- Joined
- Jul 22, 2017
So you have a computer and electricity you don't pay for? Maybe some servers sitting in a datacenter that normally run idle? Just need some extra heat this winter but don't want to buy a new heater? Well turn those machines into a quarter printer with this handy tutorial.
CPU Mining (XMR)
Monero is king here. Using the memory-hard CryptoNight algorithim it makes use of the fast L2 cache of your CPU. GPU mining is possible (using your VRAM) but typically not competitive against other coins.
Wallet: https://getmonero.org/downloads/
Miner: https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/releases
Pool List: http://moneropools.com/
Command Cheatsheet: edit your config.txt then just run it
Performance Tips: Setting low thread priority to the miner will prevent the miner from lagging your computer.
"The most you should ever use is the number of CPU cores you have. The most you should use, for max performance and efficiency, is the size of your CPU's level 2 cache, divided by 2MB." -- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4b9w1l/mining_how_many_threads/d179wg7/
Notes: Because of the inherently anonymous nature of XMR you can't actually identify the sending address when you receive a transaction. Exchanges issue PaymentIDs to track where to credit deposits to, so be certain to include a "PaymentID" along with the Address. Sometimes the PaymentID and Address are combined into a "Integrated Address", in this case a separate PaymentID is not needed. PaymentIDs are otherwise optional, and not needed when withdrawing to your own desktop wallet.
A note about video cards
Mining on video cards make use of the parallel computing API offered by your graphic card vendor, OpenCL for AMD, and CUDA for NVIDIA. Unlike 3D graphics APIs (eg. Direct3D, OpenGL, Vulkan) which are implement both on NVIDIA and AMD cards, the parallel computing APIs used are completely incompatible. AMD cards are usually more popular due to their price and power usage.
Do not set low thread priority to GPU miners. The speed at which your CPU can send commands to the GPU is very critical for good hashrates. GPU miners should not be creating high enough CPU load to be a desktop performance issue. It is very important you set low thread priority to your CPU miner if you're mining both CPU/GPU at the same time as the CPU miner will end up blocking your GPU miners thread.
AMD Video Card Mining (ETH)
Most coins mine best on AMD. In recent history the most stable coin to mine has been Ethereum (ETH) which uses the Ethash algo.
Miner: https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases
Wallet: https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
Pool List: https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/wiki/software/pools
Notes: ETH and ETC can be mined with the same software, needs different pool/wallet. ethminer supports both OpenCL and CUDA.
NVIDIA Video Card Mining (ZEC)
Equihash-based coins like Zcash (ZEC) work well on NVIDIA and in my personal experience can be mined with almost zero performance loss during general desktop usage (by contrast, a XMR GPU miner can borderline hard-lock your desktop).
Miner: https://github.com/nicehash/nheqminer/releases
Wallet: https://z.cash/download.html (I haven't had issue mining to an exchange deposit address with this coin)
Pool List: https://zcash.flypool.org/ & https://zec.nanopool.org/
Command Example: nheqminer_16_04 -l us1-zcash.flypool.org:3333 -u ADDRESS.WORKER -p z -t 0 -cd 0 -cb 32 -ct 32
Notes: ZEC and ZCL can be mined with the same software, needs different pool/wallet. nheqminer only supports CUDA.
Exchanges
Once you've got a decent payout, you'll probably want to sell it for some BTC. Stick to the below listed exchanges, don't go anywhere else (ignoring fiat-focused exchanges). A saying in the crypto community is "if you don't hold the private keys, they're not your coins", so don't treat an exchange like a wallet. Once you've got your BTC, it's best to withdraw it into a BTC wallet like Electrum (technically a SPV client, but good enough for the masses).
Recommended Altcoin Exchanges
Binance: https://binance.com/
I don't recommend these exchanges, but they're not "scams".
Poloniex: https://poloniex.com/
Bittrex: https://bittrex.com/
Cryptopia: https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/
YoBit: https://yobit.net/
Selling Tips
It can be worth it to put your altcoin up for sale at the daily or weekly high. Prices oscillate, sometimes they spike violently up and down (often at the whim of BTCs price). Don't unload your minings at the bottom of the chart, try to have some orders up at high prices to order to catch spikes up. Exchanges (eg. Poloniex) tend to give you a better fee-rate if you're a "maker" (putting unfilled order into the book) instead of a "taker" (filling an order). So even if you want to immediately sell it can make sense to put your sell order right at the end of the sell-side.
