and so on.