Claymore Dual Miner & Ethereum/altcoin guide

Science, Engineering, & Tech Cryptocurrencies
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In this thread I'm going to explain the hows and whys of mining alt coins for yourself.


Mining right now ^

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.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433925.0 <--- Official thread to claymore's Dual miner. Supports AMD and Nvidia
https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases <-- Recommended local wallet for ethereum.
http://sia.tech/apps/ <-- recommended local wallet for SIA Coin.

https://poloniex.com/ <-- suggested site for trading different cryptocoins.
https://whattomine.com/coins <-- 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.

15 Likes
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Hmm, getting an error, no matter what Pool address I put in the exe always says it is invalid, any tips? (yes I have removed the quotation marks)

Edit:

Their should be no dash between -epooleth and the address, im mining now!

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This post on stackexchange explains the reason I, and perhaps most people who do mine ethereum, mine ethereum. This, and that it's another rapidly growing altcoin.

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Thanks, small typo there. Corrected.
There are more advanced commands that one can use as well, those are explained in the readme file in the miner.
When mining two coins you should turn the intensity of your second coin up until it starts affecting your Ethereum hashrate, then you know you're fully utilizing your GPU.

A strange sidenote though for my Fiji cards mining two coins at the same time increases my Eth hashrate as well.

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Essentially Ethereum is made to really only be minable on very flexible hardware, ASICs and so on are very good at one task but aren't very flexible, hence why GPUs are a dominating Eth.

I think it's good for us gamers in the long run that mining is done on the same GPUs that we use to play games on as it helps keep the market growing to let AMD and Nvidia continue making beastly GPUs for us in the future.

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Where are you putting these sorry?

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Like this.

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

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

Just put them at the start in your bat file.

1 Like
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ah okay, cheers.

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I'm mining just ETH on a 290x, do you recommend dual mining? I don't mine 24/7 as its my main rig.

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BTC$ 2900 usd
ETH $350

Screenshot_20170610-160821.png1440x2560 349 KB

From electron to moniez
Lbry
To xchange
To btc
To bank

[Album] Electrons To Greenbacks

Sidenote, can u dualmine lbry and anythung else?

Ah eth an lbry perfecto

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You actually need 'setx ' before those commands in the bat, but then they will work

1 Like
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Yes, going to edit that. +1

14

:stuck_out_tongue: sorry for being so pedantic, I am just setting up mining and have found these errors in your tut. Non the less it definelty condenses the unyeildly origional post about the miner so thanks. As on Thursday one of my friends told me about Eth, we attempted to set up geth, parity and geniol a number of times, on saturday morning after trying overnight to get it to mine I gave up. And as if by chance maybe only 30mins after telling my friend I saw this post, and got it working straight away, one spooky coincidence, do you have an Eth adress? I would be happy to mine it for a couple cycles.

Cheers :stuck_out_tongue:

15

Hi there,
all shares i get, get rejected (100% rejection rate).

I used Nanopools tool to create a config for plain Ethereum, no dual mining jet.

My suspicion was that my wallet-address isn't legit.

Mist is still downloading blocks and will probably take a week so Mists Address will obviously not work jet.
Just for testing i used my poloniex deposit address and still only rejections.
I also tried myEthereumWallet web client thingy which yielded me the most success so far. Only DCR rejected me all the time.
The pool should be an EU pool too so there shouldn't be a reason to reject me either.

Any ideas ?

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poloniex wallets won't work, those are strictly for deposit / withdrawal and mostly cant used for miners.

maybe look for jaxx multi coin wallet and try that.

standard config-file

    -epool POOLADRESS:PORT
    -ewal WALLETADRESS
    -eworker LOGIN.WORKER
    -epsw x 
    -dpool 2ndPOOLADRESS:PORT
    -dwal 2ndWALLETADRESS
    -dpsw x 
    -allpools 1
    -eworker LOGIN.WORKER
1 Like
17

I've been back and forth on getting in on Bitcoin with an Antminer, but I worry it's already as high as it'll go so there's no point. But I know that's not the topic here.

I have a Clevo laptop with a gtx1080 and 7700k. Worth it to start mining? I'm not currently paying electricity.

18

I have been using my poloniex wallet to mine right onto from a pool.
It depends a bit on the coin, but your deposit address is static and is linked to you, but with poloniex there is a minimum amount that needs to be deposited before it shows up.

Still mining directly to a local wallet is the safest, one think I suggest when using a local wallet is to open GETH with CMD and using the -fastsync command so you don't have to download the entire blockchain, which takes a lot of time and space on your storage.
Another thing I suggest you do is to use an SSD for the blockchain, lots of small files can really make HDDs struggle.

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Mining on laptops are generally a bad idea, since laptops aren't design for 24/7 loads and tend to run hot.

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It's a pretty thick laptop with pretty large fans. Runs cool when gaming.

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Nobody can stop you and it can certainly mine, it just isn't suggested.
Feel free to try it though if you want to learn a bit about how miners and crypto works.