Steem is a blockchain-based social media platform where anyone can earn rewards by contributing quality content and rating content published by others. You can also mine it using a dedicated CPU miner if you have some spare power that you want to dedicate to supporting the network. The information regarding Steem is still highly fragmented and you need to spend quite a lot of time figuring things out even though they do not seem to be that complicated. We have spent some time trying to get things working and we have managed to successfully start mining Steem, so we have prepared a short guide to help you get started mining on Windows.

The first thing you need to start with before moving with the actual mining is to register yourself an account on the steemit website. Do note that registering currently requires you to either have a Facebook or Reddit account to use as a means of verification for your registration. After you register you can also earn Steem by posting quality articles on the website and interacting in the community in general and then you can also start mining using the guide below.

– Start by downloading the latest Steem Windows Wallet and Miner for Windows

– The miner binary is compiled for 64-bit Windows, so it will not work on 32-bit ones

– Extract the steem-win-x64-012-2.zip archive to a folder on your computer and run steemd.exe

– The first time you run the Steem Daemon executable it will create a witness_node_data_dir directory and inside will generate some additional files and folders

– Go inside the witness_node_data_dir folder and open the config.ini file with Notepad or another text editor

– Start by adding a few steem nodes to connect to, just paste the following list under P2P nodes to connect to on startup:

seed-node = 52.38.66.234:2001
seed-node = 52.37.169.52:2001
seed-node = 52.26.78.244:2001
seed-node = 192.99.4.226:2001
seed-node = 46.252.27.1:1337
seed-node = 81.89.101.133:2001
seed-node = 52.4.250.181:39705
seed-node = steemd.pharesim.me:2001
seed-node = seed.steemed.net:2001
seed-node = steem.clawmap.com:2001
seed-node = seed.steemwitness.com:2001
seed-node = steem-seed1.abit-more.com:2001

– Under the name of witness add your steemit.com username (you need to register prior to start mining), so make sure it is something like: witness = "myusername"

– Under the name of miner and its private key add your steemit.com username and private key, so make sure it is something like: miner = ["myusername","yourWIFprivatekeyhere"]

– When setting different parameters in the ini file make sure you don’t leave the # sign in front of the line as it essentially comments it out and the miner behaves as this parameter is not set, so you can get an error that a witness or miner is not set!

– If you are not sure where to get the private key, then just login to your steemit.com account, go to your Profile and then to the Permissions tab. Here you need to click on Show the private key for Active (you may need to relogin first). Do note that the key shown by default is the public key, you need to show the private key and use the private key in the config! Alternatively you can use the Owner private key, this is also your login password, but due to security reasons you better stick with the Active key.

– Under the Number of threads to use add mining-threads = 1 or higher number, depending on how much of your CPU you want to utilize for mining, more threads result in higher hashrate

– You are now ready to start mining, just run steemd.exe again and wait for the blockchain to synchronize, it could take something like 15-30 minutes or more (depending on your internet connection)

– The steem blockchain is over 3.5 million block already, but the size is not that huge yet, it is around 3.3 GB in size, so you will need more than that free space available

– In our tests with an Intel Core i7 5820K CPU (6 cores, 12 threads) running at 12 threads configured in the ini file we are getting about 44390 HPS (hashes per second) as a hashrate or around 31-33 KHS with just 6 active threads

– Do note that the mining apparently requires a lot of RAM, we get about 3GB used for 6 threads and about 5GB used for 12 threads for mining, so make sure you have enough RAM in your computer (8GB or more is recommended)

– All you have to do now is to wait for your miner to first find a POW block and then put you in the Miner-witness queue until your turn comes in to confirm a block in order to get your reward transferred to your steemit.com account

– Note that the rewards you get when you successfully mine and confirm a block are in STEEM POWER tokens and not in STEEM and they should appear in your Wallet on steemit.com, earning you 1 for each block. STEEM POWER are influence tokens which earn more power by holding long term, the more you hold the more you influence post rewards and earn for accurate voting on steemit.com. STEEM POWER tokens can be withdrawn (Powered Down), but it will require 2 years and 104 payments to convert back to STEEM. This means that once you power down you will start receiving 1/104th of your Steem Power in the form of STEEM each week until you have withdrawn all (104 weeks or 2 years pass) or you manually cancel the power down, so you can withdraw STEEM, but it is slow and in parts…

– For additional information about Steem you can visit the official website…
– Take a look at the Steemit website where you are rewarded with Steem for using it…

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