Posts Tagged ‘Ethereum pool mining’

Quick Guide on Solo GPU Mining Ethereum on Windows

14, Aug 2015

ethereum-solo-mining

AS requested here comes a simple guide on how to solo mine Ethereum Ether coins on a local system or within a network with multiple mining rigs. Note that at this point it is already pointless to try local solo mining with CPU only, and if you do not have enough GPU power available and you end up with some bad luck you may not be able to solve a block in a long time. Also our experience shows that geth may lockup at times when solo mining not sending new work from the current block, so do monitor your mining rigs carefully should you decide to try it. If you want to mine in a pool, then you might want to check out our other Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows. Before you get started you need to download the geth and ethminer Windows binaries from the link below, then just follow the instructions below:

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

Starting geth for solo mining:
– To listen for connections only on the local system type: geth --rpc --rpcaddr "localhost" --rpcport 8545
– To be accessible on the local network type: geth --rpc --rpcaddr "192.168.0.123" --rpcport 8545
– Make sure that for local LAN accessibility you replace the rpcaddr IP address to the one that of the machine geth is running on, the 192.168.0.123 is just an example
– To be accessible on the Internet type: geth --rpc --rpcaddr "x.x.x.x" --rpcport 8545
– Make sure that for Internet accessibility you replace the rpcaddr IP address to the one that of the machine geth is running on, the x.x.x.x in the example will not work, also make sure that the 8545 port (or another one you decide to use) is forwarded

Starting ethminer for solo mining:
– For local system mining with ethminer on the same PC that geth is running on use: ethminer -G
– For mining on a system in the Local LAN where geth is installed and running use: ethminer -G -F http://192.168.0.123:8545
– Make sure that for local LAN mining the IP address of the system geth is running on is set correctly on the miner, the 192.168.0.123 is just an example, also make sure that there is no Firewall blocking connections
– For using mining rig to mine over the Internet on a PC with geth running in your local LAN use: ethminer -G -F http://x.x.x.x:8545
– For Internet access make sure that instead of the x.x.x.x in the example you set your external IP address and that the 8545 port is properly forwarded between the external IP and the system running geth

It seems that ethpool has just stopped accepting new users due to high load on their server, they have posted the following message: “Due too the high hashrate the pool currently does not accept new miners!”. So if you still haven’t started mining there, existing users can continue using the service, so now may just be the right time to try out solo mining.

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

Quick Guide on How to Mine Ethereum on Windows

12, Aug 2015

ethminer-cuda-pool

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…


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