Getting Started Mining Ethereum

Bitcoin made its debut 2009 and took off as the new online currency of the future. However, it has become harder and harder to mine as people with giant GPU clusters the size of a normal bedroom are being outdown by a single person with a device called an ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit). The size of ASICs range from being the size of a USB wifi card to being the size of a couple computer power supplies, such as the AntMiner A7.

Ether, officially Ethereum is relatively new to the market as it was released June 30, 2015. Therefore, companies have not taken the time to create an ASIC that could mine ethereum at an extremely high rate like the bitcoin ASIC miners. GPU processing for Bitcoins is now almost financially impossible as the amount of power required to run the cards is in many cases much higher than the profit that is produced by them. Therefore, the new Ethereum currency is much easier to mine and much more profitable for people who do not want to spend a ton of money to get into crypto-currency mining.

Mining Ether does require some decent hardware if one wants to get paid anything within the next year. Unless one has a cluster capable of hashing at 800MH/s or more, it is probably worth it to mine in pools. The way pool mining works is that people combine computing power into one system essentially and then are paid for their computational power after a small fee is deducted for the pooling website and servers to stay online. For those just getting into mining like myself I highly recommend mining in pools.

You do not need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on mining equipment but for best results you should have the following:

1. A computer with a decent processor. Not necessarily required but it helps in the overall operation.

2. A stable and relatively strong internet connection, preferably ethernet connected instead of wifi. Again, this is not super important

3. A stable power supply from your provider, if you lose power while you are working on a block the block has to be restarted.

4. Most Importantly-A GRAPHICS CARD WITH 2GB GDDR5 OR MORE. If you have a graphics card like a Nvidia GTX 550TI that only has 1GB of RAM you will not be able to mine with ethermine.

   1. Your graphics card will also need to have support for CUDA, if Nvidia, or OpenCl if AMD. These are the two SDKs that will allow you to use your graphics cards for hashing power.

   2. Your graphics card will probably be 10x faster than your brand new CPU, therefore you really don’t need a $1000 processor, you would be better off spending it on graphics cards.

5. You are going to need a pooling website- I use weipool.org, they are reliable and only take 1% off your profit to run their services. I am sure there are many other great pooling websites out there I have just been really happy with weipool.org because they also provide your expected round payout and so fourth.

When you are ready to start mining and you have CUDA or OpenCL SDK/Support installed and ethermine, all you need to do is execute the script in the form of a bash or bat file depending on if you are running Windows are Linux. Below is the script that I use to mine. If you think that this article helped you out or if you just want to test out your system the links below should work:

GPU Mining

ethminer –farm-recheck 200 -G -F mine.weipool.org:5555/0x425da1e88129ff1690b85b9447814fb4f3a393d9/30

CPU Mining:

ethminer –farm-recheck 200 -F mine.weipool.org:5555/0x425da1e88129ff1690b85b9447814fb4f3a393d9/30

If you have multiple servers and you want to deploy the same script across all of them I recommend writing the script and then uploading it to a cloud storage service and making it public so you can just download it using wget on your server. For instance, before I had the correct GPU I CPU mined with Google’s Cloud services. I deployed 10 servers and I really did not want to write ten scripts so all I did was upload one hwrrobotics.com/miner.

Note: If you use my miner script it will install etherminer for you if you are running Ubuntu saving you the install commands.

The install commands are very simple for Ubuntu and are shown below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethereum/ethereum-qt
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ethereum/ethereum
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cpp-ethereum -y

Once my script was uploaded I executed the following:

1. wget hwrrobotics.com/miner

2. sudo bash run miner

If you are running a Windows machine and you just want a run script then you are more than welcome to use: hwrrobotics.com/minerrun and modify it in any way, shape or form.

Within the script you will find a big address, such as: 0x425da1e88129ff1690b85b9447814fb4f3a393d9 with a /30 appended to the back of it. The /30 is the speed at which you can mine in MH/s

Once you have adjusted the script to fit your needs and you run it weipool.org will add you to their list of miners by your ethereum account address. This is also the same account address where they will deposit your funds. If you have not done so already you are going to want to create an ethereum wallet so you can get paid for your work. If you go to https://www.ethereum.org/, you can download the wallet executeable and create your account.

Finally, once you have everything setup you can go ahead and run your script. Within a few minutes your address should appear on the weipool homepage as well as your current mining speed.

Congratulations! Now you will be able to literally do nothing and still get paid! No, you will not get paid a whole lot if you don’t have a ton of equipment, but there is a good chance that you will make a little more than a dollar a day if you can hash at around 18MH/s. I hope this article has been helpful and if you would like to donate to me or just mine with my account for a round that would be greatly appreciated. Thank You and I wish you the best mining experience possible.