Glossary
Altcoin/Shitcoin: any cryptocurrency that isn't bitcoin
Wallet: software you download on your computer and use to generate an address, download the blockchain (these are many GB) and send transactions. It's best to mine directly to your address, not to an exchange (unless you understand the risks).
Pool: in the beginning you could only mine on your own, but with highly competitive hashrates the need for people to pool resources together became necessary. Contributions are recorded and paid out after passing a minimum. Unless you're mining a very low hashrate coin do not attempt to solo-mine.
Miner: does math, submits "shares" to the pool to be credit to your pool balance.
Worker: Pools sometimes give you an option to add a simple name to each mining rig so you can keep track, it's just for your use and not important.
FAQ / Misc Shit
Comparing Minable Coins
http://whattomine.com/
https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency (has historical hashrate charts)
Picking a pool?
Avoid picking the most popular pools, PoW is fundamentally about decentralization. You are doing a disservice to the overall network by adding more hash power to the #1 (or even #2) pool. In extreme cases it can become possible for a dominant pool to do a "51% attack".
Speculative Mining?
It's when you try to find newly announced coins to mine, then rush them to market. You can make significantly more than whatever the top stable coin to mine is, but maybe that coin never gets listed on an exchange, ever. I made most of my coin doing this.
Finding New Shitcoins?
You're looking for POW (Proof of Work), ignore ICO/POS garbage: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0
My pool balance isn't going up!
Blocks need to mature before they are credited, different coins have different block maturation times. Be patient. Pool bookkeeping is done via cronjob and isn't real time.
USDT?
Not a cryptocurrency, not USD. It's digital funny-money issued by the same people who run Bitfinex (fiat-focused exchange). They supposedly have a bank vault full of USD in order to "peg" the value of USDT to USD. It's sketchy as shit. No you can't go to the USDT peeps and get paid out in USD. Avoid it. This ranting man on twitter will be happy to answer your questions: https://twitter.com/bitfinexed
I'll probably update this later
CPU Mining (XMR)
Monero is king here. Using the memory-hard CryptoNight algorithim it makes use of the fast L2 cache of your CPU. GPU mining is possible (using your VRAM) but typically not competitive against other coins.
Wallet: https://getmonero.org/downloads/
Miner: https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/releases
Pool List: http://moneropools.com/
Command Cheatsheet: edit your config.txt then just run it
Performance Tips: Setting low thread priority to the miner will prevent the miner from lagging your computer.
"The most you should ever use is the number of CPU cores you have. The most you should use, for max performance and efficiency, is the size of your CPU's level 2 cache, divided by 2MB." -- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4b9w1l/mining_how_many_threads/d179wg7/
Notes: Because of the inherently anonymous nature of XMR you can't actually identify the sending address when you receive a transaction. Exchanges issue PaymentIDs to track where to credit deposits to, so be certain to include a "PaymentID" along with the Address. Sometimes the PaymentID and Address are combined into a "Integrated Address", in this case a separate PaymentID is not needed. PaymentIDs are otherwise optional, and not needed when withdrawing to your own desktop wallet.
A note about video cards
Mining on video cards make use of the parallel computing API offered by your graphic card vendor, OpenCL for AMD, and CUDA for NVIDIA. Unlike 3D graphics APIs (eg. Direct3D, OpenGL, Vulkan) which are implement both on NVIDIA and AMD cards, the parallel computing APIs used are completely incompatible. AMD cards are usually more popular due to their price and power usage.
Do not set low thread priority to GPU miners. The speed at which your CPU can send commands to the GPU is very critical for good hashrates. GPU miners should not be creating high enough CPU load to be a desktop performance issue. It is very important you set low thread priority to your CPU miner if you're mining both CPU/GPU at the same time as the CPU miner will end up blocking your GPU miners thread.
AMD Video Card Mining (ETH)
Most coins mine best on AMD. In recent history the most stable coin to mine has been Ethereum (ETH) which uses the Ethash algo.
