For all those who don't know, Bitcoin mining is a way of using your own computer to crunch numbers for the virtual currency known as Bitcoins.
Essentially, your computer crunches number and gets paid for this number crunching with a small amount of Bitcoins. (I know this is an oversimplification, but it is the general idea.)
Although technically, a CPU can mine bitcoins, a GPU is far more efficient.
For reasons that are a bit complicated, AMD GPU's are quite a bit better at bitcoin mining than NVIDIA ones (although NVIDIA ones can still work well). As a result, those with good AMD GPU's will earn the highest amount of bitcoins.
However that does not mean that bitcoin mining is not worth it for people with other video cards.
In an effort to support Logan and the rest of the teksyndicate/RTW team, we have decided to start a mining pool and direct all the profits to them.
Here is how to get started:
- go to teksyndicate.com/bitcoin
- Download a wallet client. This acts as a way to record how many bitcoins your work is generating. Unless you already know what you are doing (and have a weird specific need, bitcoin-Qt is probably the best to use. It can be found here: http://bitcoin.org/ (download link in the top right corner)
- Download a GUI miner. Think of this is the program that lets you actually mine the Bitcoins. It can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/?23q67zig9hw03l4 (there are others available but this one is as good as any)
- Install and run both of them.
- In the GUI miner (the smaller window), you will see a series of fields and dropdown boxes. Set the server to 'BTC Guild (any)', Set the device to your GPU (it should be on that by default). This may be just a random string of letters and numbers, but just choose the one that's not your CPU.
For the flags, if you have an AMD GPU, type in "-v -w128" (no quotation marks and include the space).
For an NVIDIA, use "-cuda"
For the CPU affinity checkbox, tick all or all but one. The more you tick, the slower your computer will be but faster it will mine.
If you are just browsing the net or anything, leaving one core free will be more than enough.
You should now start to see a number in the bottom right corner of the window. This is how quickly you are doing calculations. The higher this number, the more bitcoins you will make per time period.
6.In the wallet client (the other window), you should see a green bar at the bottom that says 'synchronizing with network'. This is normal and will probably take a while to complete. Until it completes, you cant actually receive any bitcoins and you wont be working at your maximum rate.
7. Mine!!! You are now done and are free to mine. If you follow the steps above, you will be putting a proportion of you bitcoins into a pool which will then either be used to improve the efficiency of the bitcoin mining operation or just given to teksyndicate.
Note: for games and things, you will want to turn off the mining as it uses all your GPU power. To stop, just exit the two programs. You can mine when you want and it can work overnight or just in the background when you are browsing the net.
Also, it is entirely safe and legal, so you have nothing to worry about for those who are concerned about that stuff.
Happy Mining!
UPDATE: Please place this file into your GUIMiner main folder before starting mining: http://www.mediafire.com/view/?cdcx79ocec2onvh
That file removes any possibility to network throttling packets from being sent to the server.
UPDATE: We are no longer using slush's pool and have moved to the BTC Guild (any) server. Please change your usernames from using periods in it (.) to underscores ( _ ). Also the password is syncronized between all miners to 123. From here on you will only have to inform me on this topic how many usernames you need for how many GPUs you plan on using. If your TS name ends in a letter, it will go name, name1, name2 etc. If it ends in a number, it will go namea, nameb, namec, etc. When you change over to BTC Guild (any), click "Refresh Balance and insert API token dedf8f7f13f2db2e532f888dd5f81e6b in the window that pops up. This will tell you how much BTC we have earned.