Crypto Mining Blog

Mining for Ethereum’s Ether (ETH) coins is turning out to be a problem as it is still in its very early stages, it is still hard for non-advanced users to get started with it. Evven when you follow a guide like our guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows yuo can get to another challenge like the mining pool refusing your connections. This has happened today with the ethpool stopping to accept new miners resulting in connections for users trying to use new wallet addresses getting refused while all older miners can still continue to use the pool. The problem here is that ethpool is still the only Ethereum mining pool, so now the only alternative for new users is to solo mine – we have prepared a guide on getting started with Solo GPU Mining Ethereum on Windows. With solo mining however the risks are higher, but the rewards can also be higher if you turn up lucky, there is however no point in solo mining with CPU as the hashrate will be pretty low and you will need a lot of luck to hit a block.

We have updated our mining package that includes the geth client for generating a local Ethereum wallet and also needed for solo mining to the latest version, it is compiled for 64-bit Windows. The package also includes two versions of ethminer (also 64-bit only), the standard one with CPU and OpenCL mining as a part of cpp-ethereum and a second one forked to support CUDA as well. Note that the CUDA version can be used to mine with the CPU, OpenCL and CUDA and you should be are able to use OpenCL on Nvidia GPU’s as well. The CUDA miner should work on GPUs with Compute 2.0 or later, but if you are having trouble running the CUDA miner you can try with the OpenCL one, the resulting hashrate should not be much different between the two implementations. Also we have discovered that adding the parameter “–gpu-batch-size 20” (without the quotes) to the CUDA version of ethminer (works with the OpenCL setting of that miner as well) can increase a bit the performance you get, so we have added it by default to the example bat files for the CUDA version. The hashrate improvement is actually pretty small on Nvidia GPU’s, but on AMD cards using OpenCL it can give better results. We got up from about 24.4 MHS on Radeon R9 280X to about 26.5 MHS by adding the parameter, be aware however that this parameter is only available in the CUDA fork of ethminer.

Another interesting tip regarding issues with low hashrate, either local or reported by the pool, is to try deleting the DAG files that are being generated the first time you run ethminer. Sometimes when you are playing with different settings for the miner it seems that the DAG files may not work that well, so deleting them and having the miner generate them again with the latest settings can bring back the usual performance. So if the locally reported hashrate by the miner suddenly drops or the pool reports only a small fraction of what your total hashrate should normally be you can try deleting the DAG files and having them generated again. On Windows you can find them located in the AppData / Local / Ethash folder under your computer’s Username in the Users folder (example: C:/Users/myPC/AppData/Local/ Ethash). You may need to enable the showing of hidden system files first in order to see the needed folders in Windows Explorer if you have not enabled it already.

– Download the latest geth and ethminer compiled for Windows and ready to be used…

Ethereum launched Frontier – the first release of the project including actual mining of Ether with CPU and GPU at the end of last month. The Frontier release comes with a command line only interface with a Javascript environment that allows building, testing, deploying and using decentralized applications on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is being described as a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference. So far the available code is mostly intended for developers and though the network is active it is not very user friendly to normal people that might be interested in trying to mine some Ether. Ethereum’s next release named Homestead is supposed to offer in a few months a user friendly interface for normal users.

We have prepared a short guide that should get you started with Ethereum mining using the Frontier release on Windows and we have prepared the required software to create your own address as well as how you can mine solo or in a mining pool using either your CPU or GPU (OpenCL or CUDA). We want to warn you that although getting started with the basic usage and mining may not be that hard, to be able to take advantage of all of Ethereum’s features you’d need to spend some more time getting to know it as it things are not like with your average Bitcoin clone. We are going to be using geth (source), ethminer (source) and ethminer-cuda (source), you can download the package containing the Windows binaries for both from the link below then you need to follow the following instructions:

Generating wallet address:
– Open the geth folder and run geth-console.bat to start Ethereum in console mode
– The software will need to download the blockchain data, it can take some time
– In the console type: personal.newAccount("password")
– Instead of password in the quotes above write your own password and remember it well
– In the console type: eth.accounts
– This will list your Ethereum wallet address
– To check your account balance you can type: web3.fromWei(eth.getBalance(eth.coinbase), "ether")

Sending Ether to another wallet:
– First you need to unlock your account by typing in the console the following (replace password with your password): personal.unlockAccount(eth.accounts[0], "password")
– In the console type: eth.sendTransaction({from: 'your_address', to: 'recipient_address', value: web3.toWei(1, "ether")})
– In the above code replace your_address and recipient_address with the respective addresses, the example is for sending 1 Ether, but you can change the value depending on your needs

Mining locally on the CPU:
– Run geth-console.bat and to start CPU mining type: miner.start(4)
– The number in the quotes is the number of threads to use
– To stop CPU mining locally type: miner.stop()

Pool CPU/GPU mining using ethminer:
– Open the ethminer folder and edit the three bat files with your wallet address
– For CPU mining on the pool run: pool-cpu.bat
– For OpenCL mining on the pool run: pool-ocl.bat
– For CUDA mining on the pool run: pool-cuda.bat

The ethminer software uses the ethpool mining pool for mining, the pool fee is 2% and there is a flat fee of 0.01 Ether per payout charged with minimum payout of 1 Ether, also the pool is beta and there could be some issues. The geth software contains only CPU miner while ethminer supports CPU (up to about 2 times faster than geth CPU mining), OpenCL GPU mining for AMD (also works on Nvidia) and CUDA GPU mining. You can use OpenCL mining on Nvidia GPUs as well, could work on older GPUs that do not work with the CUDA miner. If you have integrated GPU it can also be detected as OpenCL capable and the miner may try to run on it, so you can try to use the --opencl-platform and --opencl-device command line parameters to avoid the problem.

Mining performance:
– ethminer CPU mining on Intel Core i7 5820K: 0.95 MHS
– ethminer OpenCL mining on AMD Radeon R9 280X: 24.4 MHS
– ethminer OpenCL mining on Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti: 18.5 MHS
– ethminer CUDA mining on Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti: 18.7 MHS

Do note that ethminer is 64-bit only and you need to have Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable installed (the 64-bit version) as it is compiled with Visual Studio 2013 and CUDA 7.5RC. Note that it seems AMD is currently faster mining Ethereum as compared to Nvidia GPUs and CPU mining is not much worth other than for testing purposes anyway.

– Download geth and ethminer compiled for Windows and ready to be used…