Miner: https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases
Wallet: https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases
Pool List: https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/wiki/software/pools
Notes: ETH and ETC can be mined with the same software, needs different pool/wallet. ethminer supports both OpenCL and CUDA.
NVIDIA Video Card Mining (ZEC)
Equihash-based coins like Zcash (ZEC) work well on NVIDIA and in my personal experience can be mined with almost zero performance loss during general desktop usage (by contrast, a XMR GPU miner can borderline hard-lock your desktop).
Miner: https://github.com/nicehash/nheqminer/releases
Wallet: https://z.cash/download.html (I haven't had issue mining to an exchange deposit address with this coin)
Pool List: https://zcash.flypool.org/ & https://zec.nanopool.org/
Command Example: nheqminer_16_04 -l us1-zcash.flypool.org:3333 -u ADDRESS.WORKER -p z -t 0 -cd 0 -cb 32 -ct 32
Notes: ZEC and ZCL can be mined with the same software, needs different pool/wallet. nheqminer only supports CUDA.
Exchanges
Once you've got a decent payout, you'll probably want to sell it for some BTC. Stick to the below listed exchanges, don't go anywhere else (ignoring fiat-focused exchanges). A saying in the crypto community is "if you don't hold the private keys, they're not your coins", so don't treat an exchange like a wallet. Once you've got your BTC, it's best to withdraw it into a BTC wallet like Electrum (technically a SPV client, but good enough for the masses).
Recommended Altcoin Exchanges
Binance: https://binance.com/
I don't recommend these exchanges, but they're not "scams".
Poloniex: https://poloniex.com/
Bittrex: https://bittrex.com/
Cryptopia: https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/
YoBit: https://yobit.net/
Selling Tips
It can be worth it to put your altcoin up for sale at the daily or weekly high. Prices oscillate, sometimes they spike violently up and down (often at the whim of BTCs price). Don't unload your minings at the bottom of the chart, try to have some orders up at high prices to order to catch spikes up. Exchanges (eg. Poloniex) tend to give you a better fee-rate if you're a "maker" (putting unfilled order into the book) instead of a "taker" (filling an order). So even if you want to immediately sell it can make sense to put your sell order right at the end of the sell-side.
Glossary
Altcoin/Shitcoin: any cryptocurrency that isn't bitcoin
Wallet: software you download on your computer and use to generate an address, download the blockchain (these are many GB) and send transactions. It's best to mine directly to your address, not to an exchange (unless you understand the risks).
Pool: in the beginning you could only mine on your own, but with highly competitive hashrates the need for people to pool resources together became necessary. Contributions are recorded and paid out after passing a minimum. Unless you're mining a very low hashrate coin do not attempt to solo-mine.
Miner: does math, submits "shares" to the pool to be credit to your pool balance.
Worker: Pools sometimes give you an option to add a simple name to each mining rig so you can keep track, it's just for your use and not important.
FAQ / Misc Shit
Comparing Minable Coins
http://whattomine.com/
https://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency (has historical hashrate charts)
Picking a pool?
Avoid picking the most popular pools, PoW is fundamentally about decentralization. You are doing a disservice to the overall network by adding more hash power to the #1 (or even #2) pool. In extreme cases it can become possible for a dominant pool to do a "51% attack".
Speculative Mining?
It's when you try to find newly announced coins to mine, then rush them to market. You can make significantly more than whatever the top stable coin to mine is, but maybe that coin never gets listed on an exchange, ever. I made most of my coin doing this.
Finding New Shitcoins?
You're looking for POW (Proof of Work), ignore ICO/POS garbage: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0
My pool balance isn't going up!
Blocks need to mature before they are credited, different coins have different block maturation times. Be patient. Pool bookkeeping is done via cronjob and isn't real time.
USDT?
Not a cryptocurrency, not USD. It's digital funny-money issued by the same people who run Bitfinex (fiat-focused exchange). They supposedly have a bank vault full of USD in order to "peg" the value of USDT to USD. It's sketchy as shit. No you can't go to the USDT peeps and get paid out in USD. Avoid it. This ranting man on twitter will be happy to answer your questions: https://twitter.com/bitfinexed
I'll probably update this later